My First Stalker: Part One

The downtown branch of the Richmond Public Library seemed huge to me when I was in high school. In 1980, the building had just undergone a substantial renovation and expansion; the original old library had been completely encompassed by a modern concrete façade. One entered the front door into the building’s new section, where fiction lay behind the glass walls of the first floor and stacks of non-fiction loomed above on the upper story. All it took, however, was a few steps to the right, down a hallway and through a tall marble arch to enter the old, original library.

Walking through that arch was like stepping back in time. The industrial carpet ended abruptly and was replaced by cracked and mended slabs of polished, pebbly stone. The glass-and-steel ideal gave way to ionic columns and busts of philosophers, their white marble grey with age. Down the echoing staircase was a small, scary men’s room that boasted holes between the partitions and suggestive graffiti on the walls; I'd spent many a weekend day sucking dick in its cavern-like interior. Further to the west was the children’s wing, where the chairs were all squat and low to the ground. But I liked the old library for the music room that sat at the top of those stairs.

The room was tall and gracious. In its previous life it had been the library’s main reading room. Between its floor-to-ceiling pillars now were wedged steel bookcases filled with music scores and listening booths equipped with phonograph players and reel-to-reel tapes. On sunny days, light would gently filter down through the music room’s skylights onto the tables below. When it rained or snowed, the room’s florescent bulbs, suspended only feet above the tables from the high ceilings, would cast a flickering pool of light in the room’s center, while shadows gathered in the eaves and niches. I liked the room because it was quiet. I could study there without interruption. I liked being able to hunker down with my books between classes, hearing nothing more than the faint and tinny music from the booths and the occasional rattle of book carts on the stone floors outside.

The summer between my tenth and what would have been eleventh grade, it was usually just the music librarian, the old man working his way through Bach’s entire oeuvre, and me.

And my stalker.

My parents had decided when I was a sophomore that I should skip eleventh grade. I was already a year ahead in most of my classes, anyway. They felt it would have been a waste of time just to go through the motions and finish four miserable years of high school when I could make do with three and move on to college a year early. In order to accomplish their goal, however, I had to complete an English credit in summer school. Rather than sit with the junior-year repeaters in my own high school, though, I went for the summer to Open High, an experimental system in which kids took mini-classes all over the city. For one year’s credit in high school English I would attend a college sophomore-level course on The Bible as Literature in the mornings at VCU, a seminar in the afternoons on Emily Dickinson at an old Methodist church downtown, a seminar on Biblical Greek in the later afternoons, and then a small discussion group on Shakespeare in the evenings at a church closer to my home. Between VCU and the Methodist Church, I would gulp down a bag lunch and then take myself to the air-conditioned coolness of the library reading room.

I’m not certain for how long my stalker had been following me, by mid-summer. All I know is that one hot July afternoon I looked up and there he was, a table away, facing me, his heavy-lidded eyes not moving from my own. I looked back down at my book, and then back up again. He was definitely staring at me, not even making a pretense of reading the magazine on the table in front of him.

At that moment I realized with a shock I’d seen him before, in my periphery. He’d been there other afternoons when I’d read my Dickinson in the music room, though perhaps never as boldly seated as he was that day. I began to feel hot and uncomfortable. Every time I looked up, his stare was boring through me—a lustful, sexual look that seemed to undress me and spread me wide for his imagination. The man was a handsome black guy in his late twenties or very early thirties with his hair braided in corn rows. Although his shoulders were broad and his muscles filled out his shirt, there really wasn’t anything aggressive or threatening about him. It was just his unmasked look of sexual need that unnerved me.

I put down my book and, keeping my glances limited to my knapsack and anywhere other than where he sat, I left the music room and the building. For a moment I worried—or did I hope?—he would follow me, but the pounding of my heart eased when I reached a bookstore down the street, turned around, and found him nowhere in sight.

I’d been sexually active for years by that point. I’d been cruised casually by men walking by in the library. I’d had guys ogle me from their cars and circle the block just to catch another glimpse of me. I was rangy, impossibly blond, and young, and my height made me look all the more skinny. I knew the signals of desire, but they still made me feel strange and conflicted, unable to decide whether I should encourage them, or run.

My stalker was there the next day, and the next. Every day he would arrange himself at the table across me, his blue-jeaned knees supporting his elbows, a magazine open to a page he never read, as he stared and stared at me. I never once saw him blink. I tried not to look at him—I kept my glances casual, as if I was only catching his eye accidentally as my own eyes swept up to the dirty old clock over the door, or as if I was only trying to catch the source of some noise out in the hallway. Before my class, I would pack my books and leave without even looking at him.

Mostly I hoped that if I ignored my stalker, he’d grow bored of his game and leave me alone. It was perhaps after a week that he started to follow me other places around the downtown area. I was navigating on foot and by city bus. When I would leave VCU on foot for the library, somewhere along the route he would start following me, maintaining a careful distance between us. When I left the library for the Methodist church, he would rise after me and trail behind. When our little discussion group was finished for the day, I’d see him across Grace Street, leaning against a building, one of his athletic shoes firmly on the sidewalk and the other planted flat against building’s red stone, arms crossed, muscular chest puffed out, his stare losing none of its intensity from four dozen feet away.

It’s difficult to recreate the mixture of emotions I would feel, whenever I saw him. There was sexual excitement, and some fear, and curiosity, and a whole lot of anxiety, despite the fact I never really felt he posed a physical threat to me. I would have worried greatly if he had attempted to follow me to my house, but his silent vigil seemed to end outside the Methodist church. I never saw him anywhere close to home.

Until the day, that is, when I climbed through a cloud of diesel fumes up the stairs of a public bus at the end of my street and, as I plunked my change into the drive’s glass box, saw him sitting there in the front seat, obviously waiting for me to board.

(To be concluded tomorrow.)