Behind You!

[one]

Being followed everywhere you go can be enough to make a man paranoid.

It wasn't exactly difficult to determine that I was being followed. The guy who was tailing me must have weighed a good three-hundred pounds and his penchant for loud ties and ghastly pastel leisure suits made him all the more conspicuous.

He'd been following me for about a week now, and I was no closer to understanding why than when I'd first noticed him.

When it came to surveillance, his approach was not particularly subtle. Indeed, no Sherlock Holmes was he. When I walked down the street, the fat man would invariably be trailing twenty paces behind me. If I went into a restaurant, he would seat himself on the other side of the room and eat twice as much as me in half the time, eyeing me all the while. At the library, he was always lurking in the next aisle over, his heavy footsteps all too audible as they echoed through those quiet, cavernous halls. When I went grocery shopping at Albertson's, I'd spot him feeling every piece of fruit in the produce section while watching me from the corner of his eye. If I had taken a walk through the rose garden at Jackson Park, I would have fully expected to see him seated on a bench, perusing a newspaper with eyeholes cut through it.

For the life of me, I could not imagine why anyone would want to follow me, or have me followed. What purpose keeping me under constant watch served, I could not even venture a guess.

Was I a suspect in some sort of crime? No, that couldn't be it. The only laws I'd ever broken were all traffic-related, nothing too serious. Had my wife hired a private detective to investigate some suspicion of infidelity? That seemed highly unlikely, and in any event, I'd always been completely and utterly faithful to Janet.

Did someone simply have it in for me? I supposed it was possible, but I could not imagine why. I have never harmed a fly. I donate blood once a year and I participate in the PTA at my daughter's elementary school. By all accounts, I am a decent guy. I'm an upstanding citizen; I pay my taxes and I vote in every election. I am a devoted husband and a loving father. I live in a modest house with a nice green lawn in a dull suburb. I am awfully, horribly normal, just about as unexciting as any man can be.

So why would someone want to shadow my every move?

Although I felt assured of my innocence, I was too unnerved by the mysterious fat man to ever confront him about the fact that he was quite obviously following me. As my wife never failed to point out, one of my biggest character flaws was my hopeless lack of assertiveness, and in this instance my timidity was out in full force. I guess I just hoped that the fat man would give up sooner or later, once he realized that I had absolutely nothing to hide.

I was headed to work on a grey, overcast Wednesday morning when I decided to step into a Starbucks for a little eye-opener. I had not seen the fat man that day, but it was yet to turn 8 A.M. and I was sure that he wasn't far behind.

And I was quite right.

Standing in the long line for coffee, I heard the jingling of the sleigh bell which was tied to the front door, followed by a series of slow, stomping footsteps. My heart sank. I did not even need to turn around to know who had just joined the end of the queue.

To be sure, I slowly turned my head to the side until I caught a glimpse of powder blue polyester and a flash of paisley in my peripheral vision. My suspicions were confirmed.

I tried to play it cool but my body tensed. I could feel the fat man's eyes examining me, probably taking a mental note of my strange body language as I stood perfectly still, facing forward, my back as stiff and straight as a wooden board, too afraid to move a muscle.

I could hear a soft, high-pitched whistling noise which accompanied each breath that the fat man exhaled through his big, bulbous nose, and all other sounds inside the crowded cafe seemed to fade away. As I had noted during a previous encounter, he really had quite a honker. To use an expression my mother was always fond of: When God gave out noses, the fat man must have though He'd said "roses", and asked for a great big red one.

He stank of cigarettes and mothballs. This noxious and overpowering odor wafted across the cafe and seemed to mask all other scents that drifted through the air, even the strong aroma of espresso.

After what seemed like an eternity, it was finally my turn to order. I stepped up to the counter and immediately heard a loud thud, and I knew that the fat man too had taken a step forward, closing the gap between us.

So distracted was I that for a moment, I could not seem to remember how to place an order.

"Can I... uh... Can I have a... ummm... coffee?" I said to the girl in the green apron standing behind the counter. She did not seem particularly impressed by my indecisiveness.

"Drip? Sure," she said, snapping a piece of chewing gum in her mouth. "Tall, grande, or venti?"

"Ummmmmmm..." I mumbled dumbly, wishing I had thought this through a bit better. Wishing I was more familiar with Starbucks' cup sizes. Wishing I had just gone to Peet's Coffee & Tea instead. Wishing that the fat man was not lurking behind me at the back of the line. "Whichever is biggest."
I could hear the fat man snort derisively. The barista was similarly not amused and she rolled her eyes accordingly. She poured me a venti and demanded three dollars. I handed her a twenty, grabbed my cup of coffee and headed for the door without collecting any change.

On my way out, I somehow mustered up the courage to take a good, long look at the fat man as I passed by him. His dark, beady, porpoise-like eyes bore into my soul as we momentarily locked gazes.

He was truly a repugnant physical specimen. Morbidly obese, his big belly jutted out of the open jacket of his horribly outdated baby-blue leisure suit. On the brink of complete baldness, he had made the unfortunate decision to wear what little was left of his hair in a comb-over. His face was speckled with pockmarks. His fat, flapping jowls had a texture reminiscent of the surface of the moon.

"Hey, mister! You forgot your change!" the barista called after me, waving the seventeen bucks in the air, but my hand was already on the door and I had no intention of turning back. I threw the door open, jangling the sleigh bell loudly, but before stepping out onto the sidewalk of East 82nd Avenue, I snuck one last glance over my shoulder.

The fat man had stepped out of the line, having ordered nothing, and was waddling hurriedly after me.

To be continued...