Taste My Brand New Flavor

By Joel Stein

Until the Ice Cream Man called, I thought I was a phony. Writing, after all, isn't like computer programming or shoe cobbling. Everyone can write, so my job is like being a professional talker or doodler, the latter of which, oddly enough, the New Yorker employs. But when the Ice Cream Man in Greenwich, N.Y., announced I'd won its Name That Ice Cream Flavor contest, I realized I indeed had a skill. My work, delivered under the pseudonym of a local resident, crushed the non-professional competition. I not only deserved my paycheck from TIME, but could probably make extra money naming frozen dessert products on a freelance basis.

Since I won, I have bragged about "Chunky Joe," my clever, Joycean appropriation of Ben-and-Jerry's semiotics and workaday poesy that got directly at the truth of coffee ice cream blended with white-chocolate flakes, toffee, almonds and chocolate chips. So proud was I that I headed upstate and grabbed a few of the free ice cream coupons from the friend whose name I had used.

As soon as I walked into the store I found it extremely difficult not to tell everybody that I, and not my nonwriter friend, had penned the best ice cream name the store would ever have. I saw the store's other sad, poorly written flavors, like Peanut Butter in My Chocolate and Cassie's Blue Cotton Candy with Sprinkles and the particularly lazy Vanilla. I found myself speaking in a loud, pastoral voice, saying, "My friend is amazingly talented, huh? Someone who perhaps should quit his day job and write a serious piece of literary fiction. He is what I believe is called a writer's writer." The woman behind the counter agreed, in that she didn't say anything. But she did tell me that my ice cream name stood out from the hundreds of entries, making it to the short list of five. I figured one of the others was my other suggestion, A Very Good Flavor that You're Definitely Going to Want to Try, but it was not. Instead, the other four were Millennium Madness, Millennium Flavor, Millennium Yummy and Y2Krunchy. There are, apparently, a lot of shelters in upstate New York.

Then I noticed that the flavor was spelled "Chunky Jo," which pretty much ruined my clever coffee pun. When I started to complain to the 18-year-old at the counter, who seemed sweet though unaccustomed to people from New York City screaming at her about intellectual property law, she explained that the owner of the Ice Cream Man was named Jo and that, yes, he was a bit overweight. Depressed and, frankly, sick to my stomach after eating three pints of ice cream, I left.

I came home too dejected to write, which may explain much of this column. But after a big mug of Ovaltine and a very inspiring passage from Tony Robbins, I remembered that most people don't like to write. And really, that's what it's all about--not the models, money or fan mail from Robert Goulet. No, I may not be as smart or well-informed as the Rhodes scholarship-winning, newspaper-reading people I work with, but I do love what I do. I'd be pretty happy getting paid to write for anyone, even Jo the Ice Cream Man. If he weren't such a boneheaded editor.