My friend, coworker, and former room mate Bill called John a creeper.

The slang emerged in the mid 1990s and meant someone who slinks around peeping at another person. Usually, a creeper in this context has romantic designs on whoever he or she is watching. While a creeper has the potential to become a scary stalker perhaps, generally a creeper is merely someone who’s socially inexperienced or fiercely shy and afraid to talk or move forward with the object of his or her affection.

There’s also the creeper who does things on the down low aka in secret. The pop group TLC tackled the topic in the Grammy-winning song “Creep.” The song, coincidentally, was released around the same time that this aforementioned John was creeping.

John did indeed pop up at the most unusual of times. He appeared at the restaurant where he, Bill, and I worked but on days other than his designated shift. He would loiter a little longer than necessary at whatever part of the restaurant I was working.

It was Bill who started singing the TLC song to me whenever John’s name was mentioned or after John would walk by me and leave the room.

I didn’t realize the full “creeperness” of it all until a few people from my extended network set up a movie night to watch “Interview With A Vampire”, the Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt movie that had just opened. John told me a sizeable group was going and that everyone was meeting elsewhere and then carpooling.

As it turned out, there were two of us: me and John. I drove to and from the theater with him. However, another guy did show up at the theater. I was slightly mortified to find myself on a “date” I did not want to be on and felt a little bamboozled.

John lingered an awful long time in the parking lot engaging me in conversation after the movie, but I did manage to gracefully extricate myself from the chat and head home.

A few days later, I was surprised to pick up the phone at home and hear John’s voice. He was calling from the closed gate of my apartment complex. I buzzed him into the parking lot and when I answered the door, a child of about three-years-old was with him. The little boy was his god child.

John hung out in my home for a bit and told me how much he liked kids and asked what I thought of them.

I was speechless and, frankly, had no desire for children in my life. I was 23-years-old and just recently graduated from college. I was way more concerned about getting a writing and journalism job than procreating.

I told him that very thing.

John and I stayed friendly but he did begin to pull back on the “creeping.”