There are few things left to us in 2017 that are pure and true. The sweet jingle of the ice cream truck is one of them. Everyone knows it to be the summer’s singular anthem, a sound capable of throwing you back into the best parts of your childhood at a moment’s notice.
But OF COURSE, one Harlem gentrifier wants to stop all of that.
Gothamist found a real-life white woman named Mackenzie (which, too perfect) who is hell-bent on taking down a Mister Softee ice cream truck driver who blasts jingles a little too loud for her liking.
A little background on this monster (emphasis mine):
Mackenzie, who asked that we withhold her last name for fear that she be pigeonholed as an entitled white lady whining about her new neighborhood [Ed. note: too late!!!], bought an apartment near Central Park in the spring. “This is generally a really quiet, serene block,” she wrote in an email to Gothamist. However, “The arrival of an ice cream truck in May has totally [ruined] this quiet.”
Yes, the offending ice cream truck driver has the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to blast jingles from his parked truck between 7:45-9:00 PM, according to Mackenzie. Playing jingles while parked is technically illegal, as Mackenzie knows, but it’s also the kind of thing literally nobody but Mackenzie gives a shit about. She found this out the hard way because she called everyone from 311 to the cops to the fucking mayor and her “problem” still wasn’t solved.
She’s even made videos documenting the jingling atrocity, which you can watch below. Warning: graphic jingle noises.
But if Mackenzie seems bitter as hell, this exchange she recalls between herself and the truck driver is, dare we say, delicious:
The first time this happened, she recalls, “I went down and said to him, ‘Would you mind turning off the music?’ He looked at me and he was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
She continued, “I said, ‘It’s illegal for you to have your music on anyway, so could you please turn it off?”
His response: “Fuck off.”
Wow. This American hero is here to serve you sweet treats and exactly zero fucks.
Manhattan, in case Mackenzie needed to be reminded, houses over 1.6 million people, is the densest urban area in the entire country, and is filled with ice cream trucks. Mackenzie, a white woman helping to turn one of America’s oldest and most cherished black neighborhoods into just another rich white playground, is losing her mind because people within a block of her home sometimes emit sounds that she just doesn’t want to hear.
Something else people in Harlem don’t want to hear, though? Mackenzie’s bullshit.
We’ll part with the words of Harlem resident Carolyn Graham, who had this to say to Gothamist about Mackenzie’s quixotic quest:
“They moved to Harlem, and that’s what the fuck happens in Harlem,” Graham told the news site. “They need to go somewhere else if they don’t like it.”