When I was a kid, the grocery store down the street thought it would be a good idea to hire some idiot to wear a giant foam rubber Twinkie the Kid costume and thump around the joint amusing the wee folk. My brother and I discovered this horrible affront to common sense and decency one summer afternoon when we got wired within an inch of our lives on caffeine and sugar and decided to walk to the store for more. I was, if I recall correctly, ten or eleven years old at the time, and he’s one year younger.
“How does he see in that thing?” asked my brother.
“See? He has little eye holes there in the front, behind the mesh,” I replied.
“You mean… he can’t see anything that isn’t right in front of him?”
“Yep,” I said. Before I even turned to look at him, I could sense the appearance of my brother’s Expression of Diabolical Glee.
We crept through the school supplies, secretly opening a box of markers and extracting a handful in fruity colors. Then we snuck up behind Twinkie the Kid.
The store was nearly deserted. It was just us, and The Twinkie.
The first thing he felt was a vague tickling sensation on the back of his legs as my brother and I tried to draw something hideous on him without his notice and failed. The suit was too inflexible for him to reach with his arms anywhere but right in front of him, so he tried to turn around and see what the problem was. Barely stifling hysterical laughter, every time he made one of his shuffling quarter-turns, we would simply take two steps to the side, stay directly behind him and keep drawing on his legs. There we were, in the frozen foods section, with our own private trained twinkie, making him turn this way and that as he grew increasingly frantic.
My little brother is metabolically incapable of knowing when enough is enough, however.
Sensing for the first time the wonderous feeling known as COMPLETE IMPUNITY, he takes his marker in his fist and fucking stabs Twinkie the Kid in the back of the leg.
And this wasn’t one of those fat markers. This one was thin and pointed like a pencil.
Twinkie, from deep inside his foam rubber prison, lets out a little shriek as if he had just been stung by a bee, which for all we know is exactly what he thought was happening, and he GOES DOWN IN A BIG HEAP of writhing yellow twinkie suit, lying on his side and completely unable to right himself, like a giant stupid turtle.
No longer able to contain the impossible levels of twisted delight we had generated, we threw our markers at him and exited the store as calmly as we could while Twinkie the Kid spasmed and twitched. I am sure he was a ruined husk of a man after that, even more so when he got home to his wife and she asked him why someone had drawn an ass on his leg with magic marker.