Chapter 5
Another move. I didn't go far this time, just to another rooming house on the other end of Venice. I still had to keep expenses down and I couldn't afford anything more elaborate. The only thing I wanted was to get out of that house and away from Henry and his groping, sweaty hands.
My new room was in a house much like the one I left but with a window that overlooked some sand dunes. This made me happy. All I wanted from a window was light and air. I didn't want to see any more people.
I checked the wall and discovered that there were no holes or chinks in it. If a loving couple in the next room drove me wild with their passion I would just have to learn to bear it. When I went to work the next day I was glad I had an outlet for my energies. Maybe if I wore myself I might to sleep the minute I hit the sack.
I had no special goal to work towards so I decided to create one just to give meaning to my day. I decided, like Bill, to buy a second-hand car. He didn't have a bad idea. Driving around the country aimless had a certain charm. At the rate I was saving I figured I could buy a pretty good used car in about another four months. Four months. Then I could quit the restaurant and find a new adventure in a new state.
For the next couple of months I managed to bear my loneliness but sex kept rearing its damned head. Instead of going directly home after work I took to walking around the streets of Los Angles. I was drawn to windows as birds are drawn to worms. I simply had to peep into them. Although I wasn't very successful at finding love in my own life I was sure I could find it in the lives and homes of other people.
At first I tried the big hotels remembering my Kansas City stay. I ignored the front of the buildings and walked around to the backs. People were more inclined to expose themselves when they knew their windows overlooked nothing but alleys.
I found one hotel that was perfect for a voyeur after a two week search. It was a fairly large place in a quiet neighborhood. The rear of the building overlooked a lot so I had plenty of room to "work" in and to escape from if the case would ever arise.
The night was warm which was a good sign for it meant that people would leave their windows open and tend to sleep in the nude. I found a dark spot in the vacant lot next to an overgrown bush. I made a point of wearing black slacks and a dark blouse so I would blend into the nighttime background.
The pickings were good that first time. In one room I saw a nude man stand in front of a mirror admiring himself. Men were such egoists. Even the homely ones thought they were some kind of gods. The one who posed in front of the mirror had a nice body and he obviously thought so himself because his penis was erected. He was aroused by nothing more than his own beauty. He wasn't as handsome as all that but I thought it was a waste. He should be out fucking a girl instead of admiring himself. Yet, who was I to judge anyone...a female voyeur who got her kicks by peeking into windows?
As this Adonis was drinking in his beauty a couple in the floor below him were pawing at one another. They were homely and middle-aged but they acted like a couple of kids finding sex for the first time. The man grabbed the woman's tits and she giggled. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I didn't dare get closer to the windows. Suddenly she opened his fly and pulled out his dick. She giggled again and led him around the apartment. They disappeared from one window and then reappeared in the next. The couple repeated this merry-go-round a few times getting more naked all the time. Finally they decided to get to it. The man pressed the woman against a couch and I watched his rump go up and down until he came.
There was another scene going on in still another room. This was on the top floor. There was no light in the place but a nude girl was standing at the window so it was easy to see her. She seemed to be alone. She kept cupping her hands under her breasts and dropping them. At first I thought she was a nut who was about to jump but then I realized that she was simply another hung-up chick who got her jollies in her own way. By exposing her body to the night where she was certain no one could see her, the girl got a certain charge out of life. I was tempted to give her the room number over the hard-up guy who got his kicks by exposing himself.. .to himself. . .in front of a mirror.
I waited in that lot until the girl left the window and the Adonis turned off his light. The middle-aged couple seemed to have lost their steam and were fully clothed now drinking coffee. I left the lot and experienced a degree of relief instead of frustration. I had discovered that other young people were as alone and as unhappy as I was.
I sometimes started wandering around the city right after work because I didn't have to make a round-trip to Venice all the time. Once the sun went down I went window-shopping.
Private homes offered some delights. While walking down an alley behind a row of houses I looked down into a basement and saw a nude man sleeping on a cot. His penis was limp and rested against his body like a snake. The fellow was a couple of years older than I was and very good looking. The only light came from a small T.V. set which he probably had been looking at before he fell asleep. The blue-gray light flickered across his wonderful body and I crouched down to get a better look at him. Was he married? Did he have a lot of girlfriends? Was he a good lover? I asked myself these questions as I studied his naked body and his sleeping sex.
Then a door opened a few houses down. "Hey, you!" someone shouted.
I ran quickly. With my voyeur's costume of black slacks and dark blouse I escaped into the darkness of the night. This didn't stop the one who had seen me from giving chase. "Hey, mister!" he shouted.
Mister? He hadn't had a good look at me after all. It was naturally assumed that all prowlers were males. When I reached the end of the alley I slowed down and tried to act as calm as possible. There was a loud pounding of feet behind me. A man rushed by and he stopped when he didn't see anyone in front of him. He looked at me and I felt my stomach turn into a knot. "Say, miss," he asked, "did a guy come running past you?"
"Yes," I said with a straight face. "He jumped in a car and took off like a bandit."
The man nodded. "That's just what he was," he told me. "The streets aren't safe at night. You'd better get home as quickly as possible."
I promised him that I would and tried not to hurry off. I had always thought I couldn't act but I managed well in the role of innocent bystander. This was the first time I had been caught in the act of voyeurism and had gotten away with it. I was becoming a more experienced Peeping Tom as the months went by.
The day came when I felt I had enough to buy a used car. Every voyeur needed mobility. I bought a five-year old compact for six hundred dollars and felt a keen sense of freedom as I drove about the city. The only trouble was that it tapped me out so I couldn't afford to quit my job as I had hoped. The next pile of cash I got together was going to be run-away money. This time no Bill was going to try to cheat me out of it.
I widened my scope of voyeurism via the car. It wasn't the greatest auto in the world but it did get me to places I had never been to before. I traveled up through Malibu and glanced into the windows of the beach houses that floated by. People who lived next to the beach usually dressed in bathing suits or else were either getting into them or getting out of them. I had Venice as proof of that.
The trouble with Malibu was that I couldn't get too close to the beach houses. A stranger was spotted immediately in the sparsely populated area. That's when I bought that thing no voyeur should do without.. binoculars.
The binoculars gave me an even wider scope. With that and the car I was really in business. Binoculars were useful in the daytime because a Peeping Tom could stay hidden far away from the scene he is observing. At night the binoculars weren't too useful unless you got a brightly lit window in your scope. This didn't matter because at night I liked close-in work anyhow. The binoculars just gave me a much greater freedom in the daylight hours and I exploited it.
My first big thrill with the binoculars came when I was cruising around the hilly section around Malibu. I passed one house that looked like it had a party going on since there were many cars parked out in front. I parked my six-hundred dollar chariot in a wooded area just above the house and trained my binoculars on the house. I looked right into a huge, bay window and saw what appeared to be a nudist convention. Mena and women were drinking cocktails in the nude and some were dancing genital-to-genital. I had been hearing about nude parties ever since I came to California and now I was actually seeing one in action.
It wasn't a young crowd. At least half the people seemed to be over forty and there was one old duffer with gray hair and a pot belly who had to be pushing seventy. I spotted a fat woman who had to be over two hundred pounds who waddled around with her huge, drooping boobs bouncing and her downish ass all awiggle. I couldn't see where she got the nerve to expose such a body to anyone.
I fixed my scope on the most attractive man at the nude party. He was in his thirties and he was built like a lifeguard. He had a rich tan that covered all but the area usually hidden by bathing trunks. This paleness made his prick, balls and ass, seem all the more attractive. He was talking to a woman who had to be fifty if she were a day. She wore nothing but sunglasses and four rings. As she spoke to the handsome man she stroked his penis lovingly. The nude party was becoming a sex party. I had to put my binoculars away when a couple of kids walked by. They glanced at me as if wondering what I was doing sitting in a parked car all by myself. When they passed by I lifted the binoculars to my eyes and peered through that big, bay window. That lifeguard-type and the older woman were not in the same place. I looked for them peering into this window and that one until I saw them on a small sun deck.
The woman had a sloppy figure and I couldn't imagine what the man saw in her. From my distance I had the idea that he was a gigolo and she was his "client."
The naked man stood there with his hands on his hips the perfect picture of the spoiled man who was used to having all sorts of acts performed upon him. She was a sex-hungry bitch and she clamped her painted nails deep against his lean hips as she took almost the entire tube of flesh orally. When she brought her face back so that all she held was the head of his cock I could see the shiny wetness her spit had left on the rest of his meat. The woman leaned forward again. Because the man had developed a full erection now she was only able to take half the sex tube.
I watched as she fellated her lover, her profile moving back and forth along his pecker. When she stopped moving I knew that he was shooting his load. The woman stroked his firm rump as he came and he just stood there smiling, hands on his hips. When she pulled her mouth away completely she looked up at him and spoke a few words. I decided to take up lip-reading on the spot. The man said something and then she opened her mouth very wide to take in his hanging testicles.
My breathing became labored as I stared through the binoculars. Sweat poured down my face even though there was a cool breeze blowing. The dumpy, fifty-year old woman kept mouthing the man's balls until I began to think she was trying to castrate him by sucking. Finally she broke contact again. The couple left the sun deck. A moment later they were back in the big room talking as if they had just popped out for a smoke.
I had given up the hope that I would see anything worth looking at from my own window back at the rooming house but I soon discovered how wrong I was. I was looking through the binoculars one hot, sunny afternoon on my day off when I caught of flash of nudity. When I focused my binoculars I saw three young men with long hair and beards sunbathing in a tiny valley created by the sand dunes. They were on their stomachs with their bare cans up. Their skins were very pale and I gathered that they had just arrived in Southern California and wanted to sop up the fabled sun as quickly as possible. They rubbed tanning oil on each other's body and they seemed to be talking. I watched them for a full half hour before they decided to turn over and bake the other side. They oiled up their bodies again and lay back shielding their eyes against the sun. I studied their pricks. They were all well-endowed and unerect.
I met the same boys again later on that day. I was shopping in one of the local stores when they came in to buy a couple of six-packs of beer. One of them with a short, blond beard tried to pick me up. "You live around here?" he asked.
Despite the fact that I had been looking at his naked body for a full hour I reacted to his overture in my usual shy way. I simply nodded and hurried out of the store. I cursed myself for not being friendlier but I had too many bad experiences with closeness.
The trio of new hippies shared a pad a hundred feet or so from my rooming house. They also shared a battered car that made mine look like a Rolls Royce. It had Ohio license plates. I hoped that the boys were not planning to leave right away because they were making a habit of sunning themselves in the nude in that same spot. I even took off a day of work just to watch them. Their pale skins turned into golden tans except for the blond boy. He was the kind who burnt and he had to drop out of the daily sunning session.
Since I knew the boys were from Ohio I accepted them as my own type. . .rubes living in a slicker world. With this in common I should've joined them in their nude sunbathing but, alas, a couple of other chicks beat me to it. I was surprised one day when I saw two girls with them in that little valley a hundred feet from my window. All five of them had just come from the beach and were wet. The blond boy peeled off his trunks and revealed his prick. The girls looked at one another and giggled. I assumed that the boys had led the chicks into their secret spot with promises of advancing their sexual education.
The other two boys took off their trunks and one of them had an erection. All three lads then tried to get the girls to strip. One of them finally took off the bra part of her suit and showed a really lovely pair of tits. Her breasts were of average size for her age but they jutted out proudly high on her body. All three of the boys placed their hands on them. The other girl, seeing the attention her friend was getting, took off the bra part of her swim suit. Her breasts were bigger and rounder than her companion's but they were somewhat pendulant. This didn't stop the lads from patting and kissing these globes of flesh. Now all three boys had rip-roaring hard-ons and I thought I was going to see a sex orgy until I discovered that I wasn't the only voyeur watching them.
At the summit of one of the sand dunes lay a tubby, middle-aged man in wet bathing trunks. I assumed that he had seen the boys and girls go off to the sand dunes and had followed knowing what they were going to do. After so many years of being a Peeping Tom I had finally met a fellow sickie.
The girls were about to pull down the bottom halves of their bathing suits when they looked around to see if they were really alone. The Peeping Tom ducked as they looked in his direction but it was too late. The girls put the bra parts of their suits on and rushed off. The middle-aged man hurried away in the opposite direction while the naked boys stood there boiling with frustration. I was angry with that voyeur for spoiling what could have been a fun session.
The following day that little valley was empty. It was obvious that the boys didn't even want to sun themselves there alone knowing that it had been discovered by a dirty old man. I went out to the beach and found the Ohio hippies drinking beer out of cans along with their new girl friends. I could hear them talk so I placed my blanket nearby and pretended to be engrossed in a paperback novel I had brought along.
"Peeping Toms!" one of the girls was saying. "They should all be put away."
For a fearful moment I thought she was talking about me until I realized they were discussing what had happened at the dunes.
"Voyeurs are really harmless," the blond boy told her. "They get their kicks from looking. They don't go near women."
"Why don't they?" the girl demanded. "Are they scared?"
"I remember one old boy back home who went around looking into windows," the blond lad went on. "He was married and he had three kids. His woman was putting out and she was nice ass but he still liked to prowl around looking through windows at other chicks."
"All any Peeping Tom needs is some pussy," another boy insisted.
"It's not all that simple," the blond told him. "A lot of voyeurs get all the pussy they want but they still have to look at other girls. It is the same with rapists. You'd be surprised how many of them are married or have girl friends. People thing guys rape because they can't get laid any other way. That isn't so. A rapist is sick. He doesn't attack women because he loves them but because he hates them. A voyeur is sick, too, in the same way. Peeping Toms are not violent like rapists but the sickness is there all the same. Something in their childhoods twisted them so they could only get a charge of watching others but never getting close to them."
"Listen to the professor!" one of the bearded hippies laughed. "He had a semester of psychology at college and he's been sounding like a shrink ever since."
All five of them joined in the laughter while I stared hard at the sand under my nose.
"Hey, what about female voyeurs!" one of the girls asked.
"There are no female Peeping Toms," the blond fellow said. "Women just don't go around looking at men through windows."
"I couldn't take it anymore. All that psychological talk about voyeurism gave me a headache. I gathered in the mood to talk to anyone at the moment.
"Your book!" he shouted.
I looked down and realized I had left my paperback novel behind on the sand. When I turned I saw the handsome blond lad rush over to me all smiles. He handed me the book and said, "Come over and join us. We need an extra girl."
His smile was warm and inviting. On any other day I would've joined the crowd of kids who were around my age but my headache was real and painful. The boy had already pegged me as a mental case with his talk about voyeurism. No, not really. He claimed that female voyeurs didn't exist at all. On this bias I had to be invisible to him. I ignored his offer and returned to my lonely, empty room. Once again I had rejected the hand of friendship. Maybe he was right. Maybe I could only enjoy sex by keeping it at a distance through binoculars. I felt so full of self-disgust that I threw myself across the bed and cried. Peeping Tom. Voyeur. Mental Case. Sickie. Why couldn't I love like everyone else anyhow?