I stalk people in the commuter student parking lots. It's innocent enough. All I want from them is a parking space. But as I creep along behind a young man walking to his car, I think I must seem sinister. I pause when he pauses. I start again when he starts again. But I learned to wait at the end of a lane, a trick I picked up from the more savvy stalkers.
After scoping out the two lots across from TLC last Thursday, I paused at the far end of the first parking lane behind the bookstore. That's when I saw the young man with thick-framed glasses and high-waisted jeans, his belt secured with a gold laptop buckle. I recognized his self-conscious gait, his free arm swinging out of rhythm with his pace. I thought "computer geek." I profiled him, but he was asking for it.
I felt lucky when he crossed in front of my car, heading to the black SUV just to my right. I backed up, turned on my blinker. I know he saw me. I have my own routine when I return to my car after class, so I was sympathetic to his. If he had no intention of leaving, I trusted him to tell me so. So I waited while he stood outside the driver's side door, his laptop open in the seat. I waited when he opened the rear door, shifting things around, taking a sip from a water bottle. I waited when he repeated the cycle. I wanted to leave, to move on to less obsessive prey, but I had that feeling you get when you just know if you leave after investing so much time, he'll drive off as soon as you do. Plus I know the odds are against me anyway. There are more students than there are parking spaces.
I exercised patience when he went to the rear door again, stripped off his laptop buckle, his plaid button down, his thick glasses. When he put on a gray athletic tee, untucked. By this time, I've got my phone to my ear though no one's on the line. I'm faking a conversation so that I can say with indifference on my face all the things I'm thinking. It looks more normal that way when I air my complaints. Less like a rant. Less mentally unstable. Though maybe it's both.
After he heads back to the front seat, he packs up his computer again, locks his doors, and heads back to class looking like one of those punks who bully computer geeks. I can see his smirk as he turns his back to me, strutting back to the TLC. I think "I could run over him." Of course I don't, I wouldn't. And yelling at him only gives him more power.
I've given away enough of that already. But what bugs me most is not that he stripped me of some of my own power, but that he reminded me of how fragile it was to begin with. So what if I can profile people, stereotype them based on recognizable markers. So what if I can say "geek" as though it shifts my social position somehow. Not that I consciously think "I'm better." But I'm not sure what else that could mean. Maybe just a kind of self-boasting, an idea that I'm observant, that I'm smart that way. But anybody might have made that observation.
He undermined my assumptions, pulling a Clark Kent in the parking lot. He's playing with people's assumptions on purpose, he has to be. And I don't blame him for the trick. It's not simply conformity, not simply rebellion, but power through the ability to disorient. "You can't know me." He used performativity--putting on opposing identities--to make alterable power. He also let me waste my time, a play made more powerful by changing personas in front of me. "You only thought you knew me," he suggests. I felt both amused and embarrassed. Amused because what he did was unexpected. Embarrassed because it felt like he did it to me. And because there were witnesses, I felt a heightened sense of vulnerability.
Pam,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the language here is really wonderful. The ways in which you frame the "stalker" as "investigating" and "profiling" are really interesting and lend a more legitimized voice to the stalker. Instead of some creepy stalker, this stalker is more like a PI, more stalking for a legal reason, more valid in their views. Then, the way you turn that legitimacy on its head and invert the credibility, turn it into vulnerability, and give the stalkee the power works even better after you have built up the opposite with such language.
Also, this piece goes a little bit beyond mere reportage to me. I see you beginning to reflect on the implications of first impressions, of our own judgments, of the power structure of any given situation and how easily that structure can crumble or invert. These are the elements which I think could be built upon in later drafts should you choose to take this post in that direction. If not, these same observations could prove very interesting in relation to a number of situations about which you could write. This type of self-critique, I think, is exactly what Dr. Davidson has been looking for from us. The sense that the speaker is far from infallible and that he/she is aware of their own fault, to a certain extent, makes them a more credible narrator, and credibility, although subjective, seems to be a rather pivotal part of creative non-fiction to me.