I had a talk with a friend of mine who told me that there’s been a strange guy hanging around the pool of her apartment complex. He’s in his 20s and is good-looking in a dangerous kind of way and doesn’t live in the complex, but is always by the pool. She thinks he’s a drifter who looks for places to crash. Anyway, he went to her apartment after he saw her come home from work, but when her boyfriend answered, he got nervous and started walking away. Her boyfriend asked him what he wanted and he said something about her saying that he could wait in her apartment but…nevermind. And left. She’s really creeped out.
I told her that this reminded me if a time when I was tutoring, and the student was a no-show. I’m required to wait 15 minutes at the student’s house before leaving, so I was sitting on the steps. It was about 7pm and dark when I see this guy who had been walking along the shoulder of the road when I had first driven up. He sees me and walks up to me and asks me if Jennifer lives here. Only my student and her mother live there and I know that’s not their names so I say, I don’t think so. But maybe. He says, he’s a screenwriter who writes with someone who lives in the house. He tells me that there’s no one home because he’d called 10 minutes ago and no one answered. I’m very guarded because it’s dark and there’s no one around because these are these huge estate houses so the lots are really spread out. I don’t even have my cell phone on me. He’s trying to get information out of me, asking about what I was doing there, where I live, etc., but I was being really guarded and sending out signals that I didn’t want to talk. I want to leave but I had a bad feeling about going to my car, so I figured it was safer to stay put and hope the family came home soon. He kept telling me that no one was home because he had called earlier and that it didn’t look like anyone was coming back, and I kept saying that they would probably be back soon, lying that this happened all the time but they always eventually show up. I was hoping to buy enough time until someone showed up because he was starting to make me very nervous, but I felt it was safer to stay where I was. He asked me if he could borrow my cellphone, but I told him I had left it at home. He said, “Maybe it’s in your car. Where’s your car?” I told him that it wasn’t in my car because I had looked for it earlier and realized I had left it at home. He said, “We should at least check and see if it’s in your car.” I told him, “I KNOW it’s not in my car,” but he said, very firmly, “Let’s go check.” At this point, he was standing so close that he was invading my space and getting really aggressive, and it was coming down to, if he had bad intensions, the tablecloth of pretense was about to be pulled out.
Suddenly, the front door of my student’s house opened and this shirtless blue collar guy with tattoos, long wild hair and body piercings came out. I had never seen him before but figured he was the lesser of the two evils. I told him that I was the tutor but he said my student wasn’t home. I was so terrified that he would close the door but I didn’t want to make it obvious that I was scared of this guy, in case he had a knife or gun or something. So I asked him, very seriously, “Can I PLEASE come in and call her?” He let me in and when we’re far enough away from the front door which was still open, I told him, “That guy says he knows someone named Jennifer who lives in this house.” The guy said, “I’ve never seen him before. I thought he was with you.” And I said, “No, but he seems really suspicious.” So that guy goes outside, then comes back in and tells me, “That guy disappeared. I looked up and down the street but I didn’t see him. He must have taken off.” He walked me back to my car which I was so thankful for.
I called my tutoring company that night and left a message about the incident. When we talked, I briefed them about what happened, but the conversation was steered towards mainly the student missing appointments, etc.
A day later, I was still really tweaked. I was telling some friends about what had happened and realized how scared I had a been. So I called my company and told them that I was really upset about what happened. They asked me what they could do, but pointed out that this kind of thing could have happened anywhere (ie. not when I’m at a student’s house). I didn’t feel like they really wanted to deal with it or act like it was anything outside of a creepy incident, even though, I think if anything had happened to me or another instructor in that situation, it would be a BIG problem for them. I ended up agreeing that there wasn’t really much that could be done and got off the phone, but it never sat right with me. There was not much that could be done, but I wanted to be able to get a phone call back. I wanted to be able to have someone sit down with me, and talk about instructor safety. I felt so fucking expendable from the way they dealt with it.
I asked to be taken off this student a few days later, citing major disciplinary problems which was also very true. I had to leave a message with that request and didn’t receive a call back, so I sent an email to follow-up, and didn’t get an email back. I ended up walking into the office and waiting half an hour to talk to my supervisor, for her to tell me that they were working on trying to switch out instructors. I told her that she needed to tell me definitively that they wouldn’t make me work with this student again. I was fuming that there was a chance they would make me go back. They ended up taking me off her, but the trust was already broken.
I ended up quitting that job really angry. And it wasn’t until I just wrote this stream of consciousness description about what happened that day, having originally set out to write an anecdote about scary LA guys, that I realize how scared I was that night and how invalidated and disregarded I felt at having my safety and concerns minimalized and dismissed. I was furious when I left that job, but I’m so good at hiding my feelings from myself that I never really confronted those feelings.
The exit phone call with the owner was almost intolerable. He was taking it so personally, and so focused on how insecure, wounded and vulnerable an employee leaving made him feel, when in truth, I felt like there were so many things that could have been done that weren’t done. I ended up being very diplomatic and kind on the phone, but was still pissed because when I brought up the incident, it was acknowledged but still not discussed. My point was that this company did not do the things to take care of its employees. It’s faux-humanistic. And the psychological infrastructure is a whirlpool of magnetic dysfunction and I don’t know why.
I was so much less stressed and anxious I after I left. Like leaving a suffocating nightmare landscape.