The Halloween We Met The Mugger Clown (a fictional story)

 

The Night Dad Met the Mugger Clown

Halloween is the one night of the year when Americans voluntarily send their children out into the darkness to demand candy from strangers, while also wearing costumes that make them difficult to identify in a police lineup. This is considered “tradition,” which is the word we use for things that would be illegal if we thought about them for more than four seconds.

My friend Gary learned this the hard way last Halloween, when he took his six-year-old son, Tyler, trick-or-treating.

Tyler was dressed as a “Ninja T. Rex,” which is a costume consisting of a dinosaur suit, a plastic sword, and a black belt, because apparently dinosaurs can earn belts now. Gary was dressed as a Dad, which is a costume consisting of a fleece vest, sensible shoes, and the facial expression of a man who has just been asked whether the family can get a dog.

They started at 6:15 p.m., which in Dad Time is “early enough to beat the crowds” and in Child Time is “approximately one million years past bedtime.”

For the first hour, everything went fine. Tyler collected candy from a series of homeowners who had clearly purchased it in bulk from a warehouse that also supplies prison cafeterias. Gary carried the backup bag, because Tyler’s official pumpkin-shaped bucket had a handle engineered by the same people who design airplane beverage carts: they break if you look at it.

Then, at the end of a cul-de-sac, they saw him.

He was standing beneath a streetlight. He wore a bright yellow jumpsuit. He had bright red hair. He had white face paint. He wore enormous red shoes.

“Dad!” Tyler whispered. “It’s Ronald McDonald!”

Gary, being a responsible parent, immediately assessed the situation. Was this an actual McDonald’s employee? No. Was this a person in a half-assed Ronald McDonald costume standing alone in a dark cul-de-sac at 8:40 p.m.? Yes. Was this concerning? Gary decided it was not, because the man waved cheerfully and said, “Happy Halloween!”

This is how Gary would later explain it to the police officer, who wrote down “victim approached suspect voluntarily” and then underlined it twice.

Gary and Tyler walked over. The clown smiled. Then the clown said, in a voice that was definitely not the voice of any mascot approved by a corporate legal department:

“Hand over the candy.”

Gary laughed. Because what else do you do when a man dressed as a fast-food clown demands your child’s candy? You laugh, because your brain is trying to protect you from the fact that you are about to be mugged by a guy whose shoes are larger than your torso.

“I said,” the clown repeated, stepping closer, “hand. Over. The candy.”

Tyler, who until this moment had shown no fear whatsoever of dinosaurs, werewolves, or the neighbor’s Chihuahua, grabbed Gary’s leg.

Gary held up the bag. “You want the candy?”

“I want ALL of it,” said Ronald.

Now, here is where Gary made a tactical error. He tried to negotiate.

“Listen,” Gary said, “my son has been walking for two hours. He has developed a relationship with this candy. Some of it is his favorite kind. There’s a Reese’s in there that he has already named.”

“I don’t care,” said Ronald.

“You don’t care about the Reese’s?”

“I want the candy.”

This went on for another thirty seconds, during which Gary attempted to reason with a criminal dressed as a hamburger mascot, which is not a strategy recommended by any law-enforcement agency, parenting website, or person with functioning survival instincts.

Finally, Ronald reached out, snatched the bag, and ran.

He ran surprisingly fast for a man in giant shoes. Gary chased him for half a block before realizing that (a) he was wearing Dad Shoes, (b) he was carrying a second bag of candy, and (c) he was forty-three years old.

Ronald disappeared between two houses, leaving behind only a single Fun Size Snickers bar, which Gary picked up and handed to Tyler.

“Is that all we get?” Tyler asked.

“Yes,” Gary said. “But look on the bright side. We survived a crime.”

Tyler considered this. “Can we call the police?”

“We already did,” Gary said. “They’re sending someone.”

The police arrived twelve minutes later, which is actually excellent response time for a report involving an armed fast-food clown. They were dressed exactly like police officers. Because they were. But if they went to a costume contest, they would have won. Anyway, the officer took Gary’s statement, looked at the security-camera footage from a nearby house, and identified the suspect as “a local man with an extensive costume collection and, apparently, a serious candy addiction.”

They caught him two blocks away, sitting on a curb, eating a Snickers.

At his trial—which Gary attended because he had nothing better to do and because his wife said, “You’re going to the court house, I wasn't there”—the defendant’s lawyer argued that his client had not technically committed robbery, since he had used no weapon and had merely “requested candy in an enthusiastic manner.”

The judge asked whether the defendant had been wearing the Ronald McDonald costume.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The judge asked whether he had chased the victims while wearing it.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The judge asked whether he had eaten the evidence.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The judge sentenced him to community service, anger-management classes, and a lifetime ban from wearing mascot costumes within 500 feet of children, schools, or anywhere that sells fries.

Gary and Tyler went home with one Milky Way bar, a police report, and a story that Tyler has told approximately 9,000 times, to date.

And every Halloween since, when Gary sees a person in a clown costume, he crosses the street.

Because he has learned an important lesson about parenting: You can protect your child from strangers, traffic, and questionable candy. But you cannot protect them from the possibility that, somewhere out there, a grown man in enormous red shoes is waiting to steal their Reese’s.