He had come into the gas station at around 3 AM on a Wednesday morning; he and his friend were dressed in disheveled but well-put-together outfits, flamboyant and colorful. These men had been out on the town, doing what, I could only guess. They casually paced the store, the friend, a tall man with a red shirt, picking up snacks and adding them to a growing pile of treats in the crook of his arm. The Ice Cream man tried the doors to the beer cooler, but they rattled, locked tight. Undeterred, he pushed on them, then launched himself back, shaking the door and causing the promotional flier on the glass to flutter to the ground. He rattled it a few more times, much more gently this time, and finally looked up at me for the first time since entering.
“Hey, a little help?”
“Sorry, we lock the doors at midnight. It’s a law.”
“Yeah, but I need to get into them; I want a beer.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have the keys; my manager will have to unlock them when she gets in around 7.”
I did have the keys, of course. I had all the keys except the one to the manager’s office. They were hanging on the wall just out of his sight. I just didn’t feel like ringing beer up as fruit again. I’d gone down that road before. For one, the cash register didn’t let me ring it up this late, and it was hard to get the right number of bananas and oranges to equal whatever the beer would cost. I’d oftentimes have to put in several combinations to get the price right-ish. Plus, our order system would think we sold way more oranges than we did and order extra. I’d have to be the one to throw the black, soggy lumps out once we remembered we had actually put something in our fruit display for once.
I didn’t explain all this to The Ice Cream Man, though; it was much simpler to let him think it was impossible than to have him try to counter-argue each reason why I didn’t want to do it. I’d gone down that road too.
“Man, If you don’t help me out, I might have to break it open or something….”
I shrugged at him, feigning helplessness and ignoring the twinge of dysphoria I got from the word 'man'. I wasn’t too worried about the door though. Stronger people than him had tried, but that door wasn’t going anywhere.
He shook his head in disgust and walked over to the counter.
“Hey, I’ll do you a favor; it probably gets pretty boring around here at night, right? Like, you want to spice it up?”
He pulled a small baggie with a single red pill in it out of his leopard-skin trimmed black leather jacket and put it on the counter, sliding it over to me. “This will make your night fly by, trust me. You get me some beer; it’s all yours.”
“Wow, that’s pretty tempting; what is it?”
I wasn’t particularly tempted, but I was curious. It looked familiar, but it had some numbers stamped on it, making me wonder if it was something interesting.
“This? This stuff is E. You’ll be in heaven, just this one pill. Trade me?”
I looked at the pill again. It was shiny and flat, like ibuprofen. Nothing like the flintstone vitamin-looking pills of real Ecstasy that I’d seen.
I shook my head. “Sorry man, but we get drug tested, like, all the time. Randomly too, piss tests and everything.”
This was another lie. I had been tested all of once, on my first day. It wasn’t a very good test either, it was very lax, and there was a lot of room to “cheat” it. In fact, one of my coworkers was actually high while she took it and passed with flying colors. I just didn’t want to trade beer for what looked to be a single pill of over-the-counter anti-inflammatory.
“Damn… Well, Do you know someone who wants it? I’ll sell it to you for $20; it’s worth an easy $40; I can’t take it home, though.”
“Sorry, I’m flat broke; I don’t even have enough for insurance this month unless I get overtime this week….”
This was not a lie.
He shook his head and walked to the back of the store without saying another word.
While he was gone, I looked up the pill on my phone and quickly found its twin on the images tab. Oxycontin. I was surprised that it was actually something that got you high, but with a pill that small, you’d need at least 4 or more for it to really be worth it. Besides, I need an opioid problem like I need a quarter-life crisis; it’s probably inevitable, but if I don’t let myself think about it too hard, I can keep kicking it down the road.
My investigation into reliable sources of Oxy was interrupted by a cacophony of rustling and thumps. I looked up to see the tall one had dumped a good twenty or thirty snacks on the counter and was smugly smirking at me.
“And, of course, my friend’s as well.”
He said, with all the grace of someone regifting a sweater they didn’t like. The friend in question, The Ice Cream Man, had finally earned his title. He was standing behind his buddy, a pint of ice cream in his hand, the lid underneath it like a plate, and his other hand covered in white, dripping cream. His mouth was also smeared with the mint chocolate chip ice cream, but surprisingly, his clothes were still unmarred by his seemingly messy eating style. I nodded and began scanning up the snacks, one by one until all that was left was The Ice Cream Man.
“Hey, I need to scan that real quick.”
I held the scanner out to him to scan it from his hands, and he took this as an invitation to practice working the counter himself. He grabbed the scanner in his slick, gooey hand, licked the ice cream that had run over the bar code, and scanned it. He thrust the now dripping piece of equipment back to me.
“No prob, here ya go.”
I nodded and pretended not to notice that he was trying to pass it back. I started to finish up the transaction on the PoS, and he awkwardly set it down on the counter and stepped back again.
“Ok… Looks like that’s $89.11. You can swipe whenever you’re ready.”
The Ice Cream Man whistled and shook his head.
“Y’all got some crazy expensive snacks here, you know that?”
I looked at the massive mound of chips, candy, nuts, jerky, and pastries in front of me.
“...Yeah, I guess so; gas station prices, what can you do?”
The tall one shook his head at The Ice Cream Man.
“Don’t worry, bro. I told you I’ve got this.”
He reached into his wallet, pulled out a familiar orange and green card, and stuck it into the machine. It beeped at him angrily, and I shook my head.
“No, sorry sir, for an EBT card you-”
“No, no, no, this is a credit card, not an EBT; I don’t have one of those; it should work.” He cut me off loudly.
I nodded and said, “Well, the machine is acting strange anyway, so if you could use the machine in the middle of the counter instead, it’d work better.”
He nodded gratefully and started furiously swiping his card in the EBT card reader. It beeped at him angrily. I looked over the lotto tickets at his “credit card”, which was difficult as he tried very hard to hide it from The Ice Cream Man, and I sighed.
“It looks pretty beat up. May I try?”
“Yeah, just be quick about it for me.”
He used his height to block his friend from seeing as I leaned over the counter and tried to get the worn-out and cracked card to scan on our decades-old EBT reader. After several minutes of trying, I gave up and typed his number manually. His card was empty.
“I’m really sorry, but it looks like there’s nothing on here. Do you have another-”
He quickly grabbed the EBT card from me and shoved it into his pocket.
“What do you mean nothing there? This is a black card! I should have at least twenty kay on it!” He yelled, forcing anger into his voice. I pursed my lips.
“Yeah, I’m not sure; maybe our system can’t see that one; if you have another-”
“No, fuck you and your system; I’m fucking leaving.”
He spun around and stomped off, barreling through the door as quickly as the soft close hinges would let him. As much as I wanted to, I got the feeling that shouting “Yeah, fuck the system!” after him wouldn’t end well for me. I turned to The Ice Cream Man and pointed at his eponymous snack.
“Sorry, I hate to do this, but you’ve gotta buy that. You put your fingers in it.”
He blinked and looked down as if realizing for the first time that he had, in fact, put his hand into it.
“Um, yeah, I wanted to bring this ice cream to your attention, man; actually, I think there’s something wrong with it; it’s not actually ice cream, see?”
He pulled a glob out of the carton with his hands.
“See? It’s all gooey; I can’t buy it like this. It doesn’t freakin melt, man.”
I thought back to a video I had seen a few weeks ago of someone showcasing “unmelting ice cream”. This brand was one of the ones in the video.
“Yeah, crazy, huh? If you look, it doesn’t actually say ice cream on the pint; it’s like a ‘frozen dairy treat’ or something like that. It doesn’t even melt in the sun nowadays.”
The Frozen Dairy Treat Man looked at me like I had just claimed the moon was flat.
“My dude, it is ice cream. I eat ice cream every day; this ain’t ice cream. I ain’t buying.”
“Yeah, I know it’s not, it doesn’t claim to be, but you still have to pay for it.”
“No, I don’t have to pay for a defective product; I need a refund.”
“You need to go to the company for that, but you gotta pay for what you ate, sorry.”
He shook his head and glared at me. Usually, I’d just ignore someone like this and tell them to walk out while I stocked some rillos, but this was different. I had $89.11 worth of snacks to put back on the shelf, and it was these guys’ fault. I stood my ground.
After a few seconds of glaring at me, he seemed to wilt a little and shoved his sticky hand into his back pocket, pulling out a wad of ones that he then tossed on the counter.
“Keep the fuckin change, asshole.” He muttered, stomping out the door to where his friend was pumping gas.
After I pulled a dollar and some change out of the petty cash bowl to cover the rest of his ice cream, I looked out to see him standing in the darkness, arms crossed, a white blob at his feet. He tossed the carton on top of the overflowing trash can and slowly climbed into the tall one’s truck. With the both of them snackless and broke, they screeched away into the night at top speeds, leaving the little white frozen blob and a mountain of snacks as the only reminder that they had been there.
When my shift ended, around 8:30 that morning, I walked outside and looked over to where they had been parked, and there it was, the small lump of frozen dairy treat sitting in the sun, still not ice cream, still not melted.