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

By Kate Hahn
Sunday, August 12, 2007

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.

But the feeling that I was a criminal didn't go away. I was an outsider: in my parents' homes, in my expensive school, in Washington itself.

Every night, I took off my clothes in the living room my stepmother had decorated with elaborate furniture, walked past the crossed swords she had hung on the wall, went outside and dove into the pool, where I swam looking up at the trees and the stars, trying to shed the ice cream residue that coated my body and never seemed to go away.

Then, in my pajamas, I'd watch the rerun of the day's Iran-contra hearings on public television, working my way through a bowl of Bob's. I ate the exotic flavor, Mozambique, so loaded with cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon that it reminded me of a kretek cigarette, while Robert McFarlane, the former national security adviser, with his calm demeanor and serious eyes, recounted the dates and times of phone calls. I devoured butter pecan while McFarlane successor John Poindexter, robotic behind round glasses, discussed who had signed what and when. I chopped into the rainbow-streaked vanilla, eating it color by color, as White House military aide Oliver North, in uniform and wearing a grim, brokenhearted look, showed his disappointment in Congress for criticizing his commander in chief.

If the facts lined up against him, Reagan could be impeached. I hoped that would happen, and that Bob would create a special flavor called Impeaches and Cream. But I didn't know Bob's politics. I didn't even know if Bob existed. He was as invisible and distant to me as many of the witnesses claimed Reagan was to them.

When it got slow at work, in that first week, I would talk about the previous night's hearings with Ivor. We weren't idle, of course. He had a clipboard listing the night crew's side chores, and our evenings were measured in check marks beside each task. I refilled the cake-cone dispenser as I wondered aloud what lay behind McFarlane's facial expression. Ivor disassembled a clogged syrup pump while expounding on the CIA's long history in Central America. I said I couldn't believe that someone who looked so much like a Poindexter was actually named Poindexter. Ivor explained the history of the Sandinistas. Damn, I thought, this guy is smart.

I was so alone that summer that his talking to me felt like an act of kindness. At Bob's, I didn't feel like a trespasser. The more Ivor and I got to know each other, the more I admired his conscientiousness. He had so much of what was lacking in my life and that of the country -- impartiality, reliability, responsibility.

As the summer went on, we lingered at my car after closing up, talking past the time the pint I was taking home started to melt. And later, while I swam, I began to think how great it would be to see his shadow next to mine on the bottom of the illuminated pool. But he had a girlfriend, and I doubted he was interested in me. I was too far away from the very center of coolness. So I went in every day, keeping my crush to myself, and doling out my frozen ounces of reward and punishment.

I got better and quicker at judging the portions. My hand now had the sensitivity of the scale, so I added other variables to the quality of a serving.

When a customer in a cap and cleats said: "Hey, beautiful, I'm treating my team to double scoops of butter pecan," I looked into the tub, found the richest cluster of roasted nuts, and dug in. I could also spot barren sections -- every tub of ice cream has them -- stretches equivalent to a butterfat desert. This was where I burrowed in for the disagreeable or obnoxious customers.

I knew how to dig my scoop deep down and fill it with a dome of ice cream as solid and dense as a baseball -- so thick it melted more slowly, so sturdy you could lick full force and never topple it from the cone. But I also could graze my aluminum dipper lightly across the tub, so it captured only a thin spiral. When this second type was stacked in a cone, it made a flimsy dome that began to collapse even before an unpleasant customer's tongue had finished its first arc across the surface.

I stared into those tubs all day. Sometimes, I dreamed about them, the way you do about waves when you have been at the beach all day.

One day, in mid-August, I arrived at work and didn't want any ice cream. It had already happened to Ivor. He ate only toppings: M&M's and jimmies, walnuts and blueberry syrup, nonpareils and whipped cream. When I told him about my sudden unexpected aversion to our inventory, he paused in his work, a move that was so unusual, I felt a catch in my throat. "Check this out," he said. He scooped up a globe of raspberry sorbet, shinier than ice cream, the color a deep red, dropped it in a cup and drizzled a stream of hot fudge on top.

I was grateful after the first bite. Hot and cold blended together. Tart and sweet. Smooth and seedy. Thick and thin. It was the perfect combination.

But I had to abandon the treat as the after-dinner rush poured in the door. Soon I was back to administering justice with chocolate and vanilla. And then I looked up, and there was Robert McFarlane. I recognized him from the hearings. He was with a woman I supposed was his wife, and they looked like a normal Washington couple out on a summer night -- clad in practical khaki and Oxford cloth, with tidy hair and comfortable shoes -- trying to escape the dull, depressing repetition of the evening news. As he scanned the list of flavors high on the wall, his face held the same gentle, upward glance it did when he regarded the congressional inquisitors. He eyed the word "pistachio" with the same melancholy resignation he might Sen. Inouye or Sarbanes, or anyone else on the committee.

I knew one thing. I had to scoop his ice cream. Ivor was working the line with me, and I wanted to ask him if I could wait on McFarlane. But there was no way I could do it discreetly. So I got in sync with Ivor, matched speeds with him, so that we would both be free to take the next customer at the same time. I over-scooped for everyone, and got McFarlane.

I held my scoop in the air, ready to punish this man for, as I saw it, believing he was above the law. I felt gleeful, powerful and star-struck at the same time. I cannot remember what McFarlane ordered. All I can recall is my sensation of surprise that it was not one of the most common flavors. It wasn't obscure, but it wasn't in the top five. It had seen no dramatic daily drops recorded in Ivor's white notebook.

I thrust my arm in the case, my scoop barely scraping the surface of the ice cream. At the same time, Ivor reached forward a few containers down. His shape was so familiar now in my peripheral vision: baggy T-shirt; long, outstretched arm. I felt a rush of affection for him. I wanted to be like him. This feeling was so strong that it overrode my personal sense of prejudice. I gave McFarlane a fair scoop. Then he walked down to the cash register.

I wish I could say that at that moment, I saw the similarity between McFarlane and me. By choosing who got a just serving, and who didn't, I put myself above a sort of law, too. My transgressions were minuscule. But behind them were the same mental gymnastics, the belief that the rules were something to be personally calibrated depending on my view of the situation. And once some people start thinking and behaving like that, it's only a matter of time before a few ounces of butterfat can become a cache of AK-47s.

But I didn't realize that. Not then. Not for years. The closest I got was being drawn to someone who did. I think sometimes that I didn't have a crush on Ivor himself that summer, but on his decency. A week or so later, I worked my last night at Bob's. Ivor walked me to my car, as usual. I wanted him to kiss me. Even if he had, it would not have magically transmitted the things he knew.

Now I understand the connection between Ivor's punk credentials and his concern for doing things by the book. Bob's small business was the kind that employed ragtag people like us -- struggling punk rock musicians; students without internships; girls who thought they were criminals, even if they weren't -- and it was in our best interest to make it profitable. In a band, drummers lay down the law.

They are responsible for making sure everyone stays on track, so that the group doesn't fracture into chaos. It was an ability Washington had lost in its leaders that summer but one that Ivor laid down in the vinyl grooves of records, and one that I gained at least for a moment, when I gave Robert McFarlane what, as a paying customer, he deserved.

Kate Hahn is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. She can be reached at K.Hahn@gte.net.