Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  February 3, 1988

  Chicago

  I got a job at a place called Jay Roberts Antique Warehouse. They had a help-wanted ad for a wood stripper, so I went in and talked to the owner, who asked me some questions about furniture. I start next week on a trial basis for $6 an hour.

  February 10, 1988

  Chicago

  I started my job at Jay Roberts and learned I’m replacing a guy who made $11 an hour. I was told this by Earl, who makes $15 an hour. I was hired to refinish furniture, but the first thing I did was shovel snow. Then I swept, moved dressers from place to place, and cleaned brass. While moving dressers I saw a throne made out of horseshoes.

  Earl said that five refinishers have quit since December. “Don’t tell Jay I told you,” he said.

  February 11, 1988

  Chicago

  At the end of the day Jay Roberts handed me a check and told me it just wasn’t working out. Earlier, at lunch, the furniture repairer, Lorenzo, asked me where I live. I told him, and he asked if there were a lot of faggots in Uptown. There were three other people in the room, and they all laughed. Lorenzo said that faggots destroy everything because they’re perverted and only look out for themselves. He said that they’re selfish and don’t devote themselves to family.

  I asked if he had children and he said yes, why else would he work six days a week? Before I went to Popeyes I asked if anyone wanted anything, and Lorenzo told me to bring him a woman with big tits. He said he had one last week who almost tore his dick off. That’s how much family means to him.

  I will never walk down that block again.

  February 16, 1988

  Chicago

  Reasons to live:

  1. Christmas

  2. The family beach trip

  3. Writing a published book

  4. Seeing my name in a magazine

  5. Watching C. grow bald

  6. Ronnie Ruedrich

  7. Seeing Amy on TV

  8. Other people’s books

  9. Outliving my enemies

  10. Being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air

  April 5, 1988

  Chicago

  At the IHOP I sat behind a pregnant woman in her mid-twenties and her companion, who was in her seventies and walked with a cane. The pregnant woman is expecting her baby on July 4 and said she’s hoping Mike can get his shit together before then. He’s the baby’s father and also an actor. Right now he’s playing the part of someone named John Deering. “Mike doesn’t act, he becomes,” the pregnant woman said. She told her friend that normally that’s fine, but when he becomes John Deering he freaks out that he’s got a baby on the way. A few weeks ago he moved out of their apartment. She goes over to his new place and uses the computer but only when he’s at rehearsal.

  The older woman lit a cigarette and said that in her opinion, Mike was being irresponsible.

  The pregnant woman sighed. “I’m just hoping he gets his act together, maybe after the play is finished.”

  Yesterday on the radio I heard a young woman address a few of the hardships she’s faced since her husband walked out on her and her two young children. Because he disappeared, she’s still married and thus ineligible for welfare in the state of Virginia. She’s college educated, but the children are young, and she can’t leave them alone. When she tries to get aid, the people at Social Services tell her that she’s pretty, which means what, exactly? That she could become a prostitute, or find a wealthy boyfriend? She said that her five-year-old got sick, and that when he sat on his potty seat, his intestines came out.

  I dropped my screwdriver when I heard that.

  April 29, 1988

  Chicago

  At the library I got a biography of Dorothy Parker, and on the L, I dipped into the middle of it, where an old man reaches under the table for a lit cigarette. As he bends, his arthritic knees pop, and Parker stretches out her hands, saying, “Ahhhh, there’s nothing I love more than a good crackling fire.”

  May 8, 1988

  Chicago

  They hired a waiter at the IHOP, a guy named Jace. He was OK at first, but now he brings in a portable TV and sits at the worktable smoking cigarettes and watching it. He tells customers it might be a twenty-minute wait before he can take their order, and one after another they leave. Last night there were three occupied tables. It was me, a couple, and a heavy man who waited for fifteen minutes before getting up to complain. Later at the cash register, Jace apologized for taking so long. “Sorry,” he said. “But I was watching a bullfight.”

  A bullfight?

  May 29, 1988

  Chicago

  I got so sick of being called Pee-wee that I bought a new bike with the money I earned painting for Gene. It’s like the one I had in Raleigh, a Frankenstein bike, made of different bits and pieces. The brakes are new, and the pedals. It’s been painted umpteen times and there’s a Playboy insignia on it.

  June 7, 1988

  Chicago

  I checked The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories out of the library. One of the entries in it is titled “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts.”

  June 10, 1988

  Chicago

  The poet Elaine Equi was supposed to teach a writing class at the Art Institute this fall. Instead, she and her husband are moving to New York, so Jim phoned this afternoon and asked if I might be interested. It doesn’t mean I’ll get it, just that I’ve been invited to apply.

  Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don’t, or couldn’t learn on their own if they cared to.

  June 13, 1988

  Chicago

  Frank, the super of the building I’m working in this week, is full of jokes. “Hey,” he said, “how come Puerto Ricans don’t pay with checks? Because they can’t write that small with spray paint.” Another joke was about a Polish man who, forced to shit in the woods, was advised to wipe himself with $1. In the end he winds up with shit on his hands and four quarters up his ass.

  June 23, 1988

  Chicago

  Frank told me that the metal disk on the floor beside the bathtub is a cover for the drain and that when it clogs, you unclog it with a product called Clear Out. He then pulled down the neck of his T-shirt and showed me a half a dozen welts on his chest. “I opened a jug of it once and it spattered, so be careful,” he said.

  Next he showed me a scar on his arm. Here he’d used Clear Out to remove an embarrassing tattoo. Now he has only one, a heart on his upper arm that reads I Love Patty.

  I asked who Patty was and he told me she was his first wife. I asked if that made things difficult with his second wife, and he told me that Patty and their three kids all died in a house fire while they were still married in 1977.

  House fire sounds different than just regular fire for some reason. It sounds meaner, hotter. He has one daughter left and told me that since the fire, he has gained two hundred and fifty pounds.

  June 27, 1988

  Chicago

  Someone shit on the floor of the foyer I’m working on. Luckily Frank got to work before me, so I didn’t have to clean it up. It’s so sad to see human shit out of context.

  June 28, 1988

  Chicago

  I got the job teaching a writing workshop at the Art Institute, and I owe it all to Jim, and to Evelyne, who typed up my résumé. My class will meet on Thursdays at one o’clock, hopefully in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, where we can sit around one big table. I love the rooms there but not the lights, so maybe I can bring in lamps to make it more appealing.

  On Thursday I need to fill out forms and order books. I can make people read things! I’m thinking I’ll assign Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, and an anthology called Sudden Fiction because everything in it is short and it’ll
make writing seem possible. They’re all great books, but between now and the start of school, I have to figure out why they’re great.

  As a teacher I’ll have faculty meetings and cocktail parties. I can hardly wait. It’s only one class, but still I plan to buy a briefcase and play the part for all it’s worth. Now I can refer to all the Art Institute teachers as my colleagues. Dad is super-proud of me.

  July 4, 1988

  Chicago

  We took a cab home from the Hotel Belmont and the driver scolded me several times. “Hey, buddy, don’t be crawling in my taxi.” Then he got mad at me for running my fingers along the track where the window meets the top of the door. “You’re nervous,” he said. “I know you. You’re going to ruin all the rubber up there with your nervous touching. See that No Smoking sign back there? See how it’s all worried around the edges? Nervous people done that too.”

  Ronnie was catering a banquet where the guests were drunk and annoying. A man asked her if she was Italian and when she told him yes, he said, “I thought so. All Italian women have mustaches.”

  I’d never noticed that Ronnie had a mustache, but still it upset her. When she got home she told Blair, who said she’d probably feel a lot better after a shower and a shave.

  July 8, 1988

  Chicago

  I saw a man being handcuffed under the Sheridan L stop. He’d been beating a woman who wore a tight red pantsuit with an image of a cat stitched on each leg and the word Cat written above them. Her face was puffy from the blows, and she stood there threatening the handcuffed man, who tried to break free and kick her.

  “Look at what you done now,” he kept saying.

  July 10, 1988

  Chicago

  New American Writing published my story “Firestone” and sent me a check for $15. One of the things I bought with the money is a terrarium I saw at a yard sale. I was thinking I could put hermit crabs in it. I thought of a hamster as well, but they really stink up a room if you don’t keep on top of them.

  July 15, 1988

  Chicago

  At the IHOP a boy had an epileptic seizure. I’d never seen one and didn’t tonight either. I knew something was going on behind me but didn’t turn around to look until the boy was asleep on the floor. He was snoring and his mother stood over his body while his sister ran to use the pay phone. Firemen came, and then an ambulance. An EMT guy woke the kid up gently, saying, “Terry? Hey, buddy. Hi, boy. Say, buddy, do you know what day this is? Do you realize you’re at the International House of Pancakes? Do you?”

  They put him on a stretcher and told him several times to relax. When they wheeled him by, I saw his face. He looked like someone had woken him up in the middle of the night and told him to get packed because it was time to move. He was black, and very light-skinned. Do black people become pale? Why don’t I know that?

  Last night Gretchen wore high heels, and the minute we got home she kicked them off, saying the sound was driving her crazy. “I swore to myself I’d never have a roommate who wore shoes like this,” she said.

  It’s been nice having her here. Every day she goes to the beach to revive her tan, and every day men fuck with her. They call out concerning all the various parts of her they’d like to have access to. Men on bikes, on the street, on the train. I forget how much crap women have to put up with. Last night when she was walking down Devon, a group of six boys called out, “Wooooo, baby. C’mere.”

  She walks on.

  July 22, 1988

  Chicago

  I’ve been working on a new story and have pages of IHOP notes spread before me that I can’t read. One says gammerstrayer.jermei.

  Oprah had a show about people who have forgiven the unforgivable. One girl forgave the fellow who stabbed her twenty times and then stabbed her father, a minister, to death. She had pleaded for a stay of execution, as had the man whose grandmother was stabbed to death by a gang of teenage girls. I remember when that case was all over the news. The grandmother who was murdered taught a Bible studies class.

  A woman on the panel forgave the man who killed her son while driving drunk on Christmas Eve. He’s a frequent visitor at her home now.

  There were two other guests, a woman who would never forgive the man who raped and drowned her sister, and a black woman who was shot in the stomach by gang members who then molested her daughter. She said she could hear the girl crying out, and Oprah said, “Did you help her?”

  “No,” the woman said, perhaps feeling put on the spot. “I was shot and bleeding profusely.” She explained that she still has a bullet lodged in her kidney and doesn’t see the sense in forgiving anybody. “Hate is what’s kept me alive,” she said.

  In today’s paper I read about a six-year-old girl who was stabbed seventeen times by her mother’s cousin. He was looking for money, apparently. I’m always struck by how many times people get stabbed. It seems like it’s never just once or twice. It must be one of those activities that, once you get started, you just can’t stop. The girl lived, but according to her grandmother, after the stabbing she developed a mean streak and is bossy now and picks fights.

  July 29, 1988

  Chicago

  The subject on Oprah was profound handicaps. Two of the guests were parents of a teenage boy who weighs only thirty-six pounds. He is blind and dumb and now has impaired hearing due to an ear infection. He doesn’t have any thoughts that they are aware of, and he lives at home.

  The father explained that the government will only pay SSI if you make under $17,000 a year. He advocated for a national catastrophic health plan and that was fine, but he wouldn’t stop talking about it. He said his daughter has diabetes and that his other daughter almost had cancer. Again and again he interrupted his fellow guests, and in time I grew tired of him.

  In the middle of the show, Oprah brought out a twenty-four-year-old man. She said, “Jimmy, here you are. You have no arms. You have no legs. What keeps you going?”

  Jimmy was optimistic and spoke about his life at the university where he studies child psychology. He kept saying that: the university. He said that his roommate in the dorm keeps the TV and radio and computer on the floor so he can get to them. Jimmy’s neck was thick and muscular. He wore a suit with the arms and legs pinned up.

  Another guest, a young woman, had all her limbs but they were too small. She could walk but needed crutches for long distances. Forks she could manage, and light loads. She said she wanted to die but didn’t have the wherewithal to commit suicide.

  Jimmy said he just wanted to help people. Once, when he was talking, they identified him at the bottom of the screen the way they often do on talk shows (Judy: seeks revenge; Marco: loves women). His read Jimmy: happy to be alive.

  A couple in the audience stood to talk about their twenty-seven-year-old son who had the mental capacity of a newborn baby. The husband was handsome and in his late fifties with a West Side Chicago accent. “I ain’t fed my boy in twenty years,” he said. “I’m ascared to.”

  I think I’m the ideal viewer for a show like this. After watching, I felt so lucky, like it’s a blessing just to be broke and have bad teeth.

  I worked in Linda’s garage today, and at one point the kid who lives across the alley came over to me, asking, “Are you a boy or a man?”

  July 31, 1988

  Chicago

  This afternoon I went to Montrose Beach, which was quiet and not nearly as packed as Foster. It rained yesterday, so the sand was hard. I’d been there for an hour, reading, when two men and three children moved near me. One of the men was missing his left hand. His arm was fine until a few inches above the wrist, where it tapered to a point. He sat on a blanket while the other guy took the kids into the water, all of them fully clothed, some with long pants on, even.

  While they horsed around, the man with one hand turned on an enormous radio and tuned it to a mastermix station where the songs are not sung so much as bleated. Bleated and repeated. After a few minutes of this, a fellow in a tank top
came over and asked that the music be turned down. The radio was so loud I couldn’t hear their argument, but at the end of it the one-handed man lowered the volume.

  When his friend came back, the one-handed man related what had happened. He made a fist with his good hand and held the other arm straight out like a lance. “I was just about to hit that asshole,” he said. “I tolt him, ‘This is a free country, isn’t it? Isn’t this a public beach?’”

  The wet guy looked off toward the water, trying to pick out the person who’d told his friend to turn the music down. He said it was good to bring up the free-country business. He’d have said the same thing.

  August 7, 1988

  Chicago

  Late last night a group of drunk white boys ruined their car and three others just outside my window. The crash was loud. I was in the sunroom at the time, thinking of ways to make money. The windows were open, and I heard one boy say to another, “Get going, asshole. Fucking leave. Drive, you fucker.”

  The guy behind the wheel tried to take off, but his car was too damaged. I called the police and called them again after one of the boys ordered two others to remove the license plates and the stickers. If you want the cops to come in Chicago, you really have to put the word gun in your sentence. I called a year ago and said it and they were here within two minutes—three cars of disappointed police officers.