I had never had to walk home from school before. Mom always picked me up from class. Fifteen minutes before instruction ended she was there waiting for me to make sure I wasn’t kidnapped by a candy-giver or a man who had “lost his dog.”
“They’re everywhere,” she had said. “Perverts love little boys.”
We moved to a new track home development in Folsom in 1987 and we were only the third house in the 200 lot development, but Mom had to go back to work to help pay for a more expensive mortgage so she could no longer be home to pick me up from school. I was in fourth grade now, and school was a little under a mile away from home, too close for the Folsom-Cordova School District to offer bus service and too far away to feel like anything less than a feat of athletics and bravery for a fat little boy who couldn’t outrun a child molester if his weak little hamhocks depended on it.
Once I left Theodore Judah Elementary School each day, I was looking at four or five blocks of agonizing steps forward until I was out of the older, boring residential zone that was soaked like a wet rag in weeping willows and evergreens along the sidewalks edges. It was totally unlike our open and empty construction zone where I often went to pretend to be Debbie Gibson in concert in the bathtub of a half-built home. You can never play-make believe where people are, which is why usually when I’m around humanity, I just eat.
Then I was on to East Bidwell Street, one of the two main roads in Folsom back then with a Handley’s Western Wear Store and a karate studio, each of which offered a discount for shopping at the other. The only thing that scared me more than what my mother had described to me as a man who would do anything to get me alone in a car with him, were cowboy hats and punching bags, so I usually walked through the alley a block ahead, toward a cheap grocery/pharmacy called Sprouse Reitz (no one in Folsom knew if it was pronounced Rites or Ritz). It was called the candy shop for short, because it had a selection of hardened fructose for fifteen cents. One of each candy, a Jolly Rancher, Atomic Fireball, or Orange slice cost under fifty cents, and if I rifled through the newsstand change slots, I could usually find a few quarters for extra food. I was always lucky that way, a fat kid’s version of a broken parking meter. And if I only had forty cents, a woman with fat arms and glasses who worked behind the counter smiled and threw a nickel or two in the register for me.
Three blocks later was a frozen yogurt shop called “The Eatery,” and though it was less than a quarter mile away from my front door, it often seemed like the halfway point on a hot day, and a safe place to shake off any “honing in” by a prospective rapist.
I’d been in “The Eatery” with my parents before and had a free sample in a mini plastic nibbler, the size of a peanut butter cup, and so almost daily, I’d stop in and ask a teenager behind the counter for a sample of mint chip, cookies and cream, and then vanilla bean, feigning interest in buying a very large order of soft serve yogurt for myself. “Mmm, that’s wonderful, but just not rich enough,” I’d opine, a 9 year old trying to sound like a university professor. “Might I try pistachio instead?” The yogurt scooper would just stare into space and shove yogurt at me. I liked to think of us as friends. Her name tag said Stacy but she never asked me my name. She seemed troubled.
A month after we moved in, a giant grocery store opened called Raleys and during the grand opening, a sign posted in the bakery said “Free birthday cookies served to kids under 10 daily between 3-7PM”
If there was a different unionized cake-maker in the bakery on back-to-back days, an evil plot I developed usually went down perfectly.
“Hi. Um, It’s my birthday,” I ‘d look around, feigning bashfulness. “May I have an oatmeal raisin cookie, please?”
The women were always excited to oblige (for the first week) and handed me a big warm gooey delight. After the first ten days or so that the store was open, they started putting out free cookie crumbles instead of birthday cookies, so I started bringing a Ziploc bag with me to school each day and would stash a handful (or three handfuls, elephant hoof-sized handfuls) of crumbles in a bag, take them to the eatery with any of the candies I hadn’t eaten on the way home already, and crush it all together in a cavity casserole that I squeezed through the openings of my Ziploc bag down my throat. It usually lasted until right before I reached the key under our new house’s welcome mat, which was still sticky from my candied hands the day before. Once inside, I’d lock all of the doors and make myself a bologna sandwich.
I was never abducted.
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