The Artificial Joy of Men in Tights

I hadn’t thought about Twinkie the Kid lately. Then I read The Ways We Get By, a collection of short stories by Joe Dornich.

In “The Reluctant Son of a Fake Hero,” the narrator joins his estranged father on Hollywood Blvd to cadge money off tourists seeking photos with superheroes. While “Frank” wears tights to play Superman, our anti-hero narrator is cajoled into playing Aquaman, not really “known for his muscles.”

In my story, the one about Twinkie the Kid, my father alone dons the tights. His job involves visiting grocery stores as a cream-filled golden sponge-cake. Rather than photographs, he offers snacks to unsuspecting shoppers.

I wonder how he felt pulling on the mustard-colored hose. I imagine him before the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door, flexing. He played college football, had thrown shot-put, and kept fit lifting weights. His iron filled our basement, iron I pumped many years later with my old friend Gary Gunn. I bet dad looked pretty good in his Hanes tank top and mustard tights.

The company let him use a white Ford Econoline for his Twinkie gigs. The red, blue, and yellow balloons of the Wonderbread logo plastered the sides of the van, along with one word: “Wonderbread.” We called it the Wonder Van.

Nobody but us knew it was driven by a real life superhero.

He drove the Wonder Van in mustard tights to Hartmann’s Supermarket, a small-time, family-owned grocer across from the Swiss Drycleaners and a quarter mile from our family church in Rockville. The back of the van held pallets covered with remnants of family room carpet, unauthorized seating to haul his Little League team to the ball field for batting practice.

Driving to Hartmann’s, the pallets held nothing but the hulking shell of an anthropomorphized sponge cake, complete with ten-gallon hat, blue bandana, and smiling mesh face. The van doubled as a sort of backstage wardrobe, a changing room where he pulled the big thing over his head and slipped on soft booties. For a fiction writer, this is a great place for the cops to pull up, guns drawn, and ask “What the perv heck is going on inside that van?!”

Outside Hartmann’s, he loaded a shopping cart with boxes of Twinkies, Cupcakes, and Ho Hos, a man alone. Where were his advertising sidekicks, Captain Cupcake, Happy Ho Ho, and Fruit Pie the Magician? Nowhere to be seen, the cowards.

Twinkie the Kid wheeled his snack cakes through the automatic doors and took up position in aisle 15. One massive hand gripping the box, the other gentle hand offering golden happiness, he offered artificial flavors and eternal shelf-life to kids sitting in shopping carts unhappily plying the aisles with their 1970s moms. “You get a big delight in every bite!”

The work of a hero? It is to me.

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