breathing. Amy was afraid to drive on the icy roads, but Mason needed immediate care. Liz was not pleased when Dave ran to the rescue, and she picked a fight with him. He was disgusted by her selfishness. How could she expect him to sit down and eat turkey when Mason was so ill? He would have dropped everything to help any child who needed help, and this was his kids’ baby brother. Dave told Liz it was over, and this time he meant it.
Shortly after that, Dave went to bed alone one night and woke the next morning to discover nearly every female on his cell phone contact list was mad at him. He stared at their hostile texts, baffled. It soon became clear they were responding to texts he had sent. Though he’d been deep asleep in his usual coma-like slumber, he’d somehow managed to start fights with some now very angry women. “I went to sleep with my phone plugged into my charger next to my bed and woke up to find that someone had texted these women on my phone and started some shit.”
The riled-up women included Amy, and she had retorted with an angry text of her own. Apparently, he’d also texted a number of women and was “really rude and calling them whores!” Dave was not in the habit of walking or talking in his sleep, and he’d certainly never texted in his sleep. He couldn’t see what he’d supposedly written because all of his outgoing messages had been deleted, but the recipients filled him in after he sent apologies and explained that he wasn’t the one who’d texted them in the middle of the night.
Only one woman in the bunch had become suspicious. Her name was Jane, and Dave barely knew her. They’d only recently began talking. She’d received a text from his phone, sharing a very personal thing: “I had sex tonight.”
Jane responded: “Yeah. And? What do I care?”
He appeared to reply: “Doesn’t that make you mad?”
Jane didn’t care if Dave had sex, though it was weird that he’d text to brag about it. She knew if they decided to date, it wouldn’t be exclusive. They’d discussed that in one of their first conversations. The odd texts now filling up her phone sounded nothing like the guy she’d been getting to know. After a rapid exchange of messages, an outgoing text from Dave’s phone said he wanted nothing to do with her. “Fine,” Jane replied. “Fuck you.” But she wasn’t really all that offended because she doubted Dave was the one texting her. Jane had picked up on an anomaly. “There was a word I always screwed up when texting her,” Dave recollects. “And all of the sudden, I was texting it correctly.”
While the hoopla with Jane wasn’t disastrous, he cringed when he learned some wayward texts had reached into a corner of his past, kicking up dust in a most humiliating manner. The contact info of his old high school girlfriend was stored in his phone because he sometimes texted her a friendly birthday greeting. The lady, married with four kids, had received a vulgar text.
“We hadn’t talked in forever.” Dave points out that she no longer knew him well enough to realize he was a rational person. While she seemed to accept his mortified apology when he claimed he hadn’t sent the texts, he couldn’t be sure she believed him. “Who knows? Maybe I’m off my rocker! More than anything, I think her husband was irritated, wondering why I was texting his wife at 1:30 in the morning, talking shit. And, of course, I’m like, ‘It wasn’t me!’ He’s responding, ‘Okay, it wasn’t you. It came from your phone.’ That doesn’t fly, so, I gotta explain the whole stalking thing, and that sounds like bullshit unless there’s a news article to go with it.”
In addition to the embarrassment and trouble caused by the rude texts, the situation gave Dave a serious case of the creeps. The stalker had come into his locked apartment and stood over him while he slept. How did she get in? Did she sit on the floor by his bed as she sent the dozens of inflaming messages?
Dave could protect himself from any female who meant to cause him physical harm, unless she had a weapon, or he was asleep. Asleep, he was as vulnerable as a newborn infant. As he lay dreaming, the nut who’d bragged about stabbing people had been close enough to slit