How Far Did He Go?
This evening as I was receiving my daily 15 minute shoulder/neck massage (hubby promised to try to do this until the baby is born…in large part due to subject of this post), my mind began to wander and I remembered something from when I was around 8.
We used to go the playground in my housing complex in New York City to play during the summer. Anyone from New York knows the generic make up of these playgrounds. They had monkey bars (usually shaped in an arc), two or three concrete hollow “barrels” or logs that we used to sit in and chill. It’s amazing to remember that we were small enough to fit 4 in at a time. The playground had a few benches and maybe a small basketball court.
Anyway, one summer a white man began coming to the playground to “work-out” on the monkey bars…do flips and stuff. We all thought it was cool and a bit weird for an old (probably in his 30s) white guy to come to a playground in the “projects” to play on monkey bars. When he came, there were usually no more than 5 of us little black and puerto rican girls there.
He wore those now too-short gym shorts (circa 1979-80) that were usually navy blue with white lining around the legs…remember they did an upward dip on the side of your thigh? Anyway, I don’t remember at what point it happened, but he would invite us to stand around (or maybe we stood on our own?) and watch him hang upside down by his legs. We soon noticed that he wore no underwear and his “thing” would hang down out of his shorts. We never said anything and he acted as though he didn’t notice. He never really talked to us and of course no adults ever came to the park with us. He came a few more times (always sans undies) then just stopped.
I wonder what became of him. Did he ever wait until only one girl was left in the park and then molest her? Did he eventually move on to even more sinister acts? I don’t know. However, I know now that it was no accident that he chose a playground populated by black and spanish little girls in the inner-city without supervision to hang upside down on bars with no drawers on!
Safa there are freaks like this everywhere…when I was a sophomore in high school, I took the public city bus to school. I was a pom pon girl and one morning I was sitting on the bus waiting for it to leave at 7:30 from its point of origin. I was studying for an exam with my poms in my lap. A strange man sat down next to me and after a while, I kept noticing my pom pon strands would move occasionally though I had not moved them. Long story short, this freak had cut a hole in the front of his pants through which he had left his penis hanging out and it was erect and flapping around like a fish out of water while he sat next to me. In his “excitement, he was twitching causing my pom strands to flutter.
I pushed him off the seat and the bus driver took him off the bus and held him until police arrived and took him away. Never heard anything more about it after that…what a pervert!
Comment by Sharon — March 21, 2006 @ 4:06p
Sick!
Comment by Nicole — March 21, 2006 @ 4:23p
damn… thats why my kids don’t go ANYWHERE without me or an adult that i trust!
Comment by Koolbreeze — March 21, 2006 @ 3:54p
Yeah…we had one of those guys in the projects I grew up in. used to play catch with us…then he cornered me and a friend of mine and invited us to suck it for a quarter…
We promptly told our mothers…
Next thing you know there was a CREW of dudes looking for him. I heard bad things befell him.
I wonder if it still goes down like that nowadays?
Comment by DP — March 21, 2006 @ 9:46p
when i take my girls to the park…I always keep an eye out for men or women…just there with no kids…I watch those who watch the kids intensely and so forth….It’s still like that today…perverts in the park…
I was reading above and when you described the park …and it sounded like the “jets”…I was like wait…didn’t she say complex LOL…i know those playgrounds…I didn’t grow up in them…but everybody who’s a minority in NYC has a family member or friend in the “jets”..(which they will be converting to co-ops in Harlem)…
We didn’t have a pervert in our playground….but we had a severely mentally disabled dude…Crazy Larry..who was liable to wild out at any moment…
Comment by DJ Diva — March 22, 2006 @ 12:32p
DANGGGGG.
i can’t believe that actually happened! EWWW.
i hope he got the help he so obviously needed.
Comment by indigo trails — March 22, 2006 @ 3:35p
Kids are so innocent and yes the perv probably did “try” something. Or maybe he just graduated from wanting the kids to “look”. Makes me boiling mad.
Comment by princessdominique — March 22, 2006 @ 4:34p
he’s probably in the Penn somewhere…
Comment by Cityslicker mom — March 22, 2006 @ 6:23p
Wow what an Ass!! If I ever saw some man doing that I would go crazy on his ass. He knew exactly what he was doing and yeah he probably did get one of them. I was molested as a child and that kind of thing would set me off! I try to teach my daughter what to look out for and told her straight out that some people out there would hurt you and try to hurt your privates. (she’s only 6) Every now and then we talk just to make sure. Most kids would just think it was funny that this dumb man doesn’t know his Ding A Ling is hanging out. But he was waiting for that one….. I’m glad it wasn’t you. Isn’t funny how certain things come back?
Comment by Myrah — March 23, 2006 @ 2:46p
Yeah, that unnerved me b/c I am positive that that was the pre-cursor to some life-altering incidents.
Comment by LB — March 25, 2006 @ 10:25p