44 Chapters About 4 Men (29 page)

Dear Journal,

Did you know that I’ve had the same cell phone number since 1998? It’s true. And I’ve been screening my calls since 1999. Unless the number on the caller ID belongs to someone I would ask to bail me out of jail, I do not answer.

Ever since Skeletor went all stalkery on me after the Halloween breakup from hell, I eventually realized that the phone is just an evil
Donnie Darko
–style wormhole that has the power to connect you directly to someone far away who wants to scream at you and call you a whore.

Well, fuck you, Wormhole! Whose side are you on?

Of course, this was Ronald McKnight we were dealing with, and he was nothing if not thorough. So, naturally, his particular brand of stalking included attacks by air (cell towers) as well as by land. You see, when your stalker calls you fifty-seven times a day to no avail, eventually, he’s going to have to hunt you down so that he can scream at you in person. Only, by then, he’s going to be extra pissed off because his monster truck only gets four miles to the gallon, and you just cost him, like, a hundred bucks with your selfish call-screening ways.

Honestly, referring to what Knight put me through as stalking is a bit of an understatement. That shit was terrorism. The word
stalk
implies a certain degree of stealth, which one cannot attain when one’s vehicle is louder than a Boeing 737 driving over a fresh bed of M-80s inside an aluminum school gymnasium. I would have welcomed a good old-fashioned stalking compared to the psychological torture I’d endured.

Oh…you just happened to show up, unannounced, where I am. What a creepy coincidence.

Oh, look at that. There’s a random hair doll on my porch…
a
nd it’s just my color.

Hmm…somebody seems to have left a collage of pictures of me splattered with blood on my car…again.

Child’s play.

Instead, Knight used classical conditioning to paralyze me with fear two to five times per week. Like a Pavlovian dog, the instant my highly attuned ears picked up on the inimitable rumble of Knight’s piecemeal Frankentruck in the distance, my body would freeze. It didn’t matter what I’d been doing—ringing up a customer at Pier 1 Imports, smoking a cigarette in the parking lot, readjusting my thong—the moment my brain registered that ominous engine roar, my simple daily life activities would become suspended in time, as though I were a post-volcanic citizen of Pompeii. I could literally hear Knight’s wrath coming a mile away, which gave me plenty of time to dissociate and watch from some safe floaty place above my body as Knight lurched his homemade tank over the curb in front of wherever I happened to be at the time. Then, he’d descend upon the blinking vacant doe-eyed decoy left standing in my place.

The problem with having a cell phone you don’t answer is that, over time, you wind up giving the number to anyone and everyone who asks for it.

Because
fuck it
. Right? What’s the worst that can happen? They actually call? I’m not gonna answer anyway.

And when you give your number to anyone and everyone and then don’t answer, you get a lot of voice mails.

Last week, I had a voice mail from a drunken ex—ahem, Ding-Dong—who guiltily admitted halfway through his message that he was in the process of masturbating.

Last night, some poor confused guy Sara picked up on the Las Vegas strip left me a message in which he wondered aloud why the name on my outgoing message was BB. (Sara likes to give her one night stands my number instead of hers because she’s an asshole. I don’t exactly discourage her because the voice mails make me laugh. I am also an asshole.)

And today Sara’s mom left a message, asking me to pray with her that this Alex guy that Sara is kind of seeing gets her pregnant so that she can finally have a grandbaby.

See, Journal? I can’t answer that fucker. It could literally be
anybody
. There is a very real chance that Satan himself could be on the other line, just waiting for me to pick up so that he can play the first few lines of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” backward and make my head rotate three hundred and sixty degrees while spraying bile like some kind of oscillating sprinkler head from hell.

It’s just not worth the risk.

So, now, you are probably asking yourself,
Why doesn’t she just change her fucking number?

I know. I ask myself the same thing all…the…time.

And honestly, up until recently, I didn’t have an answer. The damn thing rings day and night. And every time I see
Blocked
on my caller ID, I still have to suppress the urge to scream and stomp on my phone as if it were on fire.

But, for some unknown reason, the idea of changing my number has always been scarier. I was never able to cut the cord, but I had no idea why.

Until May 28, 2009.

The call came from my high school buddy, Tim, whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, and luckily, like everyone else under the sun, he still had my cell number. When I called him back after listening to his clipped, foreboding voice mail, he told me what I had been subconsciously waiting to hear since the day I met Ronald “Skeletor” McKnight.

He was dead.

Stabbed to death in a bar fight.

At the age of twenty-eight.

No matter how nasty our breakups had been, Knight never stopped calling me. No matter how many times he lost, pissed on, or crushed his phone into a million pieces with his bare hands; no matter how drunk he was; no matter how long it had been since we last spoke, Knight always remembered my number. It was tattooed on his brain (probably literally, knowing him).

Eventually, Knight’s calls faded from traumatizing-stalker levels to just typical middle-of-the-night-drunk-ex-boyfriend levels, but good, bad, or ugly, I never answered more than twice a year. Knight was a drug so potent that I knew I could only take a hit once every six months without falling back off the wagon.

Which, I found out once I switched my major to psychology, was just frequently enough to ensure that Knight would continue to call me forever.

I remember the exact moment I learned the term
intermittent positive reinforcement
. I was a sophomore in college. Knight and I had been broken up since my junior year of high school, so I’d already been trying (and failing) to avoid him for three years at that point.

When the hot young grad student teaching my behavioral psychology class explained to us that the hands-down best way to ensure that a behavior continued wasn’t to reward it every time it was displayed but to reinforce it randomly, my mind immediately conjured a picture of Knight’s icy, spectral face.

Holy shit! He keeps calling because I pick up at random intervals!

The second Cutie Pie asked if anyone had an example, I thrust my cell phone high into the air with a gasp of insight.

I can give you a fucking example!

Knight would typically open our biannual grown-up, yeah-sure-we’re-just-friends-now conversations by bragging about his most recent sexual conquests and exploits. It was like a tic. Then, somehow sensing my agitation through his thick drunken fog, he would change the subject, bragging instead about his recent bar-fight triumphs. After a little banter, Knight would finally pluck up enough courage to bring the conversation around to
us
, launching into a diatribe about how sorry he was for everything he’d done…blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. When I’d eventually cut him off, gently complaining about having to get up early or giving some other thinly veiled excuse to end the discomfort, he would always close with his patented ex-stalker good-bye, saying I was still
his
girl, that he’d always love me, and if I ever needed anything, he’d be there.

I know, Knight. You poor deranged, psychotic motherfucker, I know.

I’d roll my eyes and sigh into the phone, its battery searing hot against my cheek by the time I finally hung up, and just be happy that Knight was still alive and no longer driving by my parents’ house nightly or screaming at me in public.

Knight had joined the Marines the instant he graduated from high school. It didn’t change him much. He was already scary, muscle-bound, and militant, so being a Marine just…fit.

But after doing a tour of duty in Fallujah, the nature of Knight’s phone calls changed. They became friendly, vulnerable even. He asked for advice about women, finances. He talked about problems he was having with his friends and employers. He called during daylight hours, sober hours. The deeper I got into my psychology coursework, the more clear it became that Knight was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and he needed help.

I asked him about it once, and he said, “Yeah. That’s what the doc told me. Gave me some pills, but they don’t fucking work. Last night, I tried to kill a guy downtown. He started some shit with me at The Point and before I knew what was happening, my buddies were holding me back and I had a fucking broken beer bottle in my hand. They said I’d smashed the neck off on the edge of the bar and lunged at the guy. I don’t even remember doing it. So…I think it’s getting worse?”

Jesus. Ya think?

Knight later told me that one of the first things he’d seen when he touched down in Fallujah was a woman’s hand on the side of the road. Just lying there, like some dubious
Welcome to Iraq
sign. In Hawaii, pretty girls drape leis strung with fresh plumeria blossoms around your neck and kiss your cheek. In Fallujah, a bloody, sun-scorched, severed hand waves hello to you from the side of an IED-infested desert road.

I don’t know the half of what he saw, heard, or
did
while he was over there, but Knight was an emotional paradox when he returned. He’d be pensive and candid and introspective during our irregular phone calls, yet after a beer or ten, he was even more violent, brash, and reckless than ever.

Within months of his return, Knight had wrecked his motorcycle twice, the second time resulting in road rash so bad on his back that he looked like one of Hannibal Lecter’s victims. His entire back piece, the McKnight coat of arms, was just…gone.

It’s these changes in his demeanor, the increased rage and recklessness, that make it so hard for me to believe the circumstances surrounding Knight’s death.

As the story goes, Knight was trying to break up a fight between his buddy and some asshole when he was stabbed in the back by the girlfriend of said asshole. The media painted him as the heroic veteran, a valiant US Marine just stepping in to defuse a violent situation in a local bar.

Right.

I don’t care what anybody says. The Knight I knew had either started that fight or jumped in to finish it. The Knight I knew had probably gone into a blind rage and wouldn’t have stopped pummeling the nameless, faceless stranger in his grasp until he went limp. The Knight I knew was the scariest motherfucker on earth, and if he ever got
my
boyfriend on the ground while he was in full-on Skeletor mode, I would have felt the need to stab him until he stopped, too.

Or maybe that’s just the story I want to believe. Maybe I want the world to be a just place where people who serve our country overseas don’t come home just to be slaughtered at the hands of one of our own citizens while trying to break up a fight.

It was bittersweet, knowing that as I was burying my first great love, another great love was growing inside me. I worried the edges of the sonogram photo in my pocket as I gazed into the casket at Knight’s face. He looked so different from the fuzzy-headed, freckle-faced boy who had once picked dandelions for me and drawn me stick-figure pornos at school. He looked old. Leathery. Spent. His fair skin, damaged from countless hours working outdoors and riding a motorcycle, was already set into deep wrinkles, exacerbated by a lifetime of scowling. His baby-fine almost transparent blond hair—grown out and slicked back, biker-style—lay thin and limp atop his head. Not much different from when it had been shaved, it was still just a colorless frame around a colorless face.

Without a whisper of pigment in his eyebrows, eyelashes, or sideburns, Knight’s leveling arctic-blue eyes with their contrasting black pupils used to provide the only point of reference on his otherwise pallid face. Without them, his appearance was that of a man wearing an unfinished flaccid, flesh-toned rubber mask. As my brain desperately searched and scanned his pale face for that familiar bite of blue, repeatedly coming up lacking, images from the final scenes of
The Terminator
began to infiltrate my consciousness.