CAUTION: ADULT LANGUAGE AND MATERIAL. POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING. DISTURBING CONTENT.
In every neighborhood there’s one guy who can make some people sick while causing some kids to fall off their bikes in gales of laughter, cause others trauma, and piss off all the rest. One day I saw first-hand who that guy was in our neighborhood.
I’d heard stories. Never directly, you understand; it was just me overhearing adults talking.
I had a spider bike. I guess I was about nine at the time. One day I was riding with Phil Thornton, my best friend. We rode around Valley Drive to Park Creek Road, then at the North Shore on the Magothy sign, turned right to Edgewater, heading to Dutch Ship Road where I lived. It was cool and overcast. Early Spring, 1969.
Phil was behind me. The hill going up Edgewater Road was a bit steep for bikes with one sprocket or gear. It was slow going. To the right were two houses. The one at the top wasn’t a concern. I can’t remember who lived there, but that’s because they kept to themselves. Now the house I had heard about was midway up and I was abreast of it, and I looked, and the front door was wide open. An older couple lived there. The man was the one I’d overheard the bad stories about.
“Hey Phil,” I said, looking back, “Art’s door’s open.” I had told Phil the stories as best I had pieced them together. I stopped to wait for Phil but unfortunately I looked back at the open door.
It was at that moment that Artie the Weenie wagger walked across the open doorway, fat, pale and stroking an impossibly long dick. I mean a foot of the thing, curved upward and uncircumcised with an angry red head. I’ve never forgotten this image; it was too shocking and absolutely hilarious. I collapsed in fits of laughter and the door slammed shut. I gasped out loud, “Did you see that?” I pushed uphill with my feet, totally unable to pedal; my legs had gone wobbly and weak as I gave in to deep, abdomen-cramping belly laughter. Phil had an older bike. In struggling up the hill, he’d had to concentrate his attention on the road. He didn’t see what I saw.
On reflection I came to realize I wasn’t freaked out by it because of my own sexual abuse. I’m glad he didn’t see Artie in the open door.
Eventually, kids’ parents forbade them going there for trick-or-treating. One day, a blue and white Anne Arundel County Police cruiser was parked in the driveway. And just like that, old man Art was gone. Left behind was his long-suffering wife, a sweet and kind woman who sold the house, unable to escape the abuse heaped on her by neighbors who blamed her.
That was how people were back then. Boomer parents blamed her for not satisfying her husband. But I had seen her in tears over the shit her husband did. I mean, she had no power to suppress the urge of a man who masturbated in front of little boys.
I heard stories later. Girls in groups selling Girl Scout cookies weren’t even safe. He didn’t molest them, but despite their numbers, they’d get an eyeful.
Then there were the days before anyone knew. When Artie was new in town. At least two mixed groups of kids went there on Halloween, 1968. He answered the door in a bathrobe and made them come into the house. They felt trapped, as I recall.
Weenie waggers are as old as men with dicks. I escaped trauma because I was already three years deep in trauma caused by much worse than seeing a fat man with an abnormal wang beating off in his doorway.
Artie Left and we never heard from him or his wife again. Soon he was just a bad memory except to me. I still laugh every time I get reminded of it. But I’m an asshole.
But he left behind kids and parents who couldn’t talk about it much, and who probably never got over, the sight of Artie in his open doorway.
My neighborhood. 1968-69…
Memoirs of an American Asshole 