Creepy Memories

Inspirational song: The Jeep Song (The Dresden Dolls)

The TV in the other room was left on a channel that appears to be devoted to true crime stories, all night long. I’ve been too lazy to get up and turn it off. For all that these things don’t interest me much, the low droning noise is comforting. I’m only catching fragments of sentences here and there. I’ve heard about several different affairs, alibis that fall apart, cops arriving on crime scenes, and jailhouse snitches. None of it means anything to me, however enough of the random words entered my consciousness, and dragged up a memory that is incomplete. I sort of want to write about it, to see whether any new details fall into place in the retelling.

Last week the topic of “dragging Main” came up, and I was amused to learn that my husband used to come all the way out to our current home town to do this when he was a teenager. I admitted to the assembled group that I used to ride along with a young woman who did this back when I was way too young to drive or date. I had no business dragging Main at age 13, yet there I was. Between this conversation and watching the true crime Netflix series set in my hometown, I started thinking about those days, and now I’m a little curious who some of the characters were in my own drama.

I’m pretty sure it was the year I was in 8th grade that we rented out a room in our giant old house to a college student. My brother had already moved out, so there was a ton of empty space upstairs where my room was. I don’t remember much about the girl who stayed with us briefly, other than she had dark hair and thick glasses. I want to say her name was Brenda, but that is less reliable than the memory of her hair color. To me at 13, she seemed like a grownup, but she was probably only 19 or 20 herself. We got along well enough, but I couldn’t tell you about a single conversation we had. That’s long gone now. I do remember that she loved to drag Main, and she and I went out often to ride around in slow circles in downtown Ada. She talked to a whole lot more people than I did. I was horribly shy back then, and I guess at some level I was protecting myself by not engaging with the older kids much.

At some point she met a guy who lived not far from us (maybe six or seven blocks, but this is a pretty hazy part of the memory). I do not know whether they met on Main or somewhere else. I don’t know whether they dated or interacted on a more confrontational basis. What I do remember is that he started stalking her, and it ended up being traumatic for all of us, not just her. The guy drove a beat up car with a loud motor. I remember it as a light blue Jeep, but it could have been a Land Cruiser or something else, some other color. Whatever it was, the engine sound was distinctive. You could hear it coming down the street, and he would slowly chug around the block, down the alley, and back around again. I felt hunted, hiding in my house, even though I didn’t factor into this equation at all.

I don’t know now when or why she moved out. As I sit here, I’m taunted by wisps of information: she might have been a little older than I thought at first, like 23; she might have had a child living with her parents that she went back to. I don’t know anymore. I think she had been gone a while before the Jeep stalker stopped coming around.

Now that I’ve seen the Innocent Man Netflix series, I am wondering about that guy. Who was he? This would have been somewhere between 1980 and 1982, not that long before the Debbie Carter murder that is featured in the series. Did this guy know the creepy people from the bar scene where Debbie hung out? Did our college student boarder know them? Where did she meet the stalker? It was a super small town, especially then. I’m just so curious how close we really came to that world, and how lucky we were that none of it touched us at the time.