I picked chocolate fudge, cookie dough and bits from crushed Heath Bars. My date had strawberries, vanilla cream and marshmallows. The smiling servers brandished ice cream scoops like scimitars. The flavors were mashed on a cold marble slab. Music from the Pixies bounced off walls covered in pale, yellow paint. It was my first date in college.

UW students and U-District residents have long regarded Mix Ice Cream Bar, known locally as “The Mix,” as a neighborhood icon. It has humored freshman dating dramas, late night partygoers and sweet-toothed ice cream addicts looking for their banana split fix. I chose it for my date because I had read that girls like chocolate. I like ice cream. The Mix had both, plus a bathroom rife with potty humor and Day-Glo graffiti.

Minutes after ordering, our confections were ready.

The devouring took all of two minutes. The ice cream was delicious. An orgasm seemed to have nothing on the delectable puddle of crunchy, chocolate goodness moving from spoon to mouth. However, the date didn’t go as smoothly as the ice cream. After spilling a dark dab of chocolate on the girl’s blouse, it was done. Date over. Premature mastication had led to a slip of the spoon and a slap in the face.

And still, a love affair with The Mix continued. Years went by and I frequented the local ice creamery. Many people did. We thought it would last forever, like great icons do.

But in January 2008, when The Mix was supposed to open again after the holidays, the doors stayed locked. The lights stayed off. It never reopened. And the owner couldn’t be found.

It closed a week before Christmas. Nothing seemed wrong. Many restaurants and stores close for the holidays. It seemed normal. But when Deven Vierra, a former manager of The Mix, went back to work on January 5, he found the store’s doors shut.

He forces his key into the lock. The Mix’s peeling purple door pushes open.

“Strange,” Vierra said. “Why are the lights off? Why is it closed?”

He ascended a small ramp leading toward the ice cream bar. A large bulletin board sprinkled with Polaroid photos of friends and former employees hangs to his left. A picture of Lance Percy, the owner of The Mix, is pinned in the center of the board. Surrounding Percy are the words, “Lance. The Man, the Myth, the Legend.”

Employees saw Percy as a sociable guy. Short, blond hair bobbed atop his slightly heavy frame while a pair of glasses perched atop his pink brow. He thought fast and talked faster. Chatting was as customary for The Mix as chocolate fudge. He smiled constantly.

“He does things really fast and messes up sometimes,” Vierra said. “He doesn’t get pissed off at his employees for anything, only himself. He’s a weird guy.”

Normally, Percy calls his managers about when the store will open and close. Then he would post the employees’ schedules. But Vierra didn’t receive any phone call from Percy. He couldn’t find the new schedule anywhere. Dust had piled on the store’s well-worn furniture. No one had been inside The Mix for weeks.

He tried calling Percy. No answer.

Word spread to the other employees. Something was wrong. They tried calling Percy.

The message they heard was:

“I’m sorry. The voice mailbox for … Lance … is full. Please try your call again later. Goodbye.”

Four days after employees discovered a dusty ice cream parlor and a missing owner, Vierra’s cell phone rings. It’s Percy.

“All employees need to pick up their paychecks at The Mix,” Percy says. “Sorry for not calling you back sooner.”

Vierra taps END on his phone, stunned.

The Mix was closed. It had thrown in the towel and was headed for the showers.

The same day Percy called Vierra, the other Mix, located in Green Lake, had a visitor. Kim Bjorklund, the property manager of Lakeside Plaza, hadn’t received rent from Percy in more than two months.

When she arrived, she found the doors locked. The lights were off. The place seemed abandoned.

She filed a complaint with the courts, demanding rent money or relinquishment of the building’s keys, but Percy never formally responded. Nearly three weeks later, a judge ordered the eviction of The Mix from its Green Lake location. Percy owed the property owners nearly $7,000 in damages and fees.

After 14 years of serving sundaes over cold marble top counters, The Mix was shut down because it couldn’t pay the rent.

It is uncertain at this time if The Mix in the University District closed for the same reason. However, several U-District employees say they still haven’t been paid for their work during the weeks preceding Christmas. And according to some employees, the shutdown wasn’t a huge surprise.

“In a two-year period I noticed we started getting less and less customers,” former employee Chris Jones said. “We had less shipments [and] less restocking. Walls were cracking. We made less money than before.

“I think most of the core employees sensed it,” he added. “They knew that the health of the Mix was dwindling.”

Others were shocked by the business’ closure.

“I didn’t really see it coming,” Vierra said. “It seemed like he really wanted to keep it going.”

Percy’s voice mailbox is still full. With him not returning phone calls, it is unclear if either store will ever open again. But most employees don’t expect it to.

“It was an incredible place to work,” former employee Tyler Stowens said. “But I’ve moved on. I’m working somewhere else now.”

“The Mix was the best job I’ve ever had,” said Jones, who recently relocated to Portland. “The ice cream was great. Best coworkers ever. I’ll tell my grandkids about that place. It was a social nexus of the U-District.”

The sign outside The Mix still glows, a nostalgic vestige of the ice cream parlor’s former prominence. Its employees have found other jobs. Its owner has vanished. Its marble counter rests at room temperature, devoid of the delectable mix-ins that made it a local landmark.

Stacks of The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger sit sordidly near to the doorway. One pile is torn open, its contents strewn across the pavement. Rain has transformed the separated newspaper sections into wet globs of fibrous paste.

A spit wad is splattered against the window of The Mix. The place looks decrepit.

A man wearing patchwork baggy jeans and a black, hooded sweatshirt leans against the store’s smudged windowpane. A moldy-brown colored pit bull with a thick rope collar slumps lazily at his feet.

The man stamps out his cigarette and looks at me. A large brown tooth juts over his lower lip. It’s the biggest of his three visible teeth. His name is Travis.

“Yep. They’re closed,” Travis growls. “Shut down before Christmas. Bummer.”

He pulls his pants over his waist and walks away.

I scream. You scream. We all scream. But The Mix will no longer serve us ice cream. It’s closed. Kaput. Kicked the bucket. Shut down. Sayonara. There was no last hurrah for The Mix, no band that went down with the ship, no heroic send-off into the sunset. It closed without so much as a “thanks for coming” or a “we regret to inform you, but…”

The Mix will always be the place where I went on my first (disastrous) date in college. It was the first place in the U-District where I received free food, as well as my first slap in the face. And for many, memories of The Mix won’t die as easily as the business did. It was the ice cream icon of the District.

[Reach contributing writer Clark Fredricksen at development@thedaily.washington.edu.]