K & J Ice Cream Truck

That something so impossible as the J Ice Cream Truck exists at all is some sort of miracle. So, +1 star for that. Otherwise…
Well, all I can say, is Pete S. (the S stands for Somerville) is a braver man than I — when I heard the tinny tinkling of carousel music heralding its approach towards my building, I was gripped my mortal dread the likes I haven’t felt since nearly hydroplaning off the Central Artery exit to Storrow Drive and smack into the side of the Garden10 years ago.
It was two Fridays ago, a clear, lazy summer evening, just about twilight, the Lady Friend and I bowling in the living room and eating greasy Chinese food. The best of evenings… when suddenly the sky went dark, the temperature dropped a good 30 degrees, the wind kicked up, and lightning started forking across the sky. Peering with trepidation out between my blinds, I saw the rickety abomination huffing and chugging its way up Highland Ave, stalling in the middle of intersections, nearly sideswiping parked cars, and making a good go of running down the kids chasing after it (wait, what kids?). Ice cream truck? Hells chariot?
I quickly ducked for cover, grabbing the Lady Friend, who’d just entered the room and screamed in terror at catching just a fleeting glance of the J Ice Cream Truck — my invisible, and most likely imaginary, dog, Bowser, was borrowing his way underneath the couch. An unearthly hush pressed itself down over Spring Hill, all except for the manic music box wheezing away out of the back of the truck. Was this how it all ends, was this the Rapture, the End of Days?
Those tense moments might as well have been years, centuries, milllenia. But just like that, it was over — the silence lifted, the sky cleared, the truck was gone. A vision? A visitation? A warning? May it never pass this way again…

We have just about the most pathetic ice cream truck ever roaming about Somerville these days. Rather than get into the whole agonizing story of regret that was my purchase, let me just offer some bullet points about the experience.
* Our driver/​vendor, a fiftyish woman wearing a lot of makeup and jewelry more fitting a dinner party than an ice cream truck, is what I’d call a little confused by the realities of ice cream truckery. She just exudes unpreparedness. It should have been apparent to me from the start.
* The colorful pictures of treats on the truck are fading, peeling, re-​taped about a dozen times each, and comprise an ungodly mess of a presentation. That I proceeded beyond this point says a lot about my love for ice cream.
* Let’s go back to the name — it looks like there was something before the J, but it’s not there now. This could be because it’s written in some kind of magic marker.
* Honesty in advertising is important. Very little depicted on this truck seems to actually be contained within. I asked for something like four different things that she was out of before getting something I didn’t want just to get away. Each time I got the same response — «How about a chocolate cone?» — with her finally shoving two at me in her dirty hand as I insisted I didn’t want them. If I wanted a chocolate cone… never mind. They should just make this the Chocolate Cone truck and save us the trouble.
* I asked if the Chocolate Éclair is the one with the hard candy center. «They’re all hard,» she replied. «They’re frozen.»
* Every goddamned little dinky ice cream on this truck is $ 3.00. You can get a pint of some high-​end fancy ice cream in the store for that. Here, you get a three-​inch-​diameter cookie sandwich.
* I gave her a twenty for this. «Do you have anything smaller?» she asked. «I have two singles,» I told her. She stared back at me for a minute, making me think she’d see reason and just charge me two bucks. Instead she said, quite serious, «I don’t know what to do with that. Does that help me? I can’t figure that out,» unable to figure out that his was not going to lessen her change-​giving burden. Totally baffled. «I don’t think it helps you at all, unless you charge me two dollars,» I said. This only confused her further.
* Finally I paid and left as fast as I could, with her urging me to take napkins (paper towels), which I politely declined twice. When I got ten feet away, she actually yelled kind of crazily at me, «Hey, you DON’T HAVE NAPKINS! HEY!» Then she muttered to the next person, «He doesn’t want my napkins.»
So maybe that was the whole story after all, but to sum up, the truck looks terrible, it’s woefully understocked, the vendor is slightly crazy and incompetent and has dirty hands, the prices are too high… what did I miss?
Oh, yeah — she once pulled into a right-​turn lane in front of me in Union Square, parked the truck there, and got out to talk on the phone on the sidewalk. So she’s a lousy driver, too.
The kids of Somerville are gonna get skinny this summer if we don’t get another truck in the neighborhood real soon.