You won’t understand when you get older.

I was seventeen years old. I just got off work. It was a twelve hour shift at AMC Movie Theater. I was walking to catch the last bus so I could get home and get some sleep. At the bus stop this kid walked up to me. He was about ten years old. He asked me if I had some change so he could get home. I questioned why he was out on the streets so late at night begging for change. Where were his parents? I felt sorry for him. I wanted to make sure he got home safely. I went into my pocket and pull out a dollar. He saw that I had more and demanded two dollars. I didn’t like his tone. He then said that if I didn’t give him ten dollars he was going to run to the cops and tell them I touched him. I felt my blood go cold. I looked around and saw the cop car that I hadn’t even noticed just a couple seconds before. At first I was a little impress with his con game. I wonder why I didn’t think of that when I was ten years old. I wasn’t pretty sure he had freaked out a lot of adults. I grabbed my dollar from that kid’s hand. I no longer gave a damn how he got home. I told him he shouldn’t be on the streets late at night harassing people. I walked away from that kid as fast as I could.

I don’t like kids. They don’t drink or smoke and often tell lies. Growing up, my grandmother never believed me when I said I didn’t do it. She used to tell me I went to bed to wake up to tell more lie, whatever the hell that meant. But we live in an overly protected world. Students beat up teachers. I saw this one news story where this old woman was attacked by a group of girls because she told them their outfits were smutty.
They beat the shit out of her.

Present tense, I was at a Laundromat. I was sitting down trying to read my book when this little girl came up to me. I looked around to make sure she belonged to somebody. They tell kids not to talk to strangers. I believe I shouldn’t talk to strange kids. And I just saw an episode on Oprah about child predators. I felt a grown man talking to some strange little girl couldn’t be a good thing, but her mother washing clothes seem to care less. The little girl and I started talking and she started asking me all kind of crazy questions. She wanted to know if I had a wife. She wanted to know if I had kids. She wanted to know if I believed in Jesus Christ. She wanted to know if I had a Mama. She wanted to know if I had a daddy. The questions startled me because I knew the correct answers were unsuited for some gregarious little girl. I also didn’t want to lie. I don’t like lying to children. I told her I didn’t have a wife. She asked me if I lived alone. I told her I had a roommate. She asked me if he was married. I told her no. She asked me if we stayed in the same room. I said sometimes. I really wanted to say when I get drunk. She asked me if I had a child. I told her I did. That he lived in Texas with his mother. She asked why I wasn’t married to her. I wanted to tell her that she was a lesbian who paid me ten years ago for my sperm. But I couldn’t. She asked me about my mother. I told her she was alive. I wanted to tell her I haven’t seen my mother in over ten years. She asked about my father. I told her he was dead. She asked me how. I wanted to tell her he got killed trying to rob a bank he already robbed three times before. But I didn’t. I just told her she would understand when she got older. But that was lie. It’s like telling a child that Santa Claus is real. Shit, I was older and I still didn’t understand.

Life is very complicated. Heroes aren’t often heroes. But for children the instinctual need to keep like simple and magical is more for us than them. Because birth is a miracle. It doesn’t matter if the mother is on Maury Polvich with five possible men that could be the baby’s father. It’s still a miracle. But like that first kid who tried to con me, innocent doesn’t last for long. I miss innocence. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell that little girl the truth. She would understand when she got older.