Lips and ass kicking

Since Nut Korea's duck-and-cover game has pushed the Foley scandal off the front pages and dropped it down the list on news sites, I can share this story and not be a part of the madness that took place last week. It's my attempt to focus on an aspect of the Foley thing that gets mentioned as a "what happened", but gets shorted on the finding out why this aspect of the story hasn't received more scrutiny.

Forty years ago, maybe more, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, a short, pudgy man known as Lips followed boys around my neighborhood. I was one of them.

I can't recall who at school first talked about him. I went to a Catholic grammar school on the southwest side of Chicago -- White Sox, Marquette park, Midway Airport (which was actually closed back then), a square of life for me bordered by Kedzie to Western, 59th to 69th. We were all working class, the only people out and about during the weekdays were retirees and houswives, and none of us had ever heard of a Mercedes, but the sight of a battleship-sized, gleaming Cadillac made us stop and stare. I went to Catholic school for the quality of the education, not because my parents were devout Catholics. They ponyed up something like fifty bucks a month tuition, a freakin' hefty sum back then.

We lived in an apartment above a neighborhood grocer on 63rd street, one of the longest commercial streets in the city. Our front window looked out over the street, and I could sit on the radiator cover like it was a bench, and watch the show below. Our short block was between California and Mozart, our next door neighbors were Fred and his wife, an old couple who owned the bar downstairs, and beside them was Schultz's bakery -- owned by the Schultz family, who lived upstairs -- and across the steet was a large, vacant, weed-overgrown corner lot, another bar (or tavern, for you midwesteners), a tobacco store, dry cleaners and, close to the corner, the Velvet Lounge, a club that had live music and a good deal of fights.

On many nights, it was a better than watching TV.

It was a playground discussion, along the lines of "there's this guy named Lips and he's following kids around, only boys, though". It didn't ocurr to me to wonder how someone knew his name, or where that name actually came from, none of that was anywhere near as important as knowing that some guy was following us boys around. Over the next few weeks it seemed like everyone knew, including Marge, a thick, no-nonsense woman who was the crossing guard at 63rd and California. She didn't use these exact words, but I do recall one afternoon, waiting for the light to change, that she essentially said something to the effect that if she ever saw him she would kick his ass.

And then came the day when I actually saw him, when he followed me home. I wasn't coming home from school, or he would have had to get past Marge; I think I had been playing at the schoolyard, which was only three blocks from home. I didn't know it was him at first. In all the talk about him, no one had ever really described him. I just kind of noticed him at some point, not just walking behind me but looking at me. He was probably in his forties, no taller than five-foot-something, maybe five-four, something more than stocky, with a broad face. The whole 'Lips' thing, though, it must not have come from his physical attributes, because that area of his face seemed no bigger than it should have been. He was neither caucasion nor black -- which was the not quite the phrase of that time -- but I only note this because, as I later found out, his english was very, very limited.

Now, I wasn't any kind of big kid. I was fast, a decent size for my age, but certainly not big. I had a kind of confidence though, and a bit of daring. The daring thing was innate: I had an ability to be accepted and hang with some of those kids who eventually ended up in prison or dead, and I was not adverse to doing things that, had I been caught, I would have suffered grave consequences; the confidence, or whatever it might be called in a closer-to-skinny-than-not eleven year-old, that came from the judo and karate classes that my father and I had at the dojo on the corner of the next block, also visible from our front window. This was, by the way, just before Bruce Lee hit the small screen as Kato on the Green Hornet, so this was a bit of an exotic undertaking to a few of my friends.

When I realized that this was the infamous Lips, and that he was following me, I slowed a little and let him catch up, enough so that when I looked over my shoulder at him for the upteenth time, he smiled at me and nodded his head.

I picked up speed, took a detour through a short alley behind my house and came around the other side of the block. When I didn't see him on the street, and I was sure he wasn't around, I went in my front door.

I told my dad when he came home from work, leaving out the part about slowing down as I walked home. He was livid, and I knew that he wasn't livid at me. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I ever saw Lips again that I should stay away and, more importantly, tell him.

My dad is an Irishman; not just a man of Irish descent, but a man born and raised in Ireland. He met and married my mom in Glasgow, Scotland, and they emmigrated to Canada, where I popped out, before moving to Maine then Chicago. He was never one of those hard-drinking Irishman, but he had a temper. He'd been a Royal Marine commando at a pretty young age, and he was one of those men who could do anything he had to do, work any job necessary to take care of his family. He was a do'er.

I took his orders to heart.

I never told him about the second time I saw Lips. I spotted him walking along 63rd, and I fell in behind him, at a decent distance. I can't say why I followed him, exactly, but I remember it having to do with that feeling of, "there, how do you like it, weirdo". He noticed me, doing the over the shoulder thing, but something about the way I looked, I'm guessing, conveyed to him that I wasn't trying to be his buddy. We went like this for several blocks, and as he turned off 63rd and headed into a neighborhood I closed the distance between us. By the time he turned around to confront me, and the look on his face was a mix of fear and anger, we were only ten feet apart.

Again, I wasn't big, and I wasn't really 'bad', and the same can certainly be said of him, I was intimidated though, as any child can be by any adult. I stopped, but I started to harass him vocally, something along the lines of "c'mon Lips, ya' goon", and he turned and walked on. I followed, and he turned back to me. We stared at each other, he turned and walked off, and I turned to go home.

I was stting at the front window, early evening, the third and last time I saw Lips. He was across the street, walking, and he stepped off the sidewalk into the vacant lot. It was early evening, already dark, but the streetlights and light from all the stores cast enough ambient light into the lot that even though he went to the middle of what was a pretty big space, I could tell what he was doing. He was unzipping his pants to take a leak, in the middle of the field.

"He dad, there's that guy Lips, that guy that follows us around."

My dad was at my side in a heartbeat. "Where?"

"In the field, taking a pee."

He was gone down the stairs as fast as he had been at my side. I watched as he crossed the middle of the street and walked onto the lot. I saw Lips turn, still taking a leak, barely able to get his tool back into his pants before my father grabbed a handful of his jacket at the shoulder and pushed, dragged and manhandled Lips back to the sidewalk. I could see that my father was giving him an earful, and as they reached the sidewak, he threw Lips forward. Somehow the little guy managed to keep his feet, and he was moving forward at a clip that I found remarkable, considering he wasn't running, but it wasn't fast enough for my father, who stepped up behind Lips and kicked him in the ass so hard that Lips actually left the ground.

I watched my father watch Lips scamper away. When he came back upstairs, he said Lips had kept saying "weak stew, weak stew" and pointing to his stomach. My father looked at me and said, "tell me if you ever see him again", and I actually felt bad for a brief moment, becuase I was pretty sure my old man might kill Lips if he ever saw him again.

I never saw Lips again. Some time later, someone in the schoolyard said they'd heard Lips was dead, stabbed to death in a bar.

There are a few things in life that are more than warnings. Lips didn't follow boys around because he wanted to be their friend; that's not what a normal forty year-old man does. A normal forty year-old man, or any adult man, can love kids, want to be around them because he realizes the magic of kids, the potential that's wrapped up in them, and he can be involved in their lives, as a father, uncle, mentor, teacher, coach, be there for them, all those important times. But normal men know that following boys around is abberant behavior.

Abberant behavior. An elder statesman who initiates conversations with male teenagers, asking them directly -- as opposed to introducing himself to the parents and explaining why he would like a photograph to include in some official aspect of the Page program, for instance -- asking the teenager for a photograph, initiating direct, private conversations and encouraging discussions that can easily be considered as suggestive and inappropriate, this is abberant behavior.

In the face of abberant behavior, and evidence of this abberant behavior, how would anyone come to believe that a 'warning' to stop engaging in such behavior would be prudent, effective or acceptable? While I accept that we are all at the mercy of what we get from the news on this episode, one consistent aspect of the story seems to be that regardless of WHEN people knew about Foley's behavior, the initial action was to tell him to stop it.

They told him to stop it. Like a warning ticket for speeding, or an admonition for being caught in a lie.

He was told to "knock it off."

The possibility of a cover-up, lying politicians trying to cover their asses, that's old news and unsurprising. I am truly, truly saddened that from the very first opportunity to deal with this, that these men -- and we are talking about highly educated, powerful men -- believed that telling a man who was engaging underage teens in questionable, private conversations, and making inappropriate requests, to 'stop it' was a responsible course of action.

This is about so much more than political parties and fingerpointing; this is about something that was shameful from the first moment, about something that should have been confronted and dealt with from the first inlking that it was ocurring.

The first person who told Foley to "stop it", and everyone else who thought that was good enough, should have their ass kicked. Hard.