Orange Sherbet and Jessica Rabbit

by Chris Conroy

Richard Ulrich is tired of the anniversary and the specific rituals that have gone along with it for the past fifteen years and this year, the sixteenth year anniversary, today the 21st of September 2007, he is prepared to put an end to it. The Orange Sherbet Corporation — inventers of the first Push-Em-Up Pop in 1956 (first flavor: orange sherbet; hence OSC) - transferred their head salesman, Richard Ulrich, with wife Linda and 3 month old baby boy Trevor, from their Kentucky plant to their new sales division based out of Sausalito California in the summer of 1985. It has been — as it is today — Richard’s job the past fifteen years to unlock the toy chest that collects dust in the basement 364 days out of the year, and carry the “Special Items” as Linda puts it, up to the living room and arrange, in a semi-circle around a framed photo of Trevor, the items: a red Swatch Watch, Hotel California CD, Spider-Man wetsuit, a Swiss Army knife, and Trevor’s favorite doll and sleeping buddy ever since he first saw her — a stuffed Jessica Rabbit doll - strutting her animated stuff on the big screen when he was just four years old, which, by the way, was obtained by Richard’s skilled hands — after close to an hour and over ten bucks in quarters — on the toy crane machine at Fisherman’s Wharf. The Orange Sherbet Corporation set the Ulrich’s up in a three bedroom condominium that was part of a new development — Golden Gate Estates — just three blocks from the San Francisco Bay; egrets, herons and seals were among their neighbors and the only witnesses to the drowning death of little six year old Trevor Ulrich who, claimed over the phone to his Grandma in Kentucky just a day before, that he was now an expert swimmer and that he would be a lifeguard instead of a baseball player when he grew up. Hotel California is blasting from the living room speakers when Linda Ulrich walks through the front door with tears in her eyes and an ice cream cake boxed white in her hands, “Richard, we’re not supposed to play the song yet,” she yells over the music, turns and drops the cake; Richard’s lifeless body hangs from the wooden cross beams in the kitchen; an orange electric cord clenched around his neck; his face blue and slumped down over the right shoulder; the eyes rolled back and gone; the Jessica Rabbit doll — the last thing in Richard Ulrich’s hands — now on the tiled floor inches below his dangling feet. On the 21st of September 1991, Linda Ulrich woke her 6 year old son Trevor up a half hour before sunrise, dressed him in his Spider-Man wetsuit and walked him three windy blocks to the fog laden San Francisco Bay: “Go ahead, Honey,” she said and pushed him into the dark water, “show Mommy how far you can swim.”

6S - C2

Chris Conroy writes after breakfast and before lunch.