The Voyeur Mafioso (Teaser)

I have had a lot of work to do this week, so I thought I'd round out the week by posting another short story excerpt. Here's a teaser, if you will, of a much larger work. I think I posted a work in progress of this story several months back. Now it has been edited and revised considerably.

I envisioned this story as a modern day film noir, a genre that has always intrigued me.  

________________

The Voyeur Mafioso

A work of fiction.

To be honest, I’m not sure what started me along this path. It could have been boredom or the excitement of a new passion. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that many of our sexual thoughts and fantasies are fueled in large part by the basics of voyeurism. Some take it to extremes, and some play it safe. Nevertheless, our private glee and secret arousal often is motivated by observing something supposedly off-limits and forbidden.

With time, those fantasies grow more refined, layered and amplified due of our own advanced personal tastes and rich fantasy life. Both are enhanced considerably by an increase in life experiences. Mine started, as I’m sure is not uncommon, in middle school gym class. I made a game of 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 had something akin to a religious experience.

In those idyllic days, when puberty was by turns fresh, exciting, but also horrifying, 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. From there he 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, never designed to hold that much weight. 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, afterwards someone decided to start calling him Master Bates. The nickname stuck, though he absolutely hated it.

Over time, his story changed a little. Clearly glad to tell it, 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 solid. It was too plausible a story to be doubted, though by the hundredth retelling, it was probably not strictly factual.

Each of us wished we’d first thought of what Bates did. In those days of soaring testosterone levels, the only thing girls had to do was play with their hair or bend over In front of their lockers to elicit a response. It was as if a fire hose had been turned on full blast, and we were incapable of shutting it off.

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 conclusion 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 of the work, an extended interlude upon 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 still 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 graphic. Its author was much kinkier and sexually adventurous than I was or ever would be. He fancied himself a bit of a dandy and was willing to take risks I could not and would not. He was quite wealthy and could afford to play daredevil. I envied his proficiency and access, though some of his behavior was beyond even me.