Congratulations on Doing the Crime!

There are a lot of platitudes you could make about the course your life is taking. You lacked a strong male authority figure early on in life and it crippled you emotionally. You were poor and learned early how to do anything, literally anything, to make ends meet. Your mom was a crack whore. Boo fucking hoo. The point is you’re a criminal. Always have been.

But any criminal worth his salt has at least one big score coming his way and tomorrow night is yours.

Tomorrow night you and two of your crime buddies, Knuckles, a young man named ironically for a birth defect which has left him without knuckles for his adult life, and Sledge, a large man named for his powerful semblance to a sledgehammer, are going to pull up in front of the local Chuck-E-Cheese in an unmarked van leaving Jitters, your straight laced driver, to watch the exit.

Then you’ll enter the building, Sledge dressed in a unsettlingly small children’s costume, claiming that it’s his birthday and that he should be able to get in for the price of his weight. When the clerk tries to tell you that that is the Ground Round and that it’s every Tuesday and that it applies to the cost of your entree you’ll lose your shit. You’ll prattle on about how they’re discriminating against same-sex couples with mentally impaired adult children and demand to see a manager.

When the manager comes out you’ll put a gun in his face and tell him to send the staff home early. He’ll comply after a few seconds of stammering and the staff will flee the building, cheering you for liberating them. Then the manager will tell you that whatever you want is yours, just don’t hurt him. You’ll laugh menacingly and then lay down your plan.

He’ll pale at it, telling you that you should just take what’s in the registers and run but you’ve watched enough documentaries on bank robbing to know why more people don’t do it. Money is traceable. Prize tickets aren’t.

You’ll hold your gun to the back of the manager’s head while he unlocks each of the ticket dispensers on the skee-ball machines. Sledge and Knuckles will follow closely behind, stuffing the tickets into burlap sacks with “POP TARTS” stenciled on the side. By the time you reach the ticket storage room they’ll have four sacks filled and three more just waiting for what’s left of the tickets.

When you start to clear out the last of their store the manager will weep openly, telling you that you’re ruining him. He’ll say that you don’t understand what Chuck-E-Cheese will do to him. He’ll start to describe being sodomized by a giant mutated rodent in the basement of some horrible lab where cheese-less pizza is created. Towards the end he won’t be able to form words anymore, just pained noises and moans like that mouse was already balls deep.

Once he’s finished you’ll clock him on the back of the head with the butt of your pistol and you and your crime buddies will finish loading up the tickets. Then you’ll run outside where Jitters is still blending in with all the other weird fucks in unmarked vans outside of Chuck-E-Cheese. The four of you will drive away to divide up your prize, secure in knowing that you’ve just pulled off the perfect crime.

Congratulations on Doing the Crime! We just hope you don’t spend it all in one place!