Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker Page 3
Unlike iPhone or Facebook messages, Twitter doesn’t confirm receipt of direct messages. Even so, I return now and then to our one-way conversation, wanting so badly for the time stamp at the bottom of my message to read “Seen.”
* * *
Months later, after I published a version of this essay in the Guardian, Dr. Rich’s warning proved true, and I went bananas. I lost my mind.
Admittedly, I’d never had the sturdiest of dispositions. But after the piece went viral, the internet blew up in my face. Throughout my essay, I’d used the word “stalking”—as in “internet stalking”—something I considered a colloquial term at the time, but one that, given my car rental, people took quite seriously. So I was called a stalker, in the legal sense, and people wanted me to pay for it. Every five minutes, for more than two months, my phone buzzed with Twitter notifications and email alerts and actual phone calls and text messages from people who’d somehow tracked down my number.
The media team at HarperCollins initially wrote me fan mail about the piece, but when the tide turned against it on social media, they wrote me follow-up hatemail. My book editors said they’d talk to the media gals for me, but that my next book, a sequel that had been purchased as a package deal with the first, would not be promoted at all; they simply weren’t sure how to market a young adult novel, they explained, without bloggers. They told me to “go for a walk,” to “leave my computer at home” and “get some work done,” not realizing that with their encouragement—in fact, because of what had felt like an ultimatum from them—the internet had become my work, and my home.
If someone sets your neighbor’s lawn on fire, you might think of moving house or at least setting up some security precautions. I blocked people who wouldn’t stop tweeting at me. I moved threatening emails, some of which told me to kill myself or contained Google Maps photos of my mother’s house, to my spam folder. But my phone kept buzzing, and even when it didn’t buzz, I unlocked it to see what people were saying about me. I’d begun to hate myself. I didn’t know why—but I thought the internet could teach me.
Having never lost my mind before, I felt surprised by how persuasive madness was. Sites like Gawker, Jezebel, and the Los Angeles Times ran articles about me that featured photos from my Instagram account—selfies that I’d taken with strangers’ dogs, only they cropped the dogs out, so that it was just me, smiling like an overjoyed maniac. People I’d cooked dinner for in my home wrote posts on their blogs, analyzing the various microaggressions contained in my piece. I drank Grüner Veltliner by the bottle, and swallowed Klonopin, and read everything bad that everyone said about me. Online, people’s hatred made me sweat. IRL, people’s love made me feel like a burden. I started to think it might be nice to die. Just for a little while. I would die, I decided, and then in the spring I’d get married to my fiancé, whom I loved. My mind wasn’t working anymore.
One night I changed the passwords on all my various devices and started sawing at my wrist with a serrated knife. When I seemed to run out of space on one wrist, I switched to the other. But then the bloody crosshatching didn’t match. The two wrists seemed uneven. So I tried to even them out.
At the psychiatric hospital, they took away my shoelaces and spiral notebooks. I met a woman named Marva who told me she was from outer space, but used to be a poet. The nurses forbade us to touch. But I would learn that patients found ways to comfort each other.
Marva barely spoke except to yell at us. But one day in group, she placed her forehead on the table and wept. All she wanted was a hug, she said. Holidays were approaching, and as part of our therapy that morning we were making paper snowflakes for the fake Christmas tree, which the nurses had erected in the day room. While the burly group therapist asked Marva if she needed a nurse, the other patients put down their safety scissors and stretched their hands toward her across the table, hissing Marva’s name, until finally she looked up and wiped her eyes.
Marva. Marva! Pretend we’re holding your hands right now—from Earth.
Unlike me, these women had real problems. Every day I listened, humiliated, as they recounted addictions to bath salts, or losing their teeth to domestic violence, or hearing Satan scream at them all day and generally being host to a brain that always felt on fire, and when the therapist finally called on me to share, I whispered what had brought me there, because I felt so chastened by the relative lushness of my life. I talked about finally becoming a young adult author, like I’d always wanted, and losing my precious career because of all these tweets, and how the mortification of it all had made my brain turn off.
Everyone else got to remain anonymous, I complained. But I had to exist, under my real name, my real face.
When I finally looked up, tears were rolling down my cheeks. But the other women were giggling.
“What?” I said.
The woman without teeth smiled.
“Marva thinks she’s an alien,” she said, “and you think you’re a writer.”
“But I am,” I insisted. “I am, though.”
“I am,” Marva echoed.
Just then someone emitted a wild shriek, which sent everyone into fits—and at first I didn’t recognize the sound of my own pealing laughter in the mix. It had been so long since I’d heard the noise. The therapist urged us to stop. “What’s so funny?” she kept asking, and maybe we could have tried to explain it to her—the arrogance and self-delusion I’d just articulated—but instead we kept on laughing.
“And I’m famous!” the toothless woman shouted, and the rest of us howled until our teeth clacked and our eyes brimmed with water, and although I couldn’t see them, I thought I heard them reaching for me, their fingers squeaking across the laminate tabletop—Pretend we’re holding your hands, from Earth—and at least for that one moment, it felt like we were in on the same joke.
* I’d later find out from an inside source at HarperCollins that if you tweet a link to your book, probably less than 5 percent of your followers will click on it, and even fewer will buy it as a result.
* Nev’s show was later suspended, due to accusations of which he was formally acquitted but nevertheless ended that stage of his career because they went viral on the internet.
** The title reference comes at the very end of the documentary, during an interview with the man whose wife catfished Nev. He tries to explain her behavior with an allusion to the practice of shipping codfish overseas: “By the time the codfish reached China, the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with the idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them and the catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes.”
Prey
My obsession with animals preexisted any trauma in my life. As a five-year-old I wrote a fully illustrated book titled “Tigger Maskkir” (translation: “Tiger Massacre”) about circus animals who revolt and eat the clowns. My teachers thought I was becoming deranged, due to a fracturing home life, but my mom explained that it had been going on since before the divorce. I interviewed neighbors about their dogs. I put my teddy bears and stuffed lions to bed every night under blankets of washcloths—I couldn’t fall asleep until they were safely nestled together like Tetris pieces on the floor, covering every inch of carpet. I once stood for an hour with my face against the glass at Sea World, trying to make meaningful eye contact with a manatee. It never occurred to me that I was looking at a wild animal—my own reflection in the glass.
* * *
The opossum will play dead anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. At this time it cannot be provoked into moving. It can be kicked, poked and prodded, pinched or bitten without giving any signs of suffering. When the danger has passed, the opossum toddles away as if nothing ever happened.
—Ann Bailey Dunn, “Playing Possum,”
Wonderful West Virginia, July 2000
* * *
It was my first day of college. After unpacking, my mother and I
went to the Habitat for Humanity sale and bought a broken futon for $20. We carried it back across the quad, up a few flights of stairs, and into my new common room. And then my back started hurting.
Flustered by our impending separation, my equally obsessive mother became fixated on the idea of getting me a massage. A fan of free massages, I traipsed alongside her through Harvard Square, scouting options.
Every place was booked except for a place called About Hair, which offered haircuts and massages in addition to selling antiques. The store was so stuffed with secondhand items that some had been arranged outside on the sidewalk. A dark-haired, sullen-looking girl around my age was keeping an eye on them.
“The masseuse isn’t here today,” she told me in a thick accent that sounded Russian. But what did I know? I’d come from the suburbs of Milwaukee, a place so uncosmopolitan that my supermarket had an aisle labeled “Ethnic” that consisted entirely of pasta.
Standing there on the historic cobblestones outside About Hair, across from the gorgeous campus onto which I’d labored so hard to trespass, I could not deny that I had made it far out of Wisconsin, but I felt like an imposter. Massachusetts was the epicenter of sophistication, in my mind. I wanted to be worldly, open-minded, unruffled by difference. So I told myself the garbage for sale at my feet was art, that whoever owned the store must be very interesting—and when a nauseatingly pale and bald and shockingly muscular man, around fifty or sixty years old, stepped out from behind the maybe-Russian girl and introduced himself as the owner, I told myself he was an artist. Blue veins pulsed across his scalp. He looked like an albino snake. But I dismissed the reptilian hissing in my mind as midwestern narrow-mindedness. When Duncan Purdy smiled at me, I smiled back.
“I told her the masseuse is busy today,” the young woman mumbled, looking up at him with what appeared to be a mix of annoyance and fear.
He shook his head, smiling. “I can definitely fit her in.”
“Was that place creepy or artistic?” I asked my mother as we walked away. My appointment was not for a few hours. There was still time to cancel.
“Cambridge is very artsy,” she said, sounding distracted. Travel makes her nervous.
I nodded.
As I would later explain in my cross-examination, “I was trying very hard to be open-minded and not be sort of like a country girl, like a country bumpkin who didn’t understand the big city.”
* * *
Darwin’s encyclopedic investigation of domesticated species revealed an intriguing phenomenon. From his survey of the animal breeding work, he found that domesticated mammals in general exhibit a suite of behavioral, physiological, and morphological traits not observed in their wild forebears. Today, the full set of these characteristics is known to include: increased docility and tameness, coat color changes, reductions in tooth size … [and] prolongations in juvenile behavior.
—Adam S. Wilkins, Richard W. Wrangham,
and W. Tecumseh Fitch, Genetics,
vol. 197, no. 3 (2014)
* * *
After putting my mom in a cab to the airport, I returned to About Hair, which was now completely empty except for Duncan Purdy, who led me down a short flight of stairs, past mountains of antiques, to a dark, windowless room. A stool stood next to the massage bed. There was an industrial canister of massage oil on top of it. The cap was off. “I’ll give you a second to undress,” he said, giving me a towel.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“To cover yourself.”
It was a bath towel. When hung vertically it fell from my clavicle to my upper thighs. At home, a family friend had often given me back rubs on a portable massage bed that she kept in her car. I had scar tissue in my shoulder from an injury sustained in middle school, while snowboarding for the first time in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Befuddled by the injury, emergency room doctors in that small town had strapped my hand to my chest with an Ace bandage and discharged me for the six-hour car ride home. They thought it was dislocated. But over the next few days, the injury caved in and turned black. Milwaukee doctors performed surgery, put in pins, took them out, set me free. It still bothered me. The socket would not rotate and I had trouble lifting my hand above my head to blow-dry my hair. The family friend and I knew each other well, and even she covered me with a large bedsheet during massages.
But as I told myself, things were different on the East Coast.
* * *
Hognose snakes will often roll onto their back and play dead, going so far as to emit a foul musk and fecal matter from their cloaca and let their tongue hang out of their mouth, sometimes accompanied by small droplets of blood. If they are rolled upright while in this state, they will often roll back as if insisting they really are dead. It has been observed that the snake, while appearing to be dead, will still watch the threat that caused the death pose. The snake will “resurrect” sooner if the threat is looking away from it than if the threat is looking at the snake.
—Wikpedia (Original reference: G. M. Burghardt and H. W. Greene,
“Predator Simulation and Duration of Death Feigning in Neonate
Hognose Snakes,” Animal Behaviour, vol. 36, no. 6 [1988])
* * *
I gave the account of what happened next so many times in preparation for what would become my sworn testimony that during the actual trial I could tell the story with no emotion whatsoever. I once admitted to the district attorney that while I never actually questioned my version of events, I’d relayed them so repeatedly that on good days the incident felt more like something memorized than a genuine memory.
“That’s the point of testimony,” she said gently.
I grew up with a narrow understanding of sexual assault: if it didn’t include vaginal penetration (with knives on hand), it didn’t count as rape. Until I found out what mattered legally, I didn’t know how to categorize what had happened to me. I thought of it only in terms of his name: Duncan Purdy. In my gut it registered as a gross, sweaty thing that just lay there, coiled inside of me.
So here’s how it went:
I lay facedown on the table underneath the bath towel. Duncan Purdy came in fully clothed and yanked my arms behind my back until the scar tissue in my bad arm crunched and I thought my shoulders would dislocate. He tugged the towel off, flipped me onto my back, and leaned over me in a 69 position so that his crotch was in my face and his face was in my stomach. I could hardly breathe. He was tugging at my tits and working his way down to my thighs.
Unlike the hognose snake (Heterodon platirhinos), I didn’t shit myself or spit blood to make my lifelessness appear more real, but I did lie there frozen, with a detached sense of shock at my own paralyzed reaction, hating myself for being so stupid. I followed him here. I felt his nonerect penis through his pants at one point—a fact that stuck in my craw for a while afterward as one of the grossest parts—but I never saw it. And as the defense attorney said on the very last day of the trial, “It’s not quite the same as the worst of the rapes that one can envision … for instance, if he had actually, you know, thrown somebody on the ground and raped them with his penis.”
The details of which body parts he touched and in what order seem mundane and boring to me now—irrelevant except on the witness stand—though I still remember the overwhelming need to tell myself, over and over, that it wasn’t bad so long as he wasn’t looking at me—and he wasn’t; he was staring at the ceiling the whole time. As he raked his rough fingers over my skin, slathering me in waxy-smelling oil, I clung to the notion that his contemplating something other than my body was polite and professional. Maybe I had been right to argue with my abhorrence and schedule the appointment. Clearly he was not a masseuse because nothing he did felt good. But that didn’t necessarily make him a pervert. After all, he wasn’t looking at my body, which was exposed now on the table. He couldn’t see where he was putting his hands, I reasoned. So he didn’t meant to put them in my armpits, or in between my thighs. I was overreacting. It wasn’t happe
ning. He didn’t mean to.
I had made an appointment for thirty minutes but the whole thing lasted forty-five. When it was over he left the room and I wrapped my arms around my legs to cover my nakedness. Then I looked up and saw a mirror, hung above me in such a way that if someone were lying naked on her back underneath it, you would be able to see clearly between her legs by looking at the ceiling. The room was dark and I hadn’t noticed it before. But now my eyes had adjusted and I knew all my self-reassurances were bullshit. He hadn’t been averting his eyes; he had been calculatedly watching from a strange remove.
I looked around the room, which upon further scrutiny resembled a wood workshop. There were no windows. The only light trickled in from upstairs through the slats on the door. It started to sink in that I was in danger. Nobody knew where I was except for my mother, who was on a plane. I looked up and there was Duncan Purdy with an industrial bucket and a sponge, blocking the doorway. I let him wash me. He cupped the sponge in his hand and shoved it inside of me multiple times. He fisted me basically, with a sponge in his hand, and I didn’t make a sound.
“Go ahead and get dressed, I’ll be upstairs,” he said finally. “I’ll be upstairs.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d actually repeated himself or if my head was creating an echo.
So I did, I put on my skirt and tank top—an outfit I remember only because Duncan Purdy’s attorney would later ask me multiple times what I had been wearing that day, as if that had something to do with it—and met him by the cash register. In my mind, and in that moment, handing over the $48 my mother had given me was the last step to safety, the endpiece on a very close call. I hadn’t yet wrapped my mind around the fact that getting out alive might not be the only issue, or that paying would hurt my chances of being taken seriously in a courtroom. At that moment, my instinct was to quietly survive.
“You have a very athletic body,” he said, ringing me up. “Here’s my card. If you come back, I’ll give you a discount.”