nostomanic: Peewee Herman

That morning, some kid who I didn’t really know—but who probably had a rat tail since everyone had a rat tail that summer—ran into the wood paneled activity room of our day camp and rather loudly announced the news.

My heart sank.

Pee-wee was a really important part of my life, quite possibly the most important part of my life (I had all the toys, my very own Pee-wee’s playhouse, and of course watched the show EVERY Saturday).

How could this loud-mouth kid be so cavalier about such positively tragic news?

Unfortunately, the kid didn’t know why Pee-wee had been arrested—either his parents had shielded him from this crucial bit of info or he didn’t understand what indecent exposure was—so for the rest of the day, the group of 7 and 8 year-olds that I was kickin’ it with that summer speculated about how Pee-wee had managed to land himself in the pokey.

At one point, a boy came up to us and said, “I heard Pee-wee robbed a bank.”

This seemed logical. So logical, in fact, that I repeated it with complete certainty when my mom came to pick me up that afternoon.

A day or two later, I found out why he’d really been arrested. Because I didn’t know that there were porno movie houses or that there was even a thing called porn, I thought that he’d “exposed himself” at a run-of the-mill theater while watching something like Beauty and the Beast or City Slickers.

Anyway, I didn’t find what he’d done too appalling, as I had recently become obsessed with flipping the bird to no one in particular whenever I was in dark public spaces (movie theaters, Space Mountain at Disneyland, et al.)

I guess I sort of connected our two transgressions in my mind—perhaps thinking that he’d done that thing he did to achieve the sort of exhilaration that comes with being a super sneaky scofflaw.

Ultimately, the most disturbing part of the whole incident was finding out that Pee-wee Herman wasn’t Pee-wee Herman at all. He was some dude named Paul Reubens.