The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

In 1945, Ray Bradbury traveled with a friend to Mexico.  Having gone to high school in Southern California, he also grew to have a Latino friends and loved ones.  These adventures, bitter and sweet, inspired numerous stories including the following.

The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit gives us a picture of the kinds of Latinos that Ray Bradbury knew and loved at this time in his life, some of which getting memorialized in Death is a Lonely Business.  Amazingly, this was a short story in A Medicine for Melancholy that became a play in The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond Tomorrow before Disney Picked it up and turned it into a very wonderful feel-good movie.

Here’s the Wikipedia plot synopsis of the movie version (spoilers included):

The story starts off with Jose Martinez, a poor young man living in East Los Angeles who is in love with the girl next door. He sets out to go say hi when he encounters a strange man eyeing him. He runs down the street and throws his wallet with his last $20 to escape. When cornered in the alley he is given back his money where the man measures his body frame. This man is Gómez who introduces himself and then whisks Martinez off to a run-down bar. There he meets two other similarly-sized Latinos, Dominguez, a wandering guitar player, and Villanazul, a burgeoning philosopher and speaker for the people.

Barely letting the dust settle, Gómez shows them that they all have the same measurements, height, and weight. It is at that moment that Gómez shares his vision. The most beautiful, exquisite, vanilla-ice-cream-white summer suit is for sale at the downtown suit emporium. It is one of a kind and costs only $100. Alone, none of them have enough to purchase the suit, but by combining their money, they may be able to own the one-of-a-kind suit together. Each of the four has only $20, leaving them with $80 – just $20 short. They need one more person to complete their dream. In their haste, they choose to go along with a bum outside, Vámonos, who has the last $20 they need.

Once they buy the suit, they work out a system to decide who will wear it. Each partner will get to wear it for the entire night, one night a week. However, on the first night, they will each wear it for one hour, then return to the bar. Dominguez goes first, and stirs up a parade with his guitar playing, inspiring those who hear it to ¡Muévete! Villanazul is second, and during his hour he interrupts a politician on a soapbox to perform a poem he has written. Martinez, third in line, returns to the balcony where he first saw the girl next door. While she had previously not noticed him (because she did not have her glasses on), this time the bright white suit attracts her attention and Martinez gets her name: Celia Obregon.

Gómez is next. Acting on an earlier hunch that Gómez’s plan was a scam to get the money from the others to buy the suit and then leave town, Villanazul reminds Gómez to “go with God.” This was indeed the plan all along, but on the way to the bus station, Gómez encounters a mural of five men, each resembling a member of their group. Gómez decides not to leave, and returns.

Finally it is Vámonos’s turn. Gómez is infuriated that the filthy Vámonos did not get clean before it was his turn. Along with the others, they force Vámonos to take a bath, something he hadn’t done in years. Once clean, Gómez lays down a series of rules, aimed at keeping the suit clean: no eating juicy tacos, drinking wine, smoking cigars, even standing under trees with birds. Furthermore, he insists that Gómez avoid meeting with a woman named Ruby Escadrío, whose boyfriend, Toro, would ruin the suit in a fight. Vámonos heads off to a club. He is followed by the other four members, who watch him ignore every one of Gómez’s rules.

Ruby Escadrío shows up, and she and Vámonos dance. Toro, predictably, is angry. The others protect Vámonos from Toro, Gómez even going so far as to insist Toro hit him instead of Vámonos. The fight ends after Toro hits Vámonos with his car. His leg is broken, but Vámonos insists that they quickly take off the suit before the ambulance arrives, because the paramedics would cut the suit off and ruin it. They do, and Vámonos is rushed to the hospital.

In the final scene, Dominguez has ironed the suit and placed it on a mannequin. As the scene continues, it becomes apparent that the suit is one of the few things the group has left: they are sleeping on a rooftop, with only a few hammocks between them. Vámonos is fine, though his leg is still in a cast. Martinez contemplates that if they were rich, they would never have had the great time they have spent together, before Villanazul tells him to get some sleep.

 

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