I Was Stalked By A Lovecraftian Horror

I met her on the Internet.

First of all, never ever ever ever use Internet personal ads. Yes, I've met some kickass
girls through the Internet - Amber is wonderful, and Meghan is one of the coolest people
I've ever met - but I didn't meet either of them through personal ads. Naomi is cool even
if I've never met her, and so is Ashley. I didn't meet either of them through personal ads,
either. I met "Rachel" through a personal ad, though, and woo boy was it a mistake.
Never, ever, ever ever ever ever use Internet personal ads. I cannot stress this enough. If
you want to meet clingy, needy, psychotic girls with seventeen tons of emotional baggage
each then you go right ahead and use Internet personal ads. However if you want to meet
nice, quasi-normal females who won't try to break down your door and stab you to death
as you sleep...don't use Internet personal ads.

Maybe I haven't been clear enough here. Let me tell you about "Rachel".

We corresponded through e-mails for a good while. I was twenty-one at the time; she was
twenty-four. I shouldn't have gone for the older female, but what the hell, right? Older
women can be sexy. I had a huge crush on this woman who lived in my apartment
complex a few years ago. I was sixteen and she was thirty-two; she looked twenty-one.
She was incredible. I wanted that woman so badly...but anyway. Oh God, I'm hearing
"Ms. Robinson" in my head right now just thinking about her. Bridget was her name, and
she had this hot pink bathing suit that she'd wear, and oh my God she was so amazing,
she has this amazing voice and blonde hair and blue eyes and a smile that made me
unable to breathe and a great laugh and she was so friendly and when she'd wear that
bathing suit and lean over oh my God she...

Ahem.

With Rachel I was immediately tossed warning signs that I should have heeded. I, of
course, instantly disregarded every single one of them. I was at a point in my life where I
was desperate to find someone to date. I was so desperate that I was ready to overlook
almost any damned thing just to get a woman in my life. The first warning sign that I
promptly ignored was the fact that she was twenty-four and she still lived with her
parents. Okay, well, I guess that's all right. I can understand that. I lived at home until I
was twenty-one and I moved out two weeks before my twenty-second birthday. No big
deal; she just needed some time to get on her feet or something. Warning sign number
one successfully shrugged off.

Then BAM, number two hits. She's still going to school. Midlands Technical College,
part time, undecided major. All right. If you haven't decided what you're going to do at
age twenty-four, just take time off of school and discover yourself. I'm twenty-two and I
know what I want to do - I just have no idea how I'm going to get there. I took time off of
college when I was twenty, and I haven't gone back yet. Some people think that's a bad,
terrible, horrible thing, but I look at it this way - I now support myself, and haven't lived
with my mom in almost a year. I just got a great new job with a great new company, and
all of this is because I chose to work instead of going to school...hell, I've learned more
about networking at my part-time job since February than I learned at Tech in a year.
Anyway, to be a part-time student at age twenty-four is kind of weird, but it's dismissible.
I dismissed it.

Here came number three, fresh on the heels of everything else...she had a curfew.

Holy fucking pantyhose, Batman! Hold the phone! A curfew? At age twenty-four? No
way. No fucking way. I stopped having a curfew when I turned 18. A curfew at age
twenty-four is just pure bullshit.

Okay. So she's twenty-four, lives at home, has a curfew, and goes to school very part-
time. As in one class per semester. All right, maybe that's not so bad. She also works in a
nursery school and complains about her job constantly. At this time I wasn't complaining
about my job constantly - that was to come later.

But I managed to dismiss all of this. I was very, very desperate for someone to date.
Looking back on it now I'd like to slap my past self. I was pathetic. I didn't see how
horrible this girl was. And to make matters worse I'd never seen her. But by God, I was
going to meet her! We made a date to have dinner together.

Her parents had to come.

Whoa, whoa. Hold the motherfucking phone there a second, Cletus. What was that? Yep.
She insisted that her parents come on our first date. I look at it this way - any get-together
that involves parents cannot possibly count as a true date. I've used this to console myself
since the fact. So I'm going to meet this girl for dinner and her parents are going to be
there. She knows exactly what I look like and where I work by this point, so there's no
way that I can possibly stand her up. Unfortunately for me I have no desire to stand her
up at all. I arrive at the restaurant. I forget what she was wearing at the time, but I knew
to look for her. She hadn't told me what she looked like. I tend to assume the absolute
worst in a case like that. That way I'm never disappointed.

My imagination was completely unprepared to conjure what I encountered in reality. It's

never been able to craft something as horrible as what I saw that night.

Now first of all let me say that I'm not a shallow guy. I'm not exactly a male model
myself, and looks don't generally matter that much to me. I'm not incredibly picky. I find
a very wide range of body types to be attractive. I like large breasts, small breasts,
medium sized breasts. I like long hair, short hair, and everything in between. I like skinny
bodies, average bodies, and large bodies. I'm diverse in what I find to be physically
attractive. I can almost always find something attractive in unattractive girls, too. For
instance a girl may be physically ugly, but I might think she's got a nice smile. No girl is
a totally hideous beast in my eyes.
Except for Rachel.

She is singularly the most unattractive human being that I've ever encountered. I stepped
up to the restaurant and saw her. I made eye contact. I suddenly realized that it was her,
that she was she, and that I had to do a hell of an impromptu acting job to keep myself
from showing my horror. She smiled at me. I had to desperately avoid reeling in terror.

I'll try to describe her. Bear with me; this is difficult for me to do.

She's roughly twice as large as me and she's the same height as I am. That means she
weighs around three hundred and fifty pounds and she's five feet, eight inches tall. Maybe
she's not quite that large, but I'd be shocked if you told me that she weighed in at under
three hundred pounds. That, however, isn't nearly enough to make her horrifying. She's
got really short, straw-colored hair that has the consistency of straw. It looks like she
never ever has taken a comb or a brush to it a single time in her entire life. She's got huge
eyes, and they're always wide-open and unblinking. Her eyes look like they're perpetually
ready to pop right out of their sockets. She's also got a mouth full of the most crooked
horse teeth I've ever seen. You've heard people joke about them breaking cameras? She
would very likely break a camera with one of her wide-eyed grins. She's also lumpy. I
know I'm fat, but at least I'm not lumpy. I've got broad shoulders, a rather large, thick
frame comprised of thick, heavy bones, and I'm somewhat strong with some muscle. I'm
fat, but that fat is evenly distributed in a way such that no excess amount of it resides in
any one strange place. She, on the other hand, had weird lumpy areas in her shoulders.

In summary, she looked vaguely like a more-deformed version of the hunchback of Notre
Dame.

But uglier.

I've always hated to say that someone is really ugly, but this girl absolutely earned the
label. To borrow from Claude, a friend of mine, she's taken an entire ugly journey. She
fell out of the ugly tree and hit every ugly branch on the way down. Then an ugly
lumberjack came by and cut down the ugly tree which fell on top of her. Then he cut
some ugly branches off and beat her with them again. Then an ugly dog came along and
took a piss on her. It goes on and on. I need to get Claude to give me the whole list of the
ugly journey. It's horrible, and you'll love it. Suffice to say that the ugly journey applies to
this girl. She was hideous.

But I was willing to work around it. Even after she hugged me.

I wasn't going to have sex with her. But I was thinking hey, friends.

So we all sat down to dinner, myself and Rachel and her two parents. I forget what the
hell it was that her mom did, but her dad was a projectionist at the dollar theater. They
had such a huge hold on her life that I was immediately disgusted. Being the good actor
that I am, however, I managed to actually act like I was interested in what everyone had
to say and that they weren't a collection of freaky motherfuckers who needed to be placed
inside a cavern deep within the earth and never, ever let free. (Side note - the restaurant
that Rachel insisted we eat dinner at was recently the site of a brutal murder. Yeah, she's
got some good taste in restaurants, there.) So we sit, we talk, I try to force food down
even though I'd lost my appetite. Her dad goes to get more food. She goes with her. I'm
alone with her mother.

Her mother demands to see my driver's license.

Okay. What the fuck? At some point did I pass out and wake up in Fuckyland? Had this
woman gone completely insane? But the bad part is that I was only mildly shocked. I
mean, my imagination had absolutely kicked into overdrive at this point, and I expected
them to bind me, gag me, throw me in their trunk and drive me to a secluded cabin in the
woods where they'd proceed to sedate me, rape me for weeks, and then cook and eat my
bruised and battered corpse. Asking for my driver's license wasn't really so weird to me at
that point. I obliged.

"I'm a license looker," her mom said, as if that made it any less goddamned weird.

She glared at my license with her beady eyes for a minute, then handed it back to me.
Rachel came back and was only mildly embarrassed. I've got to give her a little credit for
having nerves of steel; if my mom ever did something like that I'd have her committed to
a mental institution and I'd demand that they give her multiple shock treatments on a
daily basis. I was incredibly horrified by the end of the evening, and Rachel made her
parents leave us alone in the parking lot for a minute so that she could hug me and try to
get a kiss out of me. I lied to her blatantly and said that I don't kiss on the first date. That's
pure bullshit. I've kissed before the first date before. I've kissed girls that I haven't even
wound up dating before. I've kissed girls who have just wanted to kiss me. But hey, she
didn't know that it was bullshit. She respected that, and my tongue respected the fact that
I wasn't putting it anywhere near her mouth. She insisted that we should get together
again soon, without her parents.

At this point I wanted to give her a second chance because I'd lost my mind.

Tip for guys - a second chance is not always the best of ideas.

So we decided to go to the park for a couple of hours one night. I figured we'd go, talk,
and maybe she'd seem like less of a beast in my eyes. We get there and she whips out this
blanket that she thinks we're both going to lie on. Ha! Sure thing. Just to keep her happy,
I sat on the edge of the blanket and made up some bullshit line about a bad back and how
lying down was painful. She seemed to buy it. We talked and she seemed a little less
insane than before. I was beginning to think that maybe we'd get along despite her
unlovable visage.

Then she tried to kiss me.

She said something about how she usually wouldn't kiss guys that she wasn't dating, but
that she'd make an exception in my case, and then she leaned in and tried to put her
tongue in my mouth. I managed to scramble away and, lying through my teeth once
again, said that I couldn't kiss someone that I wasn't dating. I said I'd tried it before but
that it had always produced horrible results. I even apologized. She bought that, too, and
said that if I changed my mind, well, she was more than willing to kiss me...or more.

Agh. Ugh. "Or more."

No way in hell.

So I take her home and she tries to put her hand on my leg on the way back to her house.
I ask her to please not do that, and, disappointed, she complies. As I drop her off at her
doorstep, she again tries to cram her tongue into my mouth, at which point I step away
and say that I absolutely have not changed my stance on the "no kissing" thing.
Disappointed again, she says that she understands. At this point, her lips hadn't actually
touched mine, but not from lack of trying on her part. I vowed at that moment that her
lips would never, ever touch mine. She tells me that she really wants to kiss me, and that
she'd like to date me. That way, see, I'd kiss her. I tell her I'm not ready for a relationship.

She asks me if I want to have sex with her.

Whoa. What the fuck? I won't kiss, but I'll fuck?

See, she's primed and ready for me to put my penis in her. The problem there, though, is
that I wouldn't fuck her with a dead homeless man's dick attached to the end of a fifty-
foot pole with Newt Gingrich doing the pushing. She thinks that I'll date her and then
we'll make the instant jump to having sex. She says that her parents are asleep and that
we can be really quiet, since she's got this curfew and all. She'll just go in, make sure
they're asleep, and then she'll sneak me in and the silent fuckfest can begin. No need for a
condom, either!

At this point I stopped worrying about hurting her feelings. I told her no and said that I
wasn't ready for a relationship, and that I didn't have those kind of feelings for her
anyway, so basically she needed to back off and leave me the hell alone. She wasn't
happy, but she bade me goodnight and went inside. I went home and slept, confident with
the notion that she'd leave me the hell alone and I'd have learned a very valuable,
important lesson.

So the next day she calls me at work. At 9 AM. The store opened at 10 every day. She
called me three times in a row before the store even opened. I'd asked her not to call me
at work since I was a commissioned sales counselor and my paycheck was directly
proportional to the amount of time that I spent on the sales floor and off of the phone. She
called me three more times that day. Each time I told her to leave me alone, that maybe
we'd talk later, but that I really really really needed to get back on the sales floor and, you
know, make money.
Wacky me.

She calls me at home five times that night. Five times, one right after the other, within a
fifteen minute time frame. Each time she left the exact same message...

"Nick, this is Rachel. I just wanted to let you know that I really had fun the other night,
and I was hoping you'd want to get together again sometime soon. Like, maybe
tomorrow. We could go to a movie or something. I really had fun, Nick, and I'd really like
to date you. Maybe we can talk about that tonight. Please give me a call as soon as you
get in. All right. Bye."

She left this message five fucking times...as if I was going to give up and answer after the
fourth time. "Ah, sorry, I was screening my calls, but I'll talk to you now since you
obviously won't give up, you rascal, you." Fuck that.

I call blocked the bitch.

Have you ever call blocked someone? When you do it, they get a pre-recorded message
the next time they call in...

"The party that you are trying to reach has placed a block on your number. You cannot
reach them. They don't want to talk to you. So take a hint, you dense motherfucker, and
stop calling them, because it's obvious even to imbeciles that you're not wanted by this
party. Go away and leave them the hell alone, you scary fucker."

Okay, so I embellish a bit. But that's the gist of the message, really. It doesn't leave
anything to the imagination - you've been blocked, which means they don't want to talk to
you. End of story. Quit calling them. Cut your losses and leave.

Oh, no. Not her.

She goes to a friend's house and calls me from there. She leaves the exact same message,
complete with her home phone number, but says that "for some weird reason" she
"couldn't get through" to me. No shit! I blocked you! It even told you that I blocked you!
So I block her friend's number and go to bed. My mom, by this time, was pissed off. I
still lived at home back then. I'm so sorry, mom.

So I go to work the next day...and she's already been calling. I ask a co-worker to screen
my calls. He asks how he'll know it's her.

"Easy," I say. "She'll sound like she's chewing on a dick."

He laughed. "How does someone sound like they're chewing on a dick?"

Very seriously, with no trace of humor in my voice, I look him dead in the eyes. "Just
wait," I say.
Half an hour later he comes back to me, his eyes wide open. "Dude, she just called you,"
he said. "And...you were right. She sounds like she's chewing on a dick."

So we spend the rest of the day playing Screen Nick's Calls. She calls a grand total of ten
times, getting progressively angrier each time. Finally everyone is annoyed, and I decide
to take one of her calls. She's mad.

"Nick," she starts out, "you didn't return my calls last night, and I'm really upset. I
thought we..."

I cut her off. "Please shut your fucking mouth, all right?"

She's stunned. She's a "good Christian girl," and even though she was prepared to have
dirty monkey sex with a guy she didn't even know very well, bad, naughty language
upsets her. I have the edge very briefly. I take it.

"All right. You've called me something like thirty-five times in the past two days, and
that's some really scary shit. I want you to stop calling me. Pretend that I'm dead."

"Nick, I really am attracted to you," she says, defensive. "I thought we had a connection."

"You imagined that," I say. "You're scaring my co-workers, you're pissing off my mom,
and you're scaring and annoying me. I don't like you. I don't want to fuck you. I don't
want to kiss you. You're weird, you're insane, and you're obsessed with me."

"No, I'm not obsessed with you, I..."

"Shut the hell up. You're getting ready to stalk me."

"I'm not stalking you..."

"Please, shut the absolute fuck up. I've been stalked before, and it's nasty, and I don't
really feel like going through it again. You're nuts, and you're getting ready to go off the
deep end with me. I don't want to touch you, I don't want to fuck you, and I don't even
want to be your friend. I want you to stop calling me. I mean it."

"But Nick, I want to be..."

"No, you don't. Look, I'll put it this way - if you call me one more time, I'm calling the
cops and getting a restraining order taken out on you. I'm not fucking around here. I am
very, very serious. Now leave me the fuck alone."

I hung up the phone.

Wisely, she stopped calling me.

She sent me a couple of e-mails a month or two later, but I deleted them without even
bothering to look at them. I don't know what's happened to her since then, and I don't
give a shit. It's been a little over a year and I still don't care. But let this be a lesson to you
all - do not, under any circumstances, use Internet personal ads.

Ugh.