Creepy McDonald's Man

When I was about eight, my mom worked at a small sort of sleezy bar in downtown Gulfport, MS. The dingy white-fronted bar was on an old strip of road, with one of those cheap walkup hotels above it, and a little tourist shop across the street. Like all cheap bars, it smelled of beer and cigarettes when you walked into the cool darkness. Behind the bar, reflected in the dirty mirror, there were those jars of pickled quail eggs hanging fluorescently in greenish juice, and pink-red pickled pigs feet. My mom used to sometimes have to bring me with her when she worked as a bartender-- probably on weekends during the day. I sometimes would go into the tourist shop and look at stuff-- I remember those long-necked drinking birds that would dip their heads down when the red or blue water in their butts shifted. I also remember a game called "The Hooker"-- this water globe thing where you tried to catch a golden ring on a long red nail tipped finger that was curled suggestively at the bottom of the globe.

A bar like that almost always has a customer or two, even during the day (maybe even especially during the day.) I used to like to play the pinball machine, on which I was very good, or beg my mom for quarters to play the jukebox. My favorite songs were "New Orleans Ladies" and "Help Me Make it Through the Night."

One day, I was playing pinball and I had a pretty bad cough. This youngish guy with brown hair and pasty white skin asked me if I smoked. I looked at him like he was crazy. I'm eight, dude! Really, I just said "NO!" I mean, yeah, I'm eight and in a bar during the day but that doesn't mean I smoke!! I don't know if my mom knew him from him being a regular or what, but somehow, he talked me and her into letting him take me to get McDonald's. Very few eight year old kids can resist McD's, and especially a kid who is poor and rarely gets that kind of stuff. (I don't know, nowadays, it's so cheap, maybe the poor are eating it all the time. But not back then). I think I thought that he was going to drive me to a McDs. I knew, as well as anyone else, that there wasn't a McDonald's close by the bar. We walked for a few blocks, past the BBQ place, across the railroad track. When we went to cross the railroad tracks, he wanted me to hold his hand. I found that creepy. I did not want to hold some strange man's hand, so I refused. He said "Where I come from, we hold little kid's hands when we cross the street." That's when I began to feel uncomfortable with this situation. I mean, here we were, no McDonald's in sight, and this weird pasty white guy who hung out in a bar wanted me to hold his hand. I also knew that whole "where I come from thing" was supposed to guilt me into doing something I didn't want to do, and that he was judging me. I didn't like it. I turned on my secret Kim weapon: the whine.

I started to whine that I wanted to go back, my feet hurt, I was tired. I refused to walk any further. Eventually he gave in and we went back to the bar.

I don't really think he was a pervert, but I suspect that he knew as well as I did that there was no McDonald's around there. I think he knew it was inappropriate for him to be taking me anywhere, and I'm not exactly sure why my mom let me go with him. I suspect he just thought he was doing a good deed-- get the little kid who hangs out in a bar all day out into the fresh air for a while. Like I said earlier, maybe she knew him better, and knew he was harmless. But I don't really remember him being around anymore after that, either. Nothing happened, but I did gain a healthy distrust for people offering things that sounded too good to be true.

I was thinking of this story for a couple of days now and it's turned out a little more boring than I thought it would. I'm sure if my mom, who reads the blog, reads it, she probably won't even remember the incident. But the mom in me thinks of all the things that could have happened. Nowadays, there wouldn't even be a question of letting a little kid go off with some guy like that-- but we lived in a more innocent world back then. And so, the moral of the story is that you have to teach your kids some healthy distrust, have them know that sometimes they are the best judge of a situation. If the guy had wanted to harm me, my whining most likely wouldn't have stopped him. But the fact that my little kid radar kicked in and said "hmmm...creepy guy.... let's go home" was good. Cultivate that radar in your kids. As the entry I wrote a long time ago about sex offender databases shows, there are a lot more wolves in the world than one might be aware, and usually, they are people you know rather than strangers.