The alarm goes off, and even the simple act of reaching over to turn it off brings groans of protest from my body. Everything hurts. Everything. I grab the thermometer from my nightstand and check my temp. 101 degrees F. Well, better than the 102 I'd peaked at, despite medication, the night before.
I sit up, and besides the myalgias and malaise, I'm lightheaded. I reach for a glass of water and take a sip. My neck screams in agony: the sore throat might be the worst part of my illness. I've been subsisting on yogurt and juice for a couple days because of it.
But not this day. Not today, dammit. I have a ticket to MidtownLunch's 5th birthday bash, and I'm not about to let that slide.
So I wrestle myself out of bed and pop a couple of tablets of industrial-strength ibuprofen. I take another dose from my antibiotic Z-Pack. I creak down the street and buy a box of Cepacol anesthetic throat lozenges; I notice the package information recommends taking them no more frequently than once every two hours.
In the half-hour between the moment I enter the MidtownLunch bash and the first moment I sit down to breathe, I take three of those Cepacols.
What else can I do? The Biryani cart is doling out its wonderful kati rolls. Cer Te is plating this ridiculous lobster sausage thing that turns out to be improbably good. Bian Dang's Taiwanese pork chop on rice is as addictively salty as always. Best of all, Kwik Meal's unripe-papaya-marinated-lamb is being cooked up by the Kwik Man himself, Mohammed Rahman. I have to have them all, and those lozenges only give me a few minutes of grace time each, especially under the food bolus assault I end up subjecting them to.
I do what I set out to do: eat voraciously, and eat well. And it isn't my most physically demanding feeding feat by a long shot. (That will always belong to the time I went out and ate a General Tso's Tofu sub from No. 7 Sub WHILE ACTIVELY PASSING A KIDNEY STONE -- I had to stop in the middle and writhe around on the sidewalk for a few minutes before popping up and finishing the delicious sandwich.) Still, by the end, my throat hates me, hates everything I've ever shoved through it, hates the mere thought of the phrase "all you can eat". I have to make amends.
I'm not sure how to do that, though. I'm wandering the bash grounds when I run into the Miss Softee truck.
I tell Miss Softee my tale of pharyngeal woe. She, smartly attired in a little black dress, suddenly turns maternal. "Go get a GUS soda from the guys over there!"
I oblige and return with it.
"All right, hand it to me." She takes the Meyer lemon soda and makes a soft-serve vanilla float from it, hands it to me with the sincerest of smiles. "That should make your throat feel better!"
I take a bite, then a sip. Then I mix a bit, take another bite and sip. My throat cries again, but this time in reconciliation.
I don't think Mr. Softee would have done quite the same for me. Maybe the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck would have. But if you have to choose between the BGICT and Miss Softee, you have an enviable choice indeed. Because they both resemble their product in many ways -- sweet, evergreen, winningly simple -- but differ from it in one important way: warmth.
My throat, however, prefers the cooling, and for that, Miss Softee, I will visit you again sometime.
Probability of return within 1 year: 80% read more