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 My Crack-Whore Stalker
In the last week alone, I've received more than 100 text messages on my
cell phone, three different Hallmark cards and four post-midnight (often
at 2 or 4am) voicemail messages. I don't have to guess who it is. I know
who it is. It's my crack-whore stalker.
I'll call her Tammy. I met Tammy in a college class on linguistics,
a flighty blonde with a trashy sense of style who walked boldly up to me
on break while I was smoking and just, well, started talking. It was a
few years after I'd moved to Chicago from Indiana and I simply figured
her for a new transplant too. She was mercurial, fidgety and clearly
high-strung, but I listened politely. I didn't know many people here
yet, so it was nice to have someone to talk with. Then, a few weeks into
the class, she disappeared and I thought that was the last I'd ever see
her.
Until she called one night a few weeks later asking if I wanted to
hang out. Sure, why not? We decided to meet up for coffee. Back then I
spent a lot of nights in coffee shops, reading philosophy and Russian
lit, slogging through thick volumes by Kierkegaard, Adorno and Tolstoy.
We met up several nights. Again and again, I mostly listened. I don't
remember what we talked about; I just remember she liked hearing my
thoughts on what I was reading at the time and a vague sense that she
admired my tenacity, my sense of dedication to my studies. I likewise
admired her indiscretion, her willingness to dismiss it all with a wave
of her hand; I liked her air of licentiousness. That is, until one night
she invited me over to her place, where she showed me some photographs
of her dressed up in a black wig, posed nude. What were these for? Her
job. Oh. Uh huh.
What job is that, exactly? "I'm a call girl." She said. She showed
me the website for her agency, where her face appeared as one on a grid
of girls available for escort services. She offered "in-call," making
appointments for men to have sex with her in her own house. I booked it
out of there, fast. At the time, I found myself afterward trying to
justify my uneasiness. Sure, prostitution's illegal, but I'd just spent
the better part of two full terms poring through texts on queer culture,
debating the rights of sex workers with my professors. I realized I was
acting intolerant and resolved to not prejudice my friendship with her.
That's why, a week later when she called me again, I accepted her
invitation to come out to a little party she was throwing. I had plans
to go out with some friends that night anyway, and we were in the mood
for fun. I rounded up the gang and we set out.
After a few bars, we arrived at her house. It seemed to happen in
slow motion, my eyes panning the dark rooms as we were led in. Is that a
glass pipe? Is that guy shooting up? Then she asks us: "You want to try
some crack?" Holy shit. Holy shit. Tammy had invited us to a crack
party! Stunned, we meekly accepted some beers instead, feeling like the
minor leaguers hanging out in the major league locker room. We were in
way over our heads. Two of my friends frantically waved me outside. I
thought I was going to catch hell. But once out the door, one asked me:
"Should I do it?" I didn't know how to respond. "I always said if I
had a chance, if it was just offered to me for free," he said, "then
I'd do it." I lit a cigarette and watched my two friends, one of them
still a very prominent artist in Chicago, wrestle for all of a
millisecond with their consciences. Then, they both decided to smoke
some crack.
After that, I decided to put some distance between Tammy and me. And
for a while it seemed to actually work, not returning calls or answering
emails. She went away. Eventually, I met the girl who would become my
wife and we moved in together. We got engaged, threw a few parties. Time
passed, I opened a used bookstore on Ashland Avenue putting up my own
collection of philosophy books as starter inventory. My fatal mistake:
one day, Tammy just walked in out of nowhere. With a dog wearing a
colostomy bag (the dog, not her). I was stuck minding the counter as she
updated me on the highs and lows of her heroin addiction. She was still
hooking, though she'd been busted once. I nodded, pretending to add up
receipts. But it was no use. After that day, she kept coming. I was
helpless to escape. Yet, she wasn't really doing anything wrong, so I
resigned myself to the situation. I told my wife about her and we
decided to just keep an eye on things. Then one day she called when I
wasn't in, looking to speak with my fiancee, who happened to pick up the
phone. Tammy, who knew at the time that I was engaged, asked my wife if
she'd mind if I married her instead. Her rationale? "It's Sadie Hawkins
Day," she explained. My fiancee hung up the phone, seething.
The next day, Tammy showed up in a panic while I was sitting around
the store with friends, her roommate in tow. I'd heard about her
roommate, but the reality was stranger than anything I'd previously
imagined. A dwarf, blind in one eye who walked with a cane, dragging a
malformed foot behind. I had to wonder if David Lynch was filming. I
calmly explained that she'd insulted my fiancée, and insisted as
politely as I could that she was no longer welcome in the store. We
exchanged a few parting words and she finally, reluctantly acquiesced,
the dwarf sizing me up from across the room the whole time. He grunted,
turned, they left.
And that was it. Until January of this year when she once again,
from out of nowhere, called me on my cell phone. At the time, the
interns at the magazine I work for were in the habit of handing out my
cell number to people because I was taking a lot of business on the
move. When I heard her voice, my heart sank. She told me she'd moved out
of Chicago, back to her native Omaha. That she's still desperately in
love with me. And so on and on. At that point, Tammy officially earned
the title of what's referred to in the field as a "simple obsession
stalker." According to the National Center for Victims of Crime, online
at http://www.ncvc.org/src/help/cyberstalking.html, that's a person with
whom the victim has had some previous personal interaction. It's scary
stuff, the descriptions of how the "victim literally becomes the
stalker's primary source of self-esteem," and how when lost it becomes
an imperative, sometimes violent, to recover the "lost possession."
Since that initial phone call, her fanatic behavior has slowly built
up to a crescendo of desperate communications. Yesterday, she called and
left a message saying that her mother's now finally ready to meet me.
Every night, a slew of new text messages. Matter of fact, as I'm typing
this article, my cell phone beeps. I pick it up. Four new messages. In
one of them she begs me for an email and calls me a prick for avoiding
her. It's clear now that this will never end. But it must stop. I have
to admit it. I have no choice. It's finally time to call the police.
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