The Ice Cream Man The I Scream Man Where Did the !*?! Birds Go? A Novel by T.L. Winslow © 2001 by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved. In accordance with the International Copyright Convention and U.S. federal copyright statutes, permission to adapt, copy, excerpt, whole or in part in any medium, or to extract characters for any purpose whatsoever is herewith expressly withheld. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, apply to copyright holder. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The Ice Cream Man Preface The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a 1 The Ice Cream Man useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. —OSCAR WILDE, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray When the flush of the new born sun fell first on Eden’s green and gold, Our father Adam sat under a tree and scratched with a stick in the mould; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered from behind the leaves, “It’s pretty, but is it Art?” —RUDYARD KIPLING Skill without imagination gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. —TOM STOPPARD 2 The Ice Cream Man Acknowledgements Special thanks to all you little people who made my success possible. You know who you are. Stay frosty. 3 The Ice Cream Man Warning Notice This novel is an affront to all ice cream salesmen everywhere. It is not true to life, does not reflect on the real professionalism of ice cream salesmen, and is in no way endorsed by the Ice Cream Truck Drivers’ Professional Association. It does a real disservice to all people who have ever lived on planet Earth throughout history. It sucks eggplant. It is a lie, and shows no real sense of humor. It is part of a sinister conspiracy. Don’t read it. Read something else. Ice cream drivers who are caught buying or reading it should be fired – no, hung. It is too long. He’s just out for your money, selling it by the pound. The first paragraph doesn’t draw you in. The first chapter is confusing. It is illiterate and filled with poor grammar and punctuation. It dishes Stephen King, Star Trek, Baby Boomers, city councils, auto repair professionals, the home construction industry, an entire region of the country as well as every subdivision of any kind in it, all ethnic groups (especially Italian-Americans – no, the Mafia is not Italian!), and worst of all, the great businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates (if he has foisted a monopoly that forces schlock software on a miseducated public while throttling all competition and its better products, like the sour-grapes author wrongly claims, more power to him!) It is a renegade free-love sacrilegious crypto-paedophile junk-junkie longhair bohemian beatnik-hippie anarchist Molotov cocktail in a cookie and cake coating. It won’t sell. Why doesn’t the author just get a job? Even if it does sell it would result in lawsuits from every quarter of the land and all around the globe. If the defendant won even a stay of execution it would be a travesty of justice. It is a pure publicity stunt. The author belongs behind bars, not on camera. Even better, he belongs on Devil’s Island, with his 4 The Ice Cream Man feet crippled, his hair white, his teeth decayed and black, and Ratso Rizzo AKA Rainman, a Jew pretending to be an Italian, for his only companion. Even more fitting, he should be forced to drink hemlock for corrupting the morals of the nation’s youth. There is no Ice Cream Man, or I Scream Man in the first place, never was, and never will be. The author is blacklisted by all reputable Good Humor sales organizations, or at least should be. The author is a certifiable phonybaloney, showing absolutely no knowledge or understanding of what he clearly has never personally taken part in. I have never known her/him personally, and can’t be sure if he’s a boy or a girl, and if I did I wouldn’t want to admit it without a lawyer present. If I wrote anything in praise of the author it is either a cruel and blatant forgery, or I hereby disavow knowledge of it, and besides, cyber ice cream trucks were invented by me, not him, and they don’t work anyway. I wasn’t offered one cent for my work. The author has no brains and just pretends to be a genius. He overuses the word retro. He only sees his own face in the glass, and even he admits his eyeglasses don’t work up close. His novel is a pure donkey and pony show with cheaply-drawn one-dimensional characters form-fitted to the god-awful exploitation plot which builds up straw men then tears them down, is little more than an excuse for the anti-social author to criticize everyone and everything to vent his spleen, and has no deeper symbolism than an orange peel under an ice cream truck tire. It preaches rather than teaches. It might be good to defend the ice cream truck business, but not the way he does it. There are far better fiction and nonfiction books on the same subject, and, even if there aren’t, don’t buy this. If there’s anything original in this work (which I deny), he must have stolen it. It doesn’t teach one anything about the human condition, or art, because the author is clueless about everything, including himself. No real woman would even want to touch him. Who’s he kidding? He’s impotent, a misogynist probably, and definitely un-PC. He should not only be banned in Boston but everywhere. He has 5 The Ice Cream Man never really had anything to do with the real Jehovah’s Witnesses, and has no knowledge of their doctrines. He probably can’t even read and write and just dictated the stuff to a ghostwriter who operates out of a booth at a flea market. Come to think of it, there is no evidence that the author ever existed. He’s a myth. He is a flea market, one that nobody ever goes into. And I resent being called a Commodore, little more than a rear Admiral and a cheap 8-bit computer! Besides, I’m writing my own novel on the ice cream business and you should save your time and money for that instead. And you can just forget going to the movie. The picket lines in front of every theater low and greedy enough to try showing it will be impassable. Stop the presses! Get a life! For heaven’s sake, don’t read The Ice Cream Man!@!?! —Johnny H. Good, President and Admiral The Ice Cream Truck Drivers’ Professional and Fraternal Association of American Good Humor. (Note: The above warning is not real. I wrote it myself, to save the critics some time.