Stalker Update

Let’s see….Okay. So, he was living with his invalid parents, next door to me. Fri, Nov. 8th his father dies in the afternoon, at home. So now he’s just living with his mother. And he, Don, (or rather: Sir Veillance as I like to call him), was still watching me come and go and watching my windows from outside. I am still coming and going from my back door to try to limit my contact with him. Other tenants in my building were starting to complain about his strange behavior, and, since I was one who received a ‘note’ from him, one of my neighbors suggested I report to the police, just to have something written down on record, in case things get worse. I was reluctant to do this because I imagined telling the police that my next-door-neighbor is stalking me and having the whole station erupt in laughter. This is not far from my actual experience. After filing a non-criminal police report with my less-than-sympathetic police district, I was contacted by a Chicago P.D. detective to said she’d call ‘Don’ and explain to him that I found his behavior to be threatening. In the meantime numerous, other tenants have taken up complaints with the property manager. My landlord (also my day-job boss) went to have a discussion with Don on Sunday and he took a very tall, Russian friend of his who’s in town to pose as his friend who “takes-care-of-business” complete with a finger ‘pistol’ in his pocket. (Ames, you would’ve loved it.) He confronted Don. Don says the tenants are making up lies about him. My landlord/boss said if he hears one more complaint about him he and his mother will be out. I’m not sure if he can legally do that, because Don is named on the lease, but we ‘the tenants of the building’ have been asked to write letters for a file on him in case he is kicked out and there’s a legal dispute. So far, fortunately, I haven’t seen much of Sir Veillance since my landlord/boss had the ‘chat.’ I hope that this is the end of his behavior any which way- only time will tell. It’s so strange to think that for the past two months I’ve actually gotten accustomed to always looking over my shoulder, always checking out the window to see if he’s there, varying the times I come and go so he can’t guess my schedule, religiously carrying pepper spray with finger on the trigger. It’s not so much that I feel he has violent intentions, but I feel I have a part in the fantasy in his head that, though far from reality, is perfectly normal to him. I feel he is mentally unstable, and not just because he has recently lost his job AND his father, but that his perception of reality is skewed. On one hand I am glad that he hasn’t attacked me yet, but on the other hand, I sort of wish he had so I’d have more clear cut case with the police. It is such a rollercoaster. Some days I am so stressed out I cannot concentrate on anything else, some days I am so angry that this stranger has dictated a new lifestyle to me that I’m extremely cynical, some days I feel I’m the one who’s crazy (until I remember I’m not the only one complaining), many days I am pissed off that I seem to only attract the weirdest of weird, and other days I try to laugh it off by entertaining the thought that having a stalker is kind of like having a pet that you don’t have to feed. He’s dependable, he would follow me without a leash, and at one point, he was even fetching my mail.