Letter to M.A.B

There's a man thinking about me. Right now. This very minute.

How can I be so certain?

He told me so.

Many times. In many letters. Sent from different penitentiaries.

He was released a few weeks ago and since then I have been moving through with all the grace of a swimmer in quicksand. My neighbors saw him on Good Hope road two weeks ago. Hanging on the corner. Ten minutes from our building.

This is a man who raped a young woman in 1989 according to the MD sex offender registry (and the good folks at the DC District Attorney's office). A man whose rap sheet began in January of 1979, back when I was wearing doo-doo plaits and trying to figure out all the words to Boney M's Ra-Ra-Rasputin (I didn't always live in the USA).

I know this man, even though I would prefer not to. First we had a professional relationship; he was the maintenance man in my building until he violated his parole and was set back to prison for 9 months. He would take my repair requests good naturedly and seem so genuinely apologetic when the land lady would cheap out on the supplies he would need to get the jobs done.

The first letter arrived in early November of last year:

Please forgive me for invading your home and your privacy....

Since then he's written many letters, in a delusional attempt at courtship. Rambling on at length about his dead mother (who it turns out is a prominent - living - DC councilwoman). Why her abandonment has hurt him so and how our love has sustained and renewed his faith in the human race.

I've had the pleasure of learning about how great he is:

You will find, beneath my coarse exterior, a diamond unpolished beneath that rough. Please send me a photograph of yourself so you can see my Michelangelo-like talent!

He's tried to explain why a great guy like him is stuck in prison:

Always trying to do something for someone else. Oh well. We make our choices. I'm man enough to take responsibility for mine...

And when he found out, after 42 hand written pages and not a single reply from me, that I had gone to the authorities and complained to my landlady, he hissed:

In order to get out of jail I need housing and employment. [the landlady] was like a mother to me and I told you how much I miss my mother. Not that I'm even angry with you. Since you've added another ruinous episode to my existence
it is only fair that you become my lady.

And he's ended every letter with a cute postscript!

What are your Halloween plans?!!!!!!!! Stay Sweet!

Yours,
Mad Admiration Baby!

Cleverly hi-lighted to match his initials, and that is how he would sign each letter.

This man has come into my house, stolen my clothes, left his left palm print on my headboard, and played with my vibrator. Which now sits in a police ziploc up at Ward 6 station.

It is difficult for me to adequately describe how strangely tied to this creep I am without saying that which is most painful for me to say. He's my chance to slay the dragons of rapists past and I'll be damned if I go into a third decade violated, scared, and shocked into numbness.

There are three things you can count on: Death, Taxes, and My letters....

DEAR M.A.B:

I DECLINE

Not Yours,

"Abundant Creature"

PS: The long and winding story of my many visits to many offices to have to deny to too many disinterested law enforcement officials that we never were a couple is to frustrating and depressing to write about. This man wrote these letters knowing full well prison censors were/could be reading them. Yet they let him out of jail. They didn't cure him of his sexual depravity while they had him in the system. I have 42 pages and three greeting cards from a convicted rapist and the law is basically telling me to call when he's finished "really doing something". Once again, I decline.