This is the kind of afternoon that will put John Mavro’s kids through college. The sky is cloudless. The air is still and hot. The day camps are letting out.

John should be happy — he drives an ice cream truck. Instead, he seems agitated.

Carrying a stack of paper cups out of his garage near Bloor St. W. and Lansdowne Ave., his ears perk up.

He points to the sky. “You hear that?” he says. It’s the “Mister Softee” ice cream truck jingle, the same song John uses. “That’s them.”

“They” are a cabal of ice cream truck drivers who, to hear John tell it, have been trying to muscle and weasel him out of his turf for years, parking in his regular spots and soaking up his business.

Those competitors are among the many factors that make driving an ice cream truck an oddly dispiriting job.

John Mavro — his full name is Mavromihelakis, but no one can pronounce it — is not an unhappy person by nature. At 47, his demeanour is a cross between dad and drinking buddy. His eyes glint with mischief.

A second-generation ice cream guy — his father and six of his uncles drove ice cream trucks, too — John got into the business 25 years ago to pay his tuition at York, where he studied psychology.

But the job has started taking its toll.

First, there are the hours: 7 a.m. to around 9 p.m., seven days a week.

In the morning, he gets his truck ready, tuning up the creaky 1987 GMC as needed. Then he hawks ice cream from noon to sundown, shilling everything from $2 small cones to $5 banana splits. (City bylaws prohibit drivers from playing their pied-piper tune after dusk.)

“It’s all-consuming,” he says.

Just ask Mrs. Mavro. “My wife calls herself a single parent in the summer time, ’cause I’m never around.”

John is hardly more popular with other parents — they’re among his many foes. He sees them “clenching their fists, like, ‘This guy is going to ruin my kid’s dinner,’ ” he says.

But they aren’t as bad as the run-of-the-mill grouches who complain to the city about him, usually because they don’t like his jingle.

Because of them, he drives his jaunty little truck “on pins and needles.”

Then there are the bureaucrats. “They’re just reaching into your pocket,” John says.

Ice cream truck drivers pay the city a one-time $1,070.71 licence fee, which costs another $700 a year or so to renew.

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Inventory is pricey, too. Every season, John goes through about 500 bags of Majestic-brand ice cream mix, a milky substance he keeps refrigerated in his truck, at about $30 a pop.

He didn’t want to say how much money he nets when all’s said and done. “You can make a living doing it — you’re not going to get rich.” (John does odd jobs and bartends in the off-season.)

Some drivers — not John — make extra profit by tuning their machines to pump surplus air into their soft-serve, saving on costly mix but producing less-flavourful ice cream: “It’s like diluting Coke with water.”

John talks about the ice cream business the way Hyman Roth talks about organized crime in The Godfather II — wistfully, as a dying art.

Gone are the days of the great ice cream artisans, the ones with standards and integrity. Now well-heeled fleets owned by Donkey Kone and Olympic Softee rake in profit by outbidding independents for flat-rate corporate contracts, John says — everything from Caribana and Pride to company picnics.

“It’s the old school, cruise-around-the-neighbourhood mentality that’s disappearing,” he says.

And yet, somehow, too many drivers still compete for too little terrain. There are 136 ice cream trucks in Toronto. “The market’s saturated,” John says.

Even the minutest parts of the business can be aggravating. “I hate sprinkles,” John says. “It’s the bane of my existence: cleaning them off the counter, cleaning them out of my hair. I’ve found them in the cuff of my pants, in my pockets. I would love for them to be limited — like, completely. There’s no nutritional value in them at all.”

But, like just about every aspect of ice cream trucks, kids love them. In fact, kids love John. It’s one of the bright spots in this gloomy job.

As he drove past a park near Bloor and Dufferin last week, a group of camp kids erupted in shrieks of excitement, waving wildly at his truck.

“Wait for me! Wait for me!” one screamed.

“I’m a bit of a rock star,” John says, “if you’re under 7 years old.”