A Long, Unhealthy Obsession Can Only Predict A Terrible Ending
“When I was 19 I moved out of my parents’ house and got an apartment. It was in a relatively safe neighborhood, but still affordable. One bedroom, one bath. Very modest. Nothing fancy.
Anyway, I was on the second floor, above an old man who couldn’t hear anything and below a couple in their early 20s who fought and screamed all the f*cking time, and when they weren’t fighting they took turns having loud, obnoxious sex in the wee morning hours or rolling giant f*cking boulders around the floor at all times of day apparently.
One day, the boyfriend gets violent and the cops take him away. The girl continues living there, but she comes down to me to let me know he’s gone and because I was a relatively big guy then (300+ lbs) she said he’s not supposed to come by, but can I have your number in case he does? This was before cell phones, so I gave it to her.
I should mention that I had a girlfriend (Sue) at this time, and she did not like upstairs girl (Jen).
Anyway, Jen calls me one night right before midnight. ‘Are you okay?’ I ask. ‘Yeah. What you doing?’ She asks. ‘Getting to bed, I have to be at work at 7. I work early.’ ‘Wanna come f*ck me?’ She says. Very direct.
‘Uh, I’ve got a girlfriend Jen. Talk to you later.’
Two hours later, she calls me and wakes me up. She’s crying. ‘Why don’t you think I’m attractive? Why don’t you want to f*ck me? I saw your girlfriend and she’s fat. Why don’t you want to fuck me? I swear I won’t tell anybody. But you have to break up with her. It won’t work. She doesn’t love you like I do.’
Keep in mind all those words came out at lightning speed and she was drunk. She just kept prattling on like that, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Finally, I ended up just hanging up. 30 seconds later she’s banging on my door. I decided to ignore it. She starts yelling. It’s almost two AM. She’s screaming. Crying. Banging on the door.
I do the only thing I can think of – I call the police. They say it’ll be 45 minutes.
It took them an hour, and she was banging on the door screaming and crying for the entire hour. They take her back to her apartment and calm her down. An officer takes a statement. He keeps asking ‘Was she ever in this apartment?’ and questions like that. ‘At no point did you allow her to enter the premises?’
She’d never, ever been inside my place. She told the cops a very different story – that we’d been intimate, that I’d kicked her out in the middle of sex without her keys or her wallet. I told the cop he was free to search. He looked around for about 10 minutes, seemed satisfied, and then thanked me and left. At this point, it’s near four AM.
4:30 rolls around, and she calls me and wakes me up. She’s apologizing. She’s crying. She’s so sorry she got like that, but she just misses him SO MUCH. At this point, I tell her I think it’s a bad idea that we talk anymore. I tell her I understand how hard it is, but that I’m going to miss work and I can’t afford to miss a day’s pay.
She seems to get that and hangs up.
I go to work after getting maybe 2 hours of sleep in total. I’m a zombie all day. I get home at 4:30, ready to crash. Sue, my girlfriend, was going to bring dinner by after she got off work at eight. I have 4 or so hours to sleep.
My apartment is completely spotless. Somebody came in and cleaned it. Better yet, they vacuumed, and I still didn’t even own one yet. There are freshly made cookies on the table. Sue must have gotten off early, I think. ‘Sue!?’ I say and walk to the bedroom. There, of course, is Jen. Naked except for thigh-high stockings and a hair tie. She’s lying on her back, and as I come in she pulls her knees back to her shoulders, smiles at me, and says ‘Shove your f*cking cock in me until I cry.’
I just turned around and ran out of my own apartment. Scared like a little boy. I would have run all the way to the office but I was in terrible shape so I walked. In the lobby I called the police again, they came and arrested her. Charged her with some minor things like B&E or trespassing (forget which) and she spends a couple nights in jail since her parents/friends don’t bail her out.
Behavior like this happens for weeks. I have some friends stay at my house, including Sue, during this time so I’m never alone because I’m worried she’s crazy and might do something weird.
She’s constantly knocking on the door and arguing with the people staying at my place. She offers to ‘Share me’ with Sue, offers to go down on Sue, then eventually tries to get Sue to leave me and move in with her and that they’ll be like the lesbian Bonnie and Clyde.
A week or two later she is being evicted (I guess they were late on rent already by like two months and eviction had begun) and as some form of weird protest, she paints her upper torso and face bright pink with some kind of body paint and wears a green bikini top as they drag her kicking and screaming out of the place. Police end up arresting her again for something.
My six months lease is up and I’m uncomfortable with her knowing where I live, so I move. I get an unlisted number/address. I am about 10 miles from the old place. A couple of months after I move in, there’s a knock at the door on a Saturday afternoon. It’s Jen. She followed me from my work during the week, then waited until Sue left and now she wants to apologize. She says she’s medicated, she wants to apologize. I tell her I can’t let her in, and that she needs to leave. I tell her I hope she’s better, but I can’t let her in.
Predictably, she goes nuts. Another call to the cops as I lean on my own door to keep her from pushing it in. Another arrest.
For a while, I didn’t hear from her. Six months, a year. I moved three states away, broke up with Sue (unrelated to this), and was single. It’s been about three to four years, and suddenly I get a MySpace friend request from her. I ignore it. Then I get a tirade of emails. Long-winded, lacking punctuation. Stream of consciousness. Clearly mentally ill. I just ignore them, what else can I do?
This is about 2002.
It dies down a bit. 2005, I hear back from her on Facebook. Same thing. I ignore it again.
2006, Sue messages me out of the blue. Haven’t talked to her in like eight years. She says Jen came into her work and wanted info on me, where I was, what I was doing. She was dragged out by security.
2008, Jen finds my little brother’s Facebook while he’s in college. Makes a road trip across three states to find him at school. Finds his dorm and goes to talk to him. He has no idea who she is. She threatens him, he and two friends kick her out of the dorm. He calls me, I explain. He calls the cops. They do nothing.
Six months later she accosts him at his work – a bar – his boss (female) punches her square in the mouth during a fight to get her out of the building and Jen loses two teeth. She sues the bar, the owner counter-sues, and Jen is found mentally incompetent and placed under some form of mental hold in a facility.
2012 – Jen is out of the mental illness facility and heavily medicated. Her ‘counselor’ contacts me on Facebook. ‘Would I like to help her put her past behind her?’ she asks. She wants to set up a face-to-face. I have a wife, I have a kid. I say no thank you. ‘Counselor’ gets very frustrated and tells me I’m a terrible person.
2013 – Jen commits suicide by jumping off a cliff somewhere in Arizona. Her body is found months after the fact and identified by a wallet.
Part of me wonders what I did to cause this? I literally never did anything out of the ordinary or said anything out of the ordinary to her. I was her downstairs neighbor for a couple of months by the time this started – and it caused over a decade of fixation. Mental illness is a hell of a thing.”
Phicklephilly 