A Homeless Man Has Been Stalking Me For Two Years

It is what it sounds like.

True story.

It’s 11 pm on a Wednesday, and I’m home alone.

Ben is working an overnight shift in the hospital, and our apartment is quiet. I hear the soft hum of the fridge and the pulling of the elevator cables in the hall.

As I crawl into bed, my phone rings.

Callbox Miami Beach

It’s too late for Amazon, and we have very few friends, so it must be my stalker.

His name is William Gunn, but he goes by Bill.

I’m on the third floor, so, unless someone lets Bill into the building, I’m relatively safe, but if I come too close to the window while I’m looking down and he’s looking up, he’ll be looking right at me.

So I stay in bed.

And I wait.

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Bill Gunn has been coming to my apartment and leaving me messages for two years.

As far as I remember, he and I have never met.

The oldest message I have is from March 23rd, 2023.

But there are many others. I stopped saving them after the 20th or so.

Sometimes his messages are like the methy garbled nonsense above.

Other times, he seems to be on fewer drugs, and he’s telling me that he’ll be at McDonald’s, waiting for me so we can fool around.

Bill is clearly mentally ill.

I’m not sure how one designates mentally ill anymore because nowadays it seems that everyone has started claiming that label to show the world that them falling short of the life they had decided they were entitled to is a result of something fully outside of their control, but I imagine if anyone has the right to the mental illness throne it is a man who calls people he has never met to leave messages that sound like this:

I’m also 99% sure that Bill is homeless.

Which sort of changes the probabilities assigned to all the different ways this might play out, right?

Because it makes it less likely that Bill will come rape or murder me, as premeditation usually requires some sort of a plan, and I feel like mentally ill homeless people aren’t good at that, but it simultaneously makes it more likely that, if he recognizes me on the streets, he will do something else, like eat my face.

I don’t mean to jump to these assumptions about homeless people, by the way.

I know not all homeless people are mentally ill and bad at planning.

GPT says that only 25% of homeless people have serious mental illness, which tracks with most of the homeless people I’ve spoken with over the years.

I do speak with a lot of them, by the way.

Not because I’m a do-gooder, but rather because speaking with them makes me feel less guilty about the fact that I’m doing nothing to help them from the circumstances that they are almost never responsible for.

Anyway, most homeless people are very nice.

Take Michael Boyce, for example.

Michael is a homeless black man who lives on Miami Beach and spends his days at the Starbucks by my house.

Michael is my favorite homeless person, and I mean that with no offense to any other homeless person reading this.

Every day at 7 am, Michael, 73 years old, comes from the east, walking down Lincoln Road with a walker that holds this and that and these and those. Shopping bags and duffles. Food, water, snacks, an iPad, a hat, a fan, a water bottle, a chessboard, and a poncho.

He sits under a Starbucks umbrella, and then he begins his hellos.

He’s very cute about them. His little waves and tiny smiles to each passerby.

Every patron knows Michael and they buy him food and drinks all day.

I don’t know how he pulled this off, but other homeless people should take note because by the time I get there at 9 am, he almost always says he doesn’t want anything because he’s too full, which is nice because it saves me money.

Michael always asks about my life, and he always asks about Ben.

When I first moved to Miami from LA, he asked how I was adjusting.

I told him that I hadn’t yet found a gym, and he reached deep into duffle number two and handed me a free day pass to a super fancy gym, that was way too expensive for me to ever join, signed by, “The owner — Alejandro,” Michael said, “he’s a good friend of mine,” and then a man in scrubs named Dr. Jake walked up said, “Black coffee?” and Michael said “Yes, thank you.”

Over the years, I’ve sat next to Michael many times.

He moved here a long time ago from North Carolina because his wife told him she wanted to. She asked him to marry her three times, and he kept saying no until finally, he said yes.

He loved her.

They lived in Miami for 15 years and had a beautiful life and were very happy.

And then she died.

I don’t know how or when it was after that that Michael became homeless, but for people who aren’t mentally ill or addicted to drugs before the onset of their homelessness, which is the majority of homeless people, it’s usually the same reason: your rent goes up faster than your income.

Or like how this author Brian Goldstone said on a podcast I heard: maybe you had an expensive medical bill and you missed a payment by one or two days and then the system — literally, software run by private equity landlords — spits out an eviction notice, and in states like Florida and Texas, one out of five apartments are already PE-owned.

So now there’s an eviction on your record, and no one will rent to you.

You can move into a motel, but that’s 2-3x the price of your former rent, and so, pretty soon, you’re in your car. And then you’re homeless.

Maybe that’s what happened to Michael.

And though you might suggest that Michael go to a shelter, there are no homeless shelters on Miami Beach, nor should he want to go.

Michael has a life at this specific Starbucks on this specific block. He has community and friends.

People don’t like giving up the things that make them feel safe.

They want familiar faces and habits and routines and tasks and rituals.

I imagine that’s what I am to Bill Gunn, my stalker, who is currently standing outside of my apartment, waiting for me to pick up my phone.

A ritual.

A hallucination of a person he thinks he has a relationship with, summoned each time he walks by Lincoln Road.

Hallucinations like the ones where he thinks he’s an actor on One Life to Live.

Misfirings stemming from a brain that, due to the stresses of homelessness with scary raccoons and nights that are too hot and too cold is constantly flooded with cortisol, which prevents his hippocampus from pruning neural pathways that should be deemed unproductive, like the one that tells him to walk up to the callbox and have a one-way status update with his closest imaginary friend “0341 ALEX KRUGER”.

I’ve asked my friends and family about what I’m supposed to do here.

Like, you know…what is my responsibility in response to Bill.

I went to the police.

I mean, I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Bill but I would rather have the police have something happen to Bill rather than Bill have something happen to me, but the officer, upon hearing Bill’s voicemails, looked at me and said “it’s not illegal to leave voicemails,” and so I said, “well, in the future, do you want me to go downstairs to try and get him to assault me?” to which the officer responded, “I would not recommend that.”

I guess…what really should happen, what me/Miami/the world ☮️ should do is:

• Build more psychiatric hospitals and force Bill to live in them to see if he gets better

• Prevent private equity from holding residential real estate in their portfolios

• Allow the federal government to overreach and re-zone local jurisdictions for apartment buildings + shelters and then force state + local governments to build more affordable housing

Otherwise we all end up with more of this:

But that cute little list above is never going to happen.

What’s going to happen is that Republicans and Democrats will keep blaming each other for ineptness and heartlessness, and then this problem will just get worse and worse, and more people will opt to live in neighborhoods with private security, further widening the quality of life gap because local voters will never, at scale, vote for that list above because homeowners are typically anti-affordable-housing + anti-homeless-shelters but also vote at a 1.5x than of non-homeowners, and oh, and re: private equity — we’ll never rein it in because if there’s one thing our country loves, it’s unchecked capitalism.

Instead, we will complain about being scared of people like Stalker Bill: a man who, if he had the choice of a better life and the cognitive capacity to make said choice, probably would.

Also, I’m not actually scared of Bill.

I mean, I used to be, but, at around voicemail six, I got him on video, and then the thoughts in my brain flipped from “Wow, I’m being followed by a rabid drug-addcited murderer,” to “Wow, that elderly man with a very homosexual walk seems to have recently pulled out most of his hair.”

Sad.

And then…well…last week, something horrible happened.

Ben and I were watching TV and eating ice cream, and my phone rang at 10:07 PM, and so we walked over to look down and watch Bill leave me a message, but at the end of his message, instead of walking away, Bill stayed at the callbox.

And did the unspeakable.

“Hi Rebecca, dahling,” he said, after having dialed another unit, “Bill Gunn here, model, artist, actor on One Life to Live — listen dahling—”

I gasped.

Betrayed.

“Wow,” Ben said, his mouth open as he walked away from the window, “You’ve literally been freaking out for two years about this,” he said, eyes locked on mine as he approached the couch. “He doesn’t even know who you are. He just leaves messages for everyone.” Ben sat. “You do realize how annoying you’ve been about this, right? To our friends? To the police?” He took a spoonful of ice cream and shoved it down his throat. “Ridiculous.”

Yes.

I know.

I agree with him.

I might have emotionally overreacted without enough information.

To think that I was important enough to have a stalker.

How arrogant.

I stood there for a moment and then closed the window.

I couldn’t bear to listen to Bill leave other messages.

My celebrity.

My pride.

But as I stood there at the window, seeing non-stalker Bill Gunn walk into the distance, I noticed something. That Bill and I are around the same height and that one day, if Ben ever gets sick of my antics, and my rent rises faster than my income, I too might end up like Billy Gunn: an elderly gay homeless man on Miami Beach having just finished another exhausting night on One Life to Live, sashaying my way down a busy street to call my imaginary friends and update them on the my adventurous wonderful crazy Lincoln Road life.

Update: We moved out of Miami, and the new tenant, Steven, called me last week to ask me if there was anything I should know about the apartment, and I chose not to mention any of this, even though the callbox is still set to 0341, Steven’s number now, because him getting to know Bill feels like an experience I do not wish to deprive either of them of ❤️

Questions that I would like you guys to answer in the comments below:

1. Have you ever had a stalker?

2. Have you ever thought about BECOMING a stalker?

3. Are there any cities that you look at where homeless seems to have been “solved” and not in a fake way (like shipping homeless people to other cities), but in a real way, (like good zoning and good resources)?

Also, if you liked reading this piece, and you want another one with facts and economics, feel free to read this piece. If you want something with lower stakes that is funnier, try this one.