I have a confession to make. I’m a stalker. Not the dangerous, pet rabbit boiling kind. Just your average a million times bitten, a zillion times shy type. I’m too afraid to just take a chance on love with a stranger, and in a town as tiny as Portland, what I’m really afraid of is that my “stranger” will turn out to be my best friend’s most distained “ex”. This is a socially inbred town, if ever there was one. Everyone seems to have had their hands down everyone else’s pants at sometime or other. Except me, that is. When I moved out here, I left behind a town full of bars, full of men of whom I had been full, at least once. I was sick and tired of the constant cringing and evasive manuvering that came with being a regretful slut, so I resolved to make a virginally fresh start in Portland. Little did I know that five years later I would be utterly devoid of male companionship in the biblical sense and totally hung up on amassing dossiers of useless information on a myriad of men who have never progressed passed my initial phase of infatuation. Instead of merely screening out the undesirables, I seem to have eliminated my sex life altogether.

And yet, I find stalking almost as sublimely fulfilling as regular rolls in the hay. I am constantly in a state of secret crush, which, if I remember correctly, is usually the best part of every relationship. It’s like always eating the icing and none of the cake. You get all the delicious, creamy thrills and chills, and none of the dry, flaky shit that gets stuck in your craw, no matter what you try to wash it down with. Stalking lets me flesh out my crushes into a full-blown, highly detailed fantasies. I start with in-depth interviews with his colleagues and friends, then looking him up in the white pages, on the internet and possibly his high school yearbook, if available. From there, if my interest is still ignited, I may progress to drive-bys on his home or workplace. For some reason, just seeing his car or bike or light, is deeply satisfying. Occasionally, I may enlist the help of an accomplice and stake out his favorite watering hole (the location of which I gleaned from my background research). I usually pull the plug on the operation before it progresses to this point, because the stake outs are generally fruitless exercises in frustration, as the object of my affection never seems to materialize and I end up all fucked up with no place to go. Even when my highly contrived kismet actually happens, invariably my crush suddenly stops burning and goes down in flames. My fantasy just can’t handle his reality, and I realize that he wasn’t the boy I made him up to be. Besides, what am I going to do, drag him off to my cat infested lair? I have my neo-virginal honor at stake...

And so the cycle goes: meet new boy, hack into his FBI file, actually get to know him briefly, lose all interest, next batter up. I might be at the brink of commitment (to an institution, that is), if I didn’t take solace in two things. One, that I am so well practiced at going deeply undercover emotionally, my victims are always altogether unwitting of their participation in my covert scheme. Therefore, we both emerge completely unscathed from the experience. He may have some dim recollection of some blond buying him a drink, but that’s about it. And I walk away with smug self-satisfaction at having avoided months or years of a relationship that was doomed from the outset by factors which my internal investigation turned up before he can even remember my name.

The second point of comfort lies in the fact that I am in damn good company. Stalking is a way of life for many otherwise rational, intelligent, straightforward women. We may not talk about it much in mixed company, but among our own kind, stalking is celebrated as a lifestyle choice. My friend Jane, for instance, makes me pale by comparison to her robust means of shadowy pursuit. She was the one who turned me on to the yearbook thing. (You can find public high school yearbooks stashed in the reference sections of town libraries. If he’s a local yokel, with some patient pouring over of pictures you can determine all sorts of interesting factoids...). I refer to another partner in crime as my “one stop info shop”. If you have a first name, and a general physical description, she can download from her mental database all sorts of terribly personal information about just about any boy in the metro area. From pets to penis size, she’s got it all. My friends and I act as a ring of operatives all trailing the same target when one of us has it bad for a particular fella. We make extensive use of the telephone to keep the stalker fully apprised of her victim’s whereabouts and state of being. It’s not altogether uncommon for us to relay messages like, “I have him in sights at the Space Room and he’s half in the bag. You have a possible 45 minute window of opportunity starting now at 2300 hours. It’s a go, take him down!” It’s also not altogether uncommon to immediately rouse from a deep slumber, slap some make up on and drive like hell to the rendezvous point upon receipt of said message. And when the crush withers, it’s like a little death for us all, until the torch is picked up for someone new.

Isn’t it cute the way girls can get away with all this creepy stuff, while guys are routinely sent to prison for it? Girls are probably a little bit better at keeping it undercover, and don’t usually resort to breaking and entering, except in extreme circumstances. Of course, we wouldn’t be driven to use nefarious means at all if you guys were reliable, honest and on the level, in the first place. So there. By the way, the preceeding has all been completely hypothetical conjecture on my part. If you happen to be a boy and you happen to know me, rest assured that I would never, ever actually DO any of these things, especially to you. Of course, I’m just making this all up for entertainment purposes. I’m actually a housebound happily married agoraphobe whose never even seen the Space Room, let alone staked out a man there. And did I mention that my dad’s an excellent defense attorney?