Everybody is an expert about everything! Especially on the Internets.
I don't know much about child molester's other than I would beat the shit out of one if I came across them. I couldn't identify one of them for sure. I can only think of two instances where I had an experience with them. Wait maybe four times.
Once when I was planting tulip bulbs in my Mom's front garden there were a bunch of the kids on the block playing stickball with a couple of their Dads. They were about ten or eleven or so. Anyway this dude stops in front of my areagate and is checking them out as they were playing. He was dressed roughly and looked seedy if you know what I mean. And he had no business staring at those kids from down the block. I watched him for a while as I was working and decided I had to do something. I got up and went over to him.
I said "Dude if you know what is good for you ...you will get off this block and stop staring at those kids." "You can't tell me what to do. This is a free country and I can stand here if I want too!" "That might be asshole but if one of those fathers catches you they are going to beat the living shit out of you. Especially that guy in the sanitation workers shirt. So why don't you move along while you still got teeth dickweed or I might take it personal myself." So he did. You can't protect the world but you can protect your block. I don't know if he was a kid toucher but I just got a real bad vibe you know?
Another time there was this very elderly couple who I used to do taxes for. The guy was in a wheelchair and the wife was off her rocker. I would go to the house to pick up the papers every year. I knew their sons from the Boy Scouts. Now there is always a lot of jokes about the Boy Scouts but Troop 265 from St Stevens was a different kind of joint. It was run by old WW2 vets who wanted to recapture the vibe of when they were in the service. Guys stayed involved for many decades after they grew up. We still have reunions and camping trips. I haven't gone camping in a long time but at the last reunion somebody told me a story. It seems that one of the sons of this couple took this other guy aside who was a cop. He told him that his father had molested him when he was a kid and that was why his life was so fucked up. The cop guy didn't know what to say. The statue had run...the guy was in a wheelchair....waddayagonnado. He just made sure he locked up his piece so the guy wouldn't eat his gun that night. Then it made sense to me. You see the last time I went over to do the taxes the old man was sitting in his wheelchair and he had is piscadeal out. I said "Hey Buddy you have an accident going on there." He got all flustered and zipped up. I just chalked it up to him being old and crazy instead of being a predator and a molester. He died soon after and the old lady went in a home and the kids sold the house. To a shelter for battered women. Funny how things work out.
Finally when I was in the eight grade there was still a lot of nuns teaching in my grammar school. I was very tall for my age and the nuns always had me do stuff after school. The three tallest kids would have to carry books and clean the black boards and do all this stuff. This one nun was a little strange. She always had me do things. And she was always touching me. Straightening my tie. Tucking in my shirt. Smoothing the fit of my maroon blazer. She was a young girl. Barely twenty one as I remember. I think she wasn't a full nun at the time. I think they called them novies. Student teachers. Irish. And I was the only kid with a Irish name in my class. Everyone elses name ended in a vowel. I don't know what was going on. She was a nun for crying out loud. She left the nuns the next year. I heard she joined a commune or something. I don't know if that is true. I can't tell you if it was innocent or not. I just don't know.
The older I get the less I know.
I am not an expert on everything. Not like everyone else on the Internets.
29 comments:
The thing he's holding is called an Erlenmeyer flask.
Thanks for asking.
Tits & Clouds.
It is not easy to pick them out. Most are sociopaths, which is not psychotic. They can be charming and cautious and most of them avoid getting caught.
You have to protect your kids and your neighborhoods. That is not perfect but it is something. Chances of catching one in the act in a public place doing what Sandusky did is very rare and unlikely. Usually this shit happens in families or among friends and hence the reason people do not want to confront reality.
I watched Buck the other day on Netflix. He was the model for the Horse Whisperer. The show was a documentary on how he became a horse trainer. He is really good at empathy with horses.
He was not sexual molested, but his old man was a brutal sob who beat the shit out of him and his brother all the time. Eventually a gym coach saw the welts on the little kid's back and got the sheriff involved. The sheriff was still alive and said he was not going to put up with that on his watch. He took those boys away from the dad immediately (I assume the court in that Montana town did what needed to be done) and he got a local ranching decent couple to take care of them.
It came across in that film that the people in that town were decent people who intervened once they realized something was going on. But it still took a while for that to happen.
Not that there are not decent people in New York or other big cities (frankly I think people are pretty much both good and evil everywhere and in similar proportions), but sometimes it is harder to get the system to work. And you have more of it going on, which can be overwhelming.
The thing is there are so many people and they move in and out every month.
I know more people than anyone else in the neighborhood. I know the old people who have lived there forever and many of the new people who come into the store or who I met in the restaurants or stores. But even I don't know everyone and their situations. But you need to keep your eyes open and act accordingly.
I had a very close call with a podiatrist when I was 14. I had a planters wart on the bottom of my foot , no doubt as a result of the girls gym shower floor.
Back in those days people were so innocent, my Mother used to send me there alone , my appointments were always directly after school.
The style was the mini skirt and that is what we wore to school, no slacks were allowed in those days. One day he said the muscles in my feet were "tight", so he started massaging them, I was a such a little dummy, that despite being increasingly uncomfortable and not wanting to be rude to my elders, I just sat there frozen. The massaging crept up my leg and got to my knee, that's when I jumped up ran out of there without my shoe.
I was embarrassed and didn't tell my parents,I lied and told my mom that I lost my shoe in the storm sewer grate. I never went back, I told her the wart was gone.
That pedophile podiatrist never sent my parents a bill.
That is a very interesting story Allie. I think it happens to almost everyone and they don't realize it at the time. Because people don't focus in on it because it is so far out of their expeirance.
The thing is that fourteen year olds today don't look like kids. Not the way the culture is sexualized. I am always amazed how many NYC teachers are involved in something like this and it is woefully underreported. It is very prevalent.
The Penn State thing seems different. That seem like true pedophilia with a pre-pubescent child. With a lot more people involved and enabling this guy. I hope it all comes out.
If you can take a really direct, raw account of what it's like to be an abused child, and the lifelong effects that follow, read "Elephant Girl" by Jane Devin.
I wrote a review on Amazon, and I meant every word of it and more. This can be a life-changing book for some. I think it's literally a work of genius. That, of course, assumes you can take reading a description of what it's like to be carelessly schlepped off to child pornographers and anally raped at age 10, among many, many other things in the author's gut-wrenching childhood.
If you're interested in the Penn State mess, "Elephant Girl" is not a bad place to start to expand your understanding of child abuse, assuming, as I say, you can stand reading about it at all.
The worst thing about being molested is the shame the kid feels after it's been done to him. It's not that he feels complicit in what's happened (that's BS as far as my experience went) it's just that the shame is so overwhelming, because as a child he can't get his mind around what's just happened, it's beyond his frame of reference and so he just stews in his shame, can't talk about it to anyone. To be specific I was approached by a homo when I was taking a walk around the reservoir in Highland Park on the Brooklyn/Queens border. I was 11. Totally innocent. Had no idea about anything. Anyway this older guy approached me, talking in a completely unthreatening manner, we sat down on the grass and then he put his hand on my leg and inched it into my groin. I was totally frozen. Paralyzed. But then luckily instinct took over and I stood up quickly and ran home. But as I said above the worst part was that I dared not say anything to my parents. I was overwhelmed with shame and must have been in that state for weeks before the hold of the shame on me lessened.
That experience is one of the reasons, not the only one but significant in why I have no truck with "understanding" for homosexuals.
James Joyce "touched" on the theme of pederasty in his short story, An Encounter.
The thing is that fourteen year olds today don't look like kids.
Jesus, Troop. They didn't look like kids either, often enough, for most of history. The iconic, touch-stone, reassuring notion of "kids looking like kids" is a strictly limited phenomenon, perhaps not coincidentally overlapping your own go-to template/paradigm--50s! a chunk of the early-mid 60s!
WTF, friend. DUDE!
Oh I don't know. I think these newfangled things like the TV and intertubes makes kids grow up a lot quicker.
Maybe I am just an old man.
If that what you are saying then you are correct my dear.
I think every person has a story about being approached in an inappropriate way by an adult when you are a kid. Most of the time it comes to nothing.
Sometimes it leads to tragedy.
I just know enough to know that I don't know enough. That's all.
Focusing on whether 14-year-olds, for example, look like something other than 14-year-olds, again for example, is mostly about letting adults off the hook of being required to be responsible in adult ways (however complicated and difficult that might be).
Let's disavow the bullshit and cut to the chase, say I. What say you?
Oh I don't know. I think these newfangled things like the TV and intertubes makes kids grow up a lot quicker.
Oh, I don't know. I think that old-fangled like growing up in the tenements of Williamsburg a 100ish years ago made kids grow up a lot quicker.
Oh, I don't know. I think that kids raised during a combination of The Dustbowl and The Depression on Kansas 80ish years ago make kids grow up a lot quicker.
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
I could go do this for hours, Trooper. (Referencing history and all around the world, and even present times.) I bet you could, too, if you would. Why so invested in mid-later '50s/early-mid '60s mythology?
Oh I don't know. I think these newfangled things like the TV and intertubes makes kids grow up a lot quicker.
They also make kids stay younger. Do I need to point that out to you? As if, for example, "every kid gets a trophy" wasn't part and parcel of "quality" kids programming from the start, going on 45 years ago.
Trooper. Trooper! (We need you.)
Hell, maybe even 45-60 years ago.
Kids had it tough in the past too. Beatings were the rule not the exception. Sexual abuse, while probably not more common than today, almost certainly happened and was not spoken about.
You are right that it is no different than it was 100's of years ago. In fact if you read about the 1890's you would find that they had whole brothels full of child prostitures. I agree totally that it is the adults responsiblity and totally their fault when this stuff happens. I don't excuse them in the slightest.
I just hate the sexualization of children. Maybe I am an old man. I don't remember it like that from when I was a kid. But I like to live in the moment. So now I am old. That's the moment I am in now. Everything was better when I was growing up. I had to walk eight miles in the snow to go to school. In July.
GET OFFA MY LAWN DENNIS!!!!!!!!!
Okey-dokey. Wouldn't want to be so impolite as to shank your bliss. Happy trails to you!
Kids have it better now (by far) than the 50s, and demonstrably better than the 19th century. Check statistics on life expectency, disease (remember polio), and careers. But I agree with Trooper that all is not good.
I really recommend reading "Elephant Girl" I linked above. The author is 49 years old, about the same age as Trooper and his wife, and her childhood was no "Leave it to Beaver" idyll or even approaching what Trooper experienced in Carroll Gardens. And yes, there were child pornographers around when she was 9 or 10, not to mention lousy schools and a dysfunctional child welfare system. She was a throwaway child of Trooper's generation. By the time she was 15, she had been generally brutalized, raped, and, to top it all off, whacked in the face with a baseball bat, which injury affects her to this day. The rest of her life hasn't been a picnic, either. The fact that she can tell this story without a hint of self-pity and a remarkable amount of love in her soul is, to me at least, nothing short of amazing.
Seriously, read this book.
Troop: I think it was Clint Eastwood's line: "A man has to know his limitations."
BTW--enjoying your blog--keep up the great work.
All truths are in the movies :)
I think every person has a story about being approached in an inappropriate way by an adult when you are a kid.
Do you, for real, think that?
Wish I'd had that insight something like 46-so years ago, or at least that someone had bothered to share that insight directly, as in: This is normal! It happens to everyone!. As opposed to: Look the other way. This doesn't happen.
Christ on crutch and where such weird thinking put him.
On a brighter note, just watched a "behind the scenes documentary" of the making of "Ferris Bueller." Simply wonderful. Now, THAT was useful.
For example.
I was trying to think of a story or some kind of experience with a potential molester, but I couldn't think of anything specific. The only thing that came to mind was this older guy (probably in his 50s) who occasionally hung around a local park when I was in junior high and high school. He had a frisbee and every time I was over there with a group of friends he'd ask if we wanted to play catch.
Of course we didn't, we were there doing our own thing. At the time I remember not thinking much of it, or if I did thinking the guy was lonely. Didn't occur to me that maybe he was looking for something else. And now, even as I write this, I feel bad for now ascribing motives to him that maybe he didn't have.
That's the thing, I think, with growing up in a relatively safe community. And safe doesn't mean stuck in a house in a gated community. Safe, I think, means a place where the adults really do play the role of protectors, making it seem like the world really is innocent and safe.
But, it's not really, so adults can help create a bubble so that kids can grow up psychologically somewhat healthy. Later on we find out it wasn't all that nice out there. Indeed, even when we were young. I learned not long ago that a good friend of mine in 4th and 5th grade, when we lived in Santa Barbara, was being molested by a priest at that time. Who knew? No one, apparently then. His mom was a little 'touched' and would see visions of Mary and saints and stuff, though was nice in person, very broken herself, and his dad had committed suicide when he was young. Total target.
And I know there were a lot of secrets and hidden stories in my extended family going back generations, with eccentric family members who I don't think were themselves molesters, but seemed to have been victims. But they were also WWII veterans and made great contributions, so people just moved on in those days and didn't tell the stories.
It was hushed up. Which kept the problems going in all sorts of other ways.
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