I wouldn't be flashing that around if I were you

There's a flasher on the loose in the Raleigh suburbs. Based on my personal experience, I'm surprised he hasn't made his way inside the Beltline and onto my street.

Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. I'm on the verge of a birthday a long way past 21-25, when I gave off the "show-me-what-you've-got, stranger" vibes.

I was flashed twice, in two different cities.

Incident 1, June 1991, Burlington, N.C.

Two weeks after I graduated from Elon College, home of the Fightin' Christians, I talked my friend Rex into moving to Raleigh with me. He came to my townhouse apartment to help me pack for our move.

After working for a good two hours and filling the den with my boxes of belongings, we decided to take a break from each other. Rex went upstairs to my room to work on his resume on my Brother word processor (Google it, kids).

I settled down on the couch in the living room to watch videos on MTV (Google it, kids). It was nice that night, so instead of running the air conditioner, I had the front door open with only the screen door keeping the bugs out. My roommate and I had been doing this for two years, as local law enforcement professionals were apparently as broke as college students and our parking lot was always well populated with cop cars. I turned on the outside floodlight, as was my habit when I was waiting for my roommate to come home.

My first thought, when I heard the scratching sound, was irritation. Siouxsie and the Banshees were on the television and I was already saving up for the first Lollapalooza. When I figured out it was coming from the door, three feet from where I was sitting, I jerked around huffily and I saw him.

There, three feet and an unlocked screen door away from me, was, aside from a tee-shirt over his face, a butt-naked man having a nice time with himself (that was a really lame description, but my Sainted Southern Mother reads this blog).

I was a fan of cigarettes (Don't start, kids) who three years before had figured out how to skip the 1.5-mile run and still get a passing D for the one college P.E. credit required for my English degree. I got kicked out of YWCA gymnastics in 7th grade because I couldn't do a cartwheel, so I never moved on to complicated flips off the horse.

But in those two blurry seconds, I sprinted across the room, performed a beautiful scissor-split over the pile of boxes and ascended the stairs to the second floor in two bounds. I burst into the bedroom and screamed, "Call the police!" before grabbing the phone myself.

Rex, who'd been minding his own business and had no idea what was going on, looked blankly at me. Then he managed to catch the baseball bat I flung at him and followed my screeching instructions to go down and lock the front door to keep the naked man out.

After I got off the phone with the 911 dispatcher, Rex was able to coax me downstairs, assuring me the naked man was gone and the doors were locked. We sat waiting for the police and I thanked Rex over and over for being so brave. "What's a naked man going to do to me?" he asked.

The knock on the door nearly made me jump out of my skin until I heard a deep voice announce, "Police." "Thank God," I thought as I flung open the door. Standing before me was the cop who had pulled me over a week before, asked for my license and registration, and replied to my polite "Yes, sir" with "That's ma'am."

"Oh, hi!," I managed to say, as I had a date to see her in court. She very professionally acted like nothing had ever happened between us and began asking me questions. "Can you describe his body? Did you see his genitals?"

As I began to try to stammer out an answer, her radio crackled and she stepped away. She came back and told me her partner had caught the perp running out of the woods and pulling up his pants. As they were the only squad team on patrol that night, she had to leave to pick up her partner and take the perp to jail, but she gave me a number to call the next day to find out the status.

I called. The guy was a middle-aged accountant from an old-money family. He was released and all charges dropped.

Incident 2, October 1994, Raleigh, N.C.

I had the crappiest job in the world; I had been there for three years and was up to $7 an hour for pounding away on the keyboard producing biographies for vanity reference books. I literally had to punch a clock and had a senior associate editor title.

My job didn't much matter to me back then; I've never really been on a career track. I was party girl number 1 at that age. So one day, I had a roll of film (Google it, kids) of me and my fun friends acting like fun people at the club to drop off for development. I clocked out for my 30-minute lunch and drove across Glenwood Avenue to Wal-Mart.

I parked my faded Nissan Sentra and got out. An older Pontiac covered in right-wing bumper stickers --really crazy ones-- stopped beside me as I walked in, but I was way too cool to pay attention to the driver. So I was also too cool to pay attention to him, even though I noticed him, as he followed me around the store and back out into the parking lot.

I'm gonna go ahead and give myself some cool points here, because when he pulled up next to me when I was in the turn-only lane at a red light in broad daylight, I just looked at him. Looked at him and pointed my mace at him when he got out of his car sans pants and approached my window. He backed off and got in his car. I got the left-turn light and went back to work.

The first thing I did was clock in. Then, I pretended to have a panic as I told my co-workers what had just happened to me. They called the police and comforted me as we waited for the RPD to arrive. A nice officer came and questioned me, then took me downtown to look at mugshots. I couldn't remember the guy's face, so it never went anywhere. But my employers didn't make me correct my time card or make up those hours, so it was AWESOME.

Lessons learned from the incidents:

From my fleeting glances -- and it wasn't cold either of those days -- flashers should keep it to themselves.