The Elmo Slippered Bandit

The story of America’s silliest criminal mastermind

     So No shit there I was, minding my own business eating a piece of pie at the Village Inn ‘round 1:30 a.m., when he walked in. Greasy-haired, unshaven, stinking of booze and bong water, he burst through the door with a clatter and the confidence of twelve tequila shots.

            This glorious specimen of poor decisions paused in the doorway, taking in the restaurant’s interior from behind the smoky lenses of bright, pink-framed, Hello Kitty sunglasses, giving the inn’s clientele a moment to take stock of his peculiarities: From underneath his pink frames, a dark bruise spread across his left cheek, and the bleach-stained blue Dallas Cowboys T-shit, (at least two sizes too large) clashed nicely with his yellow Sponge Bob flannel pants, but what drew my attention were the red fuzzy slippers, on which balanced the beaming face of beloved Sesame Street character, Elmo.  

            “I’ll have the Grand Slam, cutie,” the young man declared, sauntering up to the front counter, whipping of his shades with a flourish to leer unabashedly at the hostess, a woman of perhaps 45 years, and 245 pounds.

            She looked him up and down slowly, taking in the whole glorious mess, before responding.

            “Grand Slam’s at Denny’s hun,” she said with a dead-pan that could only have been earned through long years dealing with the late-night freaks who frequent 24-hour diners and cheap motels. “If you take a seat over there on the left Tim will take your order a minute.”

            I could not see the man’s face from my position, but his shoulders slumped and he let out a dejected sigh as he shuffled over to a both against the far wall, where he folded his arms on the tabletop and set his head atop them, moaning “Just bring me some fucking pancakes!”

            I dragged my attention away from what I could only assume was the anti-meth campaign’s next cautionary tale, and attempted to refocus on the task at hand.

            On the table before me, next to a half eaten piece of blue berry, lay a yellow legal pad and a cheap Bic pen. The top half of the yellow page featured a series of tick-tack-toe games drawn over with cat’s faces, (Not a very productive game, even when playing with a partner, which I did not have)

            Below them I’d scrawled a single phrase “solitaire for dummies.”

            Writers block had plagued me for weeks, and nothing, from alcohol to Ritalin seemed to make the words flow. My brain simply could not find the foothold it needed to snag a story out of the ether.

             So I sat with my bic drumming against the pad rhythmically, piece of blueberry filling and golden brown crust hovering a couple inches from my mouth for the better part of five minutes until I heard a groan from across the room.

            The waiter, Tim, stood above the bedraggled young man, an apologetic look on his face.

            “What?” the young man demanded, squinting up at the waiter.

            “What can I get for you, sir,” Tim asked politely. He was a small kid in his late teens or early twenties, and it was obvious from his nervous demeanor that he was not a fan of confrontations.

            The greasy haired young man looked confused for a moment then annoyed.

            “I already said I wanted fucking pancakes,” he said loudly, before resting his head to the Formica tabletop with a thud.

            An older couple, who’d been eating a few tables away from the newcomer’s, rose to their feet as quickly as they could manage, leaving a 20 and 2 half eaten pieces of apple on the table as they shuffled out muttering to one another about crack heads and welfare.

            Tim the waiter looked even more uncomfortable.

            “Oh, um, yes sir…. Can I get you anything to drink while you wait? Um, coffee? Water?”

            “Orange Juice,” the young man replied without lifting his head.

            “Ok, Um, good… orange juice it is,” Tim jotted it down dutifully in his note book, attaining more progress then I had in the writing department then I had in days. “Uh… the pancakes come with bacon or sausage. Which would you prefer?”

            The young degenerates head shot up from the table, from across the room his good eye gleamed a Johnny Rotten blue.

            “Bacon!” he all but shouted. “Sausage is for communists!”

            His good eye narrowed to a slit and he asked suspiciously, “Tim, are you a communist?”

            “Ah, um, no sir, republican actually,” Tim responded, but the young man had already lost interest in the waiter.

            His eye focused on a group of eight men of varying ages sitting around a larger table in the middle of the diner with bibles open in front of each of them.

            “Hey, you guys, innit a little late for Sunday school?” he shot in their direction rising up in his booth to get a better look at what they were doing.

            “Sometimes midnight is the best time to read the word,” said a middle-aged man with a potbelly, scraggly salt and pepper beard and a trucker hat. “That’s the time when some of us need the most encouragement.”

            The young man looked solemn for a moment, then he whispered loudly enough for the whole restaurant to hear, “Don’t worry! I’ll help you stay anonymous!”  

            He tried to wink his good eye, but with the other one swollen shut it didn’t really work out.

            Lowering himself back into the booth, he once again thudded his head onto the tabletop.

            “Tim, where are my fucking pancakes?” he asked in a voice that now sounded bored.

            The waiter scuttled away and the young man giggled, his Elmo slippered feet kicking like a child’s under the table.

            “AA’s for quitters,” he announced, then abruptly began to snore.

Part 2 of the adventures of the Elmo slippered bandit will be out next week

Authors Note:

While parts of this narrative i.e. the description of its antagonist are more or less based in true events, the story itself is a work of fiction.