I have been falling
asleep, the last week or two, thinking about popsicle sticks. The last week or
two is an exaggeration, okay, the last two weeks it pops into my head, one
night or another, that I should think about popsicle sticks. About how many
popsicle sticks in the course of my life I have discarded, after the popsicle,
or the ice cream, has melted in my mouth, been licked off by my tongue. After
my hands have been stickied.
Stickied. A
complicated thing for me. Is my discomfort with sticky hands somehow related to
some old tabu about masturbation? The Freudian in me has always made that
association, and, as is the nature of things Freudian, once the association is
made, how could it not be true? However, it is also true that stickiness and
the vaguely repulsive, the vaguely dirty feeling of stickiness – from the sugar
ice dripping down the popsicle stick, or the honey that creeps up the spoon
handle, or the glaze that comes off the glazed cinnamon roll – makes me want,
neurotically, to go to the bathroom and clean my hands. What Dostoevsky
character – was it Raskolnikov? – had the neurotic compulsion to clean his
hands. Of course, Raskolnikov was not dealing with a grape ice – more pawnbroker’s
blood. Still.
The thing that
impresses me, nights, about the ghosts of popsicle sticks past, is the idea of
the vast number of them – the forests, literally, cut down to provide those
thin sticks, rounded at the ends, which serve such a small purpose that, in
light of the sawmilled wilderness, one wants to ask: is this worth it? Was the
spotted owl and the Carolina Parakeet driven to extinction so that American
children, on hot summer days, clustered around swimming pools, could unwrap flavored
ice water molded in the shape of dollhouse tombstones and suck them into their
mouths, guiding them with the grip given by the popsicle stick? And of course
that moment when you bite the stick itself, when the wooden taste comes through
the melting last remnant of the ice. That taste associated with sweets, in my
memory, American sweets – the industrial signature. The chemical signature, the
signature of the wooden tongue depressor, itself moulded out of sawdust – most probably.
I’ve never been in the factory where all the popsicle sticks are manufactured.
No doubt there are many such factories. No doubt they were incountry when I was
a kid, and are now in Southeast Asia, or Mexico. I can imagine fleets of these
sticks meeting up with myriads of ice molds, somewhere, and once the
conjunction was made, then came the plasticized paper wrap, printed with the
company’s name.
Popsicle Industries of
Edgewood NJ was the major producer of popsicles in the sixties, when I was a
boy who ate popsicles, or whatever the
verb for devouring of this kind is, hidden in the vast OED no doubt. In 1986,
the New York Times noted in a small human interest story that the company was
phasing out its double stick popsicle. “The lost cultural icon in this case is
the two-stick Popsicle, the sticky confection of syrup and ice that never quite
split down the middle but always seemed just right on days when the sidewalks
were so hot they could fry a set of toes through a pair of sneakers.”
There was more to the
popsicle stick than its tag team toss – first the paper wrapping, than the wood
– into the garbage. Popsicle sticks took
their outlaw affordance and made little
popsicle crafts – protolego cabins, for instance. There were popsicle stick puppets. There were
popsicle stick flowers. There were books on popsicle stick crafts. The
schoolroom and the rec room were sites of popsicle stick construction.
On the sites where popsicles
were constructed in actuality, popsicle sticks were involved in the struggle
between labor and capital. In 1940, the Maine unemployment bureau had to
consider the case of a middle aged woman, X, who was employed as a “winder” at a popsicle
stick plant. Her job was to pick out defective sticks as they went down the
assembly line via a moving belt. She claimed that, after spending approximately
13 hours at her job, she began to suffer severe headaches and vertigo as she watched
the endless rows of sticks go past her. She quit and applied for reinstatement
of her unemployment benefits, and the state
of Maine had to decide if her excuse was justified. Should she sacrifice her
health to the popsicle belt?
The state of Maine gave
her a dispensation. A small victory for worker’s rights. Maine, at the time, hosted
many “veneer” factories – this is where sugar maple, beech and yellow birch
wood went to be made into toothpicks and popsicle sticks. And high quality
plywood. All of which connected to the decentralized frozen novelty industry of
my boyish days. I missed the big changes that occurred in the 80s – the great
age of leveraged buyouts and squeezing profit margins, destroying local
providers of popsicles and making them uniform, rewrapping them, adding vitamin
C and new flavors, and launching advertising campaigns to compete against General
Foods muscular attempt to monopolize the frozen novelty sector.
This all happened
behind my back. My consumption of popsicles in the great summer heat of New
Orleans and Austin in the 80s contributed less than ten dollars, I’d guess, to
the frozen novelty sector revenue stream. Like X, I’d moved on to other ways of
cooling my insides under the hot Dixie sun: namely, beer. The popsicle stick
was not entirely removed from my material life: one summer I had a job, under
my brother, in the maintenance crew of an apartment complex in Atlanta, and
among my duties was emptying the garbage cans around the swimming pool. There,
the popsicle stick competed with the coke can, the cigarette butt, the beer and
liquor bottle, the wadded up newspaper, the discarded tanning oil tube, and
other relicts of the animated life of the pool. Including the occasional roach
(marijuana, not insect). The smell of old beer and cigarette ash overcame any
vestigial nostalgia I might have felt on seeing the popsicle stick. Frankly, I
didn’t give a damn.
And yet here I am, in
bed in Paris, thinking that these veneer products were a clue to the great
conspiracy of material life in twentieth century America. Where have you gone,
Mrs. Robinson?