The Pervert in the Park, Chapter 2
On the author's continuing efforts to win friends and influence people
Those of you who’ve been here awhile may recall that in Chapter 1, about a year ago, I was in the park walking my dog when I noticed some not-very-engaged behaviors on the part of certain mothers. It dawned on me that I’d been making such observations for awhile. I am a very grandfatherly man and this bothered me. It occurred to me that given the distance between mothers and toddlers, and the way the moms were buried in their phones, a child could’ve gotten into trouble before anyone intervened. Someone could’ve even scooped up a kid; it’s rare but it happens. (More on this in due course.)
I tweeted a short thread about all this.
Cancel-America took notice and all hell broke loose. The general tenor of the response was, Hmm, why were you watching young mothers and their kids in the park? What is wrong with you? Weirdo! (For the record, I am a writer. We writers watch everything. Then we connect dots and write about it.) It was implied that if I’m the kind of man who thinks about kids being abducted in the park, I must be the kind of man who abducts kids in the park. I was even called to task for the use of the word mama. (Patronizing and cultural appropriation!)
More and more tweeters joined the cancel brigade.
They tagged me in tweets to the FBI, the local PD and Child Protective Services—their jaundiced tweets had a “be on the lookout for this guy” subtext.
They emailed my dean at the college. They defaced my Wikipedia page not just once, but several times. After the third such cycle they wrote en masse to Wikipedia, nominating my page for deletion. When that effort failed, they tried to insert a section about how “Salerno was involved in a disturbing incident involving children in a park.” [Nice, huh? And totally fair.]
My dean laughed it off, thank God, the drama ended on Wikipedia, and life went back to its normal not-quite-normal for me.
Today I’m in a different park. Actually a ball field. I’m there to watch my 22-year-old grandson play baseball in a nice amateur league. I do this each Sunday. He’s got skills.
Okay, let me take you through the chronology. I arrive with my folding sports chair and walk to the sun side of the field, which happened to be nearest the opposing dugout, on the third-base side. (Believe it or not, I like to sit in the direct sun for as long as I can stand it, even when it’s 109 out, as it was today. Hell, everybody’s gotta die from something, no?) In order to get there I have to walk past what had the makings of a minor encampment—a large field awning tacked to the backstop, with five mothers and a small kindergarten’s worth of children sitting/playing under it. All of the kids were maybe six or younger. Dollies and dinosaurs galore.
Two of the moms, almost in unison, tell me I’m perfectly welcome to join them under the awning; “there’s plenty of room.” I thanks-but-no-thanks them for the offer and continue to walk to my chosen spot, maybe five yards beyond the encampment.
Within minutes the kids home in on me, as kids and dogs always do. (I’m not sure I’ve ever been anywhere where there were kids or dogs and neither adopted me as a surrogate parent.) Suddenly they’re in my face, and I mean that literally. One little girl in particular approaches and stands with her odd, unsmiling face six inches from mine. With the slightest forward movement I could’ve poked her nose with my own. I looked over and one of the mothers is smiling, as if she’s thinking, how adorable.
The little girl continued to stand there, silent, expressionless, and the standoff seemed so weirdly cute that I snapped her picture. I texted the pic to my wife. She texted back, “cute.”
The oldest girl came by and held a battery-operated fan to my face. “You look sweaty,” she said. One little boy kept coming up and standing his dinosaur (a stegosaurus) on my head and making it growl. He asked if I wanted to participate in a dinosaur fight. “You can use my T-Rex,” he said. I was trying to snap a good shot of my grandson at bat and declined for the moment.
Despite the temps, the overall vibe is super-chill. One of the moms also has an infant and, without any real concealment effort, begins to nurse the child.
Then suddenly everything is not so chill. A player from the opposing team exits the ball diamond, takes the longish stroll to where I’m sitting and asks, “So who are you with here?”
I’m a bit taken aback but do not read his tone as antagonistic—yet—so I interpret it as mere curiosity as to which player I’m there to watch. I tell him about my grandson being the lead-off hitter on the other team.
Then he draws a breath and says, his tone moving toward antagonism, “I’m told you’ve been taking pictures of my child. My wife and I don’t want anyone taking pictures of our daughter.”
“She was standing right in my face,” I say, still fairly calm, “and it went on for awhile and it just struck me as hilarious. A natural photo.”
“Well, delete the photo please,” he says, the please sounding more like dammit. “And don’t take any more pictures of the children.”
He nods his head briskly (message delivered), turns around and walks back to his dugout.
I delete the photo. But I’m steaming inside. So this is where I decide to push the issue. It’s about to get a bit coarse.
I get up from the chair and stride to their dugout. I bring my bat with me. (Much like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, I like to carry a bat with me everywhere I go. I’ve been doing that for nearly all my 73 years and I don’t plan to stop. I take dozens of swings a day, often more.) The guy who confronted me isn’t in plain sight, so I call into the dugout, “I’m looking for the dude who came to talk to me about the picture.”
He emerges. His teammates begin to crowd around.
I start giving him a fuller description of the context for the photo, as I gave you here earlier—but with more edge—and I show him on my phone that all I did was text it to my wife with a caption: “Isn’t this too much?”
Then I add, “It’s not like I was putting it on some porn site. And nobody stopped her from coming over to me, you know.”
I can’t capture the precise back-and-forth of what was said from this point, but it got real intense real fast, with several of the other dads on his side now joining in. One of them says, “You think because you brought a fucking bat over, that’ll stop me from kicking your ass if you go near my kid?”
“I’m 73, man, and I wouldn’t need the bat to fuck you up.”
We avoided coming to blows, just barely, but the original dad demanded that I take my chair and “go sit on the other side of the fucking field!”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said, “It’s a public field and I’ll sit where I damn please.”
So I go back and plant myself back in my chair, at my original distance from the encampment.
And wouldn’t you know it, within a minute the boy with the stegosaurus is back, climbing up on me as if I’m a jungle gym. None of the mothers—who had to have seen and heard what just went down—says boo. I tell him he needs to go back to mommy. I add, “I’m sorry but I can’t play with you.”
I’m sitting there and before the next inning I see the guy that I presume to be the manager of the opposing team cross the field and begin talking into my grandson’s dugout. My grandson emerges and the two of them are involved in animated discussion for a time, with the manager doing most of the talking. He gestures my way several times. As he turns and walks back toward his dugout, my grandson begins the long trudge past first base, past home plate, toward me.
I have known this strapping young man since he was a little boy. We have always had a relationship that is wonderful even by normally wonderful grandfather-grandson standards. His mother credits me with teaching him how to love and trust. I won a middling national award for the essay I wrote about the experience.
I have never seen my grandson look so pained, so awkward.
“They want you to move to our side of the field before we start playing again,” he says, looking mostly at the clay-red dirt between his cleats. I nod and he turns around and trudges back to his dugout.
Not wanting to create further embarrassment for him, I carry my chair past the encampment to the first-base side of the field. I look back at the dugout where the argument took place, and they’re shaking their heads in unison.
I watched my grandson’s next at-bat—he got a hit—and then left. Somehow I’d lost interest in the game. And to be honest, I was concerned about whether I might escalate further. I’ve been known to do that. In my younger years especially, I let nothing go.
I did suppress the temptation to walk over to the encampment and say something to the mothers. I’d noticed that only two of them were wearing wedding bands. What I wanted to say was: “Do you know, statistically, who poses the greatest danger to children? It’s not the stranger in the park, ladies. It’s mommy’s new boyfriend.”
But I just drove away. My grandson and I did not have our usual post-mortem of the game. This is going to eat at me for some time, I can tell you that.