The Voyeur Mafioso

A work of fiction.

This is an incomplete draft of a short story I've been working on today. I'd like to show you its progress up until now.
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To be honest, I’m not sure what started me along this path. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that much of our sexual thoughts and fantasies are fueled by voyeurism. Particularly, our private glee can be in observing something supposed to be off-limits to us and forbidden. With time, those fantasies grow more refined, layered because of our own advanced personal tastes alongside an increase in general life experiences. Mine started in middle school gym class, seeing if I could look up the gym shorts of girls. I rarely succeeded, but when on the odd chance I did, it felt as though I’d almost had a religious experience.

In those idyllic days, when puberty was fresh, exciting, and at times mortifying, one of my classmates decided to take matters into his own hands. Because he was small of stature and didn’t weight much, he managed to remove a ceiling tile from the boys’ bathroom and from there climbed into the women’s’ facilities, only a few short yards away. For as long as his weight would hold him, he observed the bathroom habits of several of our female classmates.

With time, however, the flimsy supports gave way and he crash-landed somewhere in the neighborhood of one of the sinks. It was fortunate that no girls were present, as he quickly fled the room, feeling aroused and terrified all at once. Of course he told all of us boys about it. Being that his last name was Bates, after that mission, someone decided to start calling him Master Bates. The nickname stuck, though he absolutely hated it.

Over time, his story changed a little. He embellished a few details here and there. In each subsequent account, the names of the girls he’d viewed from above were a little different from start to finish. Still, we had it on good faith from the girls that their bathroom had to be closed for repair for two days. It was too plausible a story to be doubted, though it was probably not strictly factual.

Each of us wished we’d first thought of what Bates did.

Some years later, I read My Secret Life, an erotic book published by an anonymous author around the end of the 19th Century, shortly before the end of the Victorian Era. It could never be confused as a work of great fiction, or even good fiction, but its veracity could not be questioned. One particular anecdote has always stuck with me.

In the days before mass produced, easy to obtain pornography, men turned to other sources to appease themselves sexually. I recall one section, an interlude on a group trip through the woods. The men were to dress and bathe in one segregated area of the camp. The women were to occupy another space where they might presumably have privacy.

Several men took vantage points along the top of a hill, directly next to where the women dressed. They witnessed many women changing and taking time for bodily functions. The account was, like the rest of the book, alternately bizarre and uncomfortably sexual. Its author was much kinkier than I was, willing to take risks I could not and would not, because he was quite wealthy and could afford to play dare devil. I envied his proficiency and access, though some of his behavior was beyond even me.

When I began to give it some thought, voyeurism appeared to skirt a line somewhere between acceptable and unacceptable. If not against the law, it was, at best, invasion of privacy. But, as I learned later, it paid and a market existed for it. I had to buy my own equipment at first, though I was eventually reimbursed for it within the first month or two. Digital video cameras are a fraction of the size they used to be, as are the lenses, and I learned many ways to disguise what I was doing. Disguise was my stock in trade and I coupled that with enough raw nerve to achieve every target goal.

Every morning, even Saturday and Sunday, I received a fresh e-mail from my boss. They were usually curt and to the point, typed in all caps.

TARGET DRESSING ROOMS IN HECKART, 10:30-12:00 PM, COLLEGE STUDENT RUSH.

One wouldn’t want to hang around for too long, as that would attract attention. Times really have changed. Technology makes much possible that was once impossible, or at least consigned to the realm of fantasy.

John Lennon, while still with The Beatles, relayed in song a similar anecdote. It appears that a man had been arrested for gluing small mirrors to the tops of his boots. That way, he could get a cheap thrill by looking up women’s skirts if he was clever enough to evade suspicion. It must not have lasted for very long. I always kept the outcome in mind every day on the job, knowing that it might well be my last.

The man in the crowd with the multicolored mirrors on his hobnail boots/Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working over time. 

Photographs are much easier to take, because they take only a fraction of a second or two, but the customers clamor for videos. Don’t worry about trying to find our website. You won’t come close unless you’re an expert or have a few hours to spend fruitlessly linking from site to site. Most of our business is spread by word of mouth, though at times a few persistent and lucky people have encountered our site on a whim and subscribed. Everyone knows the risk involved. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

Every assignment has its own challenges and unknown variables. One day at a department store I spied only middle aged women, which is fine for some, but we tend to get more requests for the younger set. I’ll let our customers provide the color commentary. For me, this is just a job. My foremost responsibility is not getting caught. I’ll concede there is a degree of taboo fun present sporadically, but that’s long since faded into the background. I’ve become a professional, a label that always eluded me beforehand.

How I do it is a trade secret I would prefer to keep mostly hidden. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t learned overnight. In the beginning, I silently observed whoever entered a stall, balanced uneasily in an adjacent room, half-standing, half-crouching, peeping just over the wall, recording a few moments or so before ducking back down for protection. Before I perfected my technique, I almost got caught on more than one occasion. My first few attempts were unusable because I couldn’t hold my hand steady.