BEFORE LEAVING

The few days before I left were extremely stressful, as I’m sure you can well imagine. I had to finish off ridding myself of all of my earthly possessions, and it seemed like I’d never get things done in time.

I won’t bore you with all of the mundane details, of course, because really the point of this thing is to tell you about all of the weird things that happen seemingly continuously.

So anyway, one of the things I did before leaving was to hold a ‘garage sale’ in the Castro. Several friends helped out, including Travin.

At one point in the afternoon, this man, who I will call Fred, started talking to Travin about my bookcase. He thought it was quite nice, but was on his way to a show, and didn’t want to tie it on top of his car and have it sitting out on the street for hours, etc. etc. Eventually they started talking to me, and I gave him my email address, and said that if we didn’t sell the bookcase by the end of the day, I’d email him. He said that he had just moved into town, so if I had any additional furniture to let him know, because he was still looking for some things.

The bookcase didn’t sell by the end of the day, so we did end up emailing. Now, I’d like to point out that this guy had been talking to TRAVIN first, and he really was interested in the FURNITURE, so could I just say that none of this is really my fault?

All right.

Moving right along.

His emails were friendly and a little flirty, and I thought it was wise to tell him that I was moving to London in a week, and that my boyfriend lived there. This was all well-received. So eventually we set an appointment for him to come over and look at my furniture, and I arranged to have a friend drop by at roughly the same time, just to be on the safe side when it came to having strange men drop by my apartment.

Remember, though, he had actually been talking to Travin about furniture first, and and and this was so not my fault.

Not that it really matters, but this guy was smart (PhD) and funny and attractive(remarkable resemblance to Kevin Spacey), and all in all seemed like the sort of person who wouldn’t have trouble getting dates. Somehow this made me think, well, the guy wouldn’t need to be weird to women.

At any rate, he showed up to my apartment, and we chatted, and a woman came by to look at my massage table, and he talked her into buying it, and things were going just fine, so by the time my friend arrived, I let him know that the guy was safe and everything and that he didn’t need to worry. So after a while, it was just the two of us sitting around and chatting in my rubble-filled apartment.

So he started flirting with me a bit, and being the oh-so-subtle person I am, I eventually looked at him and said, “Look, Fred, I am not sleeping with you.”

He responded with, “That’s making quite an assumption, isn’t it?”

I said, “I’m not saying that you’re asking me to, or that you’re hinting around about it in any way. I am just stating it.”

The conversation continued for some time, and came back around to him flirting, at which point I said, “Look, Fred, let me put it this way. Nothing is going to happen tonight that I can’t tell my boyfriend about tomorrow.” His response to this was, “Well, how open is your boyfriend? I mean, like, if I were to sit here and masturbate and you were to watch, it wouldn’t be like you were actually doing anything. What would he think of that?”

!

I said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s not going to happen.” He took ‘no’ for an answer quite nicely, and eventually I let him know that it was time for him to leave. We arranged for him to come back on Sunday with a truck to haul off the furniture that he wanted to buy. The reason for this is that another friend was coming by Sunday, and I thought by now that it would be a good idea for everyone to be in the same room at the same time.

So Sunday rolled around, and the friend who picked up the other furniture came and left again, and still no Fred, but he eventually arrived with a trailer attached to the back of his car. He had been picking up furniture in the City all morning, and his car/trailer were full of things. When he arrived, he said, “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to eat yet—are you hungry? Could we grab something to eat real quick first?” This seemed like a harmless request (and he offered to pay) so I agreed.

We took my car (sans trailer) and drove to a Thai restaurant. Had a pleasant meal, discussed music mostly (we have similar tastes), things went well. Then we got back into my car and I started driving again.

After a few minutes, Fred said, “You’re oblivious, aren’t you?”

I turned to him and said, “What?” and that’s when I noticed that he was MASTURBATING IN MY CAR. The man had his pride and joy sticking out of his trousers and he was WANKING IN MY VEHICLE.

I turned to him and shouted, “Put that thing away!”

People keep asking me why this was my response. I have no idea. I think it had to do with a few things—his car was back at my house, so just kicking him out seemed pointless. The guy seemed harmless enough, apart from the over-exposure. And really, I was leaving for London in a few days, so I figured that maintaining calm was better than doing something to escalate it. I mean, if he were to start feeling the need to ‘apologize’ and ‘make it up to me’ and ‘prove that he was not a psychopath,’ it just seemed like it would be a more painful few days, so I decided to leave well enough alone and wait things out.

Anyway, I didn’t look at him for the rest of the trip, but I assume he put it away (all right, all right, I confess, he mumbled something about “oh great, now my hand smells like sex” which I found appalling and didn’t remember until my friend Andy kept asking me what happened next and I had to think hard about it) and things went normally after that. We loaded up his car with furniture, he gave me a check, and was on his way.

I did get a kind of creepy note a few days later about how he felt a ‘connection’ to me, and how having my furniture made him feel ‘even more connected’ to me, and how good people had no choice but to become closer. Most of this just seems like the guy is so socially inept that he doesn’t know it’s considered poor form to whack off in women’s cars.

So the night before I left, I came home and someone had slipped a note under my front door. I assumed this was my landlord, because he said he’d come in and check out the apartment/give me my security deposit back, etc. The building has a secured entrance, so it’s not like someone can wander in off of the street and go slipping notes under people’s doors.

Well, I guess they can somehow, because this note was from Fred, who had somehow entered the building, and he said he wanted to see me before I left, wanted to make sure I kept in touch, and “might drop by after the Cat Power show.”

I had no idea when the Cat Power show was, but I was taking no chances, so I shut off all of the lights and crawled into bed. Or, more precisely, onto the mat on the floor. My bed was gone. Fred had it, but I don’t want to think about that.

Anyway, I fell asleep.

At 3:00 am, there was a knock on my back door, which borders the back parking lot of the apartment complex. I thought, “Dear heavens, that must be Fred. What is he thinking? All of the lights are off, I’m clearly either not here or asleep, and at what point did something in his brain say, ‘Hey! You know what I bet wouldn’t be strange, stalker-like behavior at all?!’” So I stayed very still and very, very quiet, knowing that he would eventually decide I wasn’t there.

After several attempts at the back door, the knocking moved to my bedroom window. Yes. My bedroom window. My dark, quiet bedroom window. From which there was no response. So what is the obvious next step? Why, of course, to move to the living room windows and start knocking on them. Repeatedly. And, when the apartment remains dark and silent, you somehow get into the secured-entrance building and start knocking on the front door. And then when that doesn’t work, you go back outside and start ringing the front door buzzer.

There was a moment when I thought it might be a friend or family member with some kind of an emergency. Then I realized that if it was, they would call out and let me know who they were, and besides which, odds are high that since most of my family lives in other states, there wouldn’t be anything constructive I could do until morning anyway. And it just wasn’t worth the risk.

At any rate, that’s the end of that story, at least I hope. I’m in London now, no forwarding address, and several of my friends have stopped betting on how long it will take me to develop some kind of strange accent, and have now started betting on how long it will take me to get a new stalker.