Poked

I was 17 years old. Freshly graduated from High School, as naïve as a young girl who grew up in a decent neighborhood in LA would be, as naïve as a young girl who grew up in LA could not be. I had played with extremities in my own controlled ways. Running off to Bible nights, speaking in tongues, praying for the soul of my Atheist parents and hoping that the vivid nightmares of them getting left behind in the 2^nd coming would prove untrue. Id' then leave Bible night, rush to the parking lot to put on my raver pants and candy gear, propose to my favorite Happy Hardcore DJ through a custom beaded bracelet, dance until the dreaded light of morning came, and commune with all my brothers and sisters. After all, for a community of people that were so accepting of thy neighbor, lived by the rules of Peace.Love.Unity and Respect, walked amongst the tired and the poor, I’m pretty sure that meant Jesus Raves.

So there I was, a young girl ready to expand her horizons. Needing to prove a point that she was independent and fearless. Wanting to chase adventure by the tale and too naïve to know that adventure could bite her for being reckless and stupid. But what do you expect, from a child who would make fires on the roof to fry up an omlette, and never burnt the house down? I seemed to think that meant I was responsible.

Seventeen and freshly graduated, I decided it was time to go on a European adventure. As some folks might prefer the comforts of their own home while they safely sip on their chamomile tea and nibble upon their “spicy” snack of cinnamon toast and butter. My brand of person is often underprepared, obliviously confident, and with a world approach that frequently comes to, “Ahhhh fugghhit.” This often leads us to worlds of unimaginable serendipity and magic or horrific circumstances where we can’t believe we remembered our high school Spanish and narrowly escaped Mexican jail with minor bleeding and one lost shoe. Either way, “Ahhhhh fugghhit.”  Now boarding, Frankfurt Germay.

Upon arrival, I had no travel book, never heard of a hostel, hadn’t told my mom I was going to Europe alone, and had no idea where to go….no like I REALLY had no idea where to go. I was stuck in the airport for hours with no idea how to read the German signs to exit the damn airport!  It was like I was in a parallel parking nightmare that never ended, just walking back and forth with no visible way out.  Finally a man watching me, aware that I was like a Roomba in a pig pen, felt pity on me, grabbed my hand and paid for my subway out of there. He took me to his home, fed me lunch, enlightened me on what a hostel was and dropped me off at my first hostel stay.

That first 24 hours resulted in my befriending an Aussie for survival. We met an older English guy who educated me on the beers of the world, got piss drunk, woke up in a hotel where the English man was pulling his trousers over his Mickey Mouse undies and the Aussie passed out fully nude on top of the sheets. Damn, and I really needed that Aussie awake so he could show me how to get back to our hostel. And though the combination of all those things could have resulted in an immediate loss of innocence, somehow it was kept and the real mystery was, how did the Aussie get buck naked?

Over the following weeks I had learned quickly and began to move through various countries with much more savvy.  Though there were more drunken nights, and a few hiccups of a gypsy trying to pick pocket me and me punching her in her breast, to an Italian grandpa groping me on a boat, there were less strange penises.

This one night however, I was boarding an overnight train that was moving through Paris. This train was comprised of several cabins where each room would have benches that sat across from each other. The cabins had a door with curtains that you could shut for privacy and leg extenders tucked under the bench. The technique to getting a good nights rest, was to pull the leg extender on both sides out, so you could virtually lay down across them fully. You'd then sit back and pray that no more passengers would enter your cabin, as playing sardines with a bunch of strangers isn't my favorite.

As we waited for people to board the train in Paris, several passengers hurriedly opened our door, looked in for a moment, slammed the door shut and rushed off hoping to find an emptier cabin. Our cabin of 5 people was equivalent to a 17 in Black Jack.  Not good or bad, high enough to not necessarily want to risk adding more, low enough that you could.

Finally a man, who was rather port in stature and appearing to be off work, with his briefcase in hand and suit jacket on, swings the door open with a gusto. He looks in briefly, and then decides this is the cab for him. He throws his suitcase up top, and instead of taking the seat closest to the door, he decides to shimmy his less than conveniently slim body across the laps of the other travels and sits right between me and another girl.  With the haste and energy of someone conducting Beethoven, he takes the seat across from me, kicks off his shoes, peels his jacket off, rudely reaches between my legs to pull the leg extension out, pulls his out, dramatically throws a blanket over him, kicks his legs up so his feet are now resting by my head and puts his hands behind his head as he immediately closes his eyes.

At this point I am a little annoyed by his disruptive nature, and that his sweaty socks are now resting by my head. And to top it off, 5 minutes in and he has now started to snore. But what is there to say really? I decide to just deal with it until the train takes off, and if it really annoys me, I’ll ask him to move then. By then, travelers will have picked their cabins, settled in, and we will be back to our more spacious number of 5.

As I sit there waiting, unable to sleep, wondering when the train might take off, I notice the most peculiar feeling on my shoulder. As his blanket is covering him and I both, I can’t see what’s under there, but something has started to lightly tap my shoulder.  Something blunt in shape. It seemed to have its own life as it tapped on one side of my shoulder, to another side, like it was a hound dog picking up a scent. I look toward him, across the way to see if it is his hands, but his hands are resting behind his head. I then look up at his feet and suspiciously question if at the position they are resting, if it could be his penis. But that doesn’t seem quite right either. I then begin to listen to his snore pattern to decipher if it is fake or real, but it sounds amazingly real. What in the hell could that be? It seems to be moving in a curious way, like it has a life of its own. Could he possibly have a small rodent, like a ferret in his pocket?

As these questions begin to eat at me, and this curious poking keeps playing on repeat for several more minutes, I keep inching myself toward the window, but his wide stature seems to be spreading like warm cookie dough in the oven.  With every inch I seemed to find, he would slowly melt into that space, his body always pressed next to mine. As my mind wildly darts back and forth between different theories of what it could be, if he is in fact sleeping, if my feet were positioned like that and I was facing the other way, could it be my penis? All the while, fighting the urge to kick him out of the cabin too early, or we might risk having more passengers join us. I just need this train to start moving.

30 minutes go by now and I feel the curious creature slump down toward the crease of my elbow.  It sort of collapses into the crook of my arm at first, and then resuscitates itself and starts exploring the space like it was prairie dog digging through the dirt. It becomes nagging and persistent, thrusting and jabbing repetitively into my side. And he? Well he just lay there, perfectly still, snoring with the most natural sounding cadence.  With no more space to move toward the window, I turn my body completely on its side so that I have reduced the amount of space I was taking up, to the width of my shoulder. And that one move where I gave him my cold back side was enough to have the blanket prop up ever so slightly so that  I could peer inside.

I crane my neck over my shoulder to look down, and low and behold, it is a strange man's penis resting out of his business slacks.

To be honest, my reaction was not immediate. Somehow I was embarrassed and I wasn't sure what to do. I couldn't believe that this man was laying there in this catatonic state, while his penis was a literal pig in a blanket. Finally I shake myself out of this self shame state, get up immediately, slap him in the face and tell him to get the fuck out. Before I can even blink, his pants are up, his shoes are on, his jacket and briefcase in hand and he is out. This man was a goddamn professional.  Like he was an Olympic athlete in penile pokery. From how he was able to drop his pants unnoticed, to his realistic snore, to the swiftness he was out, it was obvious that he had done it many times. For all I know, the dude wakes up every morning and does visual exercises of his perfect execution. And the true mark of his extreme efficiency, was how the other passengers didn’t even begin to understand what was happening by the time he shot himself up and out of the cabin.

He was gone in a flash and I was left stunned that this Pilsbury mash-up of Sleeping Beauty had been fencing with his bare penis on me for nearly an hour. I couldn’t believe I was naïve enough to think it might have really been an animal in his trousers. I should have chased him down and reported him to the authorities, or gently put my hand down there, let his little critter smell me to know I’m safe, and then twisted his balls in a bunch until they exploded.

But instead, my good Christian self prayed for him. I felt some strange pity for him. For his imbecilic and perverted thrills.  For how lame the rest of his life must look for him to premeditate, practice and repeat this penis puppetry on whom he finds to be unsuspecting.  In some ways I might have been a better person back then, to offer this stranger prayer instead of some form of battery.

But nowadays, I know differently. I know from the years of repeated sexual assault, whether it has ended in an experience of violence or not, that there is a rampant disregard for women and their bodies as their own property. That I hardly know a single female that has not experienced being touched when they did not ask for it. How “boys will be boys” and “locker room talk” should never be normalized. How idioms like that create idiots who hide behind blanket statements that offer no meaning other than to justify a centuries long tradition of not respecting women as equals. How my reaction came from a passive acceptance of a long standing dynamic of men imposing themselves on women and my thinking that’s just how the world is, and we have to learn how to deal with it.  How that kind of thinking propagates more bad behavior.

Oh and I wonder. If I could go back, as the woman I am now, what would I do? I struggle with this at times.  Between what I want to do and what should be done.  What I want to do is to pour honey on their genitals and sit them on an ant hill in the baking sun. Honey bunches of nuts anyone? Or I could sit, and have a conversation with them. Do something unexpected and pierce them in the heart with some woman intellect and reason. Try and get through to them on a soul level.

But because I’m a clown, somehow I think I’ll just start traveling with my prosthetic nuts hanging from my shorts, triple nipple in check, buck teeth in place and a baby limb growing from my armpit. Have a good 'ol fashioned time, intimidating the intimidator while sitting on my perch, loudly sucking spit through my teeth, and never leaving him from my site. 

Oh, you think you’re perverse? Bitch, you haven’t met me.