Posted by Ian on August 9, 2005, 3:23 am All right, I admit it. One day I got hit by the thing. I gave in to the temptation, it was wrong, I felt remorse, I was worried about what was going to happen to me... and all these feelings together I couldn’t live with. So I just marched myself down to the police station, told them what I had done and handed myself right over to them to go to jail... or face whatever penalty I was going to get for it. My work usually involves spending long periods of time overseas, most often in Asia, and during my brief times back home in the States in between job assignments, sometimes I would briefly rent places for the time I was going to be here, and sometimes I would just stay at my parents’ house. One evening I was out driving along in the suburbs where we lived, and I saw a pretty blonde-haired girl, maybe 17, 18 or 19, standing by the side of the road, by a bus stop, apparently where the bus from downtown had let her off, standing there hitch-hiking. My first thoughts were, ‘She shouldn’t be out doing that. That’s dangerous.’ I stopped and picked her up. “Hi,” I said as she was getting in the car. “Where’re you headed?” “Straight ahead 12 blocks,” she replied. “All right, that’s where I’m going,” I said. “I’ll take you there.” “Thanks.” “Just getting home from work?” “Yeah.” “You know,” I said after driving a moment, “it’s dangerous for a girl to be out hitch-hiking... especially at night.” “I know,” she replied, “but when I come home from work, the bus only takes me to where you picked me up, and I don’t have any way of getting home, and it’s so far to walk....” “Doesn’t leave you with much choice, does it?” I said, shaking my head. “That’s a difficult situation, isn’t it?” “But at least this town doesn’t have a very high crime rate,” she said. “That’s true. I grew up here.” I was so in the mood for some interaction with the opposite sex, she was so pretty, but... ‘You can’t,’ I was telling myself. ‘You can’t... do something... without her consent.’ It was dark outside and dark in the car. Since she couldn’t see, I found myself reaching down, unzipping my pants and holding it in my hand. ‘Don’t let her see you doing that,’ I told myself. ‘Now put it away.’ I had it inside my pants, but with the zipper open so that it would be visible if the light in the car was on. I could envision how an article in the “Police Blotter” section of the newspaper would word it: “... man picking up woman hitch-hiker exposes himself through an open zipper....” Some of the other fellows in the Brotherhood, the secret society we were in at the UW, called that kind of exposure “doing a WinZip.” (Computer nerds?) She had been holding a piece of paper or something in her hand, and she dropped it on the floor. “Oh, I dropped something and I can’t find it,” she said. “Could you turn the light on for a second?” Oh, no. She wanted the light on and I couldn’t pull together the strength to zip up my pants. I had the strength, but what I mean is that the temptation for you-know-what was pulling at me so strongly that I couldn’t pull together the strength to withstand it by zipping up my pants first. Ahhhh.... I gave in. I turned the light on. She looked down on the floor, found it and said “Okay.” I didn’t turn the light off. We continued driving along, with her looking straight ahead. Then, without moving her head, her eyes darted down to look at it for just a second, and then looked back up, continuing to watch the road ahead. (It was clearly visible through the open zipper. She couldn’t have missed seeing it.) We went for a few blocks more, then came to the cross street where her house was. “Right up here will be fine,” she said. “Okay.” I stopped the car. “Here you are.” “Okay, thanks for the ride.” “You’re welcome. G’bye,” I said as she was starting to get out. “And be careful about the hitch-hiking. You know... there are a lot of weirdoes out there....” “Yes.... Thanks.” She got out and walked across the street behind the car. I couldn’t see her in the rear-view mirror, because it was dark. I drove on, thinking about how she could be writing down my license number. Damn! What an insane thing to have done. She could call the cops on me, and they could come to my parents’ house, find me and take me in. Damn! What a depraved, stupid thing to have done! And I couldn’t stop myself. I drove home, worried about it. When I got home, I sat down, turned on the TV, started watching “Ancient Mysteries,” and after a little while my parents came home and sat down to watch too. After a little bit, the phone rang. I froze. My mom got up and answered it. “Hello?” I waited, nearly sweating, to hear what she said next. “Oh, all right,” she said. It was somebody she knew. They talked for a little bit, then she said bye, hung up and sat back down. I breathed a sigh of relief. Once a friend in the Brotherhood told about one time when he was living at his parents’ house, before he ever went to the U or got in with it, he once did something somewhere, someone wrote down the license number to his car, called the cops on him, and later they called his parents’ house to ask them if they still owned the kind of car it was. He picked up the other phone, heard them ask that, and blurted into the conversation, “Officer, I’m the person you’re looking for. Tell you what, why don’t I go down to the station and talk about it with you, rather than over the phone?” They said, “All right then, we should see you here in a little bit?” “It should take me ten minutes to get there—fifteen, maybe,” he replied. “All right,” they said. “If you don’t show up....” “I will. I’ll be there.” “What’s this about?” his mom asked him after they hung up. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “They want me over there right away,” giving him time to make up a story. “Was it speeding?” his mom asked. “Yes,” he said, desperate to grab onto anything it could be other than what it really was. He got in the car, went to the cash machine, pulled out a thousand dollars in case he had to pay bail and didn’t know how much they would ask, then drove straight to the police station. Better that than them telling his parents what it was. He was coöperative with them, he described to them what happened, and lucky for him, the police decided to let him off with a stern warning. Now all he had to do was think up a story to tell his parents, about what it was. He had already told them it was speeding, so he made up a story about being in a parking lot, which is on private property and out of the law’s jurisdiction, going faster than the owners of the establishment wanted people going in the parking lot, but still within the speed limit on the street, and how he passed a father walking with some children, scared them, stopped to ask if they were all right, the father got mad, said some warning to him, wrote down the license number and called it in. He told his parents the policeman had said he didn’t think anything was going to come of it, but when he got a call like that he had to at least investigate it. His dad shook his head and said, “Some people sure are soreheads,” and that was the end of it. I read in the book “Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask,” in the chapter about exhibitionists, the author, in the ’60s, asked a New York police sergeant about exhibitionists and he told him they were always such nice guys he hated to have to arrest them, but he was required to by his superiors. There were quite a number of them, and each time it happened, and the woman would describe the man to the sergeant, he’d say, “Oh, I know who that is,” he’d call him on the phone, and the guy would come on down to do his time. Oftentimes they were men whose loving mothers brought them up always gently telling them that the punishment they got from their abusive fathers was the right thing for them, to the point where they convinced them—or, if not consciously telling them that, left the idea in their minds underneath, by reiterating that the thing they did, whatever it was, was wrong, and in so doing, would make it seem as if they approved of the excessive punishment from the father. Men who have no bodily shame? On the contrary, men who do suffer from bodily shame—and deep in the subconscious are convinced that getting and having the feminine love every man needs and desires must be connected to going through the things that cause suffering, including suffering from the shame of his body that he was taught in childhood to feel. Some psychologists say that underneath, the whole problem is really an addiction to punishment, a cycle that keeps on and on, a compulsive desire to eliminate the stress of guilt by suffering from something. At some point it may well up in the form of the man humiliating himself by allowing his body to be exposed to someone of the opposite sex, and then when it is impressed upon him—or if he realizes by himself—how he has hurt her by doing this, he feels guilt for that, and again feels a compulsion to eliminate the stress of the guilt by suffering some kind of punishment, which may then surface in another way. Like girls who have the problem of taking razors and cutting themselves compulsively on the arms and thighs, or wherever, the two behaviors are related. Exhibitionism is said to be resistant to treatment, and some psychologists say the reason is that when the judicial system sentences him to a punishment for it, all it’s doing is feeding the addiction. When the police who dealt with him trusted him over the phone to come down to the station, it was probably because they knew the subject—and the unusual track record so many exhibitionists have displayed of always showing up for their punishment, when confronted by the police about it. (Continued)
Link: Post a response
Message modified by board administrator August 6, 2006, 3:49 am
(Originally posted 2/7/2001, 1:37 pm) 
Message Thread:
« Back to thread
