Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Hostess Brands had any existence for me, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bodegas to buy toilet paper and egg sandwiches and the occasional guilty-pleasure Ding Dong. When one day in late autumn, as I came home, my wife, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take because I prefer to buy a cup of coffee and, more often than I’d like to admit, a rugelach at Zabar’s on my way home from work. I declined the tea at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. On eBay, for five hundred dollars plus twenty dollars shipping, she had bought one of those short, plump little cakes called “Twinkies,” which look as though they had been molded in the shape of a Midwesterner’s meaty thumb.
And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of an overcooked organic turkey and my wife’s unconscionable Thanksgiving stuffing, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the Twinkie. No sooner had the warm cream center, and the crumbs with it, dribbled down my chin and onto my game of Sudoku, than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life—the crisis in Gaza, the heartburn that had plagued me since breakfast, the fact that my mother-in-law would be staying with us until Sunday (Sunday!)—had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory; this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, “pathologically afraid of asserting myself,” as my analyst likes to say. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of the Twinkie, but that it infinitely transcended the flavor of hydrogenated soybean oil and Yellow #5, and could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
