A Scoop of Scandal

During the summer of the Iran-contra hearings, she was dishing out her own brand of justice

The summer that the Reagan administration was up to its elbows in the Iran-contra scandal, I was up to mine in ice cream. It was 1987, and I had a job at the Bob's Famous Homemade Ice Cream shop that used to be on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. Everyone in Washington was obsessed with the congressional Iran-contra hearings, which were broadcast daily on television. We watched senators question men who had been part of a group of government officials involved in a tangled and illicit scheme -- selling missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held by Iranian-backed forces in Lebanon, then diverting some of the arms profits to the anti-communist contra guerrillas in Nicaragua.

One of these notorious witnesses would eventually walk into the sugary air of Bob's and, although he would never know it, make me face, if only for a second, my own kind of corruption. But that didn't happen until the end of those three hot months 20 years ago.

What customers saw when they came to our counter was a group quite different from the suited senator-interrogators who lined the dais in the hearing room on Capitol Hill. My co-scoopers were suntanned, ponytailed girls who, like me, had been the poorest kids at their prep schools. We had read Voltaire but had never been to Vail. I was home from college, but it wasn't an Ivy. The big question the hearings were trying to answer was: How much had President Ronald Reagan known about the lawless arms-for-hostages activity -- and when? The only question we cone-fillers asked was: "What can I get for you?"

Our manager was a 25-year-old drummer with pale skin and a shock of white-blond hair. He had been in a few bands on Dischord Records, the famed D.C. punk label. But the groups stayed together only slightly longer than the minute-long songs that had made them notorious, so he was always going from gig to gig. Ivor resembled the 10-speed he rode to work: light, quick, deftly moving from one gear to another. Like the bike's curved handlebars, his wrists and palms were wound with tape. In his case, it was to prevent injuries that might interfere with his drumming.

His fingers were almost spoke-thin, but his arms were muscled from years of keeping time, plus he was more than 6 feet tall and wore baggy T-shirts stamped with black-lettered, vaguely threatening band names, so he never seemed fragile. He towered over me as I waited on customers, and in a somewhat squeaky voice reminded me that before handing over the filled cones or cups, I had to place them on the scale and compare the weight to numbers on an adjacent chart to make sure I had scooped the correct amount.

But when Ivor wasn't looking, I didn't bother to adjust the servings. If a customer doted on his child, or kissed his wife, he got extra ice cream. Rude or scowling people got less. That summer, the scale at Bob's became my personal scale of justice.

Why should I be a stickler for the rules? Those who made them certainly weren't. The Iran-contra scandal proved that. I wondered why Ivor didn't think the same way. Everything he did at work adhered strictly to store policy. Besides his scrupulous scooping, he was meticulous about the bleach-to-water ratio in the mop bucket, the number of bar towels we used during each shift, the frequent restocking of straws, wiping of tables and sweeping of floors. I just didn't get it. He was punk rock after all, a member of a kind of D.C. elite different than the one on Capitol Hill -- the cool guys of Dischord. The bands I had seen back in high school -- Minor Threat, Government Issue -- were full of fury and speed, and the anger of those without power, always suspicious of convention.

After we closed and the cashier went home, we would lock the doors to clean up, and Ivor would load the boombox with a raucous 1982 punk recording by the Bad Brains. The cassette cover showed a lightning bolt destroying the Capitol building. While I mopped the floor at a breakneck pace that matched the thrashing speed of the music, he took the daily ice cream inventory. He gently tamped down the contents of each cardboard cylinder and then used a wooden ruler to measure the distance from the surface to the top rim of the container.

Beyond the blur of my mop, I could see him methodically moving from tub to tub. He should have been holding a drumstick, not some stick with numbers on the side, tallying up someone else's profits. When he was finished with a flavor, he would slam his hands on the counter to the drumbeat of the music, until his fingers became a blur. After three seconds or so, he would stop himself and carefully record the numbers in a white, three-ring binder.

Next, we placed the measured containers in the walk-in freezer and went out to the muggy street, where castoff wads of gum melted to the size of silver dollar pancakes on the sidewalk. Ivor unlocked his 10-speed from the parking meter in front and politely walked me to my car. The only sounds were the clicking of the gears and the rustling of the paper bag in which I carried my employee perk: a daily pint of ice cream. There wasn't much conversation.

Things were just as quiet when I got home. I was alone at my dad's house in Bethesda. He was on vacation in Chile with his second wife, who had grown up there. On the den table, there was a photograph of her in a bikini, suntanned, astride a camel. On the dining room sideboard, she had placed an ornate silver container -- a samovar or soup tureen, I can't remember which. On the floors, her Persian rugs overlapped atop wall-to-wall carpet, making the ground so plush that I couldn't even hear my own footsteps. There was none of the austere Yankee aesthetic with which I had been raised.

It was as if I had broken into a stranger's home and was looking at the belongings of a family that wasn't mine. I felt the same at my mother's house, because she also had remarried. But seeing myself as a prowler wasn't just some poetic analogy: In ninth grade, about the same time Mom and Dad retied their respective knots, I ran away from home with some friends. Looking for a place to spend the night, we broke into a house we knew was empty -- the family was on vacation. We drank their liquor and spent their jar of loose change at 7-Eleven. After suspicious neighbors called the police, we were arrested, and I was so terrified and guilt-ridden that I never broke the law again.