The Man With Magazines…

I have decided to share this memory.

This is a memory that should not be in anyone’s life experiences, especially from the time of our youth. And yet, these types of encounters are reported in the news almost every week. Unfortunately for me, this experience is now a part of my memories from my teenage years.

Yes, it is real and the images can never be forgotten.

There was this man who lived directly across the street from my mom and me. He was quiet and stayed to himself. Some afternoons I would see some teenage boys not from the trailer park come out of his trailer and head down the street. They looked like they were my age.

I wondered what they were doing there.

One day, one of the boys saw me outside riding my bike. He came over to me and said that the man would like to give me something. I wondered what it could be. I agreed.

The next day the man was standing outside his trailer when I got home from school. He saw me and waved me to come over. He had what looked like a magazine wrapped in brown paper. He handed it to me and said that his boys were interested in me.

It was a strange thing for him to say since he didn’t have any children that I knew of.

I said, “Thank you,” and took the magazine into the house and set it down on my corner table in my room. I didn’t think much about it after that. I went back outside and rode my bike over to the two brothers’ trailer.

I wouldn’t look at it for several more days. It just sat on my corner table in my room.

Then one day after school while I was sitting on my bed listening to some music, I saw the magazine and decided to open it. I carefully peeled back the brown paper wrapping.

When I finally removed the brown paper covering revealing the magazine, the cover page showed a young boy scantily clad with clothes. And when I flipped the cover page to go several pages into the magazine, I was shocked to see several boys with no clothes on.

The more pages I opened the more shocked I became.

“What did this man give me,” I said out loud.

I quickly closed the magazine and scrambled with what to do with it. I knew that if I put it into the kitchen trash my mom might find it.

My mind was being tortured with what to do scenarios.

I then remembered that there was a big garbage dumpster by the back of the community center that no one would go through. It always smelled bad with all the garbage collected from the trashcans around the pool and community center.

My mom wasn’t home from work yet, so I decided to walk over to the pool and dispose of this magazine. I quickly rewrapped it with the brown paper covering and sealed it with some cellophane tape.

While walking to the pool I could not stop thinking about what I had just seen. I was so uncomfortable that my skin felt like it wanted to peel off my bones.

And then I thought about those boys who told me he wanted to give me something. And him saying, “That they were interested in me.”

Were they planning on doing some of the things to me like I saw in the magazine. Oh god, I hope not. And then my mind washed with the thought of what I had experienced the past summer in the shower.

I thought to myself, “How many adult men are like this?”

I was now more tortured in my thoughts.

As I approached the pool, I looked around to make sure that there would be no witnesses to me discarding this magazine. All was clear and this magazine disappeared forever.

I walked away carefully, silently making my way back home. I knew that I could never speak of this. I knew that I needed to avoid those boys and that man, the man with magazines.

I decided that from this moment onward that when I came home from school, I would take the back street and enter our home from the kitchen door. I did not want to be seen.

And that is what I did.

One day when I came home from school, I again entered our trailer through the kitchen door. While in the kitchen I heard some commotion outside, so I went to the window that faced his trailer to look out to see what was up. There were some men removing the trailer skirt and the front porch awning.

They were preparing the trailer to be moved. A few days later the trailer was gone. This man would never be seen again with my eyes.

I did hope that the boys he had over to his trailer frequently were free of whatever they were experiencing.

For me I felt a huge relief. I could now finally return home from school, using the front entry to our home.

But the images in that magazine were now forever embedded in my mind. I told myself to erase, erase, erase. This would be a challenge.

I told myself I could never tell anyone about this. This memory needs to die, never to be remembered.

I promised myself to never tell anyone.

And then for some reason I began to think about girls. Maybe a counter reaction.

And one specific girl flooded into my thoughts.

Our new neighbor on the other side of our trailer had just moved in. Our new neighbors were a mom and her daughter. And the girl was incredibly beautiful. She was a teenager like me.

The two brothers had seen her too. The older brother said, “She is mine.” I cringed and said, “No, she is mine,” while crossing my fingers and toes at the same time. I was going for full luck coverage.

We laughed and went back and forth, claiming our prize of desire, the dream girl of our dreams.

Little did I know I was about to meet her in person.

Yes, I was…

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