Pepe, the King Prawn

Live your life with the same unwavering wetness as Pepe the King Prawn, a deeply unwell sex pest whose thirst for experience is matched only by his terrifying, unblinking eyes.

“It might be full of chocolate!”

The context: a giant space egg has just descended to Earth, shocking the assembled masses. Everybody has their theories re: egg contents, but only Pepe has the purity of vision to posit the absolutely undeniable possibility that this mysterious vessel, one that has traveled across the frozen fields of time and space, one that has seen stars willed into violent life only to flounder back into iron nothingness with the banality of the fading day, might just be full of fucking chocolate.

This is the logic of an idiot optimist, a humanist philosopher, possibly God; someone who has attained serene and unforced enlightenment, the true white light of an eternal peace shared with all possible conceptions of a moment by virtue of the fact that the thinker in question is the single dumbest motherfucker who has ever lived. Pepe’s brain, which is bad and doesn’t work right, simply can’t conceive of a reality in which the space egg contains anything else other than something that might make him happy immediately and in the moment. It’s like if a dog had solipsism. Pepe doesn’t even require that the pleasant thing inside of the egg be grandiose or otherwise unattainable enough to justify the movie-length adventure required to bring him to its oblong presence. He just wants some fucking chocolate.

Conversely, whenever I go to the doctor’s office I assume they will find a malignant tumor, even if I’m just there to update my insurance information. Whenever someone applies sunscreen to my back at the beach I assume they will find a malignant tumor. Whenever I find a benign tumor I yell, “nice try, malignant tumor!”. Whenever I find twenty dollars blowing down the street I pocket the money and think to myself, “this will go a long way towards the chemotherapy I will require, after I finally find that malignant tumor.” If someone ever presented me with a space egg whose contents were equally likely to be anything in the universe I would assume it was a letter from my parents telling me I was a mistake.

“You tell him, and I will smack you. I will smack you like a bad, bad donkey, OK?”

Rizzo and Pepe have just tricked a desperate and suggestible Gonzo into building a jacuzzi for them by pretending to be the stuntman’s long-sought family. Rizzo feels bad and wants to come clean. Pepe responds to Rizzo’s faltering by both calling his friend a donkey and threatening him with physical violence. This quote, around which entire books on psychology should be written, is notable for two reasons:

– Pepe feels everything. He lives in the moment more than a fucking clock and he forgets any previous emotion in the precise amount of time it takes him to formulate the next one. It’s been speculated that the concept of “now” can be quantified as a few tenths of a second, but Pepe has proven that all moments are happening simultaneously in a superposition of idiot gestures and experienced exclusively through a kind of tactile enormity, like God getting super high and spending a whole afternoon petting a shag carpet. He is a conduit to a purer plane of emotion, one unencumbered, undampened, by the mechanical complexities of a functioning brain.

– Pepe, like the rest of us, is desperate. He has no plan because having a plan would require having a brain. He is mostly pinballing through life under the auspices of his latest whim, only experiencing anxiety over one poor decision for as long as it takes another to ferment inside of his lukewarm brain. Like the rest of us he leaves a trail of bad decisions in his wake and has as his only guiding principle the dim realization that he must outrun the consequences of those bad decisions for as long as it takes for old age shuffles him off first. And Kermit is the deep one?

“There is a menu correction, OK. We will now be serving bologna sandwiches.”

[grumbling from his fellow Muppets]

“But no bread.”

This quote is just too fucking real. Who among us hasn’t anticipated raspberry flap-overs only to be saddled with bologna sandwiches without the bread. My entire life has been a bologna sandwich without the bread.

“Oh, she’ll be back.”

Pepe says this after striking out with Katie Holmes, a failure which is evident to everyone except Pepe. It does not cross his mind, for there is no mind to cross, that he has not succeeded in his goal of bedding a young human woman who is disgusted by his very existence. Instead he waits, patiently, possibly forever, humming tunelessly to himself, doing that weird swaying thing that… slower people tend to do to pass the time. He fully expects, with the guileless patience of a dog waiting for their long-dead owner to come home again, that the situation will reverse itself and deliver to him the outcome he wants, because he cannot fathom anything else happening.

Pepe is too dumb to be sad.

“You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em…”

Technically Kenny Rogers said this, but Pepe said it after watching Rizzo’s cards burst into flames and having no commentary on the incident beyond, “I just won this round of cards because the other guy’s cards caught fire,” which makes the quote Pepe’s now.

The End

If good writing is good editing, Pepe is a goddamn Hemingway novel. He has managed to replace all the normal social currencies with “abject stupidity,” while still somehow retaining a favorable exchange rate. He’s like if God fell down a flight of stairs.