FRESH YARN presents: Brushes With Evil... by Suzanne Tilden-Mortimer

FRESH YARN presents:

Brushes with Evil
By Suzanne Tilden-Mortimer

I grew up in a house of screamers, and as an adult worked with advertising people who ranted. I couldn't keep a job, and the men I dated were after one thing, which they got. I was twenty-two and had become the loser my dad predicted.

Trying to find my identity, I studied Astrology, had my handwriting analyzed, and visited psychics. I was told I'm a Pisces swimming downstream. My handwriting was that of a dreamer, and lines on my palm translated overly sensitive. My Tarot cards were all about death and I had become the epitome of bad timing.

Once after parking at a meter on Wilshire, I stepped out and a double bus hooked my Pinto's door. My skirt blew over my head and the door spun down the street after the bus. I drove for months with the crumpled mess tied onto the car, having to climb across the passenger seat to reach the steering wheel.

At the end of the sixties I was renting an apartment in the Hollywood Hills and my life was still in chaos. I drank too much, jumped into bed with the worst choices of men and had again gotten fired from my job in advertising.

Grisly stories in the newspapers were about the Sharon Tate/LaBianca killings and one of the murder scenes was only blocks from my apartment. I'd gone to bed early that following weekend and sometime during the night my dog Mickey stood growling at the edge of the bed. I almost turned on a light, but stopped when I heard whispering. The hair twitched on the back of my neck. I slid my hand from under the sheet, grabbed Mickey's hind leg and the dog wiggled in beside me. My heart raced. I listened to the toilet flush, water splashing in the kitchen sink and what sounded like more than one person scooting around on the floor. I pulled the sheet over my face and pressed into the mattress. I lay barely inhaling until there was silence. Even then I didn't move and my heart continued to pound.

When sunrays filtered through the window, Mickey jumped off the bed and I stepped cautiously onto the floor. I entered the bathroom. The sink faucet was running. I hurried into the living room. The front door was standing open. I reached for the phone, but changed my mind. What could I tell police? Maybe I'd left the faucet on and had forgotten to close the front door. Maybe I'd dreamed the rest, or the place was haunted. Maybe my chanting had brought in the demons.

Years later I read Helter Skelter, the story of the Tate/LaBianca killings told by Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put Charles Manson behind bars. There's a chapter about the Manson family "creepy crawling" a house. Manson told his followers to go into homes in the Hollywood Hills and crawl around on the floor while turning on water faucets and flushing toilets. Chilled to my very core, I put down the book and paced the room. I knew during a scary night in the sixties, I had been "creepy crawled."

I was still swimming downstream in the late seventies. The man I'd been living with had gone back to his wife, and I was sleeping on a mattress in the living room of my mother's apartment on Cedar Street in Glendale. All my stuff was in storage and I'd recently dropped out of California State Northridge after accumulating student loans and running up my credit cards.

The news media was about a serial killer called the Hillside Strangler. Women disappeared after going out for a walk, or to the grocery store. Their partially buried bodies would be found days later on the hillsides of Glendale. They had been tortured, raped and strangled.

At the time, I was freelancing in advertising, picking up men in bars and nursing hangovers. One evening I stopped at the supermarket a few blocks from the apartment. It was dark by the time I dropped a bag of groceries on the back seat of my mother's Honda. As I drove out of the parking lot, a black and white followed. When the car came up on my right, I saw a dark smallish man at the wheel. He pulled behind when I turned left and after one block, followed close as I turned onto Cedar. When I parallel parked, the black and white stopped, leaving an area for me to get out where I would stand in the beams of the car's headlights.

I got that familiar hair thing on my neck and my heart raced. It looked like a police car, but there were no lights on top. I scooted across the seat and got out on the passenger side. I heard the driver calling at the same time the manager crossed the lawn from our apartment building. The driver took off.

"Was that a cop car?" I asked.

"An old black and white," he answered.

Two days later my mother rushed into the room. "It's all over the news. A woman got away from them and says the Hillside Strangler is two people. One is dark-haired and short. The taller one hides on the passenger side of the car, while the short one calls to the victim. Women think it's the police and they've done something wrong, because these guys drive an old black and white cop car, exactly like the one that followed you."

1984 brought my third brush with evil. I was living in the bottom of a two-story house on Adams Hill and had landed a media-buying job with an agency on Western Avenue. No longer drinking or hanging out in bars, I'd become lonely and depressed. The women I worked for were treacherous. Arriving at the office was like walking onto a minefield. Unable to rescue myself, I began rescuing dogs off the bump list at Los Angeles Rabies Animal Control.

My front door opened to a balcony and a deep row of steps led to the street where I parked my beat-up Toyota purchased from a junkyard. On the east was a home sitting farther back, and on the west, a vacant house under construction. On my way to work, I passed areas encircled with yellow tape and police scouring on-ramps looking for clues left by a serial killer called the Glendale Night Stalker. His victims included older women who lived alone. On hot nights he would break in through open windows or screen doors. After raping and stabbing the victim, he would mutilate the dead body, and then hide their belongings along the freeway.

Twice my Toyota was ransacked. Certain I'd locked the car, I was surprised to find the passenger side hanging open and everything in the glove compartment dumped onto the floor.

It was hot on the Sunday night I sat dozing in front of a box fan. My ninety-pound, red, hairless xoloitzcuintli lay at my feet. In Mexico this breed is used as a guard dog and owning Rhoda was like owning a gun. Twelve other rescues curled on the bed.

At midnight Rhoda started barking. I turned on a light and followed the dogs to the living room where I'd left the front door standing open. Rhoda let out a blood-curdling howl and lunged forward. I switched on the porch light, unlocked the screen and holding Rhoda's collar, stepped onto the balcony. We inched forward and I peered below. Under the streetlight a tall skinny man wearing a twisted bandana over dark shoulder length hair stared up at me. Rhoda's high-pitched bark cut the silence. The man spun and I could hear his feet hitting pavement as he disappeared into the dark. Rhoda and I hurried inside. I secured the door and checked windows. As hot as it was, I'd become cold.

Months later, after Richard Ramirez was caught, his photo appeared on the front page of the morning paper. I felt lightheaded when I recognized the tall skinny man wearing a bandana over dark shoulder length hair. The article said he lived in houses under construction located next to his victims. He would break into the car of the person he was stalking and rifle through their glove compartment. His favorite to open and easiest to steal was a Toyota.

I wonder if during those years I'd brushed with evil because my life was in turmoil. Was I a toxic person drawing negative vibrations like self-help books suggested? Was it bad timing or bad luck? Or perhaps the opposite had occurred. Maybe instead of having bad luck, mine had been incredibly good.