My First Stalker: Part Two

(Continued from yesterday.)

There was a moment, after I saw my stalker on the bus, that I could have stepped backwards and waved the bus away. I would have lost my sixty-five cents in fare, but I could have thwarted any satisfaction he might have taken in trapping me. After I heard the clunk-clunk-clunk of my change in the box and saw my pursuer sitting in that first seat perpendicular to the driver, hand on the pole, staring at me as if he was the hungry wolf and I was Little Red Riding Hood, it struck me how naïve I’d been. I thought I’d been careful to keep track of who was following me. I had assumed my stalker had never followed me home. Yet he obviously knew where I boarded the city bus on weekday mornings, and at what time. He’d made the effort to travel from wherever he lived to a spot further north, so he could be sitting on the very bus I always took in the mornings, when I’d boarded.

How was I to know, careful as I thought I’d been, that he hadn’t followed me further? That he didn’t know in which house I lived, or where I biked in my spare time, or the people I visited when I wasn’t in school? In the previous couple of weeks when he had trailed me around the city at a distance, my awareness of his easy, muscular athleticism and of the way he stared at me from under those heavy lids had made my insides crazy-sexy-confused. Now for the first time I felt genuinely frightened.

All those thoughts flashed through my brain in one indefinable instant—and then the bus doors closed.

I was aware of how his head turned when I walked further back the bus. I sat down, and stared out the window, my brain performing all kinds of life-saving calculations—like which one of the people sitting around me might help me if he attacked me right then and there, or what my chances were of sneaking out the back door at the last minute at some other stop, just so I could evade him. The bus only took me to Richmond's Broad Street; I had to transfer in order to head west to the university. He stepped out of the bus’ front exit as I left through the rear. The westbound bus roared up to the stop almost immediately.

Here’s where I made my big mistake. I boarded the second bus ahead of him. I ought to have hung back and let him get on, so then I could have chosen a seat anywhere but in his vicinity. Instead, in my panic to get away, I floundered forward and picked a seat toward the front—the first forward-facing seat available.

And my stalker sat right across the aisle in the sideways-facing seat, his body turned to mine, one of his enormous sneakered feet propped on the vinyl of the seat next to mine. He was close enough that my bare knee was almost touching the faded denim of his own. Up close, I could appreciate how long were his legs and see the damp clusters of armpit hairs poking out from under his sleeveless t-shirt. For the first time I could smell his aroma of soap from under his arms, and of sweat rising from between his corn rows. He was displaying himself to me so that it was difficult not to look. It was hard not to stare at the downy moustache he was growing, and even impossible not to observe the bulge hanging down one leg of his jeans.

It lay there, meaty and enormous, mostly hard, and bigger than any  other bulge I'd ever seen before. Our proximity was making him erect; its outline enlarged as the bus trundled down Broad, stopping every few blocks to admit and discharge more passengers, causing the tucks and folds of the denim to stretch as it lengthened and grew.

It wasn’t fight-or-flight that I felt as I shot darting looks between his legs, but a jittery, stomach-churning version of flight-or-roll-over-and-let-this-stalker-have-his-way-with-me. Mostly, flight was winning. But not entirely.

My stop was approaching. Without warning my stalker reached up and tugged at the cord a stop before mine. The bell at the front of the bus sounded with a chime. The driver began to steer toward the curb as the bus’s brakes squealed. When my stalker stood up, he gripped the rail above his head with both hands. Ropes of dark brown muscle flexed down his arms as he kept his balance. His eyes never left my face.

“You know what?” he said to me as if we’d been carrying on a conversation the entire time. In all the weeks he’d been trailing me, I’d never heard him speak a word. Although now he was trying to sound tough, I was surprised that his voice emerged as a gentle tenor. “You got attitude.”

It was like he’d slapped me across the face. I just looked up at him blankly. “I got something for you,” he continued as the front doors open. He pulled a square of paper from the back pocket of his jeans as he took a step down. It was an envelope. “This is for your attitude. For your attitude.” With his right hand he flung the paper at me like a Frisbee; it twirled at me and struck me in the chest, one of the sharp corners piercing my skin hard enough to bring an instinctive tear to my eye. The envelope fell into my lap. Feeling numb, I slid it into my Jerusalem Bible and blinked until I could see again.

The students in the Bible as Literature class were mostly sophomores and juniors looking for a quick religion credit during the summer; no one really paid attention to the three high school kids who sat scattered around the room. It wasn’t until I got to the classroom and sat down in the middle of all the chattering college kids that I dared to remove the envelope from inside my Bible. One of the corners was bent from where it had hit me, but the envelope itself was new and crisp and sealed. I turned it over to its front, where in blue pen and cramped handwriting, it read:

Rob B.

My first reaction was fear. He knew my name? How? He’d never seen anyone talk to me or address me. How did he know?

All during the first half of the lecture I paid no attention. I loved that seminar with a passion and participated in it more than I later would in any of my college classes, but that morning I just sat there, hands down, head down, unable to think or move or do anything but wonder what was inside that envelope. The ninety minutes until break felt like days, but finally when the professor gave us a five minute break, I sprang down the hallway to the men’s room, shut myself into one of the stalls, and allowed myself to open the envelope that had been given to me for my attitude. Enclosed by the privacy of steel partitions, I pulled out a blue card that on the front simply said: An Invitation.

I opened it up and saw that my stalker had bought from a Hallmark store a standard, plain party invitation. The blanks he’d filled in with his own words.

WHO: You and me??

WHAT: ??

WHEN: ??

Underneath was a note in the same cramped handwriting.

Dear Rob:

I knew from the first time I saw you that you were so beautiful I had to have you. I know that you don’t know me or nothing but I want to tell you that I would never hurt you, I only want to make you feel good and I can make you feel so good you’d only want more. I would pay as many dollars as you wanted even just to talk to you, we don’t have to have sex but you are all I think about and I would pay for any time I can spend with you, just name the amount and you can have it. It’s not just about the sex even though I could fuck your white ass better than anyone have fucked you before, but even if you just want to talk that’s cool too. I will never bother you again but please think about it and if you want to talk and meet please call me at 342-0000. Marvin

I read and re-read the note over and over again, unable to believe it. Marvin’s tone had been so hostile on the bus, but his letter was . . . well, it was unlike anything I’d ever read. I was barely able to stuff my erection back into my shorts so I could get back to class.

Through that day I reread the note over and over again, smudging its white edges with my grimy fingerprints. Half of me feared that after class I’d find Marvin following me, demanding an immediate answer.

He didn’t appear, though. After the day I encountered him on that bus, I never saw him. Not once.

What strange days those were. Over and over again I read the note whenever I was alone, usually while I masturbated furiously and explosively. Sometimes I felt as if I’d dodged a bullet, other times dwelling on the fantasy of surrendering my body to Marvin. I felt flattered by his compliments, and turned on by his desperate need. Sometimes I would rub my dick while gazing at the invitation where it lay on a pillow next to my head, imagining what he’d been doing as he wrote it, wondering where he was right then. I wondered if he thought of me.

It’s a tough battle for a teen boy—the promise and allure of hot, nasty sex and ego-feeding praise versus the rewards of sheer prudence. I might have had parents who wanted to instill the latter in me, but the former nearly always won out.

After two weeks, I decided to call. I waited until my parents were teaching one evening. In the kitchen I traced out Marvin’s number on our ancient rotary phone; the amount of time it took for the dial to chug back to its resting place made the entire ordeal seem almost torturous. Finally I heard the sound of a ring on the other end of the line. Two rings. Three rings. Five was enough. I could hang up after five, right?

Someone answered on the fourth ring. Over the clamor of children laughing and screaming, the sounds of running water, and the noise of a television set in the background, an older woman raised her voice. In my imagination, I decided instantly she was his mother. “Hello?” Her voice sounded dampened, like my own mom’s when she talked on the phone with a cigarette hanging from her mouth.

“Is Marvin there?” It took all the courage in the world just to say those three words.

I had to hold the receiver away from my ear as I hear the woman drop her phone so that it bounced several times before coming to a rest. “Marvin!” she called. “Get your ass down here! There’s some white girl on the telephone for you.”

I hung up.

Marvin was true to his word. The last glimpse I ever had of him was on that city bus, arms over his head and armpits laced with perspiration, cock hanging down the right side of his pants, his soft voice telling me I had an attitude. He never again appeared in the music room of the library. I never glimpsed him over my shoulder as I walked from site to site around the city. Summer school came to an end in late July, I graduated the following year ahead of schedule, and I moved on to other stalkers, mostly of the ex-boyfriend variety.

I still have Marvin’s note after all these years, though. Despite the erotic sentiments contained within, I’ve always been impressed by how formal the invitation is, with all its blanks neatly filled, and by how Marvin wanted to leave everything up to me, including whether or not we ever met. He might have accused me of having attitude, but of the many stalkers I’ve had over the years, he certainly was the most thoughtful.

I do sometimes wonder, though, if he ever puzzled over who the white girl on the telephone might have been, or for how long he hoped I would call before he decided that I never would. Every time I run across that small blue invitation among my belongings, I wonder if he ever went out of his way to sneak another look at me, or to follow me around the VCU campus just for old times’ sake. I even wonder sometimes what he’s like, now that he’d be solidly into his fifties.

It’s one of those stories for which I’ll never have an ending, though. One of too many.