by Michael Ray Laemmle
Have you heard the one about me watching television when an ice cream commercial came on that seemed to apply directly to my life and concerned a vision of Hell I’d had when I was thirteen years-old?
I’m on the fast approach to thirty, and though I’m in no way established, haven’t “arrived” so to speak, the advertisers of this great nation seem to already be using the nostalgia angle when selling products to my demographic, a good deal of whom are now married, have careers, and have taken on thirty-year mortgages. With the pace of change in our society being so frantic, it’s easy to feel nostalgia for the lifestyle we enjoyed even just a few years ago. And as we become bogged down in the machinations of real life and adult responsibilities, perhaps people of my generation are now recalling fondly camping with the boys, driving fast on dirt roads, and the shapelier physiques we once enjoyed. Ads for jeans show young men rafting, presumably unmarried or just recently wed. Beer commercials show men romping through Europe going to hip dance clubs where they feel no shame in ordering a Budweiser. And in one case in particular, the nostalgia goes all the way back to our youths when we were contemplating suicide and our hand was stayed by a vivid vision of Hell that manifested before our eyes.
I speak now of an advertisement I saw just a few weeks ago which took me utterly by surprise, and at first frankly caused a mild sense of disquiet. I’d seen ads for the ice cream before, though it was a brand I’d never tried and never heard of. Perhaps it was a new brand. In any case, the marketing was peculiar and seemed at first to be aimed at octogenarians and the World War II generation. The ice cream in question was called Honeymill, and was I suspect a regional brand rather than a national one.
An old man sat on the porch atop a swing watching what were presumably his grandchildren running through a sprinkler in the yard. The day was sunny, the setting idyllic, Midwestern or Southern by my surmise. Small town life, not rural per se but very near to being so.
The old man gets up and goes inside. A voiceover begins. Presumably it’s the voice of the elderly fellow. We follow him into the kitchen where he goes to the freezer and removes a carton of delicious Honeymill ice cream. He opens the lid and breathes in deeply through his nose. One supposes that Honeymill ice cream has a very fresh enticing scent. The old man gets out several bowls and drags an ice cream scoop across the smooth surface of the ice cream, creating a perfect ball of what appears to be plain vanilla. The viewer is led to believe this fellow is scooping out ice cream to offer his grandkids.
While all this action is occurring, the voiceover is saying, “Remember the good old days, running through sprinklers on long summer days and building snowmen after the first big snow? How on those days when you and your friends came running home from the old swimming hole there was Mom, already handing out bowls of fresh, natural-made Honeymill ice cream? Remember driving Mom and Dad’s car down main street to the soda fountain, where the pharmacist handed you and your date a heaping banana split made from the freshest, most naturally delicious ice cream you’d ever tasted? The world felt like a simpler place in those days. Life wasn’t perfect back then, but it sure seems like it was.”
Then the ad cuts to the grandfather sitting on his porch with two young boys and an adorable little girl. They’re all eating bowls of Honeymill ice cream. The little girl has it all over her mouth and nose, and from the perspective of the grandfather looking down she looks up and gives a great big radiant smile. Cut to the wide angle, and the grandfather is squeezing his granddaughter around the shoulders in a loving hug. Fade to white and the Honeymill logo appears on the screen. This time the voiceover says,
“Honeymill ice cream; tastes just like yesterday.”
I thought it was a fairly effective ad. I’d seen similar ones, such as those for Werther’s Originals, a butterscotch candy. The old man gives his grandson a Werther’s, just like his grandfather once did. The ads play off those generation-gapping experiences, and I don’t think they’re entirely corny. Besides, I like Werther’s Originals. They are indeed original. Nothing tastes quite like them. What stuck in my craw about this ad was the successful tagline, “Tastes just like yesterday.” It had a rich subtext and conjured up images of our happy and happily naïve youth. The association of taste with the past I thought a brilliant stroke, if anything in advertising can be considered brilliant. It was an echo of Proust’s famous passage in Swann’s Way, where the scent of muffins or cookies or something leads him to a stream-of-conscious delivery about his grandmother’s kitchen.
I thought little more of the ad until almost a year later I saw a similar one for the same product. When I originally saw it I must have been watching daytime television, or the news, or the History Channel, where the viewing demographic skewed older. This time I must have been watching the Comedy Central or VH1, anyway some station where the audience skewed young, or at least youngish. I say this because the commercial seemed geared toward people my age and demonstrated knowledge of my demographic’s harried schedule.
It was a busy morning at the house. There were two young children at the table, one of them an infant in a high chair. Bacon was burnt, and Daddy, having woken up groggily tried to drink from a piece of toast and spilled orange juice on his shirt. He ran out the door, got into his fairly new SUV, and drove off as his young son ran out the door after him holding his briefcase in the air. Stuck in gridlock commuter traffic, the man starts to daydream and the voiceover begins, just as the scene cuts to a child running along a street in tears.
“Remember how life was when you were a kid? Running home in tears after you were humiliated in front of your peers? Going upstairs to your room and destroying your Rosary before heading into the bathroom and sitting down with your father’s shaving razor? How you made small cuts in the back of your hand and thought about taking your own life, until above the bathtub there appeared a manifestation of Hell, reminding you that suicides are sent there without delay? Remember how the vision of Hell was akin to the classic representation, with dark but glowing catacombs, sulfurous smoke billowing up from below, the shadows of winged demons skirting across the jagged granite walls? Then when you ran from the bathroom in fright, there was Mom holding a bowl of the freshest, most delicious ice cream you’d ever tasted? And how just one spoonful of that Honeymill ice cream was enough to make you forget you’d been embarrassed earlier in the day and dispelled the residual images of the Inferno still clinging to your mind like the lingering aftereffect of a powerful dream?”
Then the advertisement cut to the father coming home, presumably after a hard day’s work and a grueling commute. His son was there to meet him and with one arm the father scooped him up. In the other hand he held a brown paper grocery sack. Inside in the kitchen the father brought his purchase out, a tub of Honeymill ice cream. Cut to the dining room table, where everybody has a bowl of Honeymill ice cream, even the infant in her high chair. It’s a girl, and with her tiny spoon she flings a ball of ice cream and it hits Daddy in the chest. It goes rolling down the same shirt he’d spilled orange juice on that morning. When the shirt was spoiled before work it had taken on the aspect of a small tragedy, but now the whole family just laughed as the scene faded to white. The Honeymill logo appeared, and a woman’s voice, not a character in the ad, said “Honeymill ice cream; tastes just like yesterday.”
At first I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen and heard. I didn’t want to believe it was a real advertisement. Had I just hallucinated it, or briefly fallen asleep and dreamed the whole thing? I might have thought so except for that a couple days later I saw the commercial again. This was definitely Honeymill’s latest campaign, and I had to admit it was the most bizarre advertisement I’d ever seen. I’d had a similar experience when I was a youth, about thirteen years old. But I figured it had been so unique and peculiar to my context that to conceive of it as a generalized, bonding experience of my generation was to push the boundaries of the fantastic and unimaginable. But unless I were to assume that this commercial was written, produced, and aired solely for my benefit and to attract my personal consumer dollars, I was forced to conclude that many people around my age had undergone the same thing. Of course because there was mention of a Rosary being destroyed I had to assume that only Catholics would relate to the commercial. But maybe this was inaccurate. Maybe it was all about the destruction of any religious icon. So Protestants broke a cross or tore pages from the Bible; Muslims tore their garments and cursed Mohammed; Buddhists swept their ancestor shrines off the table upon which they sat.
After seeing the ad a second time I called my friend Riley who lived in Boston. He was a fellow Catholic and had also had an internship at an advertising firm while in college.
“Riley,” I said when he answered the phone. “Kevin here.”
“Kevin bro, what’s happening?”
“Not much, man. Say, I just called to ask you kind of a weird question.”
“Shoot.”
“Well I just saw this ad for Honeymill ice cream. I’ve seen it twice now and it strikes me as the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen on television.”
“Damn, Honeymill ice cream huh?”
“Yeah. Get this, in the ad this guy remembers back to when he was a young teenager and he was going to kill himself because he somehow got embarrassed in front of his friends or something. So after tearing apart a Rosary, he goes into the bathroom and grabs his father’s shaving blade. As he’s contemplating going through with it, this vision of Hell opens up above the bathtub. Fire and brimstone, caverns, demons and the whole bit. So this makes him scared to kill himself and he runs out the door, and there’s Mom holding a bowl of Honeymill ice cream. Can you believe that shit?”
Riley laughed. “I haven’t seen the ad, but I have to admit that’s pretty damn strange.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It is bro, it is.”
“So what I called to ask is, did you ever have an experience like this when you were a kid? Because I swear to God what happened in the ad happened to me basically exactly how it was described.”
“Ha ha. That is weird, but I’ve definitely had the same experience. It was a little different though.”
“No way! Tell me about it.”
“Well I was a seventh sixth grader, I believe. Fifth or sixth, anyway. And there was this guest speaker who brought in all these animals to class. He was from the zoo or something. So he brought out this giant snake, a boa constrictor, and he asked for a volunteer from the class to come up and hold it. Well I loved snakes so I raised my hand and was practically jumping out of my seat, so the guy calls on me. When I get up there he drapes the snake over my shoulders and it starts coiling around my body. It wasn’t scary or anything, just a super weird feeling, and I’m laughing my head off. Kind of nervous and giddy and the entire class is cracking up. But laughing along with me, you know. So the snake is like tickling me, both his movements along my body and with his tongue, which he’s like flicking around my face and stuff. It was pretty funny and I guess because I was laughing so hard my bowels just loosened up and I let out this rip-roaring fart, super loud so the entire class could hear it, no problem. Even the kids way in the back. And it was like this wet, nasty fart, and I had literally shit my pants. A big old dump too, not just a squirt or anything.”
“Ha ha! You’re kidding me, man.”
“No, I swear. And from the quality of the fart, I mean, it was obvious to everybody I’d shit my pants. I totally felt this soft package blowing against the seat of my trousers, man. And it stunk too. I don’t know how many of the kids could smell it, but the zoo guy had to have. It was totally rank. And when I felt the shit filling up my underwear I kind of put my hand back to the seat of my pants and felt this enormous soft lump and my face went red. That was another clue. Of course the zoo guy made out like it was no big deal, but he had to have known I shit my pants because he started trying to uncoil the snake from my body. And he was trying to do it in a way where I didn’t have to turn around, I figure because he didn’t want to embarrass me any more than I already was by exposing the big lump in the seat of my pants. So it was kind of hard to get the snake uncoiled, and the kids were just laughing their heads off. The teacher was angry you know, just looking all stern at everybody. But she couldn’t really say anything. First of all because bringing attention to my fart would just embarrass me more, and secondly because it was just as likely the kids were laughing at the zoo guy taking the snake off. They weren’t, but technically it was just as plausible. And laughing at that was supposed to be okay.”
“Man, that sounds horrible.”
“Oh it was bad. So finally the snake is off me and I shimmy all uncomfortably up to the teacher and ask her as quiet as I can if I can go to the bathroom. Of course she lets me, and as I got out the door I look back and every kid in the class is watching me with big old grins on their faces, even though the zoo guy had already taken out a possum or something.”
“That is too much.”
“Yeah. So I went to the bathroom and scooped the shit out of my underwear, but there was no way I was going back to class. I just lived like a mile from school, so out the bathroom I went and out the front doors, all the way home. Fucking crying man, all torn up. So when I get home I’m in this terrible stew. I was a latch-key kid, so nobody was home. I went right into my room and was so angry I just knocked the crucifix off the wall where it was hanging. I sat there going over this suicide scenario in my head. My Dad had a gun, but it was locked up in a safe and I had no idea where the keys were. But I figured they were on his main keychain, so I went through this whole imaginary plan. I would steal the key off my Dad’s chain that night. I would ditch school the next day, coming home while my siblings were at school and my parents at work. I’d get the gun, load it, and blow my brains all over the wall. Of course I wouldn’t have done it, but I was pretty convinced I was going to at the time. But all of a sudden, right before my eyes this huge living image of Hell is there. Probably like a six-foot high window. But you know, Hell itself looked a little smaller. It was like watching all of its action occur on a rollout screen or something. And Hell looked like this humongous, dark cave with these passages going off into infinite other chambers. And there’s the lake of fire in one of the huge cavern bowls. It’s not molten lava or anything, it’s just fire, and there are all these people wailing in it, burning but not being consumed. And the only light in the cavern is from the fire, and I can see all these dark demons flying around in the air and they’re casting these long, creepy shadows against the background. It was weird. Scared the hell out of me. I think I did run out of the room, but my Mom was gone so she wasn’t there to hand me a bowl of Honeymill ice cream. Of course I’ve told the shitting pants part of the story a million times, but I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody about the vision of Hell. Might take away from the humor.”
“Insane, man. Well I guess that answers my question. This was a common thing for people of our generation to have seen.”
“It’s gotta be if it’s on an ice cream commercial.”
“Yeah. I don’t know, though. I’m going to have to do more research.”
“Well, tell me what you find.”
I said I would and I’d talk to him later.
The one thing I knew was that I was going to have to taste some of this Honeymill ice cream, so the next time I went grocery shopping I picked up a quart. In this sense the ad was very successful.
After putting my groceries away I scooped myself a bowl. Cookie dough flavor, my favorite. I was a little nervous and hesitated a second, but internally said what the hell and put the cold spoonful of ice cream into my mouth. As the rich, delicious, all-natural flavors exploded like firebombs of goodness across my taste buds a strange thing happened. It was much like the event in Proust’s book. I was carried away mentally by the bursting taste sensation to another time and place. I was thirteen again, out for a night at the ice-skating rink. The night was chilly, lots of my peers were there. I’d lately been in the practice of making young girls feel good about their problems. I had a good ear, could make people laugh, and girls were always eager to discuss their problems in the most dramatic ways possible. That night for whatever reason it seemed like there was a lot of hurt feelings amongst the female population. Time and again somebody would take a break and sit in the penalty boxes used during hockey games, face buried in their hands. I felt like Freud on ice, gallivanting to one girl after another, sitting beside them, sympathizing with their troubles and trying to cheer them up. This went okay for awhile, but soon all the girls began to turn on me, angry that I was taking up all the comforting time with their friends.
When I discovered that large groups of young women were angry with me and talking behind my back, I myself became wounded, and went inside to shed some tears. I doubt I was crying about the girls turning on me. Probably there was some deep trouble at home the emotional impact of which I’d been stifling. For whatever reason the events of the night had brought this emotion to the surface and released it. Crying in front of half my class added further to the humiliation, but because we were supposed to be picked up by a parent at the end of the night I couldn’t go home. I suppose I could have called my mother to come pick me up, but it didn’t cross my mind. When I finally got home I was so angry about such a humiliating public demonstration of pain I went straightaway to my room and found my Rosary. I’d been saying it almost nightly for about a year, and now felt as if God and Christ and Mary had all turned away from me, leaving me to act out in a ridiculous and embarrassing way. I looked at my Rosary guide, which I still needed to help me accurately through the prayers, and I saw where it said humility was one of the greatest virtues. Of course I knew that what was meant was humbleness before God, but I then associated humility with the more popular understanding of humiliation, and I was angry that this virtue should be so prized by Christianity. So in a rage I broke my Rosary into a dozen pieces, scattering beads all over my room.
I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I located my father’s toiletry bag and dug around in it looking for one of his razors. He still had a pack of standard blades, and I pulled one out and sat on the toilet. I made traces with it around the skin on the back of my hand, and began carving designs in the flesh. Nothing major, maybe about half a dozen cuts. There was hardly any blood as I wasn’t pressing the razor in deep and hardly needed to for incisions. I turned my wrist up and looked at my vein, running blue for several inches down my forearm. Could I really do it? It would be so easy. Not only would it bring the benefit of not having to live with the shame of my public spectacle, but everybody would feel horrible that they’d been mean to me when it was obvious I was just trying to do good and help people with their problems.
As I was thinking these thoughts I looked up, and rising just above the bathtub there opened up this portal into another dimension, and it was Hell. The vision lasted for about ten seconds. The standard inferno. Fire, smoke, caverns, winged demons, wails of agonized pain. I didn’t seen any souls burning in eternal flames, but I could hear them, and what is more I could sense them. Their loneliness, desperation and regret. The portal closed with a short whispering sound and I stood there frozen for several long minutes, perhaps a quarter of an hour. I started to come to and saw the blade still pinched between my fingers. I quickly threw it in the trash and covered it up with toilet paper so that there would be no evidence of what I had intended. The vision had reminded me that suicides go to Hell, and I became very afraid that I had been about to take my own life.
I dipped my spoon into the bowl for another bite of ice cream. It clanked against the bottom and the sound shook me from my revelry. During my trip down memory lane I had eaten the entire serving. Those ads weren’t lying. This was some damn good ice cream.
“Honeymill ice cream,” I said bemusedly to myself. “Tastes just like yesterday.”
