Somebody’s Watchin’ Me

Win­ter 1998

Work­ing, liv­ing & going to school in the City was an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence.  From the stolen cars to our neigh­bor who lived on the first floor.  His name was Charles, but some­time he came dressed as Char­lene.  A big (I mean super big mus­cled) man with a 5 o’clock shadow in a sequined dress.  A vision of blue sequins danc­ing before us.

Blue sequined Charles who came to my defense once when I came home from work & had a guy who was drunk cor­ner me on the front stoop.  He was ram­bling on about what he did for me & how I didn’t appre­ci­ate it.  I had never seen him before, but I became a stand-in for every slight & fail­ure that he had seen in his life. I was ter­ri­fied try­ing to get my key in the door and there was Charles.  He came on out. He stood there in heels, make-up part­way on, with his giant mus­cles show­ing & asked if there was a problem.

Yes, our apart­ment build­ing & the area around it was full of characters.

Appar­ently we had become enter­tain­ment for some­one as I found out one day at work.  A new girl started at the restau­rant.  She was a talker, I mean she made me look quiet.  One day she was talk­ing about how she didn’t have a T.V. & her boyfriend, who she lived with, worked a lot.  She was home alone often & so she peo­ple watched.

Then she started talk­ing about a build­ing she watched, a build­ing that when she passed she would see the man liv­ing down­stairs head­ing out.  The man seemed to match my neigh­bor Charles.  But hey, it’s a big place who knows how many well mus­cled black men wear­ing blue sequined dresses there are out there?  Maybe more than one.  But I soon found out, she wasn’t talk­ing about some­one dif­fer­ent. 

Because she started to talk about how a young cou­ple she would watch was vis­i­ble above the cor­ner party store.  They had a bright red liv­ing room and the cutest lit­tle kit­ten who would sit in their win­dow look­ing out.   She talked about how their din­ing room had no real fur­ni­ture in it & that she couldn’t see into other rooms but would won­der what they looked like.  As she was talk­ing I could feel the heat of embar­rass­ment, awk­ward­ness, and vio­la­tion rolled into one big ball rise up from the pit of my stom­ach to cover my face in a blaze of red.

She was talk­ing about US!  My Perse­phone, my boyfriend, me and our home!

I couldn’t say any­thing.  I just stared.  Then a co-worker looked at me and real­ized the same thing I had.  He said “Hey, Beth isn’t that you she’s watch­ing?”  She started to laugh & told me she was glad to finally met me.  I still wasn’t sure what to say.

I mean how do you han­dle that sit­u­a­tion? I mean it’s one thing to watch as peo­ple pass by you & take in how var­ied our world is.  It is a totally dif­fer­ent thing to sit and watch an apart­ment, a cou­ple and do so on a reg­u­lar basis. That is some­thing out of a movie.  The kind where you shout at the girl “NO, DON’T RUN UPSTAIRS!!!!!! DON’T!!!!!!” Only to watch her run upstairs and meet a death of being burned alive by a curl­ing iron or some­thing equally ridiculous.

I came home from work that night and told Mike.  He was just as uncom­fort­able about the whole sit­u­a­tion as I was.  He never dreamed of being a stand-in for a tele­vi­sion and watched with­out know­ing he was on dis­play.  We decided to change some things in the apart­ment. The next day I put up some form of cur­tains that were closed on a reg­u­lar basis. I also was secretly happy when my boss said the girl didn’t work out & wouldn’t be return­ing to work.  But I couldn’t help but won­der if she still tried to tune in to watch.

[this is part of my  “how I met your father” series]

Tagged as: how i met your father, love, love at first sight, Marriage