Many of you were moved to, um, move along to some other blog by my confession of my second encounter with an exhibitionist, posted here. That experience really made me mad, especially when I found out that the perpetrator/pervert got away to Australia (see the confession in the comments section).
What I didn't realize until later was that that encounter was my second "exposure" to an exhibitionist. The first time was much worse in many ways, except for the part where I didn't notice.
I had talked my mother into taking a friend and me to Myrtle Beach for a few days. This was about like getting her to take us to Mt. Everest, as she didn't much care for the beach, can't swim and never felt confident paying for hotel rooms and such since that was always my father's job. But I nagged long enough, so she complied. We stayed at one of those beachfront motels that looks like all the rest.
One day when we were coming back in from the beach Mama was walking pretty far ahead of my friend and me when the two of us passed a motel room door that was cocked open. We glanced in that direction and saw a naked man. To our surprise, he was staring at us, not making any attempt to cover up.
Golly gee! Can you think of a better way to make fifth-grade girls giggle than to have them accidentally see a naked man? So we giggled and giggled and didn't tell my mother why when we got to our room and couldn't quit giggling. We giggled some more and asked my mother if we could go back to the ice machine or somewhere. She didn't want to let us go, but we promised not to go far, so she let us go off on our little fake mission.
The door was shut. Were we ever disappointed. No show!
We thought we had seen something we weren't supposed to. We giggled for months about "that man." It didn't occur to me until more than a decade later that Hey! That guy was a pervert! You saw an exhibitionist.
Can you imagine someone seeing little girls coming, letting their mother pass, then going on display? Me neither. But I saw him. I hope that for the rest of his life whenever a female saw him naked, she did what we did: giggle and point.
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