Most writers I know nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things — or the horrible thing — that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire. (Everywhere I go as a writer — especially if I’m in drag as a “memoirist”—such fears seem to be first and foremost on people’s minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.) When I published my book Jane: A Murder—a book that took as its subject the 1969 murder of my mother’s younger sister — I too nursed terrible fears: namely, that I would be murdered as Jane was, as punishment for my writerly transgressions. It took the writing of not only that book, but also an unintended sequel, for me to undo this knot, and hand its strands to the wind.
Now, this story is old news, especially for me. The reason I’m bringing it up again is that, in the months directly preceding Iggy’s conception, I was interrupted for a spell by a stalker of sorts — a man obsessed with Jane’s murder, and with me as someone who had written about it. It started with a message on my voice mail at work: a man called to say my aunt “got what she deserved,” and called her a name. Specifically, he called her a “stupidhead.” (Clearly “cunt” or “bitch” would have had its own spice, but “stupidhead,” and the childish intonation in which it was delivered, generated its own species of alarm.)
I’ve worked in and around this subject long enough to know not to sit alone with such things, so I beelined down to the Valencia sheriff’s office, Harry by my side. The minute we opened the door, our spirits sank. The chubby white suburban teenagers impersonating cops were precisely the kind of men to whom we would have preferred not to unload this story. Nonetheless, I told the cop at the desk the briefest version I could manage, which spanned my aunt’s 1969 murder to the writing of my two books to the voice mail left at my work that morning. He listened to me blankly, then pulled off a shelf a binder thick as a phone book, which he began pawing through at a glacial pace. After about five minutes, his face lit up. “Here it is,” he said. “Annoying phone call.” He proceeded to write out these three words in painstaking capital letters on a form. As he labored, another young cop ambled over. What seems to be the problem here? he said. I repeated the tale. He had me call my voice mail and play him the message, after which he looked up with theatrical indignation and said, “Now, what would someone go and say a thing like that for?”
I came home and hid the “annoying phone call” report in the back of a file drawer, and hoped that was that.
A few days later, after picking up my mail at work, I found a handwritten letter from one of my students in the mix. In it he said he was very sorry to intrude upon my day, but he wanted me to know that a strange man was on campus looking for me. He said the man was stopping people in the cafeteria, in the library, at the security gate, asking if they knew me, and talking obsessively about my aunt’s murder, saying he needed to deliver me an important message. My dean got wind of the situation and whisked me into her office, where I stayed for the next four hours with the doors locked and the blinds drawn while waiting for the police to arrive — an experience that is fast becoming a staple of the American educational scene rather than a disruption of it. After campus security interviewed the student who left me the letter, along with a host of other people on campus with whom the man had spoken, I was left with this description: “a balding, heavyset white man in his early fifties, carrying an attaché case.”
Within forty-eight hours of his visit, as if acting out cinematic shorthand for how to deal with an unexpected, intense stress, I started smoking again — this after over two years of treating my body as a prenatal temple, my vices reduced to a single cup of green tea each morning. Now I sat in the backyard of our new house, a square clump of prickly weeds we felt unable to attend to until we knew how much money the pregnancy adventure was going to cost, inhaling egg-shriveling nicotine in the dark, a cylinder of pepper spray by my side. Other moments of my life may have looked worse, but this one felt like its own kind of bottom: I’d never felt so scared and nihilistic at the same time. I wept for the baby and the life I felt sure would never be ours, no matter how badly I wanted it, and for the violence that the stalker’s presence seemingly confirmed as impossible to outrun.
In the days and weeks that followed, I summoned the strength to call our donor and tell him we’d be skipping the month, and to begin the struggle of hoisting myself back onto the prenatal regime. I tried to return to reflecting on happy-making things, including a happy-making talk about Sedgwick I was due to deliver at my happy-making alma mater, the City University of New York. But the mantras of paranoid thinking—There must be no bad surprises and You can never be paranoid enough—had taken root. I couldn’t wait around for some wacko to “deliver me a message”; somehow I needed to get ahead of the situation.
It’s hard to explain, but I have a lot of friends who are private investigators. One of them gave me the number of a local PI, a guy named Andy Lamprey, described on a “total security solutions provider” website as follows: “A detective for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 29 years, Lamprey investigated numerous crimes, including homicide, and was a senior supervisor to the Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT). He is a court qualified expert in narcotics and vice enforcement and has performed several risk and vulnerability assessments, threat and management assessments and fraud investigations nationwide.”
You never know — there may come a time when you, too, feel the need to call upon an Andy Lamprey.
Lamprey eventually connects me with a guy named Malcolm, another ex-LAPD cop, who will sit, armed, in an unmarked car outside our house through the night, keeping watch over us, if we want. We want. Lamprey says he can negotiate us a reduced rate of $500 per night (LA has unbelievably high rates for “cover,” as I learn it’s called). I call my mother to ask for advice, and also to alert her to the wingnut on the loose, in case he drifts her way; she insists on putting a check in the mail to pay for a night or two of Malcolm. I feel grateful, but also guilty: it was I who had insisted on writing about Jane’s murder, and while I knew intellectually that I wasn’t responsible for this man’s actions any more than Jane was for her murder (as the caller had indicated), my less enlightened self felt sick with a sense of late-breaking comeuppance. I had summoned the horrible thing, and now here he was, attaché case in hand. It wasn’t long before my image of him merged with that of Jared Lee Loughner, the man who, exactly two weeks prior, had walked up to Representative Gabby Giffords in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, and shot her, along with eighteen others. A form letter from Giffords was found in Loughner’s home with the words “Die, Bitch” scrawled on it; Loughner was known for saying that women should not hold positions of power.
It doesn’t matter to me if both of these men are mad. Their voices still have clarity.
In the wake of the Patriot Act, during the second administration of George W., you made a series of small, handheld weapons. The rule was that each weapon had to be assembled from household items within minutes. You’d been gay-bashed before, two black eyes while waiting in line for a burrito (you ran after him, of course). Now you thought, if the government comes for its citizens, we should be prepared, even if our weapons are pathetic. Your art-weapons included a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle, a dirty sock sprouting nails, a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it, and more.