THE B-SIDE: The Pros and Cons of Installing a Ten-Foot Chocolate Fountain in My Front Yard
Lessons Learned!
Today’s guest essayist is Frank Caramillo of Bayside, Queens.
Frank owns Caramillo Used Autos on Francis Lewis Boulevard, where a slight overstock issue has made Karma Reveros extremely priced to move. He presents us with the inaugural piece in our new “Lessons Learned!” series.
I have always had a problem with impulse control. As an example, this past Sunday I knew I had to be up at 7 a.m. for work the next morning. And yet, I started watching Michael Mann’s three-hour masterpiece Heat at 11pm that night.
Or last Thursday, when beers at happy hour turned into whiskeys at 3 a.m. for the “crying-over-my-divorce” leg of the evening. At which point I thought it would be funny to prank call the Uzbekistan Consulate to ask if their country has a Walmart, because I was declaring war on low, low discount prices.
(In my defense, I think I made a solid point: that international peace is a delicate web, and all it takes is one pulled thread to unravel it.)
(Although my defense attorney has reviewed this manuscript and has asked me to clarify that this is a moral defense, and not an actual legal defense.)
The point I’m making—and this is important—is that I tend to act before carefully weighing the pros and cons.
Last fall, I took a trip to Las Vegas for my cousin’s wedding. It was held at the Bellagio Resort and Casino, and as my Uber drove past the legendary fountain at the front entrance I thought about how nice an 8.5-acre man-made lake featuring a fountain with 1,200 synchronized nozzles would look in my front yard.
The wedding itself was dull, despite my attempt to add levity by standing during the “If anyone knows why these two should not be wed” portion and pretending to declare my love for the bride. A lot of people wish they’d thought of that one, I think. The other highlight was a chocolate fountain, into which one could dip a piece of cheese—or a finger, if one was already the focus of some jealous hostility over how funny they could be.
When I got home, I couldn’t shake the image of being the proud owner of a gigantic fountain-slash-reservoir. Unfortunately, my row house in Bayside, Queens, while charming, has a front yard that borders on non-existent. The shadow of a sliver of a patch of grass.
And so the following night, as I researched water fountains with Michael Mann’s Collateral playing as background noise, I realized that if I really wanted to be the talk of the neighborhood my house could proudly host what might be the world’s first decorative, outdoor, non-event chocolate fountain.
“Imagine,” I said to myself in giddy anticipation, “being able to step outside my house anytime I want—day or night, winter or summer—and have some fresh chocolate-dipped cheese.”
I then found myself saying out loud the phrase I always say right before everything goes wrong: “What could possibly go wrong?”
That turned out to be an even better question than I realized at the time—one I sincerely wish I’d spent any time trying to answer. But first, a few things that went right.
For the twenty glorious minutes on that first day when the fountain actually worked, it was a beautiful sight. Brown, sludgy melted chocolate burbled over the pristine white, soon-to-be-permanently-stained marble surface of the fountain—like Vesuvius drowning Pompeii in slow, sugary lava. It was a sight of raw beauty, right up until the first tragedy—when it began spilling over the sides and into what was, according to a subsequent strongly-worded court order from the Environmental Protection Agency, the city’s groundwater system.
I’d like to explain, in my own defense, why the chocolate began slopping over the sides. As the first person in history to install a decorative, outdoor, non-event chocolate fountain, I had no predecessors. No role models. No blog posts, no warning labels, no chocolate fountain community forums on Facebook or Reddit.
I certainly had no one to warn me that a standard ten-foot fountain, designed primarily—or as I now realize, exclusively—for water, would also contain pipes designed exclusively to transport water, pipes which would of course prove far too narrow for thick, slow-moving, deliciously sludgy chocolate.
After I got the matter settled—following an epic four-hour argument with the return department, the manager, the district manager, and eventually the legal team at the College Point Home Depot—I finally had a suitable replacement up and running.
I was, as I’d hoped, the talk of the neighborhood and particularly of the neighborhood’s Homeowners Association. That led to a lively door-side debate with the HOA President over the legality of HOA-issued fines and cease-and-desist orders.
But a few bureaucratic hiccups and a couple of minor violations of fluid dynamics aside, I found myself enjoying my outdoor decorative chocolate fountain. For a day.
Here’s the thing about a fountain that continuously circulates any liquid, be it water or chocolate: there isn’t some subterranean aquifer endlessly supplying a self-replenishing volume of that fluid into your system. That’s not how natural science—or dessert science, for that matter—works.
Okay, to be fair to the Environmental Protection Agency, it has been explained to me that there is allegedly a reservoir of groundwater that can be ruined for several generations if one allows fifty gallons of liquid chocolate to seep into the ground above it.
My point is that when you hook up a chocolate fountain, there’s a finite amount of chocolate liquid that endlessly recirculates. So, for instance, if a group of drunks wanders by in the middle of the night after the bars close at Cry-Over-Your-Divorce O’Clock and decides to toss their mostly-eaten Big Macs and French fries into the fountain, those bits of food don’t go anywhere. They just keep resurfacing. Forever.
Also, a source of never-ending chocolate is going to attract an equally never-ending supply of pests. And while I’m certainly talking about mice, rats, opossums, roaches, and the endless armies of ants, it turns out that the worst pests by far are the neighborhood children.
It isn’t ideal when ants march into one’s chocolate fountain and drown en masse in the solidifying chocolate goo. But at least, unlike the ever-growing hordes of children hanging out in front of your home, the ants aren’t constantly talking at the tops of their lungs.
If the children weren’t yelling over each other about who won a game of freeze tag, they were screaming about how much pain they were in from the large swarms of invading wasps (also not ideal) stinging them, morning through dinner time.
Speaking of laws of physics, these children certainly seem to remain in motion—despite repeated efforts to slow them down, up to and including spraying them with a hose of liquid chocolate.
Also—and this cannot be emphasized strongly enough—raccoons are far more clever than you would think. They can undo even the strongest cover you put over your chocolate fountain at night. There is no sadder sight than a morbidly obese raccoon, its mouth clamped to the chocolate-bearing pipe it disconnected from the base, dead from an OD—Overdose of Deliciousness.
In short, while a ten-foot decorative non-event chocolate fountain might sound like the perfect addition to your outdoor home décor, you may want to seriously consider the downsides before committing to a purchase and installation.
That said, I must end this essay now—I’ve just won an eBay auction for a fully functional World War II Panzer tank, and I need to get to the airport within the hour to fly to Youngstown and pick it up.
I’m sure the HOA won’t mind. What could possibly go wrong?
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