--James Latteier

Poor Pervert/Green Lake/Mon May 31/6:35 pm: The Suspect: Mixed/male/20s-30s/6'-plus tall/250-plus lbs./black curly hair/heavy build/wearing red and white athletic basketball-type matching outfit, and red and white baseball cap.

The Victim: Asian/female/29.

The Report (by Officer G. Basley): "Victim noticed the suspect walking back and forth in the basement hallway when she was doing her laundry. He then asked her where the manager's office was. She supplied the information, placed her clothes in the dryer, and went to her room. Later when she returned to get her clothes out of the dryer, she found the laundry-room door locked and was not able to contact the manager until 6 pm, shortly after which time the door was unlocked. However, while sorting out her clothes, she found that all her lingerie, and only her lingerie, had been stolen from the dryer. The manager had not had any contact from a person fitting the suspect's description. Fingerprint check of the dryer was negative."

The Stolen Items: 1 Rampage-brand panty, black and pink thong with pink bow in front/1 light-brown and beige bra, lacy with strap/2 pink Jockey sports bras, size 32A/3 bikini panties, cotton, size 6, red, blue, white/2 pink thongs with pink bow in back/1 light purple thong/1 white cotton bra.

The Comment: Once in his dark room (and possibly playing something by Donna Summer), the pervert/suspect has only one thrill to enjoy: knowing that he has deprived the victim of clothes that once covered her most private parts. But any professional pervert knows that this pleasure is of a very low grade and hardly worth the trouble. The suspect/pervert's theft would have been impressive if he had managed to grab and take home unwashed underclothes--panties and bras that have traces of the physical body. In Nabokov's Lolita (the pervert's bible) there is this crucial scene: "I marched into [Lolita's] tumbled room, threw open the door of the closet, and plunged into a heap of crumpled things that had touched her. There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid odor in the seam. I wrapped in it Humbert's huge engorged heart. A poignant chaos was welling within me...." Indeed, the intoxication of traces.

For the overweight pervert/suspect in this report, the victim's clean clothes will offer a happiness that is as frail as smoke from a snuffed candle, a happiness that is wholly imagined ("She knows I have her underthings"). But the monster in him (the monster that will keep him awake all night) can only be satisfied by a happiness that is substantiated, intensified, and brought to the brink of life and bliss by the smells and hair of an absent body. Clean underthings are barely better than brand-new ones, which the pervert/suspect could have ordered (without risking legal punishment) from www.rampage.com (the first item in the list of stolen things, "Rampage-brand panty, black and pink thong with pink bow in front," costs only $10). Now that the frail thrill is gone, what is the overweight pervert/suspect to do with these clean underthings? He might as well give them to his sister.