Two things:
Firstly, I apologize in advance for any typos or odd phrasing. It’s quite difficult to keep focused in my current state and my keyboard is very sticky.
Secondly, as you read this story you might find yourself thinking ‘Hey, maybe writing about your intrusive thoughts isn’t the best way to handle them, maybe try distracting yourself, maybe just don’t think about it’ and I would totally agree with you IF these were simply intrusive thoughts. But I don’t think these are simply intrusive thoughts, I think I have been cursed. ‘But I don’t believe in curses’ I hear you say. Well, neither do I, but it’s just about the best explanation I have for what happened. It’s either a curse or I have tasted ice-cream that broke me. I don’t know which option scares me more.
It was three in the morning and I was hammered out of my mind trying to stagger my way back home. All in all it was a good evening, the drinks were cheap and the conversation was plentiful; the only thing that I needed to finish off the night was a nice kebab to line my stomach with to spare myself a hangover in the morning. Yet as I stumbled through the sleepy streets of Prague it seemed as if all of my usual drunk dine-in spots were closed. There was no way that I could stay conscious long enough to get food delivered, it started to look like I would have to go to bed on a diet of crackers and water but as I made my way through the park outside of my apartment I found an answer to my hungry plea.
The shine of the lamppost gave him a sort of aura, it was as if the universe had heard my pleas for a treat and placed an ice-cream peddler in my path. He stood in the middle of the empty park with his rickety cart, a grin peeking out from beneath his bushy Nietzsche-esque moustache.
“Would you like some ice-cream young man?” he asked.
“Fuck yeah!” I yelled with an energy only Long Islands can induce.
“Which flavor would you like?” He gestured towards his cart. There seemed to be a good dozen flavors all neatly marked with cursive handwriting. I was entirely too drunk to read.
“The best flavor!” I demanded.
“The best flavor?”
“Yeah! Gimme the best that you got!”
My sight was spinning with booze-induced inertia, but even through my stupor I could see a glint in his eye. The triple vision of the ice-cream man united into one, his moustache raised to reveal pearly teeth. “There’s a special recipe I keep saved for only the most exquisite of customers. Are you sure you can handle it?”
“Fuck yeah! I’m a golden god of a customer!” I yelled, because that’s the type of drunk I am.
He nodded, adjusted his hat, and opened up a wooden cabinet on his ice-cream cart from which he took out a strange little machine. My memory is pretty patchy, but I distinctly remember looking at it and thinking ‘This is some past century shit’, there’s a good chance I might have said it out loud as well. The machine started up with a sputter, it looked like a cross between a steam engine and a sausage maker. The ice-cream man reached into his cart and produced ingredients that he started to load into the machine. “It’s an old family recipe that has been passed down over generations, my great grandfather…”
In retrospect I should have listened to what he had to say, perhaps if I had heard his story I could have avoided my present situation all together. Maybe his monologue contained clues as to where I could find him, or could shed some light on what the hell was in that ice-cream, or better yet his monologue might have contained the actual recipe. I’ll never know.
I’ll never know because my drunken ass spent the whole story giggling. As soon as the ice-cream man mentioned his family I couldn’t help but imagine a dinner table filled with bushy moustaches. The ice-cream man would sit at the head of the table, twirling his moustache, next to him would be his wife, also twirling her equally-bushy moustache and on the other side of the table would be the kids, pinching at their fledgling facial hair. The food would arrive. A mess would be made.
“Honey, you have some leftovers stuck in your moustache.”
“Thanks, you too.”
Classic fucking comedy.
“Here you go,” he brought me out of my booze-induced hallucination of a hairy family with a cone of soft-serve ice-cream, “Just be sure to appreciate the gentle notes of the flavor, you will never taste something like this again.”
I wanted to pay him, but he insisted that he wasn’t making ice-cream for the money; he was providing the treat purely out of the goodness of his heart and dedication to his craft.
I shrugged and stumbled over to my apartment. I swallowed the entire cone in two bites and then passed the fuck out.
In my teens I could run a distillery in my mouth, drink enough mixer to give myself type two diabetes and smoke a million cigarettes only to wake up with a mild hangover. That time has passed a decade ago. When I woke up the morning after my encounter with the ice-cream man I grabbed my water bottle and promptly ran over to the bathroom to empty my stomach.
My brain felt bruised, my eyes stung from the smoky conversations of the night prior, the hangover was definitely there, but something was different. Instead of tasting the battery acid of last night’s consumption all I could feel on my tongue was a faint taste of vanilla. I shrugged it off, I figured that the ice-cream I had last night was just really good. I made a mental note to seek out the strange ice-cream man in the future and discarded the thought. I spent the rest of the morning drinking water and puking.
I would kill a dozen small mammals to be able to be the person I was in that bathroom, hung-over as all hell, but still capable of thought that doesn’t revolve around frozen goods. The fact that I was able to let go of the ice-cream thoughts still gives me some hope for the future, yet that hope is buried beneath an impenetrable layer of perfectly creamy vanilla.
Betty came over just as my body started becoming receptive to water. She laughed, gave me shit about being bad at holding my liquor and then we made love. Mind you, at that point Betty and me had been a thing for a month, this was a height of passion bang, this was could-I-possibly-be-dating-my-wife sex, yet as our sweaty bodies writhed with adoration I found my mind drifting. Past the excited declarations of love and the pleasure of being touched was something else, something frozen and giant, something made of the sweetest milk and the softest of petals.
“Whatcha thinking about?” She asked, as we lay in a cuddled post-coital glow.
“Ice-cream.” I felt her shift under my arm. She did not like that answer. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“That this is a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon, that I’m happy we met each other and…” she sighed, “Ice-cream now.”
There was disappointment in her voice, I searched for something sweet to say but the only sweetness that I could think of was soft served and came in a cone “Want to go get some?”
“Some ice-cream?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh, sure.”
We went to three different places. I kept on hoping that I would come across something, anything, that would satiate my craving for vanilla ice-cream but every ice-cream parlor we went to was filled with frozen disappointment. Every lick was drenched in preservatives and mold and defeat, when I tasted the third cone, the one that came from ‘The best ice-cream parlor in Central Europe’, I gagged.
“What’s wrong?” Betty asked. She wasn’t asking about the ice-cream.
I tried to explain. I tried to describe the mustacho’d ice-cream peddler, how drunk I was, his story, the taste, the craving, but the words came out sluggish and disoriented. I kept on searching for ways to describe what had happened to me, the longing that I was feeling deep in my chest, yet all I was met with was her confused gaze. It was as if my ability to speak was a McDonald’s ice-cream machine, perpetually defective.
“Look, if something is up let’s talk about it. We’re not children, we can communicate. Communication is…” I could see her lips move, I heard her voice, but my mind was utterly consumed with the thought of that gentle nectar. She talked about a past relationship, or her parents’ relationship, or some pop-psych advice, I don’t know, I wasn’t listening. All that was on my mind was a mental map of every ice-cream parlor in Prague.
As the mental fog of my hangover dissipated my craving for the ice-cream strengthened into a palpable ache. There was a burning hole in my chest, the type of hole that people fill with love or God or money or ambition, but I knew that there was only one thing that could satiate me. It wasn’t Betty.
We made plans to meet up next weekend. I watched the woman that I had cared about so deeply just that morning get on the bus and ride away. For a second there was a pang of guilt, I wanted to run after the bus and demand it stop, I wanted to jump on board and take her in my arms and tell her that she was the most important thing in my life. But a delicious, viscous cream washed that feeling of guilt away.
Seven other ice-cream parlors, I visited seven other ice-cream parlors and found nothing but frustration. My teeth hurt, partially from consuming massive amounts of vanilla ice-cream, but mainly because of the way that my jaw would clench whenever I was faced with the inevitable disappointment. The streets were dark; all the ice-cream parlors were shut, so I went to the supermarket.
As I pushed my cart through the ice-cream isle grabbing every box that contained that ambrosial flavor I found myself desperately clawing at the roof of my mouth with my tongue. Somewhere in the back of my one-track mind I was trying to dig past the remnants of the impostor flavors towards the one true holy syrup. A trace of it still had to be there, it was after all, less than twenty four hours since I had tasted the ice-cream, I had mouth-hangovers that lasted twice that long. Even a singular atom of it on my tongue could make me feel whole.
It’s with that thought I stopped. I stared into the pile of ice-cream in my cart and entertained a thought that was only remotely related to the ice-cream. This is fucking insane. I had spent an afternoon driving away someone who made me happy, I had done enough damage to my teeth to make a dentist blush, there was enough ice-cream in my cart to pay for a dinner at a fancy restaurant. Yet as I looked into that cart a chill ran down my spine, something inside of me grabbed all notion of doubt or guilt or fear, tore at those neural connections and pointed them at a single thought: I needed to taste that fucking ice-cream again.
The taste, that’s what I needed, I needed to replicate that taste. It was all insane, it was all so desperately frightening, but my mind didn’t let the emotions get to me. My thoughts were loud and clear: milk, eggs, vanilla extract, cream get whatever you need to replicate that taste. You need this. I piled more and more into my cart, I followed what my heart demanded, but somewhere in the back of my frozen treat focused brain was a small fire of hope, a hope that if the taste was replicated the madness would subside.
I can’t imagine how she felt. Literally, I cannot imagine what she had felt because of my diminished mental capacity, but even in a figurative sense, what she saw must have been hard. She rang the buzzer downstairs, it’s a miracle I even heard it by then, I was deep into tasting the disgusting store bought facsimiles, trying to pinpoint where their tastes diverged from the godly original but the buzzer broke my concentration. I swallowed the warm milky substance on my tongue and picked up the receiver.
Her voice came through, there was warmth in her words, but my brain went numb when I tried to grasp what she was saying “Hey, can… come upstairs? I just… don’t feel good about it… talk… upstairs.” An ice-berg of deliciousness towered in the cold seas of my soul, I didn’t want to see her, she would just slow me down. Yet before I knew it my finger was buzzing her through.
I don’t remember what she saw. If the amount of melted ice-cream on my hands right now is any indication, she saw enough to lose any semblance of attraction towards me. She said something, maybe a couple sentences, but they were hollow, she had lost all hope in me ever being normal. All she did was hand me two vanilla ice-creams she had grabbed from the corner store downstairs.
“I don’t need two. Take the other one.” I heard myself say.
“I don’t feel like eating ice-cream right now.” I can’t imagine how she felt.
I have spent the whole night without sleep and I don’t think sleep will come anytime soon. My entire home smells strongly of vanilla extract, the kitchen, the bedroom, everything is covered in traces of my misadventures with trying to capture the taste of that cursed ice-cream. Because… This has to be a curse right?
I have walked through the park, I have stared out of the window at the exact spot where he stood as I slaved away at making my home made atrocity, the ice-cream man is nowhere to be found. What if the story he told me was filled with hints, or there was some stupid fucking riddle at the end? What if I completely missed my chance to taste that ice-cream ever again? I bet you he’s some goddamn ghost and I offended his sensibilities. This is definitely a curse.
As soft and sweet as that taste I crave is, I know that somewhere beneath those gentle notes of vanilla is something evil. I know that I will crave this taste until the end of my days and I know that any chance at ever locating the mustachio’d man or anyone from his mustachio’d family is slim.
I thought that maybe sharing this tale would help me forget, but writing about that heavenly taste has simply made me weep on my keyboard. But if writing my story will not give me solace, then perhaps I can at least deliver a message. If you see a man selling ice-cream in the middle of the night… call me.