Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker

by Kathleen Hale

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling dazed as I slid his business card back across the counter. It was my only act of defiance that day. “Thank you so much.”

  As soon as the sun hit my face, I laughed. My knees were shaking and oil was dripping off the tips of my hair. I called my ex-boyfriend, who said, “Why in God’s name didn’t you leave?” Fifteen minutes later, I collapsed on the broken futon in my common room and gave one of my roommates the abbreviated version. “When I was ten, a man pulled down his bathing suit and masturbated at me,” she responded. “In my opinion, it’s best to forget about it.”

  The last person I told that day was my freshman proctor, a thirty-three-year-old man with braces who lived in the suite below ours. I pulled him aside at our dorm’s ice-cream meet-and-greet and said, “I think I was molested.” I wasn’t sure what to call it.

  “Were your breasts touched?” he asked sternly. I blinked at him, not knowing where to start. I wandered away and found myself in the sleep aid aisle at CVS. It was light out but I wanted to be dreaming. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in my dorm room, my eyes droopy from NyQuil, spending what would be the first of countless hours googling animal facts. “I need to erase it somehow,” I wrote in my diary. So I started listing new things to be afraid of. An anaconda’s prey ostensibly remains alive up until the digestion process. Moose are double-jointed and can kick in all directions while running up to thirty-five miles per hour. The cassowary, a shy bird that looks like a cross between a turkey and a velociraptor, and has sharp claws and a blue neck, and prowls Australian highways, and looms up to six and a half feet tall, not only exists, but can disembowel you with one sharp stroke. There were worse things out there than Duncan Purdy.

  * * *

  Tests of animal bones [at Chernobyl], where radioactivity gathers, reveal levels so high that the carcasses shouldn’t be touched with bare hands.

  —Mike Hale, “In Dead Zone of Chernobyl,

  Animal Kingdom Thrives,” New York Times,

  October 18, 2011

  * * *

  I’d always been a social creature. But during those first two months of college, it became difficult for me to talk to other humans about anything except animals. As midterms rolled around, instead of studying I found myself in the bowels of the library researching wild beasts. Most afternoons, when I should have been talking to professors about stuff I failed to understand in class because I wasn’t listening, I would aimlessly prowl the halls of the Natural History Museum, where I would read every single plaque five times, sometimes circling the space for hours before standing dazed under the whale skeleton—its baleen still intact and sprouting from its skull like a mustache. I preferred the clammy frenzy of my pointless research to class. Bettering myself, becoming credentialed, no longer obsessed me. In lecture, each professor’s sonorous voice triggered a feeling of claustrophobia. But as I fantasized about life-and-death scenarios with various nonhuman species, his head became an unthreatening speck across the room, his voice a harmless, fanlike drone.

  Over the next few weeks, I refocused my attention from the deadly beasts themselves to surviving hypothetical encounters with them. My know-how was gleaned from a combination of National Geographic videos, library books, and natural instinct. I even invented a game to distract and entertain myself during lectures: I’d flip to a fresh page, make it look like I was excitedly taking notes, and instead list as many scary creatures as I could, quizzing myself on the respective survival techniques. Then I’d check my answers against the answers in my diary, correcting myself in purple or blue pen—and occasionally chiming in on class discussion with evasive gobbledygook such as, “I totally agree with Bethany,” or “Well, if you consider the text through a Foucauldian lens, the characters are actually emphasizing what they don’t discuss. So what I’m interested in is the negative space in this book—what things have you guys noticed aren’t happening?” And then they’d talk about that for a while.

  Feral Hog: climb a tree √

  Bear: play dead √

  Great White Sharks: dig your thumbs into their eyeballs √

  Crocodiles: run. | NO—there’s a flap in their gullet that seals to keep water out of their throat during the death spin, so you should kick down its throat and choke it with water before it drowns you.

  Coyote: kick its head √

  Hyena: they hunt in packs so probably you will die. | Correct, but you could wrestle.

  Lions: talk in a calm voice to it and try to appear large √

  Rattlesnake: call 911 √

  Boa Constrictor (or Anaconda): don’t breathe. | Well, yes, but also don’t get caught in the first place. Also bite the tip of its tail as hard as you can.

  Moose: stay away! They’re dumb and stompy. Protect head √

  Tiger: I forget. | Be quiet, hide, and if it pounces, run to where it won’t land. Also FIGHT BACK.

  Piranha: don’t bleed √

  Mean Dog: kick it in the head √

  Fox: kick it in the head √

  Wolf: ? | Need more books.

  Unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t preparing to survive another attack, but rather to execute a counterattack of my own.

  * * *

  Feralization is the domestication process in reverse.

  —Edward O. Price, “Behavioral Aspects of Animal Domestication,”

  Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 59, no. 1 (1984)

  * * *

  I finally told my mom what had happened after the school newspaper published an article announcing that local business owner Duncan Purdy had been accused of running a house of prostitution. It was Thanksgiving break and I was home for the long weekend.

  Based on what was said in the article, undercover police officers had been staking out the joint for months. I imagined them watching through binoculars when I made my appointment. The sullen-looking maybe-Russian shopgirl on the sidewalk and others like her had been the masseuses, not him—and ostensibly she had turned me away because I did not physically qualify for the services she was there to perform. Or maybe she was trying to intervene—to save me from the man inside. Perhaps she knew what he was capable of. The idea that he might have done to others what he had done to me, combined with the fact that he was potentially a career criminal, somehow made my experience more real to me, and more categorically wrong.

  “This is all my fault,” Mom said, looking crumpled in the front seat. We were idling in the parking lot outside the mall. I kicked myself for not waiting to tell her until after we’d gone shopping; she hated the local shoe store even at the best of times. Now she was so upset we might not even end up going inside. “I set up the appointment. I should have known better.”

  “Can we please buy shoes?” I mumbled numbly. “Everyone at school is wearing those designer furry boots.” I had called ahead to make sure the store had the fake version.

  “Can I tell Daddy?”

  I shrugged. Just imagining the conversation made my face burn.

  She nodded, looking grave. “Your uncle knows people who could kill him. I think it’s the Irish Mafia.” She wasn’t joking. Apparently we had connections.

  “Mom. Come on.”

  I could feel her staring at me and wished there were something I could say to make her feel better that didn’t involve us talking about it anymore. I was struggling with conflicting mind-sets: there was the need to be believed and heard, and simultaneously the need to acknowledge that my experience paled in comparison to some.

  “Have you ever heard of the goliath tigerfish?” I tilted my head back, trying to keep the tears in with gravity. “They’re humongous and have these awful, daggerlike buckteeth. They’re the only fish that don’t fear crocodiles. They eat crocodiles, actually. Well, smaller ones, technically, but still.”

  “Can I hug you?” she asked.

  I let her.

  * * *

  Individual organisms in a community interact in many different ways. An interaction may benefit both individuals, or the in
teraction may benefit one organism to the detriment of the other. An interaction between two organisms that benefits one to the detriment of the other is an antagonistic interaction.

  —Allison N. P. Stevens, “Predation, Herbivory, and Parasitism,”

  Nature Education (2010)

  * * *

  The victims’ room at the district attorney’s office is decorated for the worst-case scenario. That is to say, it’s decorated for children. The first time I told my story in its entirety, I was sitting at the wrong end of a two-way mirror, in front of a Fisher-Price table strewn with toys. Plastic farm animals and dump trucks.

  They told me I was not the only girl. In addition to prosecuting Duncan Purdy on charges of running a house of prostitution, Assistant DA Melinda Thompson was also building a separate rape case against him. Melinda explained to me that although rape is often culturally defined by the number of injuries a victim sustains while fighting off a dick, Massachusetts’s legal definition of rape is defined by three elements: “penetration of any orifice by any object; force or threat of force; against the will of the victim.” I finally had a word to describe what had happened—“rape”—and as Mary Gaitskill described in her 1994 Harper’s essay on “acquaintance rape”: “the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts.”

  Jillian Gagnon looked like she could be my sister and had suffered a massage virtually identical to mine. (There were suspicions that Duncan Purdy had also hurt some of his sex workers, but none of them would, or really could, come forward due to fear of being deported.) Melinda explained that if I built my own case against Duncan, the judge and jury at Jillian’s trial would not know about me, and the judge and jury at my trial would not know about Jillian. However, if I served as a “prior bad acts” witness at Jillian’s upcoming trial, one jury would get to hear both stories.

  I had never filed a police report. There was zero physical evidence. It had been months for me and years for Jillian since our respective massages. Any verdict would hinge almost entirely on accuser testimony. At the time, I never considered the possibility that a jury would not believe me.

  As Melinda explained to me how the rules of evidence allow a jury considering a person’s guilt in one crime to hear facts about a different crime that is similar to the charged crime as proof of the person’s intent, system, or plan on the day he committed the charged crime—and how the jurors, in that scenario, aren’t considering whether or not the accused is guilty of the “prior bad acts” crime, but instead hear about that crime as supporting evidence of his guilt in the charged crime—my head spun. By then my attention span had waned to the point that doctors at campus health services were recommending amphetamine salts.

  But I’d watched enough National Geographic specials on group predation to know that deadly animals often hunt in packs. A few days later, I gave Melinda my answer. “Hyenas, wild dogs, lions—they’re all social carnivores,” I told her. “Even leopards—I mean, they’re incredibly fast, but they rely on teamwork to survive.”

  If my drivel made her question having invited me to be a witness, Melinda didn’t show it. Instead she listened attentively, arms crossed, nodding without any judgment—as if digressions about hyenas were common in the toy-littered victims’ room. Then she shook my hand.

  “Welcome to the pack,” she said.

  * * *

  Prior to Jillian’s trial, Melinda suggested it might be helpful to watch Duncan Purdy’s prostitution sentencing. “Closure and stuff,” she said. “No pressure.”

  She warned me the judge was “left-leaning,” but I thought that was a good thing. Leftist intellectual principles had allowed me to feel so superior to my midwestern cohort. I didn’t yet understand that in a country where the imprisoned population is predominantly made up of poor people, black people, and the mentally ill, criminals can also be victims. Hence, liberalism in the courtroom hinges first and foremost on second chances for the guilty—which makes sense, when you consider the constitutional principle behind American incarceration (rehabilitation), but not when you consider a victim’s desire for revenge.

  The man who got sentenced immediately prior to Duncan Purdy had been found guilty of hunting trick-or-treaters with a BB gun. I snatched a pen and notebook from my backpack and added “poachers” to my growing list of dangerous animals.

  As I reviewed my notes on venomous snakes, one of the BB gun victims’ parents stood up and read a victim’s impact statement for the judge about how their eight-year-old had a BB pellet lodged near his heart that couldn’t be removed or he would die.

  “There’s a chance it will slowly travel through his body and kill him anyway,” the father said, clasping his wife’s fingers, the printed statement shaking in his other hand.

  But the judge wasn’t paying attention. She gave the guilty man probation so quickly it was clear she’d made her decision even before putting on her robe. She explained that he’d had no priors, as if the BB thing had been a fluke.

  Duncan stepped up.

  In that moment, watching him stand before a lenient judge, I had the realization that humans are the most dangerous creatures. Of all the animals I’d studied, Duncan Purdy was the only one who’d actually hurt me. I watched his bald head shine greasily under the fluorescent lights and briefly regretted turning down my mother’s offer of a hit man. I knew what happened to sex offenders in prison. And I wanted that for him.

  The judge pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She explained to the courtroom that, because of Purdy’s previous crimes—which I learned ranged from drug possession to armed robbery—she planned to be slightly tougher on him than she had been on the poacher.

  For the prostitution charges, she sentenced him to two years and one day.

  Having covered criminal cases since then, I’m not surprised by her sentence. If anything, in retrospect, it seems pretty harsh. But at the time I felt shocked to learn that a man who’d wrestled immigrants into being his prostitutes would not be executed.

  Still, I believed in the justice system. I trusted a jury to decide whether what had happened to me was wrong—I wanted them to tell me what had happened, period. I thought the circus ahead would at least bring closure, and stuff. I thought I had noble intentions.

  I was wrong about a lot of things.

  * * *

  Animals are ostracized by their pack for being mentally or physically incapacitated, or for any other behavioral displays that might threaten the survival of the group.

  —Margaret Gruter and Roger D. Masters,

  “Ostracism as a Social and Biological Phenomenon,”

  Ethology and Sociobiology, vol. 7 (1986)

  * * *

  Girls, aside from those who became my closest friends, tried to give me hugs and then disappeared forever, or judged from afar. (While visiting me at college, my best friend from high school took one look at the For Sale sign outside Duncan Purdy’s forlorn, now empty store and said, “God, I would have left right away. What is wrong with you?”) I was a teenager and they were teenagers.

  I lost a lot of friends that year, in part because I wanted to tell everyone about the trial. Boys fetishized me, thinking they could reintroduce me to sex, which I had never learned to hate, or else they pulled my head to their chests, kissing my hair, as if we were in a movie. Everyone tried their best to be understanding, but the parts of our brain that develop empathy weren’t all there yet, and even for the most adult person in the world, my problems and I were a burden. “You’re too much,” they said. And they were right; I was impossible.

  But it wasn’t just about Duncan Purdy. I was young and passionate and annoying and promiscuous. I ate nothing all day and made up for it at night. I smoked too much weed, slept with my friends and their friends, inspiring a lot of controversy everywhere I went. I was intolerable. I was exciting. People fell in love with my impetuosity but grew sick of my predictable selfishness. Then I fell in love with their unavailability, and we br
oke each other’s hearts. As much as I wanted to break the mold of victimhood, my age and experience defined me.

  Eventually, I whittled down my friend group to a combination of patient empaths, mentally ill people, basic masochists, and those who would, for whatever reason, listen to me digress at length about radioactive wolf bones. The story often burbled to the surface during inappropriate times: over lunch with new acquaintances, during a fight with a friend about something weird that I had done, or when a paper was due. In retrospect, these were potentially stressful moments, so it makes sense that they might have conjured stressful memories. But at the time, peers saw my decision to spill the beans over cafeteria brunch as manipulative and possibly unhinged, and they weren’t wrong. Teaching assistants hinted that such confessions, when made while asking for an extension, seemed a little calculated.

  “I couldn’t tell if you were a bad person or the best person,” a boyfriend from that period later confessed. “When you were talking about it, especially if we were fighting, it felt like the ultimate trump card.”

  In general, my audiences felt used by me, and as a storyteller I grew increasingly anxious about my power to unsettle. Writing this essay took its own toll; during early drafts I called an old friend and confidant to ask about the way I acted freshman year. He asked if this was an opportunity to air old grievances and I told him sure—I asked forgiveness, realizing only afterward that doing so was tantamount to apologizing for screaming after somebody had hit me.

  Republishing it now is difficult, too. First I tried endlessly rewriting it before realizing I was stalling. The #MeToo movement was newly under way. But where I come from people remained skeptical. They worried that men are under fire. They talked about witch hunts and McCarthyism.

  Literally days before I sent this version to my editor, a source for a different story I was writing would express incredulity and contempt for sexual abuse narratives in general. “Where were all these men when I was growing up?” she asked. “These girls are mad about something, but it isn’t what they say.”