Off
the seat of a
bicycle
Chapter 29) sex: the primordial reason a cyclist would demand safe passage on the roadway.
Previous chapter
Dan
the informer was very interested in the ‘rape-trap’ story when I told
him. He said he’d check it out and that reinforced what I already knew;
that he had a reliable contact in the police department.
Interestingly
Dan was always a detailer, and would tell me what he knew about
anything we talked about. So I was expecting to hear back about the
rape-trap, but he never said anything. After a while I asked him about
it but he dropped the topic tight-lipped and looked down …
… good god, his silence was deafening … they targeted me.
They targeted me for a rape-trap.
I
let it slide off my back … it truly didn’t have anything to do with me.
But down deep I was red-faced infuriated with those people.
But
telling Dan about the trap had an unintended consequence. The police
knew I noticed the trap, so they had to push another one over the top
of me.
Within a few weeks, a very attractive young girl stopped
by to see my bother at Mom’s house. She arrived barefoot and stepped
inside for a minute then quickly left. Nobody came to visit my brother
so naturally I thought it was his girlfriend and greeted her with that
cordiality. He later confided they were just friends.
I don’t
remember her speaking to me at all, even though I was standing right
there. She dressed street but that didn’t match because she was
clear-headed, and had conversations and purpose in her mind. I liked
her because she seemed smart and interesting. She made no plans with my
brother when she left, so I figured they met someplace else regularly.
Two
nights later I left for the constitutionally-mandated night walk, but
this night I reversed direction for some reason. Why did I change
paths, what did I see? Was this the same intuit my body used to avoid
the boogeyman hiding at the railroad track when I was 8? Did the change
in direction somehow give me an advantage or better angle to see what
was happened that night?
Usually I took the route counterclockwise, but not this night.
Within
a mile of leaving the house, I crested a hill and walked up on the
sidewalk from behind a big tree in front of Dairy Queen. There was no
traffic on the highway, and it was calm with heavy humidity that night
… and suddenly this girlfriend of my brother was walking toward me on
the sidewalk a hundred yards away.
At two thirty in the morning.
As
we approached, I stepped off the sidewalk onto the lower grassy area to
let her pass. It was an automatic gesture I offered all women, and if I
had a big feathered hat, I would’ve swooped it off my head and bowed
gracefully too. All I said was, ‘hi, you’re my brother’s friend.’
She
stopped but never said a word and stood there as if expecting
something. She was looking straight at me but quiet as a rock, so I
turned and said ‘see ya later.’
It was an odd encounter, but
being optimistic and amazingly stupid at once, I thought it could lead
to love maybe sometime when we met again, but yick, this was my
brother’s girl, and that would be a bad runway to share.
Still
the event kept playing back in my head as I walked away. When I was
standing next to her, my eyes had twice gone to the same spot in the
dark field off to the right, as if somebody was watching. You’ve seen
it before; how people on Candid-Camera always look directly at the
hidden camera but don’t realize what their eyes showed them. So why had
my eyes tracked twice to the same spot?
… somebody was there, and suddenly it added up.
It
was just like at the pizza parlor; a slight, vulnerable-looking girl
had shown up briefly to make contact, then showed up once more in a
position that ‘made her look available,’ and neither time did they
speak directly to me, yet both appeared to offer a chance for the
hootie-tootie (which of course was in my head … right?).
There
was more too. It was 2:30 am, so where was she coming from? The nearest
houses or doughnut shops were miles away. And another thing, she looked
street, but wasn’t. She was clear-headed and slightly built, not a lean
daily walker like the street-girl I knew from a few years before.
Street people are lean and hard. This girl was a car rider and didn’t
walk long miles to get where she was. Nor was she going to walk the
dark mile back to my neighborhood either. She wasn’t street, it was an
act.
In the end, I never saw that girl around anywhere again. My
brother never mentioned her. She was never around the neighborhood or
along the road. Nope, she was gone because this girl was sent there to
target me.
Look at all the planning they did to create that
situation. I guess they needed to make sure the bicycle rider wasn’t a
predator, but I met their informant Dan every day and he would notice
if I came in all scratched up … so where did this shit originate? Did I
scare women car drivers? Or did women see me walking around at night
and assume I had transformed their society into boogeyworld?
Today
I understand that my face is hard and serious and probably turns people
off. People can’t tell when I’m joking around and I know I walk up and
start talking to total strangers. And I know I prefer talking to women
because I enjoy sharing feelings … and women are not compelled to tell
hunting and fishing stories. Let’s face it, every man on the planet has
caught the biggest fish in the world, but honestly, we went fishing
once and I had to set the worms free.
At the time however, I
didn’t think constructively about the incident because frankly I didn’t
care; the police could run whatever trap they wanted. I just didn’t
care is what I told myself, but down inside I felt differently. I was
shocked they would presume I could attack women and enraged that they
used my friends to invent foul ideas about me. It reinforced the
negative image I carried about myself and further steeled my
inner-belief against the things those people represented.
The
police actions didn’t matter at an everyday level because I knew how to
avoid people, after all, look at my high school basketball experience …
I couldn’t even sit next to the team because the camaraderie confused
me … I was a ‘socially-avoidant personality,’ which I learned later was
the neat clinical term for my situation.
Socially avoidant. No
wonder I felt comfortable walking late at night with a zero chance of
being embroiled in a socially distressing situation ... like, how are
you, what are you doing, have you seen Doileck or Goster or Salloid?
Hell no, I’m busy walking and busy thinking, leave me alone, you remind
me of my mother. It was the perfect intuition for avoiding trouble:
stay away from people.
It would be 23 more years before the
police started running women at me again, but always for the same
reason: under the guise of fighting criminalship, the create-a-crime
boys assume sex is the primordial reason a cyclist would demand safe
passage on the roadway.
Chapter 30) Defensive driving and the soft target
Chapter 31-32) I was done playing
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