Stalking From the Rooftops

READER'S NOTE: This blog was orignally posted on my MySpace blog, thus the references to that site.

I'm feeling more popular than usual this week. There's been an influx of people I've never met before asking to be my "friend" upon this novelty called MySpace. For the most part, I blindly accept their friendship and read all about them shortly thereafter.

I have no idea what interest these people have in who I am or what I say. Nevertheless, I am absolutely convinced that MySpace is, one way or the other, going to change the ways of the world. This world I speak of is for the lonely, the desperate, the overly-curious.

I'm speaking of course, of the world of stalkers.

I hafta admit to missing the good ol' days of stalking though. You had to really want it back then; you had to earn your information. Late-night drive-bys to see if someone else's car was in the driveway. Hiding in bushes to see who came in and out of the house. Hiding in the bathroom across the hall from your ex's highschool locker.... y'know; stuff we all used to do, right? RIGHT?

My tallest glass of "stalkahol" came during my senior year of highschool and involved a girl I never dated and barely interacted with throughout my years of academia.

READERS NOTE: The names in this blog have been changed to stop you nosey fuckers from typing them into the SEARCH function of MySpace in hopes of finding out who I once rolled with. So if you search any of the names written here, I don't actually know them.. it's just a coincidence that they are on here. Like the poor schmucks in 1983 whose phone numbers happened to be 867-5309.

"Jenny?... Jenny who? ...I don't know any Jenny, pal. My name is Ralph. ...How'd you get this number?...Yeah, well screw you too, buddy! Turn off the radio!"

Anyway, for what it's worth, I kept my real name. My real name is Ace. So go ahead and call me Ace. The name of the girl in this blog is Jenna. Jenna was not her real name, but the real life girl that Jenna is based on is a total cutie and I have firmly believed for quite some time that there are no ugly "Jennas" in this world. I cannot explain this phenomenon, but it nevertheless seems absolutely true. Therefore, nicknaming the girl in my blog Jenna, seemed more than appropriate.

So, just to recap:
1) My real name is Ace.
2) Only name your daughter Jenna if you want her to be attractive.
3) If you end up naming your attractive daughter Jenna, prepare for a swarm of dudes named Ace coming around your house looking for nookie.

* * * * *

There are two facts you need to know before I begin my story.
FACT 1: When I was in high school, the house I lived in had a stucco-topped roof that extended a solid ten feet from my upstairs bedroom window. It was essentially a back deck with no walls.
FACT 2: I was a very normal teenager growing up. I cannot prove this, you are just going to have to trust me. I was you. Or your friends. Or, if you were one of the freaks in high school, then I was the normal guy that was a little uncomfortable being your lab partner in chemistry class. That was me. Joe Normal.

But feel free to call me Ace.

And from my understanding normal people had two types of love interests growing up. There were the "Real People" and the "Unattainables". Real People talked to you, dated you, kissed you, considered you friends... and they never ever looked as good as the Unattainables. Unattainables were not famous, they were not models or pop stars. They lived in your town and shopped at your mall and hated the same gym teacher that you idolized. BUT they were in a different social hierarchy; understood the society around them better than you did. And although it is not nice to say, in highschool, they were better than you were.*

I had an Unattainable. She was in my French class when I was a freshman and I loved her everyday for four straight years. Her name was Jenna Oliver. She was clean and well-groomed and always smelled like exotic fruit. I, on the other hand, went a stretch of eight days wearing the same ratty red Tom Petty t-shirt**; so already, the differences between the two of us should be evident.

Her walk - one of the first things I noticed about her - was solid and peacock- proud with a matching vanity. Her arms, gently bent outward at the elbow, breezed past her thighs, wafting front to back, front to back.
Front to back.
Front to back.
Her butt had an imperceptible wiggle that reminded me of a sultry dame from some old James Cagney movie. I often imagined Jenna, dressed to kill, shooting some "john" in the heart with a .22 pistol. # She never carried books in her arms and I don't remember her ever wearing a backpack either. In comparison, I always walked as if I were trying to keep from crapping my pants. My back was hunched; shoulders rolled forward as if I were shielding my nipples from the rain. We were from the same town, but we were also from two wholly seperate worlds.

The largest difference between the people of my ilk and the people of hers was that I spent my time watching - Jenna spent her time being watched.

Consider this the segue back to my bedroom roof.

As it happens, Jenna lived across the alleyway from me. Well, technically across the alleway and over two houses from me, which I believe constitutes the term "kittycorner", but these blogs tend to run lengthy and I'm trying to remain conservative with my details. I hadn't realized her approximation to my house for the first three years of highschool (our groups ran in such seperate circles that she could have lived in Transylvania and I wouldn't have known it).

Then one dark, soundless spring night while looking for shooting stars on the roof (a habit I learned from my dad years ago), I noticed a pink streak wth fine golden hair speeding from one lit-up room of an adjacent house to another. When you are 17-years-old, anything with exposed skin and blonde hair draws immediate priority over everything else.

It was Jenna Oliver. And seeing Jenna Oliver in a bathtowel was like striking gold or videotaping a Sasquatch.
It was like shaking hands with Tupac.

Jenna Oliver. It might as well have been Bridgette Bardot.
Catherine Deneuve.
Audrey Hepburn.

"Holy shit," is the first sentiment that popped into my numbed-up brain. Followed closely by, "I'm seeing Jenna Oliver in a towel. She's in a towel and her hair is wet . She's in a towel, her hair is wet and her skin is all tanned." ***

What I'd like to tell you is that I remained cool. I'd really like to tell you this, but that would be lying and I wanna save all my lies in this blog for later. So although I'd like to tell you that I calmly enjoyed a glimpse of natural beauty and went merrily on with the rest of my life, I am instead forced to admit that I had a total freak-out and set up camp on my Goddamn roof for the remainder of the spring and into the summer. Noticing the amount of stargazing I had recently been engaging in, my mother bought me a telescope to better cultivate my newfound love of the stars.

I'm not kidding - it got that bad.

I also formed an odd habit of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while I waited for a glimpse of the Unattainable****.

Mozart enjoyed eating cheese while he composed, I enjoyed peanut butter and jelly while I stalked...

...Alright, lemme stop here for a second, because I'm worrying that I'm making myself out to be a dangerous creep. I wasn't dangerous. I petted dogs without them barking at me, still made babies laugh instead of cried. I was a loser - absolutely - but I wasn't a sicko. I still maintained my friendships. Still went out on weekends, completed all my homework and so-on. And while I did all that, I swore myself to secrecy. This was my mania to deal with alone. For better or for worse.

And that's how it went for the remainder of the schoolyear. Being a senior was both amazing and ominous. I was scared for my college-bound future and scared to leave my highschool years behind me. There was something comforting about my roof. Jenna Oliver became inhuman after a while. It wasn't about seeing her so much as it was about achieving a goal, which many months ago had been set at catching a glimpse. And occasionally I would see her, but only briefly and only in the evening (and never more scantily clad than that first night). I imagined her to be too cool to ever be home on the weekends. I imagined Jenna never having experienced heartbreak or sadness. I imagined her to be forever happy, always partying, always excited to be alive.

I wondered what someone like her would think of someone like me if she ever realized I climbed onto the roof 3 evenings out of every 7 with a baggie full of sandwiches. Or what she might think if she ever caught a glimpse into my window?

Life can be cruelly humorous sometimes. The summer before college, I needed a car. Anything would do, it just needed to run properly. I searched classifieds for people selling their cars and saw an ad for a nice '94 Mazda 626. Not too old. I called the number to inquire about it, the lady on the other end was middle-aged sounding, maybe older. She gave me the address and lo and behold it happened to be just one block over from me. Crazy coincidence, right?

It was Jenna Oliver's house.

And what I did not know at the time, but soon realized, was that Jenna was selling her car before she headed off to college. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that until I compared the address I had written on a Post-It note to the numbers on the house I was standing in front of. They were expecting me, I couldn't turn back now.

Could I? God what if Jenna was home? I should turn around... too late, I had already rung the doorbell. If there was a God, he would have sent Jenna to the mall an hour ago. And while we're dictating what God would do if he existed, he would not only have sent Jenna to the mall an hour ago, he would also have her try on the new underwear she bought at the mall, later tonight while I am eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches...

God apparently retired.

Jenna opens the door and sees me standing outside her home. Amazing is the only word arriving at the forefront of my thoughts. What were the fucking odds that this social butterfly would actually be home on a Saturday afternoon?! In all the days I'd sat out on the roof, I couldn't recall a single-Goddamned- time Jenna Oliver had ever been home at this time of the day.

The first thing out of Jenna's mouth was, "finally decided to get off your roof, huh?"
Alright. She didn't say that. But I imagined her saying that and I wanted you all to share in the same brief moment of horror that I had to. In actuality, she said, "Hey!" in an oddly excited fashion, like we were old buddies.

Because I am suave like George Clooney, I respond in kind with something akin to, "Jenna. you live here? Wow. Small um, world. I live just across the alley. I never knew you lived here."

I remember her smiling for an extended moment and, to this day, I wonder if it was because she knew I was lying.

At this point, all of those creepy stalker movies from the early nineties were edging their way into my consciousness. These movies always had an interaction between the slasher/stalker and the damsel-in-distress. About 50 minutes into the movie, the damsel would have some sort of run-in with the slasher (always appearing to be a kind, joyful sort) and to her, the run-in would seem harmless. But for the audience, the meeting would be wraught with tension and fear. Suddenly I felt like the audience (watching via hidden video cameras planted throughout my town, of course) was finding this particular meeting uber-creepy; wrought with tension and fear.
I was Hannibal Lector.
I was Son of Sam.
I was Lady MacBeth. I already had blood on my hands. I had never before fashioned myself Hannibal Lector, but the audience now had and I hated them for that.

The tortured outcome of this meeting is that the car turned out to be a great deal. It was in good condition, even has a tape player. I told her I'd take it and immediately regretted the decison.

I could almost hear the unsettling Howard Shore music in the background as I wrote the check. And in the brief moment our hands made contact as I passed her the check, I imagined a slow-motion close-up of this encounter, the audience recoiling, counting down the inevitable seconds until I was wearing her face as a mask!

I was a sick cannibal. Driving around in Jenna's old flesh.

As I climbed into the driver's seat, waving to Jenna I couldn't help but wonder what fava beans tasted like.

Only now - years later - does any of this strike me as humorous. The things we remember of our past; those things that will forever remain as fact. Faces and places sometimes fizzle and blur. What was said is more often than not paraphrased or fabricated altogether. Times of day, motivations; these are the things that escape us with each passing year. They are often replaced in order to protect us.

I don't remember why I sat out on the roof that last summer night, but looking back, I tell myself it was to see if Jenna had left for college yet, as I was fairly certain it would be the last time I ever saw her.† I can no longer recall the weather that final night sitting, stuck in a forward gaze into a veritable strangers bedroom window, but I'll go ahead and paint that night as a brisk August evening, because sitting here typing, that's the way I remember it.

It wasn't stalking, it was agressive fondness.

Those were the good ol' days of stalking. Back then, I put in my time. Worked my hours. Ate my sandwiches. There's no more challenge anymore. I'll finish blogging and then see what my girlfriend from four years ago did yesterday without leaving my seat... and it wouldn't be creepy. It will be assumed. Everyone is stalking these days.

Maybe even Jenna. Maybe not though, she doesn't have a MySpace account. Trust me, I've checked. Y'know... for posterity.
For the record.
For the books.
For old times sake.
_____________________________________________________________

* It should be noted that, if you happened to be the coolest person in high school, there were still "Unattainables" around. No one could escape this. If you were at the top of the heap in your own school, than YOUR Unattainable was probably enrolled at the private Catholic school on the other side of town, or the senior from last year's class, now in college.
Proof that, regardless of who you are, shit always rolls downhill.

** There was no specific reason I did this, I had other shirts. But in a running theme through this blog: teenagers can't explain anything they do. That's why everyone who is not a teenager, hates teenagers.

# I never imagined this in some gross horny manner, I just really enjoyed film noir.

*** When my faculties began functioning again, I deduced that she had just gotten out of the shower. Smart, huh?
I got B's in high school.

**** I guess it's not so odd that I ate sandwich snacks out on the roof, but I put them in plastic baggies... that's the part that's kinda wierd. I'm not sure why exactly. I never really thought about it. My mom packed my lunch sandwiches in those baggies and it just came with the territory. See? I'm telling you, teenagers can't explain anything they do. Whatever actions highschoolers take, they don't question the reasoning behind it. Just do-do-do. Why? Who the fuck knows.

† I've remained correct in that hunch, so far. I occasionally hear about her, but I have yet to see her since that summer. I hear she is still very attractive and hasn't gained any weight at all.