The Stalker - Part Two

There is a link to part one here:

Several months later I had moved in with Amanda.  As our car is once again in the shop for something Rick-related, my dad swings by the bookstore to give me a ride home from work.  It's after midnight when he turns into my street and we see, parked in front of the main door of my apartment building, Rick's idling vehicle, shadowy profile inside.  I had my dad pull over, and talked about what to do for several minutes; all the while Rick is just sitting, ominously, in his vehicle.  I was angry that this older man wanted control of Amanda, and had a predilection to menace to me.  The police, though having paid Rick several visits to his home, had their hands tied, and I'd had enough.  I waited a few more minutes before I made my decision.  

Asking Dad to stay put, I got out of the car and started walking towards the apartment from the opposite side of the street, well within Rick's field of view.  I saw him cock his head in my direction as he peered through the darkness.  He clearly did not know it was me, and once I was 90 degrees to his door, I suddenly turned and ran toward him.  I was only steps away from him when he got his car into reverse and peeled away.  I kept running toward him as he backed down the street, holding the steering-wheel in one hand, looking over his shoulder to see where he was going.  I resisted the urge to stomp on the hood of his car, though I was close enough at one point to do it.  Glancing back at me to assess my distance from him, our eyes met as his car shuddered over gravel kicking up dust at the intersection when he threw it into first gear; he screeched away with me still in pursuit.  I ran down the middle of the next street, devoid of traffic, chasing him until I could no longer see his car.

Dad pulled up alongside me and rolled down his window.  "Jesus, are you nuts?", he asked. I'd given the boots to a car once before, as a teenager walking down the street with a girlfriend.  I'd reacted badly to a racial slur hurled in our direction through the window of a station-wagon.  I have never been one to swallow intolerance of any kind, and I simply refused to be intimidated by a stalker.  I thought chasing him down could serve to send him that message.  I wanted him to think I was crazy, too, and that I would do just about anything.

Another eight months passed.  With the assistance of my folks we were able to secure a meeting with a lawyer who reviewed our notes, along with copies of the half-dozen police complaints we had filed against Rick so far.  He listened to a recent phone message left on Amanda's answering machine we'd taken to the gens d'armes, where they determined that it was "threatening" and, in fact, charged Rick with "criminal harassment".  The lawyer agreed with the police, and had us sign documents so that he could go before a judge to ask for a motion restricting Rick's communication with us - a restraining order which, at the time, cost around a thousand dollars.

Fiercely independent, Amanda had been resistant to the notion of telling her parents, who lived in another city, of our problems with Rick.  Yet, within days of requesting the restraining order and the day of the grand opening of the bookstore, I was on the street with Amanda's dad, whom I had gotten to know on a few other occasions.  He stood next to the door of his car, posturing, and asked me rhetorically, "What the hell are we going to do with this guy, anyway?" adding, "You know, I have a hunting rifle and I could bag him at 300 yards... he wouldn't even know what hit him!"

It's important to remember that these were the days before anti-stalking legislation in Canada.  It was like we were living in a war zone, and Amanda's dad was only expressing what every father would feel in the same situation, protective.  There was an overwhelming sensation of powerlessness, though we did eventually procure the restraining order against Rick.  He could not come within 250 meters of our homes and work.  A curious thing, however, happened in the final processing of the order.  We had acknowledged to our lawyer that one of the ways we were being harassed by Rick was by telephone.  The final document from the presiding judge first recognized this, but then was scratched out with a ball-point pen, siting in the same ink that it represented too much of an infringement on Rick's rights.  Weird.

Rick received a copy of the document, and continued to call Amanda's house and our newly opened bookstore at all hours.  We thought we finally had him when a stamp-less letter from him was left on Amanda's doorstep.  We called the police, and they paid him a visit.  They could do not do a thing: he claimed he had had a friend deliver it on his behalf.  Even a restraining order meant nothing to him.

Three months later we found ourselves in a courtroom filled mostly with Amanda's friends and family on one side, and Rick on the other, sitting alone to face the charge of uttering threats.  His lawyer, notably a woman, stood up to address the proceedings, requesting "a dismissal, on the grounds that this was a personal issue between my client and the witness for the Crown", who happened to be Amanda.  The judge agreed and, bafflingly, dismissed the case!  This all happened in a matter of minutes and when Rick walked out of the courtroom, I saw the look of relief on his face.  Speechless, as I remember the ten or so of us were, I held out on the hope that this would be the motivation he needed to get on with his life and leave us alone.

But that was not to be.  The calls continued daily; damage to our car, more inventive and serious.  It seemed for a time that there were longer periods between occurrences.  Then, out of the blue, he parked his car across the street from the store one day.  Thinking this to be a brazen daylight attempt to harass us, I noticed there was a woman in the passenger seat.  They got out of the car, holding hands casually as they crossed the street, looking much like a happy couple heading to the cafe next door.

This simply would not do, and so I asked Amanda if she needed a coffee.  She said, "I could use one", throwing in, "let me join you", and we stepped out and headed for the cafe.  Once in line, we were right behind Rick and his new female friend.  Amanda and I both discussed loudly that we should make it clear to Rick's acquaintance that she would be better off not hanging around with him.  Surprised, Rick caught sight of us when he turned around.  With Amanda and I suddenly on the offensive, we began describing in detail what Rick had been doing to Amanda, her apartment, and my car.  Visibly uncomfortable, they left the line and walked out of the cafe. I could tell that the woman had no idea what was going on; her eyes darted quickly between Rick and these two strangers.  We matched their stride just steps behind them and continued to delve into Rick's history.  Rushing now, they jumped into the car, Rick put the key in the ignition and threw it into reverse almost simultaneously.  As the car backed away my eyes aligned with the shaken woman's.  I said "Leave him", loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine.

You may be asking yourselves why I did not take the officer's advice to "beat him to within an inch of his life...".  I've asked myself that a number of times over the course of events.  When things were darkest, I'd seriously considered acquiring a handgun for personal protection, but I'm not a violent person, and did not consider this to be the usual thoughts and actions of the average bookseller.  The closest I came to a physical altercation with Rick was a year earlier when I had gone to Amanda's apartment to pick her up for a movie.  

I had parked right at the front door to her building; when we came off the elevator and made our way out the door, we spied movement at the passenger door to my car, not 15 feet away.  Rick was using a screwdriver to scratch the glass.  I burst into a run, he spun around on his toes and started running away.  Taking a short-cut, I jumped through the hedge of a neighbouring yard to cut him off, and when I was about to grab him by the scruff of his jacket, stopped and just let him run off in to the darkness, in the hope that I had sufficiently scared him off.  It didn't.  We were living under siege.

In fact it took six years of continual harassment, and six years of filing police reports before I received a phone call from a very restrained Rick while the store was being renovated according to the principles of feng shui, asking for a "cessation of hostilities" to which I most heartily agreed.  It sounded as though he had turned over a new leaf in his life; scratching my head, I wished him well.  We never heard from him again.  The whole feng shui thing may have paid off!

Epilogue:

Less than a year before the store closed, and about two years after I had broken up amiably with Amanda, a former mutual acquaintance of ours, Maggie, stepped cautiously over the threshold of the shop.  Still in her early twenties when we first got to know her, she had suddenly and mysteriously dropped out of sight.  I hadn't seen her in years and ran next door to buy a couple of lattes to drink at the bookstore counter while we caught up.  She told me she had a story to tell.  

She had been at a lounge with friends at about the same time Rick called me asking for a truce, and met a very nice, intelligent man whom she started dating.  Only when Maggie got to know him better did she realize the people he was referring to in a story he told her were, in fact, Amanda and I.  He mentioned how awful we were to him, wrongly accusing him of heinous deeds.  That we had ruined his life.  It was, of course, Rick.

She believed him, and stopped coming to the store to visit.  They became very close and moved in together.

Two years passed, they drifted apart, their relationship became strained.  She decided it was time to part ways.  When she moved out he started stalking her.  At this point it had been uneasily quiet for Amanda and I.  It was anything but for Maggie.  The phone calls, the showing-up-at-places unannounced.  She started filing reports to police.  He terrified her, and it was more than she could take so she left the city to start a new life elsewhere, several hours away.

One night he came looking for her after he'd managed to track her down over the phone.  He pleaded with her to come back to him, swearing that he'd harm himself if she didn't.  In a drunken stupor he arrived at her residence; it was close to dawn.  An open bottle of wine fell on the road when he got out of his car, emptying its remaining contents.   Her sleepless night ended with an early morning call to police, and Rick sobering up in the drunk tank.

All in all, Maggie spent about two hours in my store that day, describing what had been her life.  She also needed to express her regret to Amanda and I over the decision she made to believe Rick and stop spending time with us, and to talk about what she called her "poor choices".  

Shortly before she left, I asked Maggie how things were for her now.  Happily, she told me that she ended up marrying a police officer.

The Takeover Bid

Bora was a book supplier, trusted employee, and a welcome coffee companion.  He was outgoing and intelligent, pitching interesting intellectual battles with my co-founding business partner, Ethan, and I over political issues of the time.  He was compensated handsomely for the books he provided us.  It was because of the trust we had developed in him that we came to an arrangement whereby Bora, while on duty in the shop, would make a list of books he had in storage, but that we were lacking on the shelves.  He would then bring those books in on his next shift, putting them out on consignment labeled in red pen - essentially filling holes in our inventory.  It was expressed firmly that he could not put one of his books out on the floor if one of ours was there.  For this service he received 50 percent of the selling price of the book.  We programmed the cash register to create a specific category for Bora's books, to make accounting for them simpler.

My first inkling of a wheel falling off the wagon came when a long-time customer dropped by, mentioning he had driven past the store a few nights before, noting that it was 1:15 a.m. and saw that the recently acquired neon OPEN sign was still on, and the door open, with Bora busy putting books on the shelves.  This news came to me as a bit of a surprise, as we were only officially open until midnight.  I decided to have a look around the shelves.

To my surprise, I found many titles in duplicate in the Science-Fiction section, with one belonging to the store, and the other, priced lower in red, belonging to Bora.  I moved on to the Literature and Philosophy sections, where I made similar findings.  In fact, there was not a genre that had been left untouched.  If I asked you which copy of Hans Kung's Does God Exist you would buy if you had 2 identical copies, you'd probably say the one that costs less, if they were in similar condition.  Maddeningly, Bora had priced all of the books he put out to favour his copy.  Bastard!

I spent the rest of the day combing through the collections, removing every red-marked book.  I contacted Ethan, explained our predicament, expecting some insight or wisdom, but found only bafflement and frustration.  Ethan seemed upset with my discovery, but grew angry with me for having taken all Bora's books off the shelves.  "Can't we just continue until January, so that we can get through the Christmas season?" he asked.  "We'll owe him so much money, Bora will own the bookstore by then," I said, reminding him of the perilous condition of our cash flow of late.

The next morning, Ethan was working and I called him from home.  I pointed out to him that it was important for me to confront Bora myself if he came by, and asked Ethan to call me should he arrive.  He called me about an hour later, and when I walked through the door, Ethan gestured to the back room.

I could see from the way Bora looked at me that he wished me dead.  He looked down his long romanesque nose, head held high, trying to maintain his dignity, his black eyes squinting to register his disgust with my presence.   He made slow, methodical movements to check the stacks of his books I had neatly and carefully arranged on the table in the back room for him to remove from the premises.  About 3700 books in all, amounting to about 1/3 of our inventory.  I hadn't missed any - they were all there.  He began the slow retrieval of his books, loading his car to the ceiling.  By mid-afternoon they were all gone, and that was the last we saw of Bora.

The Politics Of Friendship

"So, you're selling out.  You're buying in to a system that you've fought against for the last ten years.  You're... defeated..." he said.  "Is that statement designed to make me feel better?" I asked angrily.

We sat together, he and I, for the last time.  He took one final draft of his latte, tipping the cup all the way back before setting it down on the counter.  I refused to make eye contact with him, and there was now only silence between us.  He pushed back the stool he was sitting on, its metal legs shuddering against the tile floor as it moved away from the coffee bar.  Turning, he rose to his feet and, as I looked up, he walked out the door, and out of my life.

Michael was an intelligent, affable and educated 27 year-old fellow.  A life-long student and the son of a corporate executive, he was well on his way to a master's degree in psychology.  His long brown hair tied back into a ponytail, he resembled a bearded Matthew McConaughey.  He was married to Danica, a homeopathic practitioner, and together they had two small children, a boy and a girl.

He had started hanging around the bookstore between or after classes, engaging me at first with small talk and later, when he got to know me, long conversations over coffee.  I welcomed his companionship, as our talks were interesting, dynamic and animated.  I appreciated the similarities of our world views, and looked forward to our meetings.  Philosophy, the Arts, politics, deep ecology, no topic was barred, and often customers and friends were included in the discourse.

I valued the time I spent with him, and we started meeting casually outside the store at a cafe nearby that offered great middle-eastern cuisine.  We became close friends, or so I thought at the time.  I'm not sure whether I offered him the job, or if he suggested that he work part-time.  In any case, I knew his erudition and friendly demeanor were just the ticket, and I had a renewed sense of optimism for the future.  It also gave me a chance to relax a bit, knowing there was someone I trusted looking after things in the shop.

He and his family fully enjoyed the regular community poetry readings and musical events.  He opened up new lines of communication with clients, developed relationships with performers, and helped with set-up and take-down.  During one performance, he and his daughter danced to the music of a very appreciative folk singer, charming the audience with their fluid movements.

He did have some trouble with the cash register, regularly making accounting errors that were easy enough to fix.  He'd leave me notes on bits of till tape or sheets of paper, outlining the circumstances around a mistake, saying: "Chris:  I charged someone a $7000.00 for a book..." adding cheekily, "I don't know if that was done right."  As I was paying him cash under the table at the time, he would go on to further admit: "I took $13.50 out of the till on friday for lunch."

Startling admissions to his wife over the telephone would spark misunderstandings between them, leading to a debate and ensuingly a discussion over semantics.  I extrapolated later that these disagreements often stemmed from his honesty, and his propensity to find himself in compromising situations with women.  In one instance, after having coffee with an acquaintance, he went with her to her apartment. Somehow she managed to get him in the shower, but he was clear in stating to me that he was still fully clothed when this occurred.  I struggled with the notion of his predicament, and had trouble feeling sorry for him when Danica found out.

On another occasion, he told me of a chance encounter he had with a woman in a cafe.  She approached him while he was paying for his latte, stating how attractive he was,  how much he resembled Matthew McConaughey, and that she wanted to make love to him immediately.  His stories were entertaining, but always understated, and never boastful.

At one point, circumstances in his family life were changing and I was afforded the opportunity to buy his 1979 VW Westfalia.  It was the missing piece of the puzzle for my life and the bookstore.  Nothing embodied my lifestyle better than an unreliable accordion on wheels, or "flying shingle", as my Dad called it.

One day, a housemate of mine, Paul, came home cheerfully announcing that he had procured a chunk of hash, and that he and his friend were going downstairs to bake brownies.  Hours later, with the house smelling of fresh baked goods, he emerged from the basement suite clutching two baking dishes, one for Lance, our other housemate, and the other for me. I initially refused this generous offer, however, on his insistence, I relented and promised I would find a good home for it. It turned out Michael's home was not the the best place, as their little boy managed to spot it at the back of the fridge where Michael had hidden the package.  He came bounding into the room, his face covered in chocolate icing, shouting excitedly "Mommy, mommy, I found cake in the fridge!" adding, "Can I have some?"

I figured out much later that, at the time of our parting and the store closure, Michael was losing something too.  My folks thought he was losing his hangout; my wife recently suggested it was possible that Michael had actually never been my friend, but a friend of the store's.

His little boy was just fine the next day.