One Big Bowl of Vanilla Pudding

I moved to Iowa City in May of 1996. I had just finished a nominally productive school year in East Lansing and was determined to leave academia. A childhood friend, Dan Dubs, was similarly checking out of a dormitory in favor of less instructive pursuits. His post high school path had taken him a scant 15 miles from the neighborhood we grew up in to the home of the Cyclones in Ames.

That same month, my sister had completed classwork for a degree in therapeutic recreation from The University of Iowa. She would be leaving town, and a single room in a boarding house on South Johnson Street. Dubs and I moved in.

Since the rent was paid through the end of the lease, and since the lease ran through the end of June, we weren’t pressured to find gainful employment for at least a month. However, we both promptly found jobs painting apartments for a local property management company.

Being a college town, there was generally an exodus from the larger rental properties over the course of a couple weeks every summer. The company we worked for was the largest lessor of apartments in Iowa City, and each year, they hired on a group of folks for three weeks including weekends to turn the apartments. While lease agreements required the property be cleaned before the tenants would receive their damage deposit back, the temporary crews would perform a final run through, usually focused on items typically missed or harder to clean, like ovens or the outsides of the windows. The painters, like Dubs and myself, would usually be conscripted to haul Rug Doctors around and shampoo carpets.

It was during this changing of the domiciles that Dubs and I signed a lease for a three-bedroom apartment on College Street. The bad news was that we had to move out of the boarding house four days before we could move into our new apartment. We stashed as much as we could into my car. A friend with a van drove from our hometown to move us out and stored larger items in his vehicle during the interregnum, while Dubs and I slept on the floor of our local friends’ apartment.

We finally moved into our new digs. The building was a three-story 12-plex and our apartment was in the northeast corner on the second floor. Dubs and I still had to work every day on the cleaning crews, so it wasn’t until the third or fourth week of July that we finally arranged our furnishings and we felt ready to invite visitors. So, on Friday or Saturday of that week, we threw a one-keg party for the few people we knew in town and for any friends from our hometown that wanted to celebrate our housewarming.

Unknown to us, the three young men living in the southeast corner of the first floor were also having a party. Chad, Dom, and John were Iowa City natives and all, by a year or more, younger than me. Throughout the night, revelers from both parties found themselves moving between the floors and our two apartments, which became a trend for the duration of our lease as a friendship grew between Dubs and me and the three young rogues.

At one point during our year-long lease, our friends from the downstairs apartment were evicted from the building. John, who seemed the most staid of the three, moved into the third bedroom in our unit. Thus, starting as two, when we approached July again, and time to move to a new place, we ended our lease as three.

After a year of painting apartments, I decided to give my education the old college try. I turned in my application to The University of Iowa for the fall of 1997. John, Dubs, and I also needed to find a new place to live. We recruited Dom and another IC native, TuffPuff, and found a five bedroom house on Davenport Street. (TuffPuff’s real last name was the same as a pair of brother fabulists, which, among his friends was turned into Grimace. Chad and I began calling him TuffPuff as a pronunciation of the acronym made from the initials for That Fat Purple Freak.)

Immediately after moving in, since Dubs and I still worked for the property manager, we had to work every day of the week for a little while. After all five of us were finally able to settle in, we started talking about what would be our first house party. John’s birthday was in August, so plans turned towards a weekend around that date.

Although he was only turning 20, John wanted to go all out. So, planning for this party included the rental of a dunk tank. At this time, I got the idea for another outdoor attraction for our party, and decided I would fill a wading pool full of tapioca pudding, ostensibly for attendees to wrassle in.

On the day of the party, I drove across town to the highway that led to the future birthplace of James T. Kirk and ran along the southern boundary of Iowa City. Along this stretch were the majority of the large box stores and I pulled my car into the parking lot of Cub Foods. I easily found a soft-walled kiddie pool with a blue, plastic bottom then made my way to the bulk foods. Scanning the shelves, I saw large cans of tapioca pudding, but felt like the amount I would need to buy to fill the pool would exceed the meager amount I wanted to spend. Thinking I had found a suitable solution, I bought a few boxes of powdered milk and a slew of boxes of Jell-o brand instant vanilla pudding.

Upon returning home, I found the dunk tank had been delivered by the rental company and John was using the neighbors’ hose to fill the large basin. I set up my little pool in another section of the back yard. Once the dunk tank had enough water, I commandeered the hose and began pouring water into the pool. I was able to hang the mouth of the hose over the side of the pool and open the boxes of powdered milk I had purchased from the store. The milk solids fell into the pool and rolled across the blue, plastic floor like large, puffy clouds accumulating against a high, blue sky.

Without any tools to help prep the pudding, I took off my shoes and socks. I stepped into the pool and walked in circles to swirl the milk and water into a solution. Once it seemed mixed, I opened the packages of pudding and poured them into pool while I continued walking in circles.

Now, there was a major flaw in my plan that I hadn’t considered when I went to purchase my wares. In order for the pudding to set up, I needed to bring the milk just to a boil before chilling in the refrigerator. So, rather than one big bowl of vanilla pudding, I had a wading pool filled with a sweet-smelling, yellowish liquid that was slightly thicker than whipping cream.

At this point, the afternoon was turning to evening and a few guests had started milling around our backyard. One woman opted to be the guinea pig on the dunk tank seat, and after a few pitches, she was dumped into the water. My pool of pudding, however, was not getting a single volunteer for any exhibition wrestling matches. Perhaps the clouds that had rolled in over the past few hours was, in a sense, a way to hide my disappointment; in myself that I hadn’t built a suitable pudding wrestling arena, but also disappointment that no one was interested in my quirky attraction. In any case, the clouds opened up and a deluge of rain, complete with thunder and lightning, forced all the revelers away from the dunk tank and into the house.

The party progressed, and I’d nearly forgotten about my pool as heavy drops threatened to dilute the mixture of milk and unset pudding. While the storm abated late in the evening, the party remained inside the house as darkness fell. Around midnight, Luke, a person I knew from central Iowa randomly walks through the door of the house. He sees me, so I rise to meet him and we go outside by his car. There, he turns to me and asks, “So, where is this wading pool full of pudding?”

I point to the backyard. Then, with an attitude of defiance, I ran at the pool and dove into the “pudding,” coating myself, my hair, and my clothing in its cloying sweetness. I took Luke back into the house where we grabbed a couple of my roommates and led them to my room so we could smoke a little weed. As unexpectedly as he arrived, Luke left shortly after that. And me, having started the day early, I passed out on the couch.

The next day, I had to drive to Webster City to participate in a golf event my dad put on each year for his colleagues at work. It took about two and a half to three hours to drive from Iowa City to Webster City, and I gamely took off in my car. I was still a little inebriated from the night before and drove through Taco Bell to get some grub to sop up the alcohol still moving about my system. In any case, it wasn’t until I was well away from Iowa City on interstate 80 before I was sober enough to take stock of my situation.

Slowly, as my senses sharpened, I began to smell something kind of nasty. I couldn’t figure out what the odor was, but it had hints of vomit. There wasn’t a sour taste in my mouth and I didn’t remember throwing up the night before. I suspected it may have been the food I ordered, not because it was bad, but, let’s be serious, it was Taco Bell. Still, I couldn’t identify the source of the stink. I kept driving, making small sniffs intermittently, trying not to inhale the vapors too deeply. Finally, at one point, I held my shirt collar to my nose, and there I found it. The smell was coming from my clothes. It was emanating from the t-shirt and shorts I was wearing when I dove into my wading pool full of pudding. The milk had gone sour.

Once I reached my parents’ house, I took a shower and put on clean clothes. I drove to the golf course to play in the tournament for my father. I stayed in Webster City long enough to eat some food and have my mom wash some of my clothes. She made significant noise about the prior night’s party outfit and asked if someone had thrown up on me. I demurred.

I drove back to Iowa City that afternoon and found a number of my roommates in Dubs’s room playing N64. He had the room on the first floor in the back of the house and I noticed he had all his windows shut and all of my roommates had a shiny, sweaty sheen to them. The moment I walked into the room, all my friends stopped playing and erupted in yells:

“Dude, your pool reeks!”

“You gotta get that shit out of here!”

“That pool is so nasty!”

Point taken.

I went out to the backyard to look at the festering pudding pool. Not sure how I could drain it before throwing it away, I decided I would drag the whole thing to the alley behind the house. This course of action was more difficult than I thought due to the weight of the liquid. I pulled on one side of the pool, walking backward and digging my heels into the dirt of the backyard. It stretched into an oval and I made reasonable progress dragging the pool over the ground towards the alley without spilling more than the occasional dollop.

In the backyard, there was a shed for the house that the landlord did not give us access to. In addition, there was a concrete walk around it. As I neared the alleyway, I had to drag the pool over that sidewalk. Unfortunately, a lot of earth had receded from the edge of the concrete. And as I dragged the pool over the corner of the walk, it caught on a chunk of concrete, tearing the bottom of the pool, and its contents spread out into a broad puddle across the backyard.

Boy, I sure hoped it would rain again, soon.