Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  On Thursdays Julia works for the people who live next door to Tracy, a couple with a dog named Domino, who was not in his outdoor pen today. “You think he ran away?” she asked ten or so times before knocking on the couple’s door and hearing him bark on the other side of it.

  Aside from working for Tracy, Julia and I have WPTF radio in common. We both listen to Open Line and agreed that Barbara needs to start putting some of her callers in their place.

  November 19, 1983

  Raleigh

  On Thursday I was accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on Friday I received insurance and housing information. I’ll leave Raleigh on January 2. It hasn’t really hit me yet, all the work I have to do before I go. Leaving. I am leaving.

  “What’s David up to?”

  “Didn’t you hear? He left and moved to Chicago!”

  December 26, 1983

  Raleigh

  This is my twenty-seventh birthday. I’ve been anticipating this age for a long time, thinking that when I reach it, I’ll make a big change. I seem old to me now.

  The Amtrak station is not answering their phone, which is a problem because I’m supposed to pay for my ticket today. My reservation will be canceled if I don’t do something fast. I’ve thrown out a lot these past few weeks and have packed most everything else for storage.

  December 28, 1983

  Raleigh

  This was my last night at the IHOP. I’ve been going steadily since 1979, just drinking coffee and reading. On my way out tonight I said good-bye to my waitress and left a $2 tip. I didn’t cry, though I worried I might.

  Also today I got a real winter coat, boots, socks, and gloves. The coat is down and super-ugly. I never thought I’d see the day that I’d wear a down coat. Gretchen came with me. Then I went and paid $183 for my train ticket. I liked the woman at the station and felt bad for hating her so hard the other day when she wasn’t answering the phone.

  1984

  January 6, 1984

  Chicago, Illinois

  Now I am in Chicago. Everyone came to the train station in Raleigh and saw me off. It was bitterly cold, and I cried as we pulled away and I saw Mom and Joe and Sharon and Dean and Katherine and the Parkers all waving. At the DC station I bought a Coke from a vending machine that talked. That was a first.

  My three days visiting Allyn in Pittsburgh were a blur—smoked a lot of pot, snorted a good deal of cocaine, which never really agrees with me.

  Tonight was a reception for new students in the dining area of the Art Institute. There was wine and cheese and people in uniforms who emptied the ashtrays. I’m not as hysterical as I thought I might be and am having a good time looking around. Visited the post office and the big main library and the conservatory of music, where Ned Rorem went. I am beside myself. On leaving the reception tonight, I saw a man sitting on a stool. He’d removed his artificial legs, which were lying on the ground beside him. What a place!

  January 10, 1984

  Chicago

  I looked at four apartments today, the best being 820 West Cuyler. It’s a short street, and everyone in the building is from Mexico or Central America. There’s trash in the courtyard and on the landings, but the rent is only $190. The living room / bedroom ceiling is covered with plastic to catch the falling plaster. The floors are collaged with different patterns of linoleum, but the bathroom’s OK. There are plenty of windows and a kitchen big enough to do all my work in. Best of all, it’s eight blocks from an IHOP that looks exactly like the one I left behind in Raleigh, both inside and out.

  January 15, 1984

  Chicago

  After looking at sixteen apartments, some so small I could heat them with a candle and a few that were roommate situations, I came back to 820 West Cuyler. George, the super, told me I can take up the linoleum if I want and remove the flimsy wall that divides the main room in half. The closet’s big, and he will replaster the ceiling.

  While cleaning it, I found lots of matches, a cap, and a rattrap. The last tenants left behind a sofa I’ll be getting rid of and a framed picture of Jesus spreading his arms as wide as they will go. There are roach eggs everywhere, and the place stinks of pesticide.

  January 17, 1984

  Chicago

  Because I’m basically starting from scratch, I have to take a number of core classes. These are 2-D (basic drawing), 3-D (basic sculpture), and 4-D, which can be video or performance or whatever the teacher, whose name is Ken Shorr, wants. Our first assignment from him is to collect overheard sentences and shape them into a dialogue. Then we’re to find a scrap of something measuring four by five feet and slap a word or image on it. This is right up my alley, and I’ve already started on it. My scrap will be some of the linoleum I’ve ripped off my living-room floor.

  Ken said that school is one of the few places—perhaps the only place—where we’ll find people who are interested in what we have to say. He’s sort of a pessimist that way. Before class, I looked him up and learned he was in the Whitney Biennial. I wanted to ask what he’d done to get there, but I had already talked too much in 2-D and 3-D and didn’t want to exhaust everybody.

  January 22, 1984

  Chicago

  I pulled up all the linoleum, got rid of the extra wall in the living room, and have started painting the kitchen. Last night, after finishing the cabinets, I went to the little market around the corner for beer and found $45 on the floor in front of the checkout counter. I thought I’d dropped it, and by the time I discovered it wasn’t mine, I was back home. First thing today I went out and blew it. I bought:

  1. two pounds of goat meat

  2. more beer

  3. Fires by Raymond Carver

  4. the New York Review of Books

  5. hardware

  6. groceries

  7. a magazine called Straight to Hell in which gay men recount true sexual experiences, many of them outdoors and in cars or under bridges

  February 13, 1984

  Chicago

  I sanded the living-room floor and put the first coat of polyurethane on it before leaving for school this morning. At five I returned to find a group of kids playing in the hall. When I unlocked my door they rushed in behind me and ran all over the place. None of them speak English, so I had to scold them in Spanish, which made them laugh.

  I can’t believe how good my apartment looks now. I’ve been sleeping in the big closet and will probably continue to do so. That way I can keep the living room completely empty, not a thing in it.

  February 20, 1984

  Chicago

  There’s a radio show I’ve started listening to that’s hosted by a woman named Phyllis Levy. People phone in and discuss their sexual experiences—it’s fantastic. Last night Debbie called saying that she and her boyfriend spent the weekend experimenting with a vibrator. She came four times—a first. “It was wild!” she said.

  Phyllis seemed genuinely happy for both Debbie and her boyfriend. Then Jill called to discuss a fantasy situation, and Frank reminisced about a recent three-way with his ex-girlfriend and the guy she’s now seeing. Next came Sue. Her parents are divorced, and during a visit with her dad last week, he came to her bed in the middle of the night and the two of them made love. That was the term she used, made love.

  Phyllis explained that this is what we call an “incest situation.” She was clearly disturbed and suggested that Sue might want to date men who were not related to her. Then Laurie called to say she’d just done the dinner dishes dressed in a negligee. She stopped to answer the phone and returned to find her husband, completely naked, scrubbing the bottoms of the pans. It was, she said, “a real turn-on.”

  Phyllis was happy for her and spoke briefly about the element of surprise. The program airs on Sunday nights and reminds me every week that I’m not in North Carolina anymore.

  February 27, 1984

  Chicago

  Again last night I listened to Let’s Get Personal on Q101. The first hour is hosted by a woman wh
o’s interested in general problems and miserabilia. She has numbers for various suicide-prevention hotlines and places where people can report child abuse, etc. The next hour, and my favorite, is hosted by Phyllis Levy, who started off by speaking to a man who was born in India. He said that small insects were thriving in his girlfriend’s pubic forest—that’s how he described it. He was worried that she’d been unfaithful and that these creatures were a sign of that.

  Irene called, upset that her brother had started wearing women’s clothing. Phyllis calmly explained that this is what we call cross-dressing. It doesn’t mean Irene’s brother is gay, she said. Plenty of cross-dressers marry and have children. “Is that what’s bothering you?” she asked.

  Irene said no, the trouble is that her brother is taking all her and her mother’s clothes and that they haven’t got a single bra or pair of panties left.

  The solution, Phyllis said, was to put a lock on her bedroom door and offer to take her brother out shopping.

  When Brian, the premature ejaculator, phoned in, Phyllis suggested he try an exercise called “the quiet vagina.” Another solution was to masturbate before sex so as to calm his penis down a little. She really has all the answers, Phyllis does.

  March 16, 1984

  Chicago

  There’s a big argument going on next door in Spanish. I can make out two words: whore and shoe. Two men are yelling at the woman. Someone has been slapped. On the ground in front of the building are a number of broken things that seem to have been thrown out the window. Clothes and hangers, a cabbage, mayonnaise.

  March 24, 1984

  Chicago

  Last night I saw a woman drag a teenage boy out of the Sheridan “L” Lounge. She was maybe in her forties and kept slapping the kid across the face. “How many times do I got to tell you to stay out of there?” she asked. “It’s trouble.” Every so often she’d pause from smacking him and sign something with her hands. He responded with a noise rather than words. That’s when I realized he was deaf.

  When the slapping stopped, she grabbed the kid’s ear and twisted it. Like a dog being beaten by his master, he did not fight back but just took it. A couple of people watching heckled the woman. “Leave him alone!” they shouted.

  She shouted back that they should mind their own business. She called them trash, and in response they laughed at her.

  March 26, 1984

  Chicago

  Betty Carter is perfection. They just played her version of “What’s New” on the radio. It’s on her latest record, and I think I’ll buy it for Dad. Female jazz vocalists are just about the only things we agree on. When good music would come on the radio at home, he used to call me into the living room and make me sit still until the song was over, saying as it played, “Are you listening to this? My God!”

  April 8, 1984

  Chicago

  There was a severely handicapped guy at the IHOP tonight. He was with two men and a woman, and I watched as one of the men spooned ice cream into his mouth. Everyone involved was black. The guy in the wheelchair could not talk; he could only moan. I couldn’t tell what it meant, though: Was he in pain? Was he unhappy? It sounded like he was being tortured—horrible to listen to. The woman kept scolding him and calling him a show-off. She said she would quit taking him to nightclubs if he kept on acting that way. Does he think the IHOP is a nightclub, I wondered, or is she referring to someplace else?

  April 29, 1984

  Chicago

  At night in warm weather, the courtyard of my building is crowded with children jumping rope and playing various games. They’d bashed in a piñata while I was at the IHOP, and I returned to find bits of it all over the ground, lying among candy wrappers. This afternoon I was working, and when someone knocked on the door, I answered wearing a hideous rubber mask I’d brought back from Raleigh. I’d assumed a kid had come around, but instead it was the man down the hall, who asked for a cigarette.

  April 30, 1984

  Chicago

  The woman next door came, asking for a cigarette. Four minutes later she sent her daughter to ask for another one. The next time I just won’t answer. All day long I fend off people who want my cigarettes. It’s not right that I should lose the battle in my very own home.

  May 24, 1984

  Chicago

  Last night Neil caught another mouse. It was two a.m. and I was in the kitchen working. After presenting it to me, she set the mouse down. He was still alive, and she pounced on him when he tried to make a run for it. She batted the poor thing about, and after a while I started feeling sorry for him. “You’re being cruel,” I said. “Put yourself in his shoes, why don’t you?” I picked her up, and the mouse ran into a hole under the radiator. Looking back, I shouldn’t have gotten involved. I went to bed then, and she stayed up to sulk.

  May 30, 1984

  Chicago

  Edith Sitwell said that one of her favorite pastimes was to sharpen her claws on the wooden heads of her opponents.

  June 14, 1984

  Chicago

  I met with a guy named Harry, who’s started a refinishing business. I’d hoped I was done with chemical stripper, but he’s offering $5 an hour and we’ll be working in people’s houses rather than in a garage. The interview was held at Harry’s apartment, a big clean place, nicely decorated but with the TV on. His wife was at work, and after asking me a few questions, he offered me a beer. Then he rolled a joint, and I thought, Great, I’ve found a job.

  June 25, 1984

  Chicago

  I found a letter on the ground near the neighborhood McDonald’s. It reads:

  What I think about my mother

  My mother is a bitch.

  Motherfucker shitty ass.

  Haffer goddamn nigger sucker she raisin’ witch. Shit.

  signed Charlene Moore

  June 30, 1984

  Chicago

  At work Harry told me about his brother Bob, who died a few years ago at the age of twenty-six. Bob had bad luck. He was an epileptic, and a seizure he once had while driving caused a ten-car pileup. Later he fell down some stairs and broke both his legs. Finally he was hit by a train while walking, which is strange because trains don’t generally sneak up on people. For the most part, barring a derailment, you know exactly where to find them.

  All that was left intact after he was run over were his hands.

  August 13, 1984

  Chicago

  Ken Shorr, the guy I had for 4-D, called a few days ago and asked if I’d be interested in being in a play he wrote. I haven’t acted since high school, but it’ll be just the two of us and he is terribly funny. I went to his place last night and met his wife and newborn son. They didn’t have any ashtrays, so I used a plate. We talked, and he gave me a script I brought home and read. I already have the first page memorized. I play his father.

  August 15, 1984

  Chicago

  Tiffany was rushed to the hospital in New York the night before last. It turned out she was four months pregnant and the baby was growing in her fallopian tube rather than in her womb. It’s called an ectopic pregnancy, and she knew nothing about it until she started hemorrhaging. “Do you have any questions?” the doctor asked before he performed the operation to extract the fetus.

  And in a weak voice Tiffany said, “Yes. When can I have sex again?”

  You really have to hand it to her sometimes.

  August 26, 1984

  Chicago

  Tiffany’s been home for two weeks, and Mom can’t take it anymore. Last night they had a fight and pulled each other’s hair. Tiffany is twenty-one now. Mom called to tell me about it and to offer me $300 to spend on school clothes. Three hundred dollars!

  August 30, 1984

  Chicago

  Tonight at the IHOP two men were hostile to Lisa the waitress. They had ordered hamburgers and kept pestering her as to their whereabouts. Were those them, under the heat lamp? They better not be!

  The men were gay, a couple. Both were
in their fifties and one had a mustache. Lisa gave them some lip and they stormed out. I was at the register when one of them returned and told her she could take his hamburger and shove it up her ass. When saying this, he lowered his voice to a whisper and narrowed his eyes.

  The two men live near the bowling alley in a basement apartment. I often walk by and see them in there, sometimes lying around in colorful underpants watching TV. Their floor is carpeted and there’s a dumbbell in one corner.

  September 6, 1984

  Chicago

  School started, and I had my first writing workshop, taught by a woman named Lynn Koons. There are twenty-five students in the class, and she had us arrange our chairs in a circle. Then she asked us each to recall a vivid image from a dream. Oh, no, I thought. Dreams!

  September 10, 1984

  Chicago

  Tonight was my first art history class. It’s called Artists’ Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks. The teacher, Stephen L., explained what we’d be reading and told us we’d have one major paper. I think I might want to do mine on Edmund Wilson, but it’s early yet. Before the break we were shown a number of slides, and when we came to a Paul Klee painting, the guy beside me said loudly, “I could do that.”