I have promised several people that I would tell this story, and now I am.  Let it be known that the story, as I am telling it, is true.  Others would claim that I am not being truthful and that I was actually guilty of what the officers accused me of.  I assure you, I was innocent.  I did not do it.  It does sound like something I could be capable of, but I DID NOT DO IT.  This is a faithful narrative of HOW BRUCE PAINE WAS NEARLY ARRESTED FOR MASTURBATING.

    In 1998, I was a freshman at Indiana University.  I stayed in a dorm that was not a dorm, it was a Living and Learning Center.  As such, it was not necessarily administered by faculty or staff, it was run by students.  It had some general university guidelines, but mostly it was governed by students and had different rules regarding the intermixing of the sexes.  It was an interesting place.  It was actually several buildings, but one was a beautiful building, it was the men’s dormitory in the early 1900s and was built to look like a castle of sorts.  I lived there.  It was an interesting place with a lot of interesting people.  To get into it you had to be selected through an application process that reviewed your academic and extra-curricular activities.  I had a friend from high-school who was a year older that believed we could get into the main dormitory if I applied to be his room mate.  My bid was successful because, despite being something of a rural kid, my application was full of things like choir, band, theater, and a few selected academic activities.  The food there was great.

            One particular Friday I was coming home from a class and found three people standing in front of my dorm room door.  One was my Resident Advisor, on was a young lady who served as the Women’s Issue Representative, and one was a cop.  My Ra and the WIR looked like they were about to die.  The cop was serious.  He had a right to be.  I hate cops and have a hard time hiding it.  As I approached he asked,

            “Are you Bruce Paine?” and I said,

            “Do you have a warrant?” 

            The other two people there believed they were there for very different reasons.  My RA believed that he and I were both about to be arrested.  You see, in my room was a humidor my room mate had purchased.  In it was nearly half a pound of pot that was going to be divided amongst several people who had gone together to buy it in such a size at a deal.  It was to supply said people over the Christmas holiday.  My RA had been the gentleman to initiate negotiate the deal.  He believed that someone had sold us out.

            The young lady was a more interesting case.  She thought she was there because a few weeks earlier she had been involved in a more lurid scene.  Bruce Paine was at a low-key party with several people and drinking and smoking had been a part of it.  This young lady along with another young lady had attempted to take advantage of a young Bruce Paine, fresh off the pumpkin farm as he was, while he was passed out in a chair.  The entire escapade was caught on tape the said tape was residing comfortably in my dorm room.  She believed the cop was there for her.

            In fact, neither of them was considered the culprit in this particular happenstance.  The cop was not there for the weed, the RA had to be there because dorm rules stated that the RA had to be present with any police officer at a scene.  The young lady was not going to jail, in fact, Bruce Paine was rather pleased with his performance on the tape despite being unconscious, and had kept the tape as proof of his well-rounded abilities.  He was far from ashamed.  The young lady was there because she was the Women’s Issue Representative and had to be present at any situation where a young lady had made a complaint of a sexual nature. 

            So now, as you can see, that left Bruce Paine holding the bag, as it were.

            “This isn’t what you think,” the cop said.  “Are you Bruce Paine?”

            “Is there something I can help you with?  Are you arresting me?  Have charges been filed against me?” I asked patiently though it doesn't seem that way now that I see it typed out.

            “I don’t want to.  I really think we should discuss this inside your room.  Privately,” the cop said, not understanding that the other two people with us HAD to be there during our discussion.

            “There is no way that is going to happen,” I said flatly, though not unpleasantly.

            “It isn’t that,” he said, “I am not looking for anything.  You and I just need to talk.”  He was remarkably patient.  “I am not searching anything, I just need to talk to you and look out your window.” He couldn’t go in and search for anything if he had wanted to.  Dorm rules stated that the police could not search a room without a warrant and dorm officials could do no more than stand in the doorway and look in.  I had no fear that anyone would find the humidor in my room mate’s closet or watch the tape in the VCR.  I was not going to let a cop in without a warrant as a matter of principle.  He seemed to understand this.  “Look, this is kind of private and I think it should be discussed that way.”

            “I don’t think that is necessary,” I said, “I don’t mind these people hearing anything concerning you and me.”  That was how I wanted it.  If a cop was going to end up beating me, I wanted witnesses.

            “Are you sure?” he asked.  I was and nodded so.  “Well,” he started with a sigh, “At about ten thirty this morning a girl called us claiming that you had been sitting in your window and masturbating while you watched her in the courtyard.”

            BOOM!

            The look on my RA’s face was priceless.  He went from relieved to shocked to hysterical in the span of a tenth of a second.  The young lady began as flabbergasted but shifted from bemused to sultry in the same mark of time.  I was silent.

            “I don’t think it was me.” I said calmly and confused.  The cop nodded but continued,

            “She gave us a description and then pointed out which window and told us your name.  She said you were wearing blue boxer shorts.”  The evidence seemed pretty damning.  Still, I was innocent.

            I was wearing blue boxer shorts, and some have indicated that this is the key to the story.  Why?  Because, I wear a lot of blue.  Many of my friends know it and it is the color of almost all of my t-shirts that I like to wear.  It is kind of my color.  But that meant nothing to me.  Everybody has blue boxers.  My evidence came from one simple fact.  I was in class at the time of the masturbating.  I was taking a test in a math class about a half a mile away.  Others would indicate that this, too, is evidence of my guilt as I was known to skip classes with frequency and, in particular, skip math classes.  They are wrong, again.  I went to the class and took the test.  Others would cry me guilty by saying that, at that age, I was prone to masturbating at any time I found myself alone.  That may have been true, but how would they know?

            The biggest piece of evidence to exonerate me was, as it often is in these cases, physical evidence.  In my dorm room the window ledge is not wide enough for someone to sit in the window and is too high for someone to see my pelvic area had I been standing next to it.  I told the officer this and he claimed I could have been standing on a chair.  I told him that to do that I would have had to straddle the ancient radiator, which I was not willing to do naked, and that the “victim” of the crime (which I actually believe to be victimLESS) had claimed I was sitting in the window. 

            I then asked the officer if he could tell me what the description of me had been.  He said that the girl had claimed that I was medium height, with a medium build and had short, dark hair.  I told him that the description applied to 85% of the floor.  He said that she pointed out which window and used my name.  I told him she was mistaken.  As it happened, in the lounge of my floor there was a giant poster with the room numbers and Polaroids of all the men on the floor.  It was a get to know your neighbors thing.  I asked if this was how I was identified.  He would not say.  He said that his job was to simply inform me of the allegation and that an investigator would be coming to look into it deeper.  I would be expected to cooperate.  He said he needed to see my window.  I told him he could look at it from the outside of the building unless he could produce a warrant.  He was surprisingly cooperative and said his goodbyes and left.

            The three remaining members of the party waited in silence as he walked to the stairs.  When he was gone, my RA said,

            “Holy shit, when they called I didn’t even know who Bruce Paine was.”  I was then, as I have nearly always been, known by a nickname.  He had never heard my real name applied to the person he hung out with.

            “What the F*** were you doing?” the young lady asked.  I told them I wasn’t even there, but they didn’t believe me.  I went inside and waited for my room mate to get home from work, certain that he must have been the whacker.  But that didn’t make since, either.  The accuser had been identified as a girl and my room mate was gay.  I sat in confusion for two days, afraid I was going to be arrested for a crime I didn’t commit as my A-TEAM heroes had been but also afraid to call my parents and tell them I needed an attorney to defend me against the charge of jerking off. 

            When the investigator finally came, I let him in.  It was three days later and at roughly the same time.  The humidor and the liquor were long gone.  He was a middle aged man in plain clothes and seemed to have a sense of humor.  At first he seemed to think that I had been guilty but that it wasn’t that big a deal.  He told me “my story” about taking a test had checked out but that the instructor had been unable to indicate when I left the room.  I told him about the window, and how I couldn’t fit in it.  He looked at me and looked at the window.  His demeanor changed.  It seemed to make sense to him.  I asked him how the “victim” had gotten my name and he said they checked my name with the room numbers poster in the lounge.  I explained how nearly everybody on the floor matched that description.  We got up and went to the poster and he confirmed that.  He asked if it was possible to misidentify the window and the room number.  I said I didn’t know.  He said the accuser counted the number of windows on the outside of the building and then applied that to the poster. 

            Next we went outside to look at the building and that was when we had our windfall.  Things finally started pointing up for me.  The building had wide buttresses along its face that were cosmetic rather than structural.  As it were, every other room had its windows built into the buttresses and had a bay window.  Mine was between buttresses, and did not.  With the winter sun was rising behind us in the east, as it must have been of that fateful day.   With the sun behind us as we looked at the building, we could not see into the windows that were flat.  They simply reflected the bright fall sky.  You could not see in.  The bay windows, however, being rounded, did not reflect the sun as fully on the portions that did not face full east and you could see right through them.  Not only that, but they ledges wide enough to sit on.  The investigator went back inside and I followed him up the stairs and into our lounge.  He looked at my picture.  My neighbors on one side were a black guy and a blonde kid, as I could have told him.  On the other side, however, was one really tall guy with long hair and one guy who was a medium build, with short, dark hair. 

            I immediately knew it.  McCleine was a goofball.  He had a bay window.  It had to be him.  The investigator thanked me for cooperating and left.  As it turned out, it was McCleine.  Not only that, but as I found out at dinner, it was not his first offense.  He was doing it all the time and people saw him doing it all the time.  He would do it in the afternoon when a hundred people were playing ultimate Frisbee in the courtyard.  He would do it in the morning when the Tai Chi classes would meet.  It seemed as though everyone but me had seen him doing it at some point.  When I asked him, he admitted it.  He did not admit it to the police.

            McCleine was lucky.  Most of the girls in our dorm were not the pure-as-the-driven-snow girls that I was used to and they smoked pot, too, so they weren't of the disposition to call cops.  When confronted with pictures of both McCleine and I, the girl that was offended could not identify anyone with any reliability and McCLeine and I went un-punished.  During the next semester a guy was caught by the police doing about the same thing.  He was climbing a tree outside of one of the dorms and doing it while looking in on girls.  It was then made a no-no to climb trees on Bloomington’s campus at night.

            That used to be a fun story to tell.  At some point my friends stopped believing that I was innocent, though, and now they all tell the story differently.  They tell it as though I had done it, and that only my skill and savvy as a bullshit artist saved me from the police.  In reality, I am not much of a bullshit artist.  I simply lack the imagination to construct such a tale.

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