yustyoking

 

              “I’ve watched you,” my mom remarks. “You say you don’t suffer fools. Then you treat everyone else as though they are idiots. When you don’t have many friends, you feel lonely.

             “Isn’t it time to be a little less judgmental?”

            It’s summer, the sun is shining, I shouldn’t be in crisis. Yet my world is spinning out of control. One method I’ve learned, is that when your world is falling apart, act as though things are normal. The long-term problems still need attention, but meanwhile, temporarily, you can get through the day.

            Gritting my teeth, that’s what I now do.  

                                                      *

            I ain’t nobody’s father, but I’ve gotten myself into a predicament and I don’t much like it. A four-day wonder, there are so many lessons to be learned, I’m writing about it.

            In the Army, when training us as field negotiators, the brass told us, “Human consciousness is infinitely flexible. The only limitation in your thinking is what you impose, what you bring to the table.”

            Today we call that “thinking outside the box.”

            Since I don’t naturally subscribe to society’s conventions, I sometimes feel like a mousetrap about to spring or a hand grenade about to explode. Anything that pulls the pin, can set off an explosion.

             And let’s face it, I dress like a kid: shorts and a T-shirt, white socks and tennis shoes, clean-shaven, my hair a wry stubble uponst my head.

             I look whatever age the viewer chooses.

            In Oxburg, if you walk along The 1812 Hwy, crossing South Concord on the way to the library, you come to the Woodley Hills neighborhood. This is still brick cottage country, but no two houses are the same. Individually contracted during the 1950’s, these modest two-story dwellings include orange-colored Mexican adobe villas with curved Spanish balconies, whitewashed Tudor homes, Cape Cods with wide, lacy verandahs facing the sidewalk, and redwood follies from San Francisco. It’s all residential. Suburbia.

            The Oxburg Community Swimming Pool is undergoing renovation. Since the Board of Directors is busy keeping up with the Jones’s, our 75-meter pool no longer suffices. Now we need 100-meter lanes. The contractor, Gary Lee — a local boy I went to school with— is pulling his hair out. Torrential Spring rains delayed pouring the concrete. “You do want to let it cure a little,” he complains, when I walk over there to see what’s up. “Everybody expects you to have the pool open by Memorial Day,” he explains, the two of us surveying a newly created Olympic monstrosity awash in a sea of mud.  “In Oxburg, Maryland, in 2012, that just isn’t going to happen.”

            “So be it.”

            “Such reasonableness,” he marvels. “Everybody else is threatening to sue!”

            It’s 7 o’clock at night. I leave him there, surveying the wreck of the OCSP. I’m carrying a blue cloth pouch, headed for the library, which is open until 9 p.m.

            Since they cannot swim, teenagers fill the streets. Otherwise, they’d be horsing around at the pool. Walking along South Huron Street, I pass two schoolgirls who are busy chattering. I nod my head in their direction. They nod back, but hardly give me a second glance. There is, however, a young lady— she looks about 10 years old— walking toward me. She’s still half a block away, but she’s pegging me with her stare. Red warning lights are flashing inside my head. The curly blond hair, the white blouse, the skimpy white tennis shorts, white tennis shoes and oval face are what I like, but, of course, not in a 10-year-old. Her arms and legs are thin as noodles.

            We, too, nod at one another. She ducks down a side street, a cul-de-sac, staring meaningfully across Huron Street. I follow her glance and see a family father, his gray suit jacket thrown over his arm, briefcase in hand. He and I give each other an understanding look. He heads into his house.

            I’m watching my step as I walk across the street, but let’s face facts, I am dawdling. My young friend walks about 20 feet down the hill. Suddenly, she turns around, facing me. Now I see the tiny breasts pressing at the white cotton blouse. That her face has a sculpted, craggy look to it. I find this irresistible, the wedge of a nose, the hooded eyes, the bushy blond eyebrows, the perfectly round chin, the bow mouth, bent down in a smirk. “Hi-i-i-i!” she calls.

            Jesus, Joseph, Mary and all the saints!

            “H-H-Hi!” I shout back, kind of frozen to the spot.

            “Where are you goin’?” she drawls in a sweet voice, dancing around on the sidewalk, a step left, a step right, a step left, rolling her hips like a prowling pussycat. She waves a hand.

            Young girls are walking time machines, transporting us backward to the days of our youth.

            I walk down the hill, approaching her, expecting every grown-up in Woodley Hills to come jumping from their houses like a Jack In the Box, screaming “Pedophile!!!”

            It doesn’t happen.

            “I’m goin’ to the library,” I tell her.

            “You can’t go to the library now,” she says. “They’re closed!”

            Looking into her blue eyes, I dumbly nod my head and say, “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah, you’re right. They’re closed.”

            “Stay here and play with me!” she says, both hands raised, palms to the sky, like an Indian princess.

            Good grief! She plucks a basketball off the lawn and coltishly, amateurishly, shoots at the basket mounted on a frame in the street.

            And yes, I have a decided erection.

            “Take off your sunglasses,” she says. “I can’t see your eyes!”

            I take ‘em off and stow them in my blue pouch.

           “What’s your name?” she asks.

            “Kevin. What’s yours?”

            “Kevin?” she asks, giggling. “What a dumb name! My name is…Tracie.” She draws out her name until it sounds about 20 letters long.

            “Gosh… Tracie. That’s such a beautiful name,” I breathe.

            I park my pouch against the white picket fence and fall into her rhythm: She shoots baskets, usually missing her shot. I retrieve the ball and hand it to her. Those little hands of hers keep brushing against mine. Whether that depends on the contour of the ball or not, I don’t ask.

            Chatting endlessly, she frowns, she giggles, her eyebrows rise up and down comically. This is a very young girl. I am transfixed.

            What’s the attraction? Not all, but most of the single women my age whom I have met are extremely bitter. Veterans of bad marriages and even messier divorces, they are man-haters. They want nothing to do with the vermin called “men.” After running up against their implacable fury, even the narcissistic attention of a self-absorbed teenager seems attractive. Never mind that Tracie is experimenting with her sexuality, testing to see how much sway she possesses over others. My right to choose or reject involvement at least gives me the semblance of control over my situation. Granted, I am pretty desperate.

             “How old are you?” she lisps.

             “I’m 38,” I lie.

             “Gosh!” she says, all wide-eyed, stopping to stare up into my face. “I’m… only… 13! You shouldn’t… be… here…talking… with me! “

             “Yes, but… I… I… I want to,” I stammer.

              This is SO WRONG!

             “What’s in your pouch?” she asks, throwing the basketball into the air and catching it, looking at me sideways.

             “Oh, that’s my gear,” I reply.

             “Show me!”

            So I take out my sunglasses in their black plastic case.

             “Let me try those!” Tracie demands. They are way too big, sliding off her nose, but they do give her a Lolita aspect. She hands them back. “Give me your ball cap!”

             I’m wearing a bright burgundy Nationals cap with its stylized “W”… for Washington, D.C. I hand it to her and she tries it on. It’s much too large. Tipping it back on her head, she looks like a swimsuit model!

            “I’m gonna keep this!” she chortles. “What else you got?” Smiling like a pixie, she holds out her hands. “Gimmee!!!”

             Gimmee.

             She appropriates my pen, my clipboard, my half-used roll of quarters. She lets me keep my reading glasses and eyeglass case, my Kleenex and my thumb drive.

            “How many quarters are these?” she asks.

            “I don’t know. There are $10 in a tube. I’ve used about half. I guess… twenty quarters maybe. Five dollars.”

             She stacks my former possessions in a neat pile on the grass by the fence. Looking into the yard, I see a sundial and a green plastic garden chair lying on its side. “Got any money?” Tracie murmurs, gazing off into the distance.

            “I’m sorry. What?” I ask.

            Looking right at me, a radiant smile blooms on her face. “DO YOU HAVE ANY MONEY?!” she whoops. You know, just loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear and maybe folks living three miles away.

           “What— but— uh— “ I stammer.

           “Just open your wallet and give me what you got,” she suggests, as if this is the most reasonable request imaginable.

           I do. I open my wallet.

           Surprise!

          What a joke!

           I have two dollars in my wallet.

           Five bucks went, as a tip, to the auto mechanic who changed the oil in my mom’s car. The ten and the twenty went to the typewriter repairman who came by our house and announced that my Aunt Mini’s Smith-Corona was no longer repairable. “This is a 20-year-old machine,” Tom, the repairman, explained regretfully, examining it atop the picnic table on our back porch. “The solenoid has given up the ghost. They just don’t make them anymore. I’d have to have exactly this model to pluck the part from, if I was going to replace it. I don’t have that!”

           “Well, now I know what to tell my Aunt Mini,” I concur.

           Tom charges corporations $99 for house calls. The go-to guy for typewriters, he can no longer afford renting a shop. I give him $30. “I’m paying for your expertise,” I tell him.

            Leaving me $2 in my wallet.

           “Why don’t you have any more money?” Tracie whines, snatching the two one dollar bills from my hand with grubby little fingers.

           “I gave the money away. In tips.”

             “You dummy!” she declares. “You could have given that money to me! Where do you live?”

             I explain that it’s a 20-minute walk.

            “I want your phone number! Gimmee your phone number! Gimmee!” she insists, her hands out, palms up. Thrusting out her lower lip, she glowers at me threateningly.

            I give her my business card.

           “Is this your home phone number?”

           “Yeah. Yes.”

            “Tra-cie!” I hear an angry woman’s voice shout from the house. “Get in here!”

            “That’s my mom,” she says simply, gathering the things from the lawn— my ball cap, my pen, clipboard and roll of quarters. “I gotta go inside now. I’ll call you!” she tells me, sulking.

             I walk home, my pecker immensely sore from pressing against the inside of my cargo shorts.

             This is nuts!

             I expect an angry call from Mrs. Tracie, threats of calling the police, the usual folderol and brouhaha.

            Another surprise. When my phone rings, it’s Tracie herself. “I have my own cell,” she chirps. “I can call anyone I want, as long as I don’t text or send pix. That’s too expensive.”

           “Wow! Well, yes. Okay.”

          “Tomorrow, you’ll come here and bring me money!” she says, a simple, declarative statement.

         “Well, okay, yes, I guess I will,” I admit, pulled by the undertow of her voice.

          “I’ll call you in the morning and then you’ll come here. We’re going to the mall.”

           “You and your mom are going to the mall?” I ask.

           “Why do you want to bring my mom? You and I are going to the mall!” she insists.

            It’s the White Flint Mall. It’s five miles away. “We’re walking to the mall?”

           “Why do you want to walk? That’ll take forever! Listen to me! I’m telling you to bring your car, so we can go to the mall!”

            She’s never even asked me if I own a car. Apparently, in Tracie’s world, all adults have cars.

            “That was so neat, meeting you today,” she laughs. “Did you have fun?”

            “I always have fun with… you… Tracie!”

            “Uh-huh! Yup! I gotta go! Bye!” she says and immediately hangs up. Her mommy, no doubt, asking who she is talking to.

             The next day, I take her to the mall, my cock a hot, pulsing misery, my shorts hopelessly distended for all to see.

             And she’s your typical 13-year-old: We drink malted milkshakes at a soda fountain. Tracie has me buy her tank tops. We get ice cream. She buys sunglasses. (I pay.) We eat hamburgers. At the drugstore, she buys magazines (“Twenty ways to a brighter complexion!”) and DVD’s (Cars 2, Madagascar) and CD’s (Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, REO Speedwagon’s Greatest Hits). I pay for everything. “Go to the bank and use the ATM machine!” she orders.

             “The ATM machine?” I ask.

             She waves her hands at me like I am an idiot. “Money!… Money?! “ She’s exasperated.

             She wants $100 in fives. Ignoring the ATM, I go into the bank, fill out a withdrawal slip and ask the teller for $100 in fives. “I need them to tip, please,” I say. They know me here. “Please make them reasonably crisp bills.”

              Smiling, the lady teller, a Latina, provides me with good bills.

             “How we doin’?” asks Tracie in a whiny voice, appearing at my side. “I got tired of waitin’ in the car!”

            “We’re doin’ fine,” I tell her, turning to go, bills in hand.

            “HE’S GONNA GIVE THAT MONEY TO ME!” she informs the Latina teller and anyone else at the White Flint Mall who might be interested.

            The teller gives me a sickly smile and shrugs.

           “Sorry about that!” I tell her lamely.

           As they say in Sweden, “If you play with fire, you get burned.”

           “Let’s, y’know, GO!” whines Tracie.

           This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.

           I drive her home.

           “Basketball! Time t’ play basketball!” she informs me, jumping from the car, running across the lawn and grabbing the ball.

            Another half-hour spent chasing her rebounds.

           “Let’s go to the library! They’re open now!”

           We do. She finds some books, summer reading, in the children’s section. Twilight. Vampire stories for kids. “Have you read these? They’re really good!”

            “No, I haven’t read them,” I reply, aware that I myself am associating with something of a vampire here.

           “You should read them! They’re really good!”

           “Oh, yes! I will! I will!”

                                                        *

             I feel like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch writing Venus In Furs: Ostensibly, he presents his story as a warning to avoid masochism. Immersing themselves in his tale, however, both writer and reader share the voyeurism of vicarious pleasure.

             “Where have you been all day?” asks my mom. She’s got a point. It’s summer. Even if I’m not screenwriting for Hollywood at the moment, there is still a lawn to mow, bushes to trim, a basement to clean, cars to wash.

             “I was helping a friend,” I say, not wanting to elaborate, but also not wishing to lie.

             She gives me that crabby, skeptical look of hers. The Feingold variety of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

            Next morning, I mow the lawn and wash her car.

           “Who is this on the answering machine?” mom asks. “You know I don’t hear well. It sounds like a child.”

           Well…yes. It’s a message from Tracie. “It’s Thursday morning! WHERE ARE YOU? Get over here! If you get this message, come over and HONK YOUR HORN three times and I’ll come out. COME OVER HERE!”

           “Actually, it’s for me. My buddy Bob’s daughter says he needs help with cleaning out his garage. I told you, yesterday. It’s the same chore. We’ll be finished by tonight,” I tell my mom vaguely, hating to make things up.

           I get to Tracie’s. Parking next to the basketball stand, I honk three times.

           Nothing.

          Five minutes later, I honk three times.

           Like a genie popping out of a bottle, smiling from ear to ear, dressed again in skimpy white shorts, white tee and white tennis shoes, she comes walking across the backyard. She jumps into my car. “Drive!” she commands.

            “Where?”

            “Don’t ask,” she frowns, a mercurial shift in temperament. “JUST DRIVE!”

             I do.

             “Let’s go to Baltimore!”

             “Wha-at?”

             “I want to go to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore!”

             So, I gas up the car and drive us to the Inner Harbor. Summer, picturesque, we visit the tall ships participating in the “Sailabration” event commemorating the 200^th anniversary of The War of 1812. I can’t fault Tracie for wanting to be there, even I find it impressive, if touristy. We buy matching “War of 1812” T-shirts, eat peanuts, wander around the harbor, get ice cream and wile away the afternoon.

             I try to stay abreast of the youth culture, but Tracie’s age group is something else! Her fave band is called Ice Cream Sundae. Their CD is entitled “We’re Just As Sweet” (Rainfeather Records, 2011). Preoccupied with ice cream, karate, videogames, television cartoons and nightmares, Nashville Cats they are not. 

            “It’s a shame your pants stick out so much,” Tracie observes, chocolate ice cream smeared artistically across her mouth. Using a napkin, I wipe it away.  “Otherwise, everyone would think I’m your daughter.”

           “You are my daughter.”

           “That’s good, because no one else cares about me at all!” she tells me, sliding into a funk.

           “I’ll do anything for you, Tracie!”

            “Good! Otherwise, nobody shares anything.”

            This new, frowning, difficult Tracie is someone I have not previously encountered.

            “Let’s go to your car.”

            We get to the parking lot. We climb in the car. A Honda Accord, it has bucket front seats. “Oh, look at the sea gull!” Tracie exclaims, leaning across my lap to peer out my driver’s side window, digging her sharp little elbows into my groin.

            “Vurry nice,” I mumble, in pain.

            “What a strange-looking bird!” she insists, crawling over the shift knob and onto my lap. She presses her behind against me, shifting back and forth, her backbone resting against my chest, a head full of blond hair and hairspray stuck in my face. “Oh, look, look, look!” Tracie cries, waving her spindly arms, her hands flailing the air, rhythmically rocking atop my swollen organ. What she’s looking at, her head swiveling in every direction, God only knows. “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! You’re such a bad man!” she concludes, sliding off me.

             Madly stuffing tissues into my pants, I sit in the front seat of my car, helplessly ejaculating.

             “What’s the matter?” Tracie asks innocently, batting her eyelashes at me.

              This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.

              When we get back to Oxburg, she wants to buy cough drops at the pharmacy.

             “Do you have a cough?” I ask.

             “No, I just like the way they taste!” she replies, your typical kid.

             Friday morning, I have to pick her up at 10 a.m. When I arrive, she tells me the plan for the day: We have to drive, she announces, to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “They have Civil War stuff. I want a Civil War hat and a musket and whatever else is neat.”

            This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.  

            By Friday night, I’ve had more than enough joy from my little companion Tracie. “You take up all my time,” I complain, peering at her in the haunting pink glow of sunset. We’re sitting in my car.

            “I know! That’s why we’re friends!” she grins. She’s so cute!

            Unbelievable! I’m rock hard again. Do they make an anti-Viagra? “I have a lot of chores to do over the weekend!”

            “Yeah, I got a lot of stuff to do on the weekend, too,” she agrees. “I’ll call you!”

             “I love you, Tracie,” I tell her helplessly.

             “Oh, no, daddy! Don’t say that! I don’t want to hear it!” she shouts, becoming hysterical. Wrenching the door handle, she kicks open the passenger side door and flies from my car, a white wraith in the twilight.

              This is why adult men don’t have relationships with young girls.

              Now I’m persona non grata. She won’t have anything to do with me. Not only has she told me to keep away, she’s threatened to report me to the authorities.

            We all know what that means. It’s over.

            She was driving me crazy, but I miss her terribly.

            Forget my lack of commitment, fooling around with youngsters. This unwillingness to even engage with someone my own age shows a pathological lack of self-confidence.

             Pedophilia is a burdensome affliction.   

                                                        *