Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  June 16, 1987

  Chicago

  I had an elaborate fantasy yesterday after the kids called me Pee-wee again. I kept thinking how great it would be to follow them home, buy their apartment buildings, and evict them. I don’t know what I would do with the buildings after I bought them. I wasn’t thinking that clearly.

  June 19, 1987

  Chicago

  I ran into Walt on the L this morning. He owes me $450 and said he was just going to call me the other day because Gail, his wife, is always saying, “We need to pay that David Sedaris.”

  I actually don’t hold anything against him. I miss Walt and Gail. Walt said that last week she got a profit-sharing check for $10,000. That was why he planned to call—to pay me. He said he took the check to the bank but lost it along the way. It was physically big, he told me. “I folded it in my top pocket, and wouldn’t you know!”

  He called the bank to cancel it, then he called New York for a replacement check, but the woman whose job it would be to write it was on vacation. “Wouldn’t you know it!”

  At around five, I took the L home. A woman near me had a three-year-old child on her lap, a girl, who looked at me and said, “Mommy, I hate that man.”

  Hours later, walking up Leland, I heard someone running up behind me. It was a guy who lives in the halfway house next door. He is black and wore a long-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way to the neck. The man called me sir and asked how I was doing.

  “All right,” I said.

  He told me that he had a taste for a steak sandwich and asked me if I’d buy him one. You can’t pull money out of your pocket on Leland Avenue. It’s like ringing a bell, so I said no and he ran across the street to ask a woman the same question.

  Later still I saw two men sitting in a car in front of the halfway house. They had the door open and were listening to the radio. As I passed, one of them asked me for a cigarette.

  “I don’t smoke,” I told them. Then I thought of the guy who wanted a steak sandwich and of the little girl who hated me and thought, What the hell. I handed the guy in the car one of my cigarettes, and he scowled at me and said, “Fucking liar.”

  June 21, 1987

  Chicago

  I listened to a radio tribute to Arch Oboler, the creator of Lights Out, a scary program that aired in the ’30s. They interviewed him at his home in Studio City and then they played a few of his radio dramas, starting with “Cat Wife,” about a woman who hangs out with her friends, drinking and gossiping. Her husband calls her a cat, and then she turns into one.

  It was a fifteen-minute story dragged out to half an hour. Boris Karloff played the husband and would say, “You, Linda, are nothing but a cat. A cat, do you hear me? You remind me of a cat. When I think of you, a cat comes to mind. You…cat, you. You belong in an alley with your friends, yowling and carrying on. Cat.”

  When Linda turns into a cat, Boris Karloff feels responsible. He tries to keep it a secret and murders two people who discover the truth. Then Linda claws his eyes out and he shoots himself by accident.

  June 22, 1987

  Chicago

  When John Tsokantis was growing up in Greece, he learned to play water polo and smoke. He told me that when kids misbehaved in class, the teacher would send them to the corner, where they had to kneel on a pile of rocks.

  I like the kind of man John is. He watches things closely and then does nothing with the information. His English has improved since I met him four years ago, shortly before he had an aneurysm. The other night at a pizza restaurant he played a game of picking out the thirty spies hidden in the landscape of his place mat. I couldn’t find even one, but then he explained it. “Is not the whole thing,” he told me. “Only the heads of the spies.”

  July 11, 1987

  Chicago

  Last night I watched a made-for-TV movie called Consenting Adult. It was another of those programs about how people with station wagons solve problems. In this case the problem was the son, who turned out to be gay. Marlo Thomas played the mother, and after learning the truth, she pulled her car off the side of the road and wept. It was silly, and watching it I wondered why such movies always concern the upper middle class. If they were a minority family, the show would be a situation comedy and everyone would laugh it off.

  July 16, 1987

  Chicago

  I went to the library and passed a street musician who had a live weasel in his guitar case. It was on a leash and was taking a nap. There was a girl at school who had a weasel, though she called it a ferret. She said it was sweet and would burrow under the covers while she was sleeping.

  If there was a weasel in my house, I’d move.

  July 26, 1987

  Chicago

  When Steve was six years old, his family lived in Hollywood and he appeared on The Pat Boone Show, which had a segment involving kids and the adorable things they sometimes come up with. He remembers saying, “A doctor or a fireman,” but can no longer remember whether he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, or who he wanted to sleep with.

  September 13, 1987

  Raleigh

  Amy said loudly to Paul’s girlfriend yesterday, “Hey, did that bleach ever work on your mustache?” They were in a crowded ladies’ room, and everyone turned to look at Angie’s upper lip.

  Later she said to Mom in line at the grocery store, “It’s great they gave you your license back so soon after that DWI.”

  September 20, 1987

  Chicago

  Before I left Raleigh, Mom walked the dog up the street and back. It’s part of her exercise, and she went as far as the Andrewses’ old house, where Melina peed in the driveway. Just then a boy drove up and told my mother to get the fuck off his property. He called her a bitch and a cunt, so Mom returned home, dropped off the dog, and went back up the street, where she told the kid that he couldn’t talk to her that way. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, how’d you like it if I shit in your driveway?”

  Mom said Melina was only peeing, but peeing and shitting were the same to this kid. Again he called her a bitch and ordered her off his property. Then he threatened to come to our house with his Doberman pinscher.

  “Do you have a Doberman pinscher?” Mom asked.

  He said no but that he could just come alone and pee in our driveway.

  Mom said it was good that he didn’t have a dog and that she wouldn’t put it past him to pee in our driveway. She told me this in the kitchen as she poured herself a drink. Then she made me promise not to tell Paul because he would make trouble and as a result Melina could wind up dead.

  I can’t keep a secret to save my life, so she said that if I do tell him, she’ll never help me out again.

  Help means money.

  My lips are sealed, which is a pity. Paul would have gotten inventive revenge. He’s not the type to pour sugar in someone’s gas tank. Rather, he’d steadily chip away at this boy and his family. He’d be patient, and just when they thought it was over, he’d start again. It would go on for years until they begged for mercy. That Mom felt safe telling me about it is a real shame. An embarrassment, really.

  November 2, 1987

  Chicago

  I bought an old newspaper photo of a suicide note left by a man named Wilbur Wright who hanged himself in the county jail. “I can’t go on,” it reads. “Life isn’t worth anything without you forgive me. Bobbye I love you more than you’ll ever know. May God watch over you and our baby. Bill.”

  November 3, 1987

  Chicago

  Those boys were on the street again tonight, three of them. They are ten, maybe twelve years old. One is chubby and wears glasses. Tonight they yelled, “Nerd! You…prick.”

  I’d never have talked that way to a grown-up when I was their age.

  November 4, 1987

  Chicago

  I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read I LOVE KILLING COMMUNISTS. The word love was replaced by a heart shape I’m guessing they’ll put on the typewriter keyboard
any day now, right beside the exclamation point. The bumper sticker was on a Ford Fairlane on Montrose Avenue.

  November 7, 1987

  Chicago

  I saw a family—a mother, father, and ten-year-old boy—walk down Leland Avenue today. It was raining, and when the mother told her son to put up the hood on his Windbreaker, the boy said, “Aww, lemme alone. My fuckin’ hair ain’t wet.”

  She responded, sweetly, “Maybe not, but it will be.”

  November 14, 1987

  Chicago

  Barbara went to clear the dishes off the table behind me at the IHOP tonight. A couple was sitting there, both in their sixties, and they started smoking the moment they’d finished.

  “Was everything all right with your meal?” Barbara asked.

  “No,” the woman said. “No, it was not. The meat was all tough and the vegetables was cold.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say anything?” Barbara asked.

  And the woman said, “We was hongry.”

  November 16, 1987

  Chicago

  Steve Lafreniere loaned me a few copies of a St. Louis newspaper called the Evening Whirl, which comes out daily and is completely devoted to black-on-black crime. Criminals are pictured on every page beneath headlines like “Fiend Sneaks In While Parents Are Asleep, Sodomizes Their Two Sons” and “Mean Pastor of Church Dates Two Brothers, 10 and 11, He’s Caught.”

  This man rapes two kids, and the paper calls him mean?

  “It was revealed how the sex mad faggot tagged one boy that he especially adored and wrecked him. He would tie him up by his hands and body and go to work on his victim like a greedy hog that had missed a meal. He caught the boy like a rooster running after a hen and dragged him into the office and oh, Glory! What a session, oh, my!”

  There is a short article in one issue headlined “You Don’t Know Who in the Hell I Am, Do You? I’m Mr. Muckity Muck with the Big Buck. Mess with Me and You’ll Have No Luck.”

  Another article is titled “Andy Gray Said, ‘I Am Freakish. I Love My Own Sex and I Like ’Em Young. If They Yield to Me I’ll Give ’Em Some Tongue. I Can’t Help How I Was Born, I’m Gonna Have Fun and Live, Right On!’” It says in this article that Mr. Gray “snorted and cavorted with other men.”

  This paper is not to be believed. An annual subscription costs $35. The ads are placed by lawyers, funeral homes, and bail bondsmen.

  November 17, 1987

  Chicago

  Police caught the guy responsible for smashing windows and painting swastikas outside Jewish businesses on Devon Avenue. He’s out on bail now, and this morning’s paper included a picture of him. What strikes me is that he has a very small mouth, smaller than a baby’s. I mean, tiny. If you wanted him to suck your thumb, you’d have to grease it up first. The article says he belongs to a skinhead group and has tattoos, which is strange, I think, because Jews in concentration camps had shaved heads and tattoos. You’d think the anti-Semites would go for a different look.

  December 27, 1987

  Raleigh

  Tiffany left this morning. Last night we sat around in the basement with company and she told us that she often gets gas trapped in her neck. She pointed to a spot beneath her ear, saying, “It’s right here.”

  I never heard of such a thing.

  She spent most of her vacation on the telephone arguing with black men who are a mystery to us. Some we’ve met once or twice, but she never tells us the nature of their relationships. It’s not normal to spend hours in your room crying over misunderstandings with people who are just friends. She left herself out of a lot this Christmas. Every night has ended with Amy, Gretchen, Paul, and me sitting on one bed or another and laughing until four in the morning.

  1988

  January 3, 1988

  Chicago

  It was cold when I returned to Chicago yesterday—eleven degrees. I took the bus into town and was surprised when the driver kicked someone off. It was a belligerent man who’d been arguing with him over what seemed to me like nothing. After a few minutes the passengers started putting their two cents in, and not long afterward the guy was thrown off. “I hope you freeze to death,” the driver shouted after he’d closed the door.

  The first Chicago baby of 1988 was born a few minutes after midnight. A suburban limo service had promised a special ride to the child and its parents, and other businesses had made similar offers. On the news tonight they showed the mother and father receiving a box of fine cigars and a dozen roses before getting into the backseat of a Rolls-Royce. According to the reporter, the two are not married. Both are sixteen years old, and black, and from the West Side. They looked very happy.

  January 6, 1988

  Chicago

  It is bitterly cold out tonight. I was on Irving Park Road walking past Graceland Cemetery, on my way home from the IHOP, when a van pulled over and the driver motioned to me. I ignored him, and he followed slowly behind me and honked. When the window came down, I saw that the guy was missing a few teeth and that he wasn’t much older than me. He asked where I was going, and when I said, “Home,” he asked if he could do anything for me.

  That stretch of Irving is usually busy with prostitutes. If he thought that’s what I was, then the rules have definitely changed since I left Chicago for the holidays. Here I was, wearing two coats, two hats, and glasses. I thought of accepting a ride but said that I was fine walking. Get into a car with a stranger on that stretch of Irving and you can’t really complain should something awful happen.

  January 11, 1988

  Chicago

  I ran into Shirley on Broadway and Irving. She was my neighbor on Cuyler, the only other native-born American in the building. Shirley wears an overcoat, a housedress, and slacks all at the same time. She has only one visible tooth, and it’s on the bottom. I asked about Ray, the man she lived with, and she told me he’d passed away on August 30, of cancer or something. Ray was always drunk. He wore ski caps, like Shirley does, and women’s glasses.

  “He died on me” was how she put it. She said that her brother had died on her too. Then she laughed, like they were off somewhere, hiding together.

  January 13, 1988

  Chicago

  David G. was on Wilson Avenue, walking behind a large woman in a thin winter coat. The pawnshop hadn’t shoveled their sidewalk, and there was only a narrow path in front of it, bordered by snow-covered ice. Two Mexican girls were coming from the other direction, and just as they reached the start of the path, the large woman shouted, “Out of the way, bitches. This is my country.”

  January 14, 1988

  Chicago

  Last week on Montrose and Magnolia I noticed a flyer for a missing cat named Brutus, and this afternoon in a vacant lot I think I found him: big and black, with ragged ears. He was dead, and frozen solid.

  I called the number on the flyer and told the woman who answered where she could find the body. “I hope I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure it’s Brutus,” I said.

  She asked if the dead cat had nappy ears and I said yes. What I didn’t say was that I think the body had been kicked up and down the street. It was scuffed, and a lot of the fur had been worn away. The woman sounded very distressed on the phone. The poster mentioned a $100 reward, but I didn’t bring it up, figuring it only applied if Brutus was returned alive.

  January 17, 1988

  Chicago

  There’s a Wieboldt’s not far away so yesterday I ducked my head in. The store sells dress shirts for $6. They sell a line of denim jackets that have Love and Peace already written across the backs of them. One of the cashiers, a teenage boy, wore a Gucci sweatshirt and had a sketchy mustache. He was smoking, and when a customer stepped forward to pay, he laid the cigarette on the counter, with the lit end hanging over the edge. When it fell to the floor, he sighed and stepped on it.

  Half the shelves in the store were empty, not because it’s a popular place but because no one restocked them. They’re exhausted over at Wieboldt’s. Like the
ALDI grocery store further down Broadway, their motto is “Leave us alone. Let us smoke in peace, for God’s sake.” Goldblatt’s is even worse. All of the mannequins in their front windows are missing their fingers.

  January 27, 1988

  Chicago

  At the underground Jackson L stop, I came upon a group of three rappers. The song they were performing was about AIDS, a message to all “fags, fairies, and dykes” that they are “history.” They will die and everyone will be better for it. One rapper said in an aside that he hoped there wasn’t anyone with that shit standing next to him. A big crowd had gathered to listen, and they loved it. Everyone laughed and applauded.

  I received a letter from Susan Wheeler, who’s in New York now, temping at a company that makes dental rinses. For Christmas her mother gave her a beautifully wrapped empty box, three pairs of queen-size panty hose that are way too big for her, and $32.

  January 28, 1988

  Chicago

  I called about a job writing for a young person’s cable show. The receptionist answered, saying, “Youff C’moonication.”

  “Excuse me?”

  It took me a while to realize he was saying “Youth Communications.”

  I eventually got through to the guy in charge who told me I didn’t want the job. He said he’d just had two people walk out on him and I’d no doubt be the third. I said all right and hung up.