HOSTESS DONETTES
When I was 15, I used to work on weekends with my uncles. They owned a couple of badly beat up Elgin "Pelican" street sweepers (built in Elgin, IL, home of early BMX freestyle spot The Tubes). My uncles had a sweeping and striping business, and I would help them paint parking stalls in giant mall parking lots and junior college campuses.
The sweepers were stored in a rented warehouse on the outskirts of town, which was incredible. It was parceled out in 10,000-foot lots of space, rusting girders holding up the ceiling, tons of random rooms, ducts, mountains of Happy Birthday napkins...all manner of weird, forgotten shit. Some cavernous rooms were totally empty, except for a folding metal chair sitting in the middle.
The General Dynamics corporation was across the street, a barbed wire and magnetic scan card perimeter. They made missile defense equipment. They actually used part of the warehouse for storage, and once, exploring where we shouldn�t have been, we pulled back a tarpaulin and found a full scale sleek-nosed battle tank constructed out of plywood. We backed away from it like it was a cobra, afraid that the CIA would drop out of the ceiling and arrest us.
This warehouse was also swarming with stray cats. Dozens of them. They were there for the rats, and the free space. My uncles would buy bulk bags of cheap cat food and empty the contents into a heap on the floor and the cats would shoot out of the corners and go crazy for this stuff. One eyed, three-legs, oil stained fur, no tail, badass industrial wild cats.
One Saturday morning I was down there and found a bag of petrified stale Hostess mini powdered donuts. They were light and airy, but hard as Pennsylvania Dutch pretzels. Powdered sugar still in tact. I lofted one of the mini donuts in my hand and scanned the room for a target. "Bet you can't hit that cat over there..." my uncle Joe tempted. It was way out of range...lurking near a stored 1974 Dodge with flat tires. 50 yards. The cat turned to walk away, I cocked back and fired the donut. Its white coating shone like a tracer bullet as it arced through the warehouse and hit the cat square in the exact center of its anus. The cat jumped three feet straight up and made a satisfying yowl that echoed back at us across the distance, then it vanished into the shadows. It was a million to one shot, perfectly executed.
That's what I think of when I think of when someone asks me, "What do you think of Hostess powdered Donettes?"
� 2001 LEWMAN