The Ice Cream Man & Other Stories: Fiction by Sam Pink
Reviews
By Gabino Iglesias
Sam Pink’s work is the literary equivalent of wabi-sabi, a concept in traditional Japanese aesthetics that centers on the acceptance and, to some degree, the enjoyment of imperfection. Pink’s work walks a fine line between fiction and biography and finds a bizarre kind of beauty in exploring lives full of crappy jobs, depression, drugs and booze, jokes, and even death.
The Ice Cream Man & Other Stories, Pink’s latest, collects his short stories from 2014 to 2019. The narratives vary in length and subject matter but share some cohesive elements at their core that give the collection a wonderful sense of unity. Broken English, struggling to make ends meet, and being angry at your awful job are just some of the elements that come up time and again in this collection, and they are all treated with the understated tone Pink uses for almost everything. His fiction delivers raw, smart observations that make him one of the most engaging and honest chroniclers of contemporary life on the wrong side of the tracks.
Pink is an author that always dances to the beat of his own drum, and the structure of this collection reflects that as much as the stories do. Instead of being organized by theme or chronology, the narratives are grouped by place of residence: Chicago, Florida, and Michigan. This makes the writing feel even more biographical and helps highlight how place, weather, and living situations impacted Pink’s psyche and, by default, his writing.
While there are no throwaways here, there are a few stories in The Ice Cream Man that deserve special attention. The first ones are two separate tales that complement each other: “The Dishwasher” and “The Sandwich Maker.” Both are about working at a food place and fighting to keep a positive attitude when everything is horrible and everyone is a bit insane and depressed. Pink’s distinctive style, which is short, fast, and punchy, pulls readers into the backstage of a restaurant and shows them how jokes and hatred collide in the name of coping:
“Hey, put some gloves on, fuckface,” says the chef, coming up from downstairs holding a bunch of ingredients.
The chef.
The chef doesn’t hate anyone.
Because he hates everything.
There’s nothing personal about it.
He hates people, of course, so like, you too, but also rocks, trees, birds, ideas, whatever.
This afternoon he’s so hungover and baggy eyed and haggard it’s like a genetic reversion.
Pink’s work is a testament to hard living. His words are about sadness, carrying on when there appear to be no reasons to do so. However, there’s always something there, right below the surface, that makes everything worth the effort. That hidden something is often humor, but it sometimes morphs into love or making money or getting together with friends and drinking beer. Pink shows us the blood and death around us, the busted windows and homelessness that live like a cancerous tumor at the heart of every city. Then, he makes us laugh or nod as we see ourselves reflected in his wild, violent world.
The perfect story for showing what Pink does best, that strange mix of awful and beautiful and hilarious and depressing, is “The Ice Cream Man,” which takes place in Florida. The narrator gets a job driving an ice cream truck (“It was maybe the first job I’d ever had where people were happy to see me.”). In two weeks, he’ll get paid. That’s the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. For two weeks he drives around slowly, blasting Do Your Ears Hang Low? and trying to sell ice cream to people. Unfortunately, things are not that easy and there are a lot of costs he has to cover before he gets paid. When he learns this, he does something that will put a smile on every reader’s face. However, before that happens, Pink gives us his vision of a calm, lonely hell experienced while sweating in an ice cream truck in the Florida heat:
Hadn’t been keeping track exactly but I had to be close to getting paid, I figured.
Had to be.
As I pulled into my first subdivision of the day, I quietly and tonelessly said ‘Get some, motherfucker,’ and flipped on Song 7.
Here I am.
I’m here.
But the subdivision looked empty.
Yes, I’d learned all the marks of my clientele.
Small plastic kitchens on playgrounds.
Bikes.
Miniature basketball hoops.
But there was none of that.
So I went down a kind of hidden road, off a dead-end, where the houses were just double-wides on cinder blocks.
Piles of broken shit in the front yard and lawn ornaments all over.
Plywood add-ons.
Mostly mud lawns.
Big drainage ditches.
Rusted cars surrounded by weeds.
Florida shit.
Another outstanding story is “Blue Victoria,” which recounts the times a group of friends and acquaintances spent together while living in a dilapidated apartment. This story has everything Pink puts into his work, but it also features a death that hurts the narrator to the core. This is one of the saddest of Pink’s short stories, but it’s a story that illuminates the way life pushes on inexorably, caring little for the way it damages people. Dark and heartbreaking, this tale shows Pink is capable of writing powerful fiction far from his usual territory.
To say Pink is a master chronicler of minimum-wage living or to call his work some of the grittiest, most honest urban realism in contemporary literature are both accurate, but they fail to convey what reading his words is like. Reading Pink is entering a world where short sentences reign and economy of language is both a sword that trims unnecessary fat and a magnifying glass that helps us see the stuff that truly matters. The Ice Cream Man is a collection of stories that fully engages with the real world, the world of bent cigarettes and murder, of homelessness and day drinking, of rats in the alley and jobs you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy and evictions and sorrow. It’s a dark world, sure, but it also contains hope and healthy doses of laughter, friendship, and ice cream, and those things are enough to keep you coming back for more.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. You can find him on Twitter @Gabino_Iglesias.
More Reviews