"I just got arrested," Paul said over the telephone to his sister, Abby. "I'm gonna disappear now."

A reluctant fugitive since the fateful night of July 26th, Paul Reubens has kept in touch with only three friends. He won't tell them where he is. In his house in the Hollywood Hills, an answering machine takes calls from well-wishers. Paul's secretary calls back to say thanks.

The day after he was arrested for indecent exposure in a Florida pornographic theater, the bright red door of Pee-wee's Playhouse - a Saturday-morning kids' show that even parents loved - was boarded up. Unsold Pee-wee Herman dolls became orphans. Disney-MGM Studios dropped him from its two-minute tour video. Executives at Disney, CBS and Toys'R'Us had acted swiftly to protect the interests of American children.

Bad boy, Pee-wee. Rest in peace, Pee-wee Herman. Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah. An adult playing a child, he needed to be punished like a child for acting like an adult. Paul's own lawyer provided an epitaph: "His career is over." It was as if redheaded Randy, the Playhouse bully, had poisoned the gestalt: no more gentle dinosaurs or anthropomorphic furniture, no more secret word.

As Paul Reubens's mug shot surpassed Demi Moore's pregnant tummy as the image of the year (at least on these shores), as talk-show sympathy and outrage roared in the background, the controversy moved on to stage 2: assigning responsibility.

It was the grown-up version of what happens when a child picks himself up, wailing, from a puddle on the playground. Somebody would have to pay. Somebody was at fault. Somebody did this. The secret word was blame.

Assuming Paul committed a crime, it seemed the blame belonged to him. Stars have to be careful. Then, to just clam up like that. You could practically hear his advisers: Not smart at all, Paul. Go get back in that skinny suit and beg'em for forgiveness.

Though it hadn't yet died, the Playhouse was on its way to becoming a nursing home. Exhausted after five years of Saturday mornings, Paul walked away from his contract at CBS in 1990, taping the final two years' worth of shows in one year.�@His Sarasota visit came near the end of a months-long vacation: a sabbatical during which the thirty-eight-year-old actor pondered life after Pee-wee, thought about other characters, about producing or appearing in other people's movies.

"Pee-wee was just one little thing that worked," a friend says. "Paul has aspirations to branch out."

Greedily greeting this revelation, many people theorized that Paul got himself arrested to speed up the process, to accelerate Pee-wee's suicide. Maybe even subconsciously! These were the same people who guided their children through the trauma of a Pee-wee-less Saturday morning by following the advice of newspaper psychologists.

Assuming Paul was innocent - a logical assumption to make before a trial, and he had pleaded innocent - the blame fell on the usual suspects: the press and the cops. An able young reporter named Karen Dillon, working the three-to-midnight shift at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, recognized Paul Reubens's name on the police blotter and broke the story. The New York tabloids put Pee-wee's mug shot on page 1. OH, PEE-WEE! said the New York Post. Shuffling onto Entertainment Tonight, Soupy Sales, a former kids'-show host who was banished for telling kids to steal, announced with glee: "It's over, it's over. He signed his own death warrant. Where else is he gonna work? Television will never give him another chance." Blame Entertainment Tonight. Blame the tabs. Blame Karen Dillon.

The logic in all of this was faulty. For one thing, it assumed that Karen Dillon, whose paper is owned by the New York Times Company, should have suppressed news of Paul's arrest. Imagine the indignant holler that would have gone up when that got out. In fact, Paul's lawyer, Dan Dannheisser, tried to persuade the Herald-Tribune to put a lid on it in return for a Pee-wee benefit for the newspaper. The Herald ran its story.

So blame the Florida cops, for sending four undercover officers to the South Trial Adult Theater. The Special Investigations Bureau (SIB) of the Sarasota Sheriff's Department immediately took the heat for misplaced priorities. On the night of July 26th, Detectives William Walters, David Tuggle, Steve Boone and Frank Alessio left headquarters in downtown Sarasota and drove the six miles out to South Trail, where three second-run porn films played to a nearly empty house. "You have a squad of folks sitting around with nothing to do," Sarasota County sheriff Geoff Monge said before he stopped talking to reporters. "Instead of having them sit around for the rest of the evening, that's when they go to the adult theaters." Each man arrived in plain clothes, carrying a standard-issue SIG-Sauer P-226 9 -mm autoloader pistol.

South Trail XXX is a porn house languishing in permanent obsolescence. You see one of these at the ass end of every main drag in the South, its billboard-size sign glowing unevenly, a totem to American sexual prudery. In the lobby some dusty dildos and ben-wa balls are for sale, along with a lonely blowup doll. A few dozen men, most on Social Security, pay $8 to watch a fuzzy screen that comes to life at 10:45 every morning. most of South Trail's business, in the VCR age, is $3.99 tape rentals. When the rental trade slows, employees play a STRING BREAK pinball machine in the lobby or computer games they carry to work with them. One ticket taker invites his girlfriend in. They make out at the front desk, undisturbed, while the porn plays.

The detectives fanned out in the dark. The few patrons sat in the last couple of rows. Among the members of the squad, Walters, Boone and Tuggle had kept their noses clean during their years with the Sheriff's Department. Detective Frank Alessio had been commended for some crack stings and had once helped rescue two stranded swimmers. But Alessio was not exactly a model officer. Although he was a nine-year veteran, he had a spotty driving record, and some might say Alessio had a big mouth. In 1985 a local lawyer Alessio had stopped for driving on a closed road wrote to Sheriff Monge about the officer's "bad attitude," his "pushiness" and "his dealing with me as if I were a major criminal."

Alessio and his team claim that Paul took his penis out, stroked it until a movie ended, then shifted in his seat, hid his penis for a while, and when another movie started, spit into his left hand and stroked his penis again. Later, in the lobby, after he'd used the bathroom, Paul was placed under arrest.

"This is embarrassing," Paul supposedly said, in his off-duty look, with eyeglasses, hair past his shoulders and a goatee. "Every time he had a hiatus, that disguise worked perfectly well for him as a functioning human being," Paul's friend Allee Willis said later. "How many times can you listen to [fans on the street saying] 'I know you are, but what am I?' So it was either grow a beard and mustache and don't look like Pee-wee Herman or stay home."

"Can I show you some ID?" Paul asked out in the parking lot, reaching under the carpeting in the trunk of his Mazda and taking out his wallet. People fooled around with each other in there, he knew, but he thought it was okay to be by himself. The detectives scanned Paul's license, unimpressed. Glumly he said, "I'm Pee-wee Herman."

The point was this: Celebrity didn't matter to SIB detectives. They cuffed Paul and took him downtown. Florida has never been a place where cops strain their necks looking the other way. So those who blamed the cops needed to answer the question: Should SIB have let Paul walk because he was Pee-wee?