Everyone Knows To Stay Away From The Pervs

Mom didn't go to the bar. Mom rarely drank, and she absolutely hated beer. She called it "piss water". She looked down on beer drinkers, viewing them as only one step above winos. This kept us pretty isolated from the rest of the neighborhood. All my friends went to the bar to buy cigarettes for their parents. Mom sent us all the way to the gas station. The gas station was a full block away, and to get there you had to pass abandoned buildings and such. Just because an owner doesn't want a building, doesn't mean it is empty. The homeless slept there or used the buildings as shelter. The homeless weren't a threat. It was the pervs we had to watch out for.
The pervs used the abandoned buildings -and the space between them, in the afternoons and evenings. Mom usually needed a new pack of cigarettes around 7:00 pm. That was prime perv time. The pervs would bring their dirty magazines and whack off in the buildings. Some of them needed a more public place to do their business, so they'd use the gravel and glass parking lot between the buildings.

That really sucked for my sister and I, because the parking lot held a short cut to the gas station. If there was even a chance that someone might be lurking in the lot, or the path beyond that led to a hole in the gas station's fence; we would take the long way. Neither of us wanted to get snatched. Snatchings were common, and never talked about.

If you grew up in a good neighborhood, you might not understand. Admitting that you were snatched and violated would be showing weakness. You might as well paint "victim" across your forehead, and be done with it. Weak people got robbed, beaten and raped. Not once or twice, but often. You never, never, never admit weakness in a neighborhood like mine. I think that's why it bothered mom so much when we got robbed. Somehow, we had appeared as victims. After that, we had to be a lot more vigilant. We had to come across as twice as tough as before. We had to convince the neighborhood that there would be retribution on an apocalyptic scale, or live in fear that next time we might be home, and lose more than just stuff. -I know it sounds melodramatic, but it was simply the way things were-

The pervs were another example of the way things were. I never counted how often I saw some perv masturbating in a semi-private part of the parking lot. The boldest perv I remember was standing in the middle of the lot, holding his pants in one hand and his dick in the other. He was looking down at a magazine. When he saw my sister and I, he walked off to a corner, just beating away. He left the magazine behind. We were lucky, he wasn't one of those guys who prefers children. We didn't have to see him look at us and get even more excited, or worse yet, chase us. That happened a few times, too. Being chased by a perv is no picnic.

We had a series of safe doors to knock on. Any of the bikers would have let us in. Also most of the pot dealers, and Tattoo Annie, the neighborhood prostitute. The pervs never chased us very far, though. We never had to knock on any of the doors. At least not for the neighborhood pervs. There were a few incidents being followed by a car...

They never tried the candy bit. Most of them offered money. "Hey, girl. Ya want some money?" Like that's going to bring me anywhere near a perv in a car! Street snatchings you might walk away from. Cars never brought you home.

How did I know this, when no one ever talked about it? I don't know. I think the real meaning of, "You stay away from those pervs." filters into kids through osmosis or something. We just all knew what would happen if you didn't stay away.