
We live in an urban neighborhood, close enough to Chicago to ride the El (instead of the commuter trains). It’s a great place to live but, like all dense spaces, crime is a bigger problem than in the country. In the four years we’ve lived in our house, we’ve had one crime happen to us — someone broke into our garage.
But we’re wary, of course. So the other night, as we’re getting ready to head for bed, we notice a car parked in front of our house with the headlights on. That’s not so unusual — it could be someone waiting to give someone a ride or something. But as we turn off lights and begin our bed-time routine, we notice the car still sitting there. And sitting there. And then we spot the glow of a cigarette (or something else smokable) through the window.
Now that’s a little creepy. I hate to think the worst of people, but I don’t really want somebody just sitting in a car in front of my house at 11pm. Then we spot a second person in the car and divine that this isn’t a stakeout or a team casing our neighborhood. It’s a date. Because, let’s say, the moon rises.
Now I’m faced with mixed emotions — on the one hand, I’m relieved that the couple in the car is not planning to break into my house (probably: I guess they could be mixing business and pleasure). On the other hand, I’m grossed out because they’re having sex in a car in front of my house. Yuck. We dithered a few minutes because:
- I really don’t have a problem, in the abstract, with people having sex in cars if they want to do that in a secluded place. But if ever there’s a time to invoke NIMBY, er NIMFY….
- If what they were smoking turned out to be illegal, I don’t want them to do jail time, as I’m pretty strongly opposed to our current war on drugs and the punishment regime it perpetuates. But if they’re going to smoke and then drive….
- I don’t know for sure that the sex in the car is consentual, though from the context we gleaned it probably was — we didn’t look too carefully, cuz you know, YUCK.
So I did call the non-emergency police number and reported a couple having sex in a car on our block. I didn’t mention the smoking. A police car pulled up behind them a couple minutes later and, as far as we could see without staring out the window (we were oscillating between prurient nosiness and prudish looking away), urged the couple, by his very presence, to move along. And so they did.
I’m still not entirely sure about whether I wanted them to be menaced by the police, but ultimately it comes down to this: do I want our block to be a place people park their cars to have sex at night? No, no I do not.