Hot Cocoa Bombs (Away) Part 1
My Tuesday morning volunteer shift at the street ministry was set to begin. Men and women living outdoors waited around in the parking lot, listening to music on their phones, shooting the shit, pulling it together, and smoking cigarettes.
Breakfast duty consisted of pouring percolator coffee into paper cups and then whipping up a variety of orders for the clientele: cream, sugar, four sugars, milk, hot chocolate, sweetness and the occasional coffee over Lucky Charms, Froot Loops or oatmeal.
A new Covid protocol mandated patrons sit at the tables and then I would hustle out the orders. It was a much better system than having people stand in line, get angry, jostle.
Right before the front door opened, I noticed a small stack of clear plastic packages with labeling that
read: Hot Dark Cocoa Bombs. The packages contained approximately meatball-sized chocolate bombs decorated with green and white icing and star-shaped marshmallows. Sentences on the packaging instructed the user to drop the confectionery sphere into their coffee or hot chocolate, thereby rendering it more delicious and a potential murder weapon in an episode of a properly rebooted Perry Mason.
Upon further inspection I learned Total Cluster Fudge manufactured the product. Moreover, stamps revealed expiration dates: today! Apparently a grocery store had donated the bombs to the ministry and saved them from an eternal defused life of decomposition and methane release in a landfill.
So, bombs away, and I was the intrepid solo bombardier with a helluva a lot of ordnance to expend, on....well...innocent homeless men and women just looking for a little overpowered Yuban or Maxwell House to make it through the morning.
An immediate question arose at precisely the same time homeless men and women were stepping inside. How would I deliver the sugary payload? No way I would don rubber gloves! I'd look like a damn proctologist!
Tongs! Of course! Tongs! Tongs! Tongs! I'd still resemble a proctologist in action, but at least a kinder, gentler version.
I dug a plastic black beauty out of a drawer and the mission began. It occurred to me that I was going to have to aggressively market the bomb because no one had ever seen such an edible thing before and it did look vaguely scatological. I concocted a quick sales pitch, tried it out in whispers, and practiced my tong bombing technique without actually dropping one.
Some pitches:
Hey, you wanna get bombed?
You need a bomb in your coffee?
Hey, want something sweet on the eve of destruction?
How about a secret sugar bomb brother?
Ground control to Major Tom....