Jeff Johnson

Jeff Johnson’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s, Fence, 5_Trope, The Minus Times, and other magazines.

ICE CREAM

It started with a playful argument over a drink an airport bar offered called a "flirtation device." Several ice cubes (donning tooth-picked orange slices in lieu of life preservers) lay beached on a mountain of vanilla ice cream scooped lovingly into a port goblet.

A few eyedroppers of grenadine and amaretto were added for blood and, I suppose, as a melting agent so that we could enjoy the chaos of all the tastes at once.

My co-pilot, so to speak, and I laughingly bumped noses as we manipulated our straws amongst the dwindling survivors. The woman was not my wife, but everyone involved (including the bartender whose apron was soggy with Kahlua) had the sense that something magical could happen. This was, after all, turn of the century Milwaukee.

For the sake of our argument, I fancied myself a hard-packed ice cream purist in a soft-serve world. I huffed and puffed over the betrayal and inherent laziness that soft-serve technology implied. I would no longer toe the line for convenience sake. I divulged plans to wear seersucker year-round and operate a taffy-colored shoppe that played field recordings of ice cream truck plinkings 24-7.

--And most of the time I referred to it as ice milk.

--And at first, all of the above was done with a wink.

But as the spat escalated, and it became apparent that we would not sneak off to French Kiss under a Koala changing table in a forgotten bathroom somewhere in the vicinity of gate 46E, I became bitter. The woman hobbled toward her Charlotte-bound flight and I remained in character for what seemed like forever.

When I returned home, I set about creating a network of sympathizers for ice cream scoopers who’d been sidelined with carpal tunnel syndrome, or who merely could no longer find suitable work since the Bridgeman’s chain began to nose-dive in the middle 1980’s.

For a period, I lost a great deal of my inheritance by desktop publishing a

True, my essays may have had a polarizing effect, as they were variations on only one theme, The Olde Days, and all but three of them contained the sentence: "Remember when a bite into a scoop (yes an actual scoop, people) of ice cream meant—perhaps—a toothy battle with calcified, frozen chunks of peppermint candy or chocolate shrapnel?"

[I always implied that my readers should—in anticipation—rub their palms together as they read that sentence.]

I also extolled the virtues of:

The Bonnet
The Cuff-Link (s)
Exquisite Syrups
The Fig
Pinewood Derbies

&

Day-Light Baseball

After my wife left, there was really no reason to stay hidden in my damp basement, wrestling with antique piano rolls I’d won at auctions, riffling through my archive of collected papers on the effects of freezer burn on nougat.

I lugged the computer (my one nod to the future) up to the dining room and began composing dessert lectures, pecking out winning phrases against the royal blue glow of the DOS operating system.

An old classmate, now a municipal librarian one county over, had offered me a small monthly stipend to deliver these speeches on Saturday afternoons, under the guise of "how-to," the only caveat being that I wore clown attire: a wig, a yellow suit and size 22 cherry red tap shoes. I agreed and was soon speaking regularly to a handful of drowsy, cow-eyed children who reeked of urine and markers, while their parents bickered tediously over delinquent Mary Chapin Carpenter CDs and fraying wool jewelry.

At some point I realized that I was unnecessary and unlovable. At the time, it was only the unnecessary part that hurt. So, I soldiered on.

I stayed to myself mostly, surrounded by my uncashed library checks, my watercolors of waist-coated butlers delivering steaming popovers, and my rare Braille "insult" postcards from 1920’s Philadelphia.

I took to wearing bifocals, though I didn’t need them. I badgered my barber--an aspiring venture capitalist--with my plans for an Easter-themed ice milk restaurant where every dish employed nutmeg and the mint dessert grass was on the house. He didn’t take to it. In fact, he refused to cut my hair any longer.

My ex-wife’s family got malicious. A nephew would park in my driveway, with a carload of friends and lay on his horn for minutes. They knew I would not respond, and soon enough eggs were brought into the equation.

>From St. Patrick’s Day until August, I slept on a hammock I’d rigged from the kitchen counter to a broom closet door, listened to Hoagy Carmichael songs on an AM transistor radio and pretended I heard a heavy drizzle pattering on the roof.

It was only one sunny afternoon after the radio batteries died (the power had been shut off ages ago) and I harnessed the energy required to shave the pilled mitten that was my beard, that I stepped onto the front stoop and assessed the damage.

After I’d taken a wire brush to the splats, I peddled my no-speed over to Sherwin Williams and made my way up and down the aisles with a fist full of paint swatch cards. The help were preoccupied with a joke whose punchline—involving grout—they stumbled upon repeatedly. When they begged me for help, I realized I hadn’t been in a conversation in over a year.

When I ducked into the pastels, they laughed even harder. I stopped, sucked hard on the lump in my throat, and resisted an urge to re-paint all of my trim pistachio.