yustyoking

 

The cold weather is nipping at our heels. I wanted to write about ISIS, but I’ve got this legal conundrum. I’ve spent the day trying to figure out how to put the situation in the best possible light. You guys who know me are gonna be pissed! I blame it on the goddam picnic tables.

Oxburg, Maryland has three schools, Pierce Elementary— where both my younger bro’ Tim and I went to school— H. L. Mencken Middle School and, of course, Oxburg High. Long may the purple and yellow (yech!) wave victorious! “Oxburg, Oxburg, who’s gonna buy the slurpees?” as our cheerleading squad used to chant at football games.

My current legal battle has gone on for a month. As Tim says: “If Maryland is my lover, why am I ducking for cover?” It was only this week that my case came up on the docket.

The library sits next to H. L. Mencken Middle School. And there are these wooden picnic tables where, cloudy or bright, sweet young girls hang out after school. I mean, this is a given. Mindless maidens, noses buried in their smartphones, nobody using the library pays them any mind. Separate worlds. Fridays, however, are a problem. Predatory Friday, suddenly our young damsels are looking for a sugar daddy to finance their weekend activities. I came out of the wrong door at the library, and there were two young ladies waiting to pounce.

Sandee has hair three colors of blond, any one of which may or may not be natural. All this wavy blond hair cascading off the shoulders of her fire engine red outfit. Okay, I’m a pushover for girls with painted eyes. She had me right there. “Hey, mister,” she called in the cracked, nasal voice of adolescence. “Whaddya gonna do this weekend? Julie and I want to have fun but we don’t have any money, tee hee hee! ” Waving a hand, kicking her foot, smirking, she kept me enthralled with those dynamite blue-green eyes. This was a sad situation. I hoped her braces would demure me, but instead, they just made her seem all of 13 years old— which she is— and I found that strangely attractive. Kind of like revisiting my misspent youth.

Her girlfriend Julie was no help. Your foxy brunette with tight, tight blue slacks that showed off her exceptional hips and a round little rump, she wore a patterned blouse that somehow drew my glance upward to that laughing face of hers. “How much money ya got in yer wallet?” she guffawed.

(I need to stop grinding my teeth while writing about this, but read on!)

“No, really, guys, I — ”

“How old are you?” lisped Sandee, pointing at me with her whole hand. Her red lacquered nails resembled ice picks.

“I’m 42,” I lied, shaving 15 off my age.

“What year were you born?” Julie immediately countered, a smart cookie.

I, too, am nimble at math. “October 12, 1973.”

“L-L-Listen,” Sandee insisted, “It’s so warm out! Take off your jacket!”

Just kidding around, I took off my jacket and dumped it unceremoniously on the table.

“Lemme see yer wallet,” cracked Julie, both hands held out in front of her like an Egyptian maiden.

“No way!”

“Way!”

“Give her your wallet!” laughed Sandee.

God help me, I handed Julie my wallet.

My life is so barren of romance, the girls’ teasing had me swollen like a blimp, pressing achingly inside my pants. It’s been too long. Sandee and Julie gave each other a look of “Oh, wow!” while examining my crotch with wolfish grins.

“Now take off your shirt!” Sandee commanded.

“Oh, come on…”

With Sandee laughing, waving her nails in my face and kicking her legs, I found myself compelled to comply. Once I had my shirt off, of course, every Tom, Dick and Harry in the neighborhood was gazing, appalled, at my pale torso. Customers from the bank across the street, school personnel, neighbors on West 31st Road. Very quickly, I did a few Arnold Schwartzenegger poses and pulled my shirt and jacket back on.

Julie, meanwhile, took advantage of my little exhibition to relieve me of the $38 in my wallet: A twenty, a ten, a five and three ones. Foosh! Quick as The Flash, all gone!  “Here! Take yer wallet,” she drawled, tossing it on the table. Love that Maryland accent!

Sandee laughingly suggested, “Get down on all fours and bark like a dog!” That’s when the police arrived. I was busy tucking in my shirt tails, under my jacket.

“Okay, don’t move,” two male policemen instructed us, approaching edgily, looking larger than life in their brown uniforms.

Droooop, I lost that erection muy rápido! “Is there a problem?” I asked.

“Show your I.D. and shut up!” suggested one police officer. I really liked the way his partner unclipped the flap on his holster. Did they actually feel threatened?

“WE’RE JUST TALKING!” Julie insisted.

Sandee’s porcelain white skin had already turned a whiter shade of pale.

While one cop kept me under surveillance, his partner went to their cruiser and put my particulars into the computer.

The blacks in Baltimore are rioting in protest over police violence. Here in lily white Oxburg, the local gendarmes divide their time equally between investigating burglaries, directing Saturday traffic at the synagogue and Sunday traffic at the mosque, and running a series of speed traps along The 1812 Highway.

“So what’s it all about?” asked the first officer when his partner came up empty. “Do you know these girls?”

“It’s literally nothing. We’re playing. I work really hard, so when they saw me and I saw them, we decided to joke around.”

“Somebody called and said there was a streaker. Was that you?”

“THERE WAS NO STREAKER!” Julie volunteered, but I shushed her with a wave of my hand. I think she was ready to get in a fistfight with the cops.

“I told them about training on a Nautilus at the gym and they wanted to see my muscles, so I took off my shirt for a second. Bodybuilding poses. Half a minute at the most.”

“Okay, we’re charging you with pedophilia. You can explain it to the judge.”

“There’s no law against talking to people, officers.”

“Tell it to the judge! You did a lot more than just talk! Now shut up!”

BAM! Just like that, I and my book bag are loaded into the cage in the back of the police car and I am driven to the precinct house, fingerprinted, and put in a holding cell. My one phone call is, naturally, to my mom. She, in turn, calls her estate lawyer, who practically has a meltdown over the phone. Eventually, a chubby criminal lawyer named Richard Pope comes to my aid. Standing outside my cell, briefcase in hand, he’s sprung me! When the guard opens up, Richard shakes my hand. “I know who you are! I’ve seen the golf trophies. I graduated twenty years after you at Dorkburg,” he tells me, a big smile on his face.

“Long live the purple and gold,” I breathe.

******

I get several unpleasant telephone calls from the parents. They do not appreciate our little charade by the picnic tables. Sandee’s mom calls me a child molester. Julie’s dad accuses me of being a Muslim terrorist. “If you ever show your ugly snout around my daughter again,” he informs me, “I’ve got a gun and I’m prepared to use it!” They are out for blood. I find anything and everything I say only sets them off. So I stop trying to explain my concern that the girls not be traumatized by a court appearance. They’re good kids. We adults may be full of bilge, but there is no earthly reason to put them through such an ordeal. Thankfully, Richard agrees with me. He convinces the prosecutor to take oral depositions from each of the teenagers. These will be used in court.

******

My argument is that in a world where angry, radicalized shooters massacre innocent people once a week, what possible harm does it do if two young girls and I clown around?

“Firstly, you are not a legal expert, so your lay interpretation of the law interests the judge not at all,” Richard tells me, totally deflating my trial balloon.

Ouch!

“Secondly, you cannot put an equal sign between other people’s behavior and your own. The judge is concerned primarily with the letter of the law. Have you violated existing statutes? Only in extremis does the spirit of the law enter the picture at this level. We’re not talking Clarence Darrow pleading before the Supreme Court here. You are remanded to district court, the lowest rung on the legal ladder.”

Ga-a-a-a! At $250 an hour, I give it another shot: “There was no public nudity to speak of. No one touched anyone else. There was no intention of anyone doing any touching. Who took the ‘innocent’ out of innocent fun?”

“You’re not listening, Kevin! Think of the law as a game with a very intricate set of rules. All we servants of the court practice it daily. You cannot show up with neophyte opinions and ‘win’ against paid professionals. All you can do is lose. That’s why you pay me. To minimize the damage.”

Yikes! I feel like I’m on my way to San Quentin.

******

Richard is very good in the courtroom. I can’t quote the judge without risking a boatload of legal grief, so I’ll merely describe the issues. The county prosecutor charges me with pedophilia and contributing to the delinquency of two minors.

“Pedophilia presupposes a sexual motive behind the actions of the accused, which has in no way been substantiated,” Richard points out.

The judge lectures us: In nine out of ten cases of adults misbehaving in the presence of a minor, predation is the motive. A legal precedent is already in effect.

Richard objects that this hasn’t been proven in the current case.

The prosecutor insists that the charges stand.

Richard offers to take the case to trial.

The judge does that “please approach the bench” thing. I sit and sulk while the three of them confer. When Richard returns, he’s smiling ever so slightly. “They want to hit you with a $500 fine and give you a year’s probation.”

“Shit! Sure,” I tell him. “It’s a storm in a teacup. There wasn’t any ‘there’ there.”

“Hell, even I know that,” Richard insists.

“What about my first amendment rights? Certainly there’s no law against talking with a member of the younger generation.”

“You should have thought of that before you took your shirt off, Kevin!” he admonishes me, a less than amused look on his face.

“I acted like an idiot,” I agree.

“We won’t tell the judge that, he’d up your fine.”

******

“Hey, mister!” Sandee and Julie shout, waving from a distance outside the library this last Friday. It’s sunny, but the weather’s turned cold. We’re bundled up. “No hard feelings, huh?”

“You never did a bad thing in your life!” I shout back, waving.

They laugh.

I laugh.

******

The End. I hope.

 

***************** Ambiguous Law Enforcement *******************

The good news is, I was not arrested and I am not pro-pedophilia. The purpose of the story is to show how difficult we find handling ambiguous issues. While the local police in San Bernardino, California were issuing traffic tickets and investigating local disturbances, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik purchased 4,500 rounds of ammunition and assorted bomb components without awakening the interest of either the FBI or the San Bernardino police. Farook and Malik were not members of the military, law enforcement or a gun club. Why did they need 4,500 rounds of ammunition? While the police were going about their daily business, Farook and Malik killed 14 people and wounded 21 others. We need to get our priorities straight.