My Stalker

Bookstores bring out the strange more than any other environment I’ve ever been in. And I have an extensive history of drug use.

Most of these people are harmless types who want to skim the photography books for nude pictures. A little silly in the internet age, but even the sexual deviant community has its Luddites. Some just want to hang out and read for free or talk to the employees at length about whatever literary obsession they might be into. But there are always the stalkers—the completely sketchy assholes who come in to harass the retail employees because they are a fixed target, unable to leave or get away from the public because they’re at work.

When I was managing a bookstore in D.C., I had a very basic policy when it came to one of my female employees being harassed: immediate expulsion of the harasser, no questions asked. When Colleen said the guy in the newsie cap wouldn’t leave her alone, I walked over and said, “Get the fuck out!” Not, “Sir, I have to ask you to leave.” No. Just: Get the fuck out. Partly, this was my tactic because I was a short sighted 25 year old and liked the conflict—I was working through some anger issues. But it was also practical. This was a very popular place, part bookstore, part nightspot, with a bar on the premises. So a certain take-no-shit, bouncer attitude was sometimes required. You had to herd cats—often drunk cats—and if one was out of line to the point of making your employees feel threatened, you had to make it clear from the start that things were going to go your way. No matter what. And that you’d be willing to go further than they would to make absolutely sure of it.

All of that was fine when I was the one doing the tossing—when I was protecting my employees from their stalkers. Then I got a stalker of my own.

We’ll call her Jane.

Jane started coming in and asking for help finding books—generally history and politics. That wasn’t unusual. A regular customer might latch onto a particular staff member for all their questions, and you wouldn’t mind helping them out. But then Jane stopped looking for books. She started coming in just to make awkward conversation and ask me personal questions. So eventually, I managed to drop—without her directly asking—that I had a serious, long-term girlfriend.

After that, Jane began coming into the bookstore simply to take up a position somewhere in the room I was in so she could stare at me for hours. I’d be at the register, look up, and find Jane strategically positioned in the psychology section (not kidding), with a book open in front of her and her gaze fixed on my every movement. It was unsettling. She did this for months. Then she'd work up the courage to talk to me again. I’d drop the girlfriend information again. She’d disappear for a couple weeks. Then she’d show up and resume her silent surveillance.

One day, she made her quarterly approach, and I said the following: “You make me very uncomfortable. I do not appreciate your attentions, and it would be best if you went to someone else for your questions from now on and left me alone.” She seemed struck. And she left.

For two months.

Then she was back. Watching.

This went on for a year and a half. I began telling my girlfriend not to come into the shop because I was starting to consider Jane dangerous.

But I didn’t feel comfortable throwing her out myself. So I went to another manager, Chris—who was a wuss. He hemmed and hawed, stared out the window, and then deferred the issue to David, the owner.

Fine, I thought. David routinely tells annoying customers that he’s sick of dealing with them, or that they’re fat—just for the pleasure of watching them storm out in a huff. Surely he won’t blink at this.

Instead, David tells me I’ll have to talk to the lawyers.

This was one of the bookstores whose sales records were subpoenaed by the Ken Starr Commission during the Lewinsky scandal. The lawyers who fought that subpoena. Those are the people I now have to sit down with and explain: “My stalker’s name is Jane. She, um, stares at me…”

For whatever reason, in a place that reserves the right to deny service to anyone for any reason—often no reason whatsoever—I cannot have my stalker tossed. I’m a man, and she’s a woman, and that changes the dynamic. I am told this by people who have petitioned Congress in relation to a presidential blow job. I reply - to people cited in the records of an impeachment - that it takes very little upper-body strength to aim and fire a gun.

No dice.

Instead, I’m given a set of bureaucratic steps that I’ll have to go through over months in order to ban Jane. The first of which is notifying another manager when she enters the store, and keeping a written log of her activity while she’s there.

I’m pissed.

I throw guys out all the time for making an employee uncomfortable for five minutes. Now, I can’t get Jane tossed after a year and a half of constant surveillance? At least, the company pays for a notebook so I can start my log.

Two days later, Jane walks in.

My blood instantly boils. I’ve had enough of this stupidity. I pull out the Log, slam it down on the counter, look toward Chris—who is all the way across the crowded store—and I shout:

“CHRIS! STALKER’S BACK!”

Then I look Jane dead in the eye.

And in that moment, I see an expression come over her face that, in a year and a half, I’ve never seen before: clarity.

Jane has this look of horrifying realization. I can see that, for the first time, she’s seeing her actions from the outside. She is a stalker. She just needed to hear the word. She goes utterly pale, turns, and runs out the door.

But, looking into Jane's eyes at that moment, I was experiencing something too. It was not a moment of clarity. More the opposite, a moment when things become more nuanced, more obscure, but also harder to dismiss.

There are certain emotions we have a hard time discussing or telling stories about. The two that come to mind right now are Desperation and Bitterness. We can talk about being lonely, we can talk about disappointment. But there is something deeply shameful about the other two. It's like you have not only lost the battle with loneliness or disappointment, but also with your inability to maintain your dignity in the face of those losses. You've let yourself be overtaken in a way that is unseemly, in a way that makes the other human animals want to reject you like bad food or a foul smell or a reminder that the capacity to lose themselves in the same way is something they carry inside, as well. Those things are too human. What could be more human than needing love and contact the most when they seem most unattainable. Or resenting having your dreams of yourself and your possibilities stripped away by unfair circumstances or betrayal. But it is fundamentally unhealthy to give in for too long to those things for reasons that are real and dangerous. Other emotions pass, those emotions are among the few that can transform into states. Conditions that do not need outside support to sustain. The emotions we fear are the ones we could get lost in forever. So we have a hard time looking directly at them, or talking about them, or telling stories about them. Still, I would not trust a person who has never had to look over those ledges, who has never felt loneliness in a way that left them absolutely desperate or their dreams dashed in a way that left them bitter. It is terrible to lose yourself to those things. But it is coddled and thin and soft to have never experienced them, to have never felt yourself lost there, and to have never had to find your way back out. 

I don't say this to excuse Jane. It is wrong to stalk people. And I don't even know that I would change what I did. She needed to see clearly what she was subjecting me to. But I am not without sympathy for her. At least, I am not now. I hope this was a turning point for her and not just a shameful moment that deepened her sense of desperation and isolation. But I will never know, because I never saw her again.