Have you ever had one of those times when someone says something to you and it sparks a memory of some event in your life that you always thought you would never forget, only to realize that you had basically forgotten about it for at least ten years? I had one of those moments today. I don’t recall exactly what was said that made me remember the event, it had something to do with being followed by a car while on a bicycle. Anyway, for the lack of anything better to post I will recount this story from my past. I really shouldn’t, but has that ever stopped me before?
It all happened over summer vacation either the year before or the year after my freshman year of high school, come to think of it it must have happened before my first year of high school as I recall telling the story to someone in drafting class (which I only took my freshman year, elective class, easy A, what could be so hard about drawing a straight line when they require that you use a ruler?). Anyway, as I think about it that would make me a bit younger than I thought I was. Depending on what month it happened I would either have been thirteen or fourteen, either way still pretty damn young as you will no doubt agree.
I was at the little mall in Roseburg, OR. playing video games and ‘cruising for chicks’ in the sense that I was walking around the mall wearing the torn up jeans (with leopard print spandex under them), Def Leppard t-shirt and wearing a ridiculous hat that I got at the county fair. Mind you this was all status quo in the late eighties, I looked like damn near every other kid there. Because my dad didn’t really understand that the price of video games had gone up since he was a kid it didn’t take long to run out of quarters (on a side note, didn’t you just love Guantlet?). As I recall the last game I played that day was “720”, a game which I really sucked at, but I had to give it a try since it was one of the newer games there at the time.
I made one last round of the mall floor, which was really tiny by todays standards; you could get to any store within a minute from any entrance. Unable to find my one true love, I left through the Montgomery Wards where I had left my bicycle locked up. I unchained the bike and started to push it across the parking lot, as I think back I don’t have any idea why I wasn’t riding it across the parking lot, but that is how it happened. I heard a voice over my shoulder shout, “Hey.” I turned around thinking it was probably mall security wanting to give me a pat down, that was commonplace for kids my age at this mall. I asked what he wanted, and was quite surprised by his response.
“How would you like to make some money?” The guy asked me.
Again, in hindsight I should have thought this was a bit odd, but it was the summer and I had been doing odd jobs for a lot of dad’s friends. It was not uncommon that I would work in a yard for eight or ten hours and get only twenty dollars and a glass of lemonade, which was pretty cheap even way back then. So, being naive, I assumed that one of dad’s friends had told one of their friends, and that he somehow knew what I looked like well enough to pick me out of a dozen identically dressed kids my age at the mall. (that does seem pretty far-fetched, but this is how I remember it). So I asked him, “Doing what?”
I sure wish that I had a recording of what he said. I can remember the words that he spoke in vivid detail, I can remember every nuance of his voice. As I sit here typing I can hear it in my head just as if it were an audio file that I was playing on my computer. I will never forget the tone, and the absolute non-chalance of the way he responded with this quote:
“Well, gettin’ kinky, I guess.”
I said no thanks and got onto the bike, he shouted, in the middle of a parking lot, “I’ve got a hundred dollars for you and it won’t take but a half an hour.” I didn’t respond, just pumped the pedals as fast as I could. In my hurry to get away as fast as possible, I made a mistake that could very well have cost me my life, since you are reading this I guess you already know it didn’t, but I will elaborate anyway. There were two ways to get home from the mall, one was along Garden Valley Boulevard which was always dense with traffic and had a lot of stoplights. The other was much faster with no stoplights, but there was also no traffic, that was the way I chose to go, hoping to get home as fast as possible.
I was riding along stewing in anger about what had happened. I wasn’t frightened, as I recall, just violently angry. It was only about a ten minute ride home (well to the friend’s house where my dad was going to pick me up later that day) and I was about a third of the way there when the same guy pulled up next to me in a yellow Chevy Monza. He was keeping pace with me for a few seconds while I tried to ignore him, then he said, “I have two hundred dollars here.”. I was still not interested and just ignored it, knowing that I was only six minutes from home, and maybe three minutes from a very public street. Thankfully, he fell back. Whcich, again, should have been a tigger since I was on a bicycle and he was in a car, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
I had made it about another minute down the road when I saw the car pull up next to me again. The guy had in his hands a bunch of twenty dollar bills, fanned out, and said, “I have three-hundred dollars here, do you know how to play with yourself?” Even though that was more money than I would make for like a few years, I still declined in the only way I knew how, I yelled NO and kept pumping the pedals. Thankfully, for me, the guy then went past me and I never actually saw him again, though I did see his car again 😉 and that is something that I best not speak of here.
Whether the guy went back to the mall and found another adolescent to molest is something that I just do not know. Actually, considering that his car was still in the parking lot of that mall the next night, long after the mall had closed, may point to the fact that he did, or at least tried. When my friends and I were walking home from the roller skating rink the next night, we saw the same yellow chevy monza in the parking lot of the mall, it was the only car there. I grabbed a huge rock from the side of the road and threw it through the windshield. Try to molest me and there are consequences..
Thankfully, I guess, the guy that was pursuing me was only a pediphile. Had he been the type that would rape and torture children, only to toss the bodies over a bridge months later I would have really been fucked. The thing about that whole experience is that it really bolsters my hatred misunderstanding of homosexuals. I do not hate or fear homosexuals, as a matter of fact I have a brother that is homosexual. To my knowledge he has never cruised the local mall looking for barely pubescent boys to take home, if he has done that, my gun will be the first justice to reach him.
Had this been a woman in the same age group as the man was, (of course I remember him as being a geezer, but as I think back on it he had a full head of hair, a mullet actually, and I doubt that he was any older than 35-40 since he didn’t have much grey hair and a really smooth face.) I might not think of it as such a negative experience. Might have expanded my horizons…so to speak…
As I write it, it kind of makes me question what I hated more, the fact that the guy was a pediphile, or the fact that the guy was a Homosexual pediphile. Either way, death would be far too pleasant an option for someone like him. As I previously stated, the non-chalance that he used when he talked of sex made me think that he had done it before and would certainly do it again. I have no doubt in my mind that this guy is now in prison, and probably enjoying the experience, yet as an adult I have to wonder how we can keep freaks like him away from children.
If we had not been in the middle of a city (no matter how small), and had he the inclination to have an orgasm that involved a young boy, I really don’t think that he would have cared if there was life in the body of that boy. I am, of course, speaking from the perspective of someone who is not a pediphile and certainly not a necrophiliac pediphile, I am just saying that I was lucky to be approached by the one that didn’t turn me into part of the new house that they were building.
Pediphiles are one of the most troubling things in the world, in my mind. If you can go to visit a friend and see their child, say 8-12 years old, swimming in a play pool, if you find that erotic you need help. I may not be the most ‘stand up’ citizen in this country, but I certainly do not find it erotic when I see a five-year-old swimming in a pool. If you do fall into the aforesaid demographic, please kill yourself as the lynch mob will be quite unforgiving…