It wasn’t until a close friend of mine told me about her team of over-eager fans that I became so intimately familiar with the term “stalker”. Like many of my generation, I often bat the phrase around lightly, describing the ex who lingers, or the guy who calls a bit too much.
Unlike most people my age, I have had real, actual, you-need-to-seek-medical-help stalkers. Some of them were dangerous, most of them just creepy. And it’s surprising how light the laws are where this personal safety issue is concerned: basically the police can do little more than help you enforce restraining orders until someone does you physical harm.
On one level it makes sense – we have freedom of assembly, a person can be anywhere at any time with any group of people as long as they aren’t hurting anyone. On another level, it’s a shame to me that we can’t make the obvious distinction between a person exercising their pursuit of happiness with free assembly, and a person who is seriously infringing upon mine.
I mean, we have laws to get creditors to stop calling – people who are legally entitled to our money, whether or not we have it at the time. But we don’t have much more than caller block to make someone stop calling us.
Right now, I’m dealing with two stalkers. One is my ex. To say he’s apeshit over losing me would be to put it mildly. Maybe it’s vain and arrogant to say that I’m used to guys being devastated over losing me, but it’s also true. So I didn’t notice his particular level of distraught until he started taking it to an extra level.
I won’t go into details, I’ll just say it’s stressful to deal with.
The other person has newly entered the stalker olympics. I jokingly said something to him about his recent tendency to call, email, IM, and show up everywhere I’m thinking about going. It hadn’t really reached a level where I felt more unsafe than flattered, so I really was just kidding.
He responded by telling me that, according to the New York statutes, what he was doing is nothing like stalking.
Um.
Why does he know what the statute says off the top of his head? He’s not a lawyer, and even if he was, that’s still not mental rolodex material.
Some people would say I should be happy that I’m attractive enough to have people want to be around me so much that it drives them crazy. Though the thought has crossed my mind that I obviously still have “it” if some people can’t live without being around “it”.
But in reality I think these are folks who just get fixated and that it really doesn’t have anything to do with me.
For example, in college, I dated this guy named Glen. Despite the way our involvement ended, I still have to say he is one of the most gorgeous creatures I have ever laid eyes on. At 6 foot four he was a foot taller than me. Cafe latte skin, which I normally don’t prefer, went well with green eyes and a soft curly afro.
From the start, I knew it wouldn’t last. I just can’t take pretty boys seriously if they aren’t super-intelligent. I’m not into looks — I wouldn’t call myself gorgeous but I think I am attractive enough that it doesn’t have a bearing on who I pair up with. My kids will still get the gene for pretty, in other words. What I look for instead is a man who is smart in an area I’m interested in but don’t really get.
Smart men are ultra-sexy to me.
Anyway, back to Glen. So Glen, was a pretty boy, but not just pretty. The poor child was as dumb as a sack of rocks. His skylight didn’t have a bright setting. He had the IQ of a cup of cold water.
You feel me, right? The opposite of smart.
But he was very kind and sweet, and liked to spend his money on “college girls” a group which I was a happy member of at the time. This was in the early-90s.
One day, I invited him up to my room to talk to him, thinking that maybe there was a deeper level to him that I wasn’t seeing. Well, after I declined his request to go down on me, I found out that he was freshly out of jail and trying to lead a clean life. In that former life, he’d dealt drugs.
Now, I’d dated my fair share of former drug dealers in high school, enough to know that bullets don’t have a particular person’s name inscribed on them.
It’s not like some young dummy with a gun has been taking his weapon to the range for target practice. No, no. He “sprays the area.” Therefore, you don’t want to be in that “area”.
So, not so much for moral reasons as for the way more selfish reason of my own protection, I began to plot ways to first, get him out of my room and second, break up with him in public.
Long story longer, the break-up didn’t seem to take on his end. For a month, he called me every hour on the hour. Yes, at night too. Our 70s-style dorm phones, shared by 4 suite mates, did not have caller ID. And though his pattern was easy to figure out, there were 3 other people getting calls to the phone.
We left it off the hook at night and when we were in class, but it had to stop. So one day, they get a call saying he is waiting for me in the lobby.
I had one of my closest guy friends in my room with me- I remember taking off my glasses and handing them to him so I could run down the stairs to, in my mind, slap the shit out of Glen. I get down there, and he asks to see me outside. A gang of his friends are out there, or maybe just a regular gang, I don’t know.
i couldn’t think of a more satisfying thing to do than to dress him down in front of his pals, so I said yes.
When we got out there, he pulled a gun on me.
What he didn’t realize is that I was going through a really depressed period where I was suicidal. Instead of backing away, I egged him on. Dismissing me as crazy, he and his friends left, just as the guy who had been with me upstairs arrived. After much persuading, he took me to the on-campus police station to file a report.
We found out he had a rap sheet two and a half inches thick. It must have been printing for half an hour. The much-repeated conclusion was that if the confrontation had gone a bit differently, he definitely would have shot me.
Not that my tactic was smart — at all — but at least it threw him enough to leave, as the picture of me as crazy was enough for him to save face in front of his, er, “associates”.
Moral of the story: I’ve found that about half of the people who stalk me, at some point, have criminal records and are crazy enough to attempt to do me bodily harm. Stalkers are not a status symbol, they are a public safety issue. We need to figure out a fair way to sort the crazies from the love sick, and keep the ones who need mental help away from us, as well as prevent them from harming themselves.
If anyone is aware of organizations or resources besides the ones below, please add them.
Do You Have a Stalker? Here are some resources:
- MedicineNet’sThe Mind of a Stalker -Are they harmless or dangerous?
- Stalking Behavior has victim resources.
- Guidlines specific to Internet Stalkers
- Dealing with Stalkers
- End Stalking In America