2007, New York

By Scarlett Fever

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

I yelled at my mother once. I stole Post-its from the office. I spit gum out on the sidewalk. And oh yeah, I’m a stalker.

I tried to stop, but I’m doing it again. I’m all about the search and destroy. Not so much on the destroy, but very big on the search. You can run, but you can’t hide. That’s my middle name.

Partly, it’s because I have trouble letting go. Mostly, it’s because I don’t remember things, and so I need to hang on to everything and everyone, forever, so they can tell me what it is that I don’t remember, once I forget. And I don’t remember anything.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I remember some things, but there are great big gaps. Not just a night here and there, but months. Years.

I keep records. Journals. Phone bills. Medical reports. Photographs. Class pictures. Date books. I write down appointments, even after they’ve happened.

Don’t bother asking me what I did over the weekend. I’ll stand there with a blank look on my face, too embarrassed to get out my Filofax to find out. I may get it – the memory of two days ago – eventually, but it’ll be a struggle of reconstruction.

I have boxes of my diaries, date books, and phone books going back to fourth grade. Evidence of a life I don’t remember. I keep a three-ring binder with a page or more for each year, starting with the year I was born.

Each January, I pull out the binder and my date book, and I re-create the past year. I list whom I was sleeping with, whom I was dating (not always the same), and any event that should be worth remembering (the circus, a vacation, a car accident, an illness, or a death). If it’s not written down, I can pretty much guarantee that it’s gone.

Sometimes, all I remember is the act of writing it down. There’s also an Excel spreadsheet with hyperlinks, photos and an added column for where I was drinking that year (this column is very full, and the fact that it needs to be included may have a lot to do with why I remember so little).

Other people remember my life. An old classmate at a college reunion recounted the time I took her to Plato’s Retreat for her 19th birthday. I don’t doubt it. I also don’t remember it. Not even a little bit. I had to take her word for it. I shrugged and smiled, too embarrassed at the loss of memory to ask – what happened? Did we have fun? What was I wearing? Did I run into anyone I knew there? Was I drunk? (Of course I was drunk. I was always drunk then.)

Sometimes, I will ask. My current friends understand my Memento syndrome and know that it’s nothing personal. Just because I don’t remember doing something with you, being at your house or having you in mine – it’s no reflection on how much I care about you. I love you, I really do, I just don’t remember you.

And so lately, I’ve been stalking Nick again. Because I know he can fill in the some of the blanks. He knows. He can tell me things. And he won’t, so I want to know even more. His silence makes me think that our time together was even more potent, or at least more interesting than I suspect.

These are the things I remember about us. We met at the Lone Star. We were probably both there to see Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. If this were six degrees of Me, you could connect Nick and me in two, with Kinky right in the middle. My tattered memory of us reads very much like 9 ½ Weeks, so it might have been over when he started pushing me to meet his daughter.

I remember thinking that children shouldn’t even be allowed in the same room as people like us. I remember hiding in the back of his closet with a gun. I hope it was a water gun, but I really don’t know. I remember him bathing me, or maybe that was a scene from 9 ½ Weeks. That’s the thing. I don’t know what I remember, what I’ve made up, when or why it ended. But I’m sure he does.

A few years ago, in the first few months of a newfound and long-overdue sobriety, before I had actually figured out how to “do” life without booze, I needed a distraction. I looked Nick up, intent on rekindling our madness.

We met at an upscale restaurant near Central Park. He was newly married and reeking of monogamy, a concept that had never occurred to me. I mean, I never cheated on anyone, but I had been the “other woman” most of my life. I knew that whatever he had with his wife – love, I thought scornfully – was nothing when measured up against the sexual insanity we’d shared.

Midway through my lunchtime seduction, I looked up and recognized our waiter from the 12-step program I was using to learn how not to drink a day at a time. Damn it, I thought. The spiritual part of the program was stalking me, and there was no way to get away with what I’d planned and feel good about myself at the same time. And I am all about feeling good as often as I can, for as long as I can, even if I’m not going to remember it in the morning.

Normally, I didn’t mind feeling good at the expense of a marriage, but apparently those antics were on their way out, along with the booze. I looked at Nick, told him to go home to his wife, and I walked out.

What hasn’t changed in sobriety is my own stalking behavior, my “search and destroy” mode. I’m very good at it. Sober, I’m even better. I found an ex-boyfriend who was hiding in Vegas under a different name, on the lam from a large debt to the IRS. I found the family members of another, after they’d moved out of state on the heels of an insurance scam and changed their names.

Neither was happy to discover how easy it was to find them. Thanks to the Internet, it’s harder to fall off the grid than you’d think. The Internet is the new stakeout tool.

Nick is easy to find. Not only is he not trying to hide, but he’s pretty high-profile in his field. I’ve tracked him through several different corporations, mergers and takeovers. Business phone numbers are listed on corporate Web sites, and e-mail is easy to figure out. If you’re lazy, the receptionist of just about any major company will give you an employee’s e-mail address, let you know what city so and so is based in, whether he’s in town, etc. And there you are.

I wrote to Nick a few years ago, asking him to help me put my pieces together. To tell me what he remembered. I didn’t ask to meet or imply that anything would happen – this wasn’t a seduction. Maybe I would’ve gotten a better response if it had been.

It’d been more than 20 years since we were together for however long that was (Two days? Two weeks? Two months?). His daughter would be grown with children of her own by now, and for all I know, that marriage that started when I saw him last may have bitten the dust by now.

I know nothing. We have no friends in common anymore. I’m not a threat. I have a respectable job. I’m a middle-aged woman with a wild past but a very mild present. And yet although he responded once, saying he’d be happy to meet and talk, it was only that once.

Unfortunately, that one small response is all I need to keep me going. For years now, and through dozens of e-mails and calls, I’ve been pursuing him. I stop and then start again. It’s a game I can’t end. It’s turned into a battle of wills. The e-mails continue, as if by barraging him, by refusing to go away, he’ll see that I’m harmless.

I’m considering, seriously considering, taking an afternoon off and laying in wait outside his office. I know how crazy that sounds. That by showing up, cornering him, I could somehow convince him that I come in peace. That by escalating my stalking behavior, somehow things will be clearer for him. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I will. I don’t know.

I wonder what he looks like after 20 years. I wonder if his relationship with his wife or whomever he’s with now is as intensely sexual and twisted as ours was. You’d think by virtue of simply aging that some of that would’ve calmed down. But maybe not. Neither one of us is very old.

My ex in Vegas was not unpleasantly surprised when I found him. A little dismayed, though: if I’d found him so effortlessly, how easy would it be for an entity with the resources of the Internal Revenue Service to find him? We maintained contact for a while, talked about getting back together, but life off the grid isn’t for me. He has since gone deep enough underground that I can no longer find him. I guess he learned something from me: how not to leave a trail. For him, my stalking was helpful.

My ex’s family in Florida were less than pleased to hear that I’d traced them so easily across several states and name changes. My letters and calls went unanswered. They were free of me, only by sheer accident and ignorance, when a second cousin, not knowing better, answered the phone when everyone else was out. He gave me the information I needed, gave me the closure I craved.

My ex was dead. I had thought as much, I just needed to know for sure. I never bothered his family again.

But Nick, Nick continues to elude me, or rather, he continues to evade me. Because I know where he is. I always know where he is. New York, Florida, New York again. We’re in the same city again, blocks away. What I don’t know is why he won’t answer. Why he won’t send a simple e-mail starting with “This is what I remember” and ending with “now leave me alone.” And I would. I really would.

Until then though, I am in pursuit mode, stealth mode, stalker mode. The game is Search and Destroy, and I am a heat-seeking missile. Manhattan is a small island, everyone is a walking-distance away, and anyone can be watched in anonymity from that crowd across the street.

Scarlett Fever was born with the first issue of Bust magazine and has gone on to publish in Penthouse, Playgirl, Tear (Italy), Olive Tree Literary Review, Cosmopolitan, and Stim. She has also been anthologized in Best American Erotica 1995, Between the Sheets (Penthouse anthology), and The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order. Scarlett has been working for what seems like forever on the memoirs of her 10 years in the topless business in the pre-Disney Times Square. Scarlett Fever is a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 | Email This Post

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