Jimmy C
Not my story. Source: /u/the_restlessartist (originally posted here)
TL;DR: Met a scary man named Jimmy C who knew everything about me, said he had planned to drown me in the ocean, and said something foreboding that has caused me to look at the license plate of every black Mercedes I've ever seen, even 10 years later. I thought I didn't remember it right, 10 years later my ex-girlfriend showed me her journal from that day - I had remembered it exactly right.
I met a "man" once who knew everything about me and said he'd jumped off the San Francisco bridge many years ago (even though I met him in Tybee Island, Georgia).
STORY (true): This has haunted me for a long time. I was about 19 or 20 at the time and I was living in Savannah, GA. I drank a lot (had a crappy fake ID), I worked this terrible job as a grunt laborer. The kind where you go to those temp labor agencies like AbleBody and LaborFinders. I'd show up at 4AM, work until 5PM, and drink myself to sleep after only taking home maybe $60 for the day.
I was supposed to go into work this particular morning, but I decided to skip (it's a labor agency, they'll just find somebody else). I call the girlfriend and tell her I want to go to the beach (Tybee). I had already started drinking.
She comes over, we hop in my big, ugly van, pack up some rods, and head to the beach.
I decided to have a drink across from the beach at this little bar. This is where the story gets interesting.
Shortly after ordering my drink, I get this really weird feeling. I became hyper aware of my surroundings.
The door opens, and I see this guy walk in out of my peripheral vision.
There was a seat between me and my girlfriend - but the bar was empty at like 9AM and he could have sat ANYWHERE ELSE - yet he chooses to sit right between her and I.
Then, he starts doing this thing with his fingers. The bar top was reflective. And he takes his fingers like two little legs, and starts just...walking with them "skating" with them on the top of the counter.
This isn't something out of the ordinary, but I took notice because when I was in school, I did that all the time. I pretended I had roller blades on my fingers and that I was skating around my desk. I hated school and was always distracting myself. So I became kind of mesmerize for some reason.
That's when he looks at me, and in this really think kind of...Germanic or "Nordic" accent he says, "I notice you're a man who pays attention to detail. I'm also a man who pays attention to detail."
Now, before I continue - I have to describe this guy. He had this short, spiky hair that was bleached at the tips, kind of like a late 90s style.
He had REALLY expensive clothes on. Like, a nice Prada leather jacket, nice designer jeans, really nice boots. He seemed like a kind of gay guy with awesome fashion sense and really distinctive taste.
I always remember this, because I think to myself, "Some weird homeless crazy guy COULDN'T have afforded those clothes."
Anyway, the other thing that stuck out was his eyes -- they were piercing gray. It reminded me of like a Husky's eyes, but his pupils just stayed this disturbing pin-point size. They were just extremely small, which caused his look to be kind of terrifying.
His teeth were normal, right? But not at the same time. I don't know how to explain it, they were sharper than they should be... as if they were filed slightly
His hands were normal, but his fingernails were slightly long and pointed, as if he deliberately did it.
He kept licking his teeth, too, as if he were salivating.
The thing about this guy is that, you look at him, and EVERYTHING seems normal, but off at the same time, so you're questioning if YOU'RE crazy for thinking this.
This guy, then begins to start talking about the relationship between me and my girlfriend, but really strangely. He's talking about how beautiful she is and how I should pay more attention to her (I was kind of a dick to her).
Shortly after he began talking like this, I had this almost "knowing" feeling come over me. Like... I knew this guy was not a human. I look at my girlfriend and say, "You need to leave."
She just kind of looks at me like she "knows" too - without a word of protest, she gets up quietly and leaves. Later I learned that she went next door to get a coffee.
That's when this guy, literally says to me with the utmost confidene - "You were supposed to go fishing today."
He points at the beach across the street.
"If you had, I would have drowned you in that ocean" and I shit you not he fucking HISSED.
Again, for some reason this overwhelming calm had come over me. I just ask, "Who are you?"
He answers back with this crazy gutteral language - like "ack back" but it was really long. It sounded Arabic or Hebrew or something? I just - for some reason without skipping a beat, and I have no idea why I was so calm to this day - ask, "say it in a way that I can understand."
He says, "You can call me Jimmy C. I jumped off the San Francisco bridge years ago. And we've been watching you."
From there on out he never referred to himself as "me" or "I" but only "we".
The conversation became something very strange after this. He was saying things like, "We see you taking a bath - we wish we too could feel the warmth of the water and the comfort of the steam" and other stuff.
He kept buying me drinks too - specifically whiskey sours. it was like he had an endless supply of money. He smoked Marlboro Ultra Light cigarettes.
After I don't know how long - because I lost sense of time kind of - I told him I'm going to leave. I walk next door, I get my girlfriend and she's stone silent.
We start driving home - don't say a word. Then I just ask, "Do you know what that was?" and she just says "That was a demon". This girl had parents that were scientists, she was really analytical, completely non-religious, and that was the first thing she said out of her mouth.
Now, I didn't say this part before, because - to me - this is the most important aspect of the story, so I'll say it now. Because it's what happened AFTER this that screwed me up for fucking years.
The last thing this Jimmy C. guy said to me before I left, is this.
"Look at my car"
I look outside, I see one of those newer Volkswagon Beetles. It was white.
"What does the license plate say?"
I look at the plate and it literally says, "Fierce".
He looks me dead in the eyes and says, "The next time you see me, I'll be driving a black Mercedes and the license plate will say Utopia".
Stupid, right?
That night I was still calm. I don't know why. I felt like that guy on Office Space after his hypnotherapist died right in front of him and he was weirdly zen.
But, my girlfriend started having terrible nightmares of this guy's head just staring at her in her dreams.
Weeks went by, and that's when the encounter started affecting me. I found myself becoming paranoid about that black fucking Mercedes!
Every black car I saw, I checked if it was a Mercedes, if it was, I immediately looked at the license plate. I started doing it when I watched TV or movies as well. I couldn't stop.
Now, I'm going to fast forward a bit. About 10 years go by... I'm 29 (so this is just recently) and, in silence, when I'm alone, when I'm drinking, I often think about this encounter. I still look at black Mercedes every time they pass, but I'm not so much anxious about it anymore, as curious.
And, I remember that my girlfriend at the time always kept a journal. By now I'm pretty sure that I'm insane, maybe I was drunk, maybe I'm not remembering any of this correctly.
After years of trying to find news articles of a "Jimmy C." that committed suicide of the San Francisco bridge, looking at black cars, and so on, I feel like I'd "grown out of it."
Yet, still, I had to know. So, last year I track down my ex girlfriend. We ended on bad terms. I find out she's a school teacher in Wisconsin, has married a woman, and is actually trying to have a child.
I figure she's not going to talk to me, but I send her an FB message anyway. I ask her if she can find the journal from that day, because I have to know if her events line up with mine.
Sure enough - she had it. And it contained even more detail than what I remembered, because she had literally written it at the coffee shop next door RIGHT after it happened.
Here's what she sent me:
Notes on what happened at Tybee Island, GA on the first Tuesday in December 2005: Drove there during the day and the sunshine was getting me down - kept thinking about how earlier I had gone to [The_Restlessartist's] house after waking up there - and he woke up early, took a shower, came back and woke me up, acted very sweet. Then I went home, took a shower, came back to go with him to Tybee, and he'd gotten drunk already and was teasing me, being sort of an ass. I even threatened to go home once, but I stayed, feeling that I really should go to Tybee with him. But I was excited to show Tybee to Will during the day since I knew it well and he'd never seen it. He talked about how it all reminded him of his childhood as we drove through the salt marshes and over bridges - the sun, the palm trees. I'd grown up in fog. Got to Tybee and he wanted to get a couple of beers even though we had rum in the trunk. Well really the back of the van. The first bar we went to carded [The_Restlessartists] , and so we left, remarking that everyone in the place had given us strange looks as soon as we walked in. Went over to Fannie's a couple of doors down, all in the area of the beach by the pier. I decided I didn't want beer after all and told the woman I'd just like a glass of water.
[The_Restlessartists] had a PBR. Only cost a dollar. Noticed the VW Beetle (white) parked outside when I came in, but did not see Jimmy enter. [The-Restlessartist] pointed out a man sitting one stool down from me drumming his fingers strangely on the stainless steel bar, more like dancing with his nails, stretching his long fingers. Thought immediately that he was gay. [The-Restlessartist] and I watched and talked in whispers about it for a few minutes before he - the stranger - spoke. He first talked about how I had noticed him dancing with his nails (the words he used) then lookd at his nails, surprised, and said they look like shit. I laughed, getting a weird feeling about the guy. He then spoke about how it's important to notice details and he likes it when people pay attention - that he pays attention to everything - that he knows that I do too. His eyes are (some word I can't decipher), blue/grey, he has blonde hair and a narrow pointed nose above pale lips that cover crooked teeth, not very white, almost like fangs. His teeth are all I can look at until I look him in the eye, something I normally won't do until I know a person at least a little, and he seems to evade me.
He asks if I love [the_restlessartist] (doesn't use his name or mine). Without hesitation, I nod and say yes. He asks [the_restlessartist], "do you love her?" And he looks uncomfortable, laughs a little bit, says, "Yeah, I guess so." then the guy says that I am beautiful, that if [the_restlessartist] won't love me, unconditionally, as I do him, someone else will. He touches my hair and says that I am a creature of God. He then tells us that he walked three miles up and down the beach and it sucked... said some things about "God's green earth" ... told a story about a scorpion that asked a frog for a ride across a river... who then stung the frog, told the frog it was in his nature, and then they both enjoyed their last minutes of life because they both would then die. He told [the_restlessartist] he knew him and kept trying to get to him through me. He'd say "I'm not hitting on you girl," but continually told me I was beautiful. He tried to piss [the_restlessartist] off - kept saying that he knew him, said he is in his room at night, he's what crawls on [the_restlessartist's] back. Told [the_restlessartist] his glasses (the aviator sunglasses that I gave him) were cheap - that my glasses were perfect because I see through them rather than hide behind them. Then he said that I was perfection, that I was "one step away from becoming myself."
Earlier he talked about fashion - thought my glasses might be Armani, said Prada was his favorite person, when I noticed that his orange leather jacket had a red rectangle of fabric on the left breast that said PRADA.
He said to [the_restlessartist] that he knew who he was, to which [the_restlessartist] replied that he knew who HE was. The stranger left to go to his car to get money for more drinks - he'd offered to buy us all a shot of tequila and already bought [the_restlessartist] a beer. As he walked out he pointed to the license plate. His car was the white Beetle outside. The license plate read "FEIRCE." While he was gone, [the_restlessartist] asked me if I knew who the man was. I nodded, saying I had an idea. "Yeah, but you think you're crazy every time you think it, don't you." I was thinking the man was the devil or something close.
[then I wrote that I missed some things - here they are:] When asked where he was from, he didn't asnwer. We thought he could've been from Tybee, but he said he didn't live there. Asked him where he lived and he just started talking about his other car, a mercedez Benz with a plate that said "Utopia." Asked if he live din his car, he said no, "Utopia's doors are closed to me."
[the_restlessartist] asked him where he learned all he was talking about (he'd said he could speak 5 languages, English being the most important because it is "trained" and often spoke a few sentences in a language I could not recognize. And he said he lad live din San Francisco, where he jumped off a bridge and died.
This is the point where I told her to leave. That's when he said he would have drowned me in the ocean, started referring to himself as "we" and finally told me that the next time I would see him it would be in that black Mercedes.
When I read what she had written - literally THAT day - I knew that I wasn't imagining the details wrong. That this ACTUALLY happened. This is probably the single most frustrating and scary thing that has ever happened to me. i want to imagine it's just a normal crazy guy, but unless you SAW it and FELT it and heard him talk about all the little details of what you were supposed to do that day when only you knew it, you just can't understand the impact of it.
It's been 10 years, and my only solace really is that my ex-girlfriend was there to corroborate. That communication - where I reached out to her - actually caused us to be on good terms again after a decade. It seems to have been something that bothered her just as much as it bothered me. And still, to this day - even though I'm living 10,000 miles away in Southeast Asia. I can't stop looking for that car. I can't stop thinking about Jimmy C's twisted face.
I wonder if he's still "crawls" on my back, and if the fear I feel at night - often to where I must drink myself to sleep or find a one-night-stand just so I don't feel alone - is him, or "them", watching me.
EDIT: Somebody sent me a site where I can lookup California license plates (I tired this earlier in GA, don't know why I didn't try it in California). The license plate "Utopia" is registered to a Mercedes, but it won't say the color. I'm kind of freaked out to say the least: http://imgur.com/zoig3dR
EDIT #2: This is the site: http://www.vindecoderz.com/EN/California/license-plate-number-lookup
EDIT #3: Somebody found another more reliable source, still shows a 2000 Mercedes as having the license plate "Utopia" in California. Yet, this one had the vin number if anybody is good at looking that up: WDBHA29G7YA818700
