You Met Him In The Flesh
I’m in a crowded café working on a project at my computer, sitting at a table alongside the main aisle that runs down the center of the restaurant from the front door, past the counter, and out to the back door.
I’m very intent on the project and have headphones on, mostly tuning out my surroundings. However, I register the shape of a person moving past me, and as they get right next to my shoulder, my brain suddenly wakes up enough to think, “That’s a lot of flesh color.”
I turn around just to see the nude buttocks of an older man vanish around the corner and out the back door. My eye meets those of a couple of college girls sitting at the booth behind me, who look like they can’t quite decide if they’re horrified or about to burst out laughing.
Right about then, a manager sprints past us, on the phone with (I assume) the cops, and I hear him say, “No, he just came through again! He’s heading out the back door now!”
The stunned silence of the cafe slowly reverts to normal — if probably a bit hysterical — chatter again, and I later overhear the manager talking to a couple of his employees. Apparently, the streaker was a local elderly man who had been passively terrorizing a bunch of businesses in that general area for about two weeks. He’d just walk in, completely nude, and walk out again, refusing to speak to anyone. Turns out he was a dementia patient who was regularly slipping away from his not-so-conscientious “caretaker.”
All I can say is, I am so grateful that my project had me focused enough that I didn’t look up in time to see the approach, only the retreat!
