Dirty Deeds

My mom and Mrs. Wilkins had a tough trip home from their shopping trip in the city. A weirdo sat across from them and somewhere between Wayne Junction and Washington Lane, he decided to expose himself. With some manipulation, he demonstrated how he could move blood into what he was displaying to them.

He was weird because he expected people to applaud. They were mortified. They fled to other seats. The guy who showed them his plumbing was thrown off the train between stations.

We heard the story at the dinner table. It was a scary story. It might have been worse if we were served sausage. Anyway, I got to thinking that he might appear on the train that I took to school every day. I had seen guys thrown off the train before, but that was for trying to stiff the railroad for their fares.

A man who lived up the street jumped off a garage roof in his birthday suit as my sister and Peggy Delia were walking by in their Girl Scout uniforms. They were rattled. Some liberals might admit that a fat, hairy, thirty year old man is a bit out of line leaping nude in front of eleven year olds. If Ronnie Vile or Don Advena or Charlie McCullough dropped off the roof, sans clothing, the girls might have followed any one of them home. If I, at age nine, pulled that trick, they would have beat me up. After they had told my father, he would have beat me up.

We really thought that flashers and people who liked to look at people who had their pants off, were odd. Some guys dropped their pants in front of boys and some of them wanted to get into the pants of boys — and did. A half century later the odd became an alternative way of life.