A Crazy Woman in my House

After Easter, Stefan wrote a very informative and morbidly interesting blog describing his strange trip to the emergency room. In that tradition, I wanted to post about what happened at casa de Tanner yesterday evening regarding an odd lady, the police, and some presumably poisoned muffins.

I was watching the Spurs demolish the-team-who-shall-not-be-named in my living room when halftime came about, prompting me to go to my room and change out of my work clothes. In my room, I also happened to get a couple of DrawSomething alerts, so I sat down to answer some of those, as I am wont to do. After finishing one, I heard my roommate Amber talking to another female voice in the kitchen, and I thought That’s odd, I didn’t hear the doorbell, and as most of my roommate’s friends are attractive women my age, I immediately went out to investigate. There, in my kitchen, stood a quite un-attractive woman of about forty years with really bad skin, and after a confused “hi?” came out of my mouth she ran up to me and gave me a big hug that lingered too long and rubbed my head seductively. I immediately looked at Amber with my best “who the fuck is this?” face, and saw that she was looking at me with the same expression. After the hug, I waited for the lady-I-didn’t-know to introduce herself, or let the awkward silence linger long enough for her to give some sort of explanation, but she just stood there smiling. It occurred to me that she was waiting for me to recognize her, so I started searching my mind: was she some relative I knew long ago? Was she someone I knew from the writing journal at WSU Tri-Cities? Was she one of my parents’ friends? You see, sometimes when you grow up in the Tri-Cities people assume you know who everybody is, and I’ve had many awkward conversations with people I only barely recognize; at the hardware store or in rec sports or at Costco (okay, mostly at Costco), so I was hesitant to just plain out ask her who she was. At first. But after about five minutes I just looked at her and said, “Who ARE you?” To which she replied, “I’m Amber.” This is when my head alarm went off.

Well, clearly you are just repeating what my roommate said and are being deliberately vague and weird. “What are you doing in my house?” I asked. She brought beer and muffins, she said, and held up a Guinness in a bottle to show me. The muffins were on the counter in a big Ziploc freezer bag. The ensuing conversation led to me asking several more questions, ranging from “are you sure you are in the right house?” to “ARE YOU INSANE GETTHEFUCKOUTOFHERE?!?” and none of them were answered with anything more than an awkward smile. At this point, Amber (my roommate, not the crazy lady) had the Richland police department on the phone. I contemplated grabbing the crazy person and throwing her out physically, but then I thought that she very well might bite me and give me Hepatitis. Plus, when I told her I was going to physically throw her out she gave me the creepiest (seriously not hyperbole) look that could have been interpreted as “ravage me, bald head” or “touch me and I will bite off your nose,” so I decided to make sure I stayed on the other side of the counter.

Finally, I think it registered with her that Amber was talking to the police and giving them her description, so she just walked out the door and down the street. As soon as Amber got off the phone, we immediately tried to start a conversation about it, but were both too weirded out to really process the encounter and mostly just kept saying “What. The. Fuck?” The doorbell rang shortly after, and a police officer was there to ask us what happened. Amber’s story was she was out on the back porch on the phone and letting her dog run around while I was in my room, and apparently that’s when this lady just walked in to my house and into my kitchen. Amber came in from the porch and saw her in the pantry, going through food and stuff, and the refrigerator door was open. Thinking it was someone I knew, my roommate just started being friendly with her, and when I came out and the lady gave me a hug, she thought I must know who it is. Amber said afterward that at first she thought I was just pretending not to know what was going on because I was embarrassed for hooking up with this very unattractive lady over the weekend (Amber was at Sasquatch and I had the house to myself) to which I replied, *DRY HEAVE. The actual conversation ended like this: Amber - “Well I was thinking c’mon Tanner, you don’t have to be so desperate. I can introduce you to people…” Me - *Laugh/Awww…I’m that pathetic?

But I digress. The cops took our statements and were really shocked to learn that she just walked into our house uninvited. Turns out, this lady lives right down the street, and she told the cops that she got in a fight with her husband and just needed someone to talk to, so she was visiting her neighbors. At first, the police thought we were over-reacting, but then they talked to her more, and she gave them some more creepy hugs, and they found out her husband wasn’t even home. She left her two kids there (eight and ten years old) to come visit us, and the more she talked to the cops the more they began to see why Amber and I were freaking the fuck out. Also, it turns out her name actually WAS Amber, so ironically the one thing she answered truthfully and coherently was actually what made me think she was crazy.

The cops made her call the crisis hotline, and after a lengthy (and I’m assuming bizarre) conversation they recommended that she visit the mental hospital, calling her episode “consistent with a complete psychotic breakdown” and the cops said that if she isn’t committed that we need to be careful with her in the neighborhood, because she could easily get violent. I went to the sporting goods store and bought some pepper spray, because, again, Hepatitis.  Also, I threw the muffins away, but I’m gonna enjoy that Guinness later.