This kid is walking home. Young kid, eight or nine years old, and he's coming through a vacant lot, the sort of swampy, debris-strewn back forty that your parents always tell you to avoid, like this kid's parents probably did. Syringes or broken bottles or used condoms lying around. But the kid's walking through anyhow, just casual, open-hearted. And lo and behold! The risk was not without reward—lying there in the rubble is a welder's mask.
The kid is psyched.
This isn't just some piece of shit, is the reason why. This is an honest-to-goodness gold strike; this is a functional (or semi-functional, and the point's moot anyhow, because the kid is not going to weld with it) piece of industrial equipment. And it's adaptable too, which truthfully is what floats the kid's boat: he turns it into a spaceman helmet. So he continues his walk home, only now with the spaceman helmet and making spaceman noises, and rounding a corner in a world of his own he barely notices that this truly seedy-looking guy is approaching him.
Seedy like a sack of trash left out in the rain: use your imagination. (Bowling shirt? Possibly. Filthy Reebok hightops? My sources say yes. Pomade? Indeed. Overcoat? But of course.) He saunters over to the kid, who's just clued-in enough to hope the seedy guy will do him the favor of walking on down the street. But the guy stops instead, a few feet away.
Say, kid, the guy says, as the kid walks past.
The kid pauses, slows, fishing for some parental advice he's pretty sure he heard—crucial, listen-here-little-man stuff. Never take candy from strangers? Well, there's no candy on the table just yet. He could go for a Clark bar. But he snaps out of it, says nothing and keeps walking.
Kid, the guy says, reasonably enough, I just got a question.
The kid stops and flips up the visor of the mask. Yeah? he answers.
The guy adjusts his toothpick, cramming it way back there. Uh, he begins.
The kid shrugs his shoulders, looks around.
So, the guy offers, I was just wondering uh, do you uh know what a pedophile is?
No, the kid tells him, puzzled. He flips the mask up and down.
Well, what about mo-les-tation? You ever heard about that?
No.
Well what about sodomy? You know what uh that's all about?
And the kid says, Look, I gotta level with you, I'm not a real welder.
Hey, I warned you that you wouldn't find it funny. (You can blame my friend Mike; he was the one who told me the joke. Mike always had a quiver full of jokes.)
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