Mom’s Stalker

Reading Time: 9 minutes

When I was around 12 or 13 years old, my mom had a stalker. Maybe this is implied in “stalker”, but this guy was a real piece of work. 

My mom was fresh out of an ugly divorce because my dad decided it might be kind of cool to move in with a female coworker. “Why would my wife and kids mind? C’est la vie, man. We can all still get along.” So, mom turned to church because she was never that big on whiskey, and that’s where she met her would-be stalker, of all places. 

I calculate mom was around 38 and Señor Creepy was probably in his early 50’s. He had a big, rectangle Frankenstein’s monster kind of head, black hair peppered with white, and a big Tom Selleck mustache. When I picture him, I remember him in jeans, a leather belt, grey cowboy boots, and a white wife beater (god, do they still call it that? There’s gotta be a better name by now. I swear I’m not trying to be punny) with black chest hair poking out of the collar. He had a big chest and broad shoulders, and he walked with a cane. 

He drove a massive car, something like a 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass. It was more like a boat but the velvety interior and ashtrays built into the backseat armrests screamed cheap Vegas lounge. And nobody cared because you could fit four people comfortably in the front. 

Legend goes, that when he was in high school, he was some kind of small-town track star and that earned him the nickname Smoke. After getting to know him and listening to the self-inflated tall tales he would spin, I’ve often wondered since then if he gave himself that nickname. 

Do you remember that scene in Napoleon Dynamite when Jon Gries’ character Uncle Rico, the former high school football “star” says, “How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?…” Well, same vibes, same look, same haircut even. Whether Smoke gave himself the nickname or not, it stuck and that is how the people around town knew him, even after his accident left him with a disability. 

Smoke was in a car accident as a young man, ruining his track career and ensuring that he would forever need a cane to walk. His bad leg, the right one, was rotated 45 degrees out. And although I might wake up in a cubbyhole in hell tomorrow for saying it, I thank the highway fairies that Smoke, the stalker, hadn’t been capable of physically chasing us down, and mostly had to stick to stalking in his car.

Drive-by creeping.

Despite his disability and the fact that he walked about as fast as tectonic plates shift, he was forever, Smoke.

When mom and Smoke started dating, he was pretty normal. He did cheesy shit like trying to use slang from 1968 to look hip and “with it” in front of me and my pre-teen friends. Our favorite of his attempts was, “stylin”. “Hey girls, those boss shoes are stylin.” My friends and I would give each other the side-eye followed by an eye roll. But apart from that language sacrilege, he didn’t start out as a bad guy. In fact, we were under the impression he was a pretty good guy. He bought mom gifts, did stuff around the house, took us to the gas station drive-through, and treated us to 32 oz. fountain sodas in classy styrofoam cups (is this a thing in places besides the midwest?)

But one day, mom decided, as you do as a recent divorcée, that this stylin’ hip cat a decade her senior was a rebound and she wasn’t really that into him. And that is when the smoke hit the fan. 

He knew where the spare key was hidden. That was my fault. Anybody that I even remotely trust has the login credentials to my life. I learned nothing from this experience. 

We started picking up hints that he was going into our house while we weren’t home. He was accusing my mother of leaving him for another man by the same name as her best friend’s husband—the name that popped up on the caller ID when my mom’s buddy would call. 

Mom changed the locks on the doors. 

Our small town is organized like a tree. Main Street is the trunk, and all the other streets branch off of that. Again, this is a SMALL town, I’m talking Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. I’m just using the comparison to explain that everyone, going anywhere, gets on Main Street.

Anytime we left the house, we would pass Smoke on Main Street. It took a couple of weeks of us passing him EVERY time we drove down the main drag to realize that was the point. He was out cruising to spot mom to see where she was, at what time, if she was coming or going, and who she was with. It was so unbelievable it was funny. I remember us taking bets on whether we’d pass him by the gas station or the Burger King and cracking up when we rounded a corner and there he was.  

We thought it was weird but we got on with our lives, not really sure he was a problem or just a sad, big-headed man with a broken heart. 

My mom, sister, and I would be sitting around, watching TV in the living room when there would be a knock on the door. We ignored it because um, hello, shit is over. Take your Burt Reynolds wannabe ass somewhere else. This is the year 2000. And when no one answered the knock he would try the door, wiggling the knob, and finding it locked he would start to bang on the door and shout things at us through the door like, “I painted your room! I want my porcelain lighthouse knick-knack that I bought you!” Meanwhile, we’re all trying to watch TV looking at each other like, “Yo, is this normal? Is this how breakups usually go? I can’t hear Malcolm in the Middle. Somebody turn it up.” 

Smoke would call my dad and interrupt his infidelity wonderland to tell say that we had been harassing him. 

There would be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde voice messages on the answering machine each day. 

Message 1, *Angry screaming* “Donna, you’re an awful person! How could you do this to me after everything I did for you?! Everything that I ever gave you, I want back! You’re such a petty person!” 

And then the machine would beep and the voicemail number 2 would go something like, *timid and sweet* “Aw, Donna, I love you so much, please take me back. You mean the world to me.” 

Beeeeeep Voicemail 3, *angry screaming* “You used me you stupid bitch!!!!” 

Beeeeeep, voicemail 4, *soft spoken* “Donna, please pick up the phone. I love you. We just need to talk this out.” 

I don’t remember how long we carried on with the bipolar voice messages, Main Street vigilance, banging on our doors, and shouting as we tensely tried to chill and ignore the crazy man outside.

The unhinged thing that finally triggered my mom to think, “hey, maybe this isn’t normal breakup behavior and I should probably seek legal action” was when he crossed a line at her work. 

Because yes, you guessed it—the whole time that we were seeing him at the pump, at the grocery store, and outside our windows, while he pounded on our doors—he was bugging mom at work, too. 

The real victims here are the taxpayers funding this man’s disability checks so he could dedicate himself full-time to stalking. 

Mom worked at Dollar Tree where everything is a dollar. Not exactly known for the classiest clientele… but that doesn’t mean you want to white trash it up even further with your crazed ex-boyfriend stalking all over the place.

My painfully private mother had to let her coworkers know what the deal was with Monsieur Mustache so that every time he came into the store, she could sneak into the back. Luckily, the registers faced the window and since he wasn’t exactly speed walking his way across the parking lot, she had time to make a clean escape. 

He would sit in the parking lot, go in to “shop,” buy something, go to his car for a bit, and return to the store to return the thing bought 10 minutes earlier. Lather, rinse, repeat. Each time he entered the store, he would ask for my mom to attend him. 

One day, leaving work, and getting in her car, she looked over at him, where he sat watching her. He made a gun with his fingers, and ‘shot’ her with it, his hand cocking back, recoiling, his lips mouthing, “pow”. And that is when she finally thought, “Yup, I guess it’s time to put an end to this.” I’m sure she even rolled her eyes and thought, “damn, another thing on my to-do list”. 

The whole time mom was pretty matter-of-fact about it all and thought it would all just eventually wear itself out. She was annoyed, but she was never visibly disturbed, at least not in front of us. 

Looking back now it’s pretty funny that the same woman who jumps to the worst-case scenario in her mind about everyone else getting murdered was not taking her own real-life, dangerous situation seriously. I remember when I was 16 and I would get off work, if I had forgotten to call her, she would say, “Why didn’t you call?! For all I knew you were lying in a ditch somewhere with your head cut off!” But interestingly, she couldn’t apply that same level of exaggerated worry to her own life in a situation in front of us with a tangible threat. 

I didn’t know about the stuff that had been going on at mom’s work until I heard her explain it to the police officer that came over to file the report for the restraining order. The reality didn’t hit Smoke til the courthouse. Once he had the restraining order in hand, he couldn’t talk to her. And the thing finally came to a screeching halt… for my mother. 

But Smoke and I’s saga wasn’t over. He could still terrorize us kids as he pleased. Apparently, Scott County didn’t think he was a threat to my sister and me. Smoke and I will be forever linked because I have him to thank for the one and only stain on my juvenile record. 

One day my sister came home crying because she had been out for a walk with her friends and Smoke chased her in his car. Yes, the man that mom met in church now had my 9-year-old sister frantically cutting through backyards on foot. I understand why people compare dating to fish in the sea. There are some pretty oddball things in the sea, too. 

That’s my baby sister. My natural reaction was to round up my cousins in a pre-teen revenge posse. I picked up the largest rock I could find and headed for Smoke’s house where I had every intention of breaking out a window. I had my torch and pitchfork and my cousins egged me on toward Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. My plan of action came to me quite swiftly and very little thought was put into it. But before I could ever even make it to Smoke’s house, he drove by, still just cruising, looking for women and children to intimidate. 

The rock that was intended for the window of his mobile home found its place snuggly against his car door and only because I had poor aim. I was trying to hit his car window in hopes of breaking it and rocking his fat head. I dented the car door and screamed insulting obscenities that my cousins quite enjoyed hearing in populated streets in plain day. Smoke rolled down his window to shout, “You’re in trouble now, Caitlan” and went straight to the police station. 

They took my prints and had me write a report, my side of the story. I had to fight to hold back a smile. Isn’t it bizarre? It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re happy to get a cast. When you’re used to being good, it feels so deliciously great to be bad. I wasn’t expecting to feel satisfied to be sitting in a police station (foreshadowing my troubled teen years and early 20s? You betcha!). But c’mon! It was for a great cause. My sister! 

Mom was pissed but understanding. I am sure we had to pay to fix the dent in his car. That thought hadn’t entered my mind while hatching my brilliant revenge plan. Weirdly, it “fixed” things. Realizing we were inclined to vandalism and we had cousin backup, Smoke backed off.

_

Here we are 20+ years later and there must be some kind of residual trauma from such an odd prolonged experience. At the peak of the insanity, I once had a nightmare that Smoke set me on fire.

But even if my mom, sister, and I are traumatized in some way, I’m not sure how that manifests, today. We certainly have not swept the experience under the rug. We joke about it quite often. Since none of us wound up murdered, why not turn it into an inside joke? I’ll knock on mom’s door and shout through the window, “I want my ceramic lighthouse back Donna. I painted your room, goddammit.” 

I recently realized that despite 8 years of marriage, I had never told my husband about mom’s stalker. It’s one of my many ‘little-known facts’ that aren’t appropriate for icebreaker games. In the plot of my life, the experience feels like a footnote, now.

My mom’s favorite way to sum it up is, “He turned out to be a real weirdo.”  

Smoke moved to a town just 11 miles over and incredibly, I haven’t seen him since. Mom said that she ran into him at the gas station once, years later. He approached her and said, timidly, “Hey, Donna… would you go out with me?”