The Prayers and Tears of Jesus Quintana

Buying a house introduces you to all sorts of strange new things and concerns. The most unexpectedly entertaining of these is this. It's safe for work, yes, but as you will discover, it is also undeniably pornographic. It is sick and prurient and disturbing and dangerous and so fascinating that whole hours of your life will disappear into it, never to return. Because, as you will learn, THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.

The relationship between the unencompassable variety of human sexual desires and the law has never been an easy one, and the line between the harmless pervert and the sex criminal is blurry and ever-shifting, but the penalty for those discovered to be on the wrong side of the line is absolute and unwavering. These men (and I have yet to find a woman on the list, although there must be some) are now at odds with their society. The difference between the guy who bedded a 17-year-old with a fake ID and the serial child rapist is erased by the common designation of "sex offender." Everybody goes on the list. Everyone gets his picture on the internet. Every alias is held up for scrutiny. They have been paraded in shame through the town square, and every public encounter they have is haunted by the same question: "Recognize me?"

The closest one to my house is two or three blocks. We call him "The Todd" because humor, as Gene will tell you, is how people come to grips with the things that disturb us. The Todd, in his photograph, sports the same basic demeanor as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed did, upon being awakened by the United States Special Forces sometime before dawn, with nought but a wifebeater and a Selleck-worthy moustache'n'chest-hair combo (perhaps he was at a costume party the night before?) to protect him. But where KSM sports the disgruntlement of a freshly-bathed tabby, The Todd evinces the pleading desperation of a man for whom the crime was quick and the penalty slow. In his eyes is reflected the future, dark and inexorable as a storm at sea, with every thought and movement tied directly back to the horrible act that led him to be in front of that camera.

Browsing through the kid-touchers, wife-beaters, father-rapers, and uncategorizably disturbed folks who live in my neighborhood (what are "crimes against nature?"), I found myself judging the pervs not by the nature of their crimes, but by the emotions signalled by their mugshots. Some were visibly angry, some were smugly contemptuous, some were stone-faced, and some, like The Todd, were sadly bewildered, adrift in the wake of their own loss of self-control. These men are wreckers of lives, perpetrators of horror, somebody somewhere's personal demon and tormentor, but that last group are wrecked and tormented themselves. The forced isolation of prison would be a relief for these men, because every glance, every meeting, every job application or knock at the door brings the same apprehension, the fear of the Knowing Look. It's a peculiarly cruel punishment for a peculiarly cruel crime, and once you look up your address in the database, you'll be qualified to mete it out.