Moodswing - A lousy stalker

It’s time I stop stalking my ex-boyfriend — I know my husband, for one, would probably appreciate it — but old habits die hard. “Quit pretending you have a life without me and pick up the phone, you worthless stain on the butt end of the earth!” I shout into Lary’s answering machine, and Lary is not even my ex-boyfriend.

I was calling him so he’d go with me to the bookstore to pick up my ex-boyfriend’s latest best-seller. It’s his 10th or so; I’ve lost count, which means I suck as a stalker.

But still, 10 best-sellers? I knew him when he was nothin’! He was living in his car, for chrissakes! “Pick up the phone, you crusty pocket of pus! Pickituppickituppickitup!!!!!”

Finally my heavy flirting paid off and Lary picked up the phone. “Hi, whore,” he laughed. “Come over, what’s keeping you?” What was keeping me was that time three years ago when I showed up at his house unannounced and he shot at me.

“I didn’t shoot at you,” Lary likes to clarify. “If I shot at you I would have hit you and you’d be dead right now.”

Whatever the case, the incident is not one I’d like to relive. Other than that I consider Lary somewhat safe. He’s never threatened to kill me, although he’s offered to kill me a few times as a favor, to put me out of my misery like a lame horse, but I declined and he seems to respect that.

But he doesn’t respect my stalking technique. He considers himself an expert on stalkers, having been the victim of one himself for the past several months. I sort of feel responsible for that, having driven him to — and then ditched him at — the party where he met the girl who became his ex-girlfriend and then his stalker. The whole time she was engaged to marry someone else, but — since she also had multiple personalities — she was apparently able to multitask her relationships, too.

“I wouldn’t even have minded the multiple personalities if one of them wasn’t Satan,” Lary said. She’s moved away, but sometimes returns to Atlanta and sleeps in her car outside Lary’s back door. On those days Lary stays with another ex-girlfriend until the coast is clear.

“So I know a stalker when I see one,” Lary said to me, “and you’re no stalker.” I’d have to do more than buy someone’s books to be a stalker, he said. I buy all of Larry McMurtry’s books, he pointed out, and I’m not stalking him, now am I? But I didn’t used to know Larry McMurtry when he was living in a van on the campus parking lot, or wait tables with him in a really bad theme restaurant by the San Diego airport, or shoot pool with him regularly in a beachside dive bar.

So what I’m saying is that this ex-boyfriend is kind of camping out in my head, which I occasionally pound against the wall. “How can this be?” I wail inwardly. How can he catch a cosmic break like this while I’m still flailing around in the evil world like a little crab without its exoskeleton? Jesus God, I’m jealous.

The last time I saw him was when I’d returned to San Diego to care for my dying mother, who was living in a beach cottage not far from where my ex-boyfriend probably still lives. I recognized him one morning as we walked toward each other on the strand.

I didn’t know that he’d become hugely successful since I saw him last, so to me he was simply my old friend. But right then I couldn’t bear to be asked how I’d been doing lately — not on the verge of becoming an orphan as I was — so I ducked my head and we passed each other without a word.

“Remember Andy?” I asked my mother later that day. She was in a coma, but nurses had told me to talk to her anyway. “I just saw him but couldn’t say hi.” Then I stopped talking because talking felt awkward. She died a few hours later, in my arms as it just so happens, and I’ve always regretted that my last words to her were chosen so carelessly.

“You walked right by him, right by him, and said nothing,” Lary shakes his head. “See? You make a lousy stalker.”