Malts

After a Royals game in 1975, my brother Joe and two of his buddies visited Wimpey’s, a hamburger joint on Troost Avenue that was a hangout, if not a city-wide destination. They’d been to Wimpey’s a hundred times before, but that night one of the teens was disgruntled by the quality of his chocolate malt, so he stepped outside and heaved the cup at the front glass window and shouted “This malt sucks!" His pals inside had no choice but to grab for their food and drinks and scurry out, their long hair flying behind them.

Inside that car that sped away on Troost, I imagine the offender was both congratulated and censured; no doubt there were explosions of laughter and loud words spoken with the kinds of exaggerated inflections that are peculiar to such a moment—all of which played against the backdrop of an Allman Brothers eight-track tape.

Then the offender said this: “My bi-nocs!” The fool had left his father’s expensive binoculars on the customer countertop.

When the boys returned, the proprietor, Sam, was in the parking lot spraying down the mess. Somehow he resisted the urge to train that garden hose on them.

“You kids think you’re so funny,” he snarled into the car window.

He was right. But it was a safe call. Most high-school kids think they’re so funny.

I’ve heard that story a couple dozen times, and it continues to puzzle me, for I always thought Wimpey’s malts were delicious. They were as thick as pudding and therefore long-lasting, a welcome contrast to the watery, grainy shakes you’d find at McDonald’s. They were so thick, in fact, that when I dipped my stubby french fries into them the way a normal person dips his fries into ketchup, they often broke apart, only to reveal themselves later at the bottom of the cup as I dredged for the last vestiges of viscosity.

While the Wimpey’s malts were good, the best I ever had were blended in a certain Baskin-Robbins on a dozen or more occasions in 1985. But my malt-drinking buddy and I paid a steep price in both dollars and nervous energy. A large malt ran about three-fifty, an expenditure we took seriously because our hourly wages were equal to that sum.

Worse, the pair of adolescents who were always behind the counter believed that making malts was beneath them. They were ten years younger than us, looked like Eddie Haskell, and weighed fifty pounds each, but we spoke to them like low-level street soldiers might speak to the Godfather on the day of his daughter’s wedding. We’d even rehearse in the parking lot. I’d paste on the kind of silly grin that people affect when they’re introduced to Jimmy Carter, and I’d say, “Yes, could you be so kind as to concoct a large chocolate malt for me, using equal portions of chocolate and vanilla ice creams?” And my drinking buddy, playing the role of either Haskell, would park his hands on his hips and say, “I could lose my job because of this.”

They were always saying they could lose their jobs if they obliged any request we made. If we wanted more malt powder, less malt powder, a new straw, we were clearly putting their jobs on the line.

We suffered these surly kids only because each had the Midas touch when it came to blending malts. But they did not appreciate their special talent. Imagine if George W. Bush rolled his eyes every time someone dark-skinned got tortured—that’s how odd their behavior seemed.

No longer are there interesting ways to describe good food and drink. If you doubt me, watch the Food Network for a couple hours. I won’t dwell on how good those malts were, but I will spend a moment on their metaphorical significance. They simply represented all that was good on this earth, up until our straws began making those sad, sad sounds that prophesied the end was near. These noises were at first abrasive and rather belching in nature, but too soon they turned frightfully asthmatic as the southernmost points of the straws danced their desperate dry dance on the tiny round dance-floors. At that point, neither of us could think of anything outside of man’s inhumanity to man.

One night we got dizzy from spending half a minute inhaling nothing but the ghosts of malteds past.

“Now what?” said my friend, looking as glassy-eyed and wobbly as Ted Nugent looks at his breakfast table each day.

“Well, we can’t order another one or those kids might get fired,” I said.

“Those phonies. They’re nice to the cute girls but never to guys like us.”

As if on cue, a pair of pretty girls half our age approached the store. We sped toward them in a high-kneed gait, like British comedians would, and waved paper money and shouted “Girls! Say, girls!” Those pretty girls must have suddenly remembered they had a lot of homework to do because they turned and fled, leaving us with a diminishing view of the soles of their sneakers.

At some point, something must have cost the surly Haskells their jobs, or else they chose to work elsewhere. At any rate, after the boys were gone, the quality of malts spiraled at that store. One fall night, we polished off our runny drinks in about nine seconds flat and didn’t even bother to exercise our straws against the soggy bottom.

“Now what?” he asked, dispirited.

“Dairy Queen’s only ten minutes away.”

He looked at his shoes. “Has it come to this?”

It had.

Back before we discovered Baskin-Robbins, and decades before there were custard stands and creameries on every corner, a Dairy Queen was a welcome sight. The day I passed my driver’s test, my first destination was, of course, McDonald’s. I was sixteen and therefore hard-wired to make that sad choice. But my second trip, the next afternoon, was to the Dairy Queen in the Waldo community a few miles west of my home. I ordered a medium chocolate malt, and for the next two or three years I made that same purchase just about every day. I’d like to say there were cute girls behind the counter who drew me there on such a regular basis, but that would be a lie. The malts were why I came.

As I bring to a close this homage, allow me to describe an incident from the middle 1980s. One frosty evening, at the Minsky’s restaurant in Watts Mill, my malt-drinking buddy and I shared a large pizza that was festooned with Italian sausage and red onions, accompanied by industrial-sized sodas. Afterwards, while in the parking lot, with our belt-buckles loosened and pounds of masticated bread dough gassifying within our stomachs, we agreed that nothing would hit the spot so much as a large chocolate malt, and we knew there was a Baskin-Robbins not far away.

As I sat in my car a half-hour later, I recalled a favorite saying of my grandmother’s: “I’m so full, I couldn’t drink a thimble full of water.” Warily, I lifted the plastic lid and peeked into the cup to see just how much malt remained. Imagine my shock and agitation when what I spied within that cup were Ethan Brand’s furnace and Shylock’s ducats and Gatsby’s Daisy and Yoric’s skull and even Jon Lovitz’s devil, which was especially agitating because the evening predated Jon Lovitz as a featured player on “Saturday Night Live,” much less a regular cast member.

With trembling fingers I replaced the lid and asked my friend to take a look inside his cup. “What do you see?”

“Peacocks,” he said with a shiver. “And I do believe they are Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.”

I nodded soberly. “Maybe it’s time we take a step back.”

The drive to my home was tough. We were so full that the very idea of respiration struck us as highly distasteful. We sat in a grim silence as my car proceeded north on Holmes Road. It was the kind of tense silence most often found between young felons who suddenly realize it wasn’t such a good idea to kill that neighbor kid a few minutes ago, and who both suddenly realize it was the other guy’s idea in the first place.

Then I don’t know why I put this out there, but let the record show that I did: “You know what’d go down good right now? A big greasy plate of onion rings.”

Now I remember why I put it out there. Even in my misery I hoped to make him laugh.

Indeed, his first response was to laugh, and it was a response that triggered my own laughter. But these laughs devolved into moans as we each focused on our own visions of greasy rings piled one atop the other. Suddenly, red and yellow spots danced before my eyes. I rushed to lower my window and noted my passenger doing the same. The pizza and the soda and the malt and everything I had eaten since the sixth grade now conspired towards liberty. I suspended my head out the window like a dog even as I hastened my dash home.

In troubled moments like that, when the sweat builds on the forehead and the saliva pools beneath the tonsils, even the most uneducated among us might find himself engaged in an interior monologue that owes much to Elizabethan prose styles: “O damn ye dissembling Dr. Pepper! Thou cursed shards of parmesan and thou divers boluses of leavened yeast, I entreat thee remain in thy hallowed repose for nigh on three or four minutes—depending on the caprices of these traffic lights—till I reacheth my most private and sanctified chamber.”

My friend tucked his head back inside and swallowed very hard and then called to me: “How’s a plate of sweet and sour pork sound right about now?”

We replaced our heads into the chilly air once again.

“Or a nice big bite of butter?” he proposed, green of face.

“Or, I called out, “a stick of butter dunked into a bowl of melted butter.”

“Speed, friend, speed,” he begged.

Rest assured that we made it home safely, somehow, where we soon split a six-pack of beer and chatted about television or something.