call of the plains

As requested, I have one story about the stalker I shared with my friend W. That in itself requires some explanation. The woman was not stalking me, but since I lived with W. and hung out with him a lot, she was always around our house and wherever we were out on the town.

W. was very nice about it, much nicer than I would have been. M., the stalker, and I had been very close friends for several months. She was on an upswing at that point (she is bipolar), reaching a manic phase, and we would stay up late watching the X Files and then I'd crash while she stayed up all night doing whatever it was she did. I mean I never woke up with her standing over me or anything. Anyway, once she started her depressive phase, she stopped speaking to me.

Move ahead several months. I'd moved in with W. and we were happily getting his new house and yard cleaned up and decorated and lived in. M. had stopped hanging around him for a while but had recently reappeared. We were out one night drinking and then went back to our house. W. and I both went to bed and M. was supposed to be sleeping on the couch but as usual she crept upstairs into W.'s room. A bit later we both woke up to swearing and a loud "bump bump bump" noise ending in a crash.

M. had gotten up to go to the bathroom and had put her hand down on a speaker we had set on the landing half way up the stairs. The speaker was rather tippy because it was an old house and the floor wasn't even so when M. tried to steady herself it fell over. She pitched down the stairs head first and landed at the bottom, head resting on W.'s hand weights with the speaker on her back. W. came racing down in his underwear* and after we stopped laughing we picked up M. and tried to get her to go to the hospital. I was sure she had a concussion and she proved me right by commencing to vomit. Luckily the bathroom was at the bottom of the stairs so we just positioned her and stood back. She refused to go to the emergency room after a lot of arguing so I'm afraid we just left her alone. Some time in the morning she drove herself home. I think that was the last time she followed W. around.

It sounds really mean that we started laughing as soon as we saw her but 1. she was not supposed to be upstairs in the first place and 2. her big ass was hanging out and sort of up in the air and 3. her head was literally wedged against some 10 lb weights and the wall and with the speaker on her back she looked like a big white crazy-eyed turtle. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

*W. had chosen to wear tighty whiteys that night for some unknown reason. I'm still a little scarred by that.