Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  A Brooklyn man blamed Reagan for his AIDS, speaking almost as if he’d caught it from him. I hated Reagan but stopped dwelling on it after he became such an easy and popular target. My eyes never welled up when he spoke. They narrowed.

  January 24, 1989

  Chicago

  Names from the phone book:

  Adonis Labinski

  Dolly Branch

  B. J. Beefus

  Eugene Bratman

  Wolfgang Fey

  Freeman Fry

  January 27, 1989

  Chicago

  I was in the coffee shop of the Palmer House, seated at the counter, and reached for my glasses. The guy next to me had set his glasses down as well, and when, by mistake, I picked them up, he let out a little cry and accused me of trying to steal them. The man was in his seventies and though his glasses had plastic frames like mine and were a similar shade of brown, his were aviators. Mine was an honest mistake. I apologized, but still he called the waitress over, saying, “This guy was trying to steal from me.”

  The waitress talked to him the way you might to a child. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sure he wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  The man, frustrated that nobody recognized the kind of person I really was, lifted his coffee cup and held it close to his chest, as if I might try to swipe that too.

  Just then a woman took a seat and the man turned to her and said, “Watch out. This one here just tried to steal my glasses.” I glanced over to give her my this-person-is-crazy look, but she was too busy locking her purse firmly between her legs.

  January 30, 1989

  Chicago

  I saw an ad in Time magazine for a CD of the biggest country hits of 1961. Songs include:

  “Under the Influence of Love”

  “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven”

  “Po’ Folks”

  “Beggar to a King”

  “Three Hearts in a Tangle”

  Each of these would be a great story title.

  February 2, 1989

  Chicago

  Because Stephanie quit, Mary was back at the IHOP tonight. She worked there for nine years and left three weeks ago to manage a hotel restaurant in Evanston. She told me that she loves it but misses throwing people out and calling the police. That was always her thing. I remember nights when one out of every four people who walked through the door would get the bum’s rush. Someone would mutter something under his breath, and she would snatch the menu out of his hand and point to the door, shouting, “I heard that—out!” Not just crazy people and drunks but men and women who never imagined themselves being thrown out of a restaurant.

  Tonight the man I think of as the Old Jew paid his bill and asked Mary if she was back working nights.

  She said yes, but just for two weeks.

  “Well, if you’re free sometime, I’d like to take you out,” he said.

  Mary put her hands on her hips. “Are you kidding? The only place I want you to go is hell. Understand? You can go straight to hell.”

  The Old Jew looked down at the gum displayed in the case before him and said, “Oh, well. I guess it’s just that way with some people.”

  “Yes,” Mary said. “It sure is. It’s that way with me.”

  After he left, I asked Mary why she hates him so much. He’s been a regular as long as I have—five years now, though he’s never spoken to me and just looks away when I nod hello. The Old Jew eats at the IHOP every night, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of a nurse. He’s been through dozens of them, and I always figured either he doesn’t pay well or they get bored. He’s got to be in his late eighties, hunched over, the top of his bald head speckled with liver spots.

  Mary told me that he used to come in for lunch back when she worked the day shift. One afternoon he told her that his wife had just died and that he wanted to get rid of some of her old jewelry and would love it if Mary would take some.

  “I agreed because I know how hard that can be, getting rid of things after someone you love dies,” she told me.

  That night she went to his apartment and noticed in the living room half a dozen candy dishes, some glass and some silver, all filled with condoms. The Old Jew told her then that actually his wife had died more than eight years ago and that he didn’t have many of her belongings left. “Maybe a pair of earrings,” he said, but he’d have to get in the right mood before he started looking for them.

  Mary said she didn’t feel threatened. “I could have beaten him to death with one hand tied behind my back,” she assured me. “But ever since then I’ve really hated him, because sometimes that’s the way it is.”

  I was in front of the Sheridan L stop when I passed a woman cursing at oncoming cars. I’d seen her before. She looks like W. C. Fields would if he wore a red wig. Her nose is bulbous, like his, and she doesn’t have any noticeable eyebrows or lashes. When a couple walked past, she said that they were going home to fuck, just like all the other shitheads.

  I’m guessing she has Tourette’s or something.

  I’d taught and was wearing a tie and carrying my briefcase. When I was a student, I always felt better when the teacher dressed up. It suggested that his or her job was a real one. As for the briefcase, I look at it like a safe. Students see me putting their papers into it, and it makes them feel that their stories are valuable, though it is a drag to carry.

  As I passed the woman in front of the L station, she said, “Oh, look at him. The little man. Thinks he’s a big fucking deal because he’s carrying an attaché case.” I crossed the street with my head down, shattered because she could see right through me.

  February 10, 1989

  Chicago

  Jackie Disler is a fountain of information. This morning she told me that Hungarians have the filthiest mouths in Europe and are known to say, “Get that cock out of my face that is covered with shit that you used to fuck Jesus.”

  According to her, fucking Jesus is a popular insult in that part of the world.

  February 13, 1989

  Chicago

  Tonight at Barbara’s Bookstore, Tobias Wolff read from his new memoir, This Boy’s Life. All the seats were taken, so I sat on the floor in the front and tried to act normal. I was too shy to say anything when I got my book signed, afraid that if I started talking, everything inside me would just spill out. He seemed like a kind person and wore a turtleneck, a plaid shirt, a tweed jacket, and jeans with black socks and running shoes. I have to be his biggest fan.

  February 14, 1989

  Chicago

  Barbara has begun speaking to me. She’s from Tennessee, maybe forty-five years old, and has worked at the IHOP the entire time that I’ve been hanging out there. Tonight she told me that the new waitress, the black woman who started a few weeks back, has been fired for refusing to wear panty hose. Barbara said, “And of course we have to wear panty hose. We all do!”

  March 4, 1989

  Chicago

  I read an interview with an obsessive-compulsive woman who said that before she went on medication, she spent eighteen hours a day cleaning her house. After vacuuming, she would go over the carpet with tape in order to pick up dirt she might have missed. When guests visited, she’d make a mental note of everything they touched and wipe it down the moment they left. She said she’d miss important events in order to stay home and clean her keys or her checkbook, which, how do you even do? As for keys, it would never occur to me that mine were dirty, though they probably are. Filthy, actually.

  March 13, 1989

  Chicago

  A man approached me on the Wilson L platform this morning to ask me what I thought of the neighborhood. He said a woman he knew had just moved in and he was worried about her. I didn’t want to be the voice of doom and told him that nothing terrible has ever happened to me here, which is true. Then I said that I fully expected something terrible to happen, which is also the truth.

  Why live in a place where you expect trouble? He could have asked me that, but he d
idn’t. I’m surprised he approached me in the first place. I look terrible lately. I reek. A few days ago I was behind my desk at school and caught a whiff of urine. Then I realized it was me I smelled—my pants. My students must have noticed it. How could they have not? I’ll have to concoct some sort of a story. I could say that I take care of a baby every Wednesday morning and that last week it peed on me.

  March 20, 1989

  Chicago

  I read a story by a Chinese woman whose main character curses her husband by calling him a turtle and a salted egg.

  March 21, 1989

  Chicago

  Last week a manhole cover disappeared from the alley behind my building. I guess people sell them for scrap or something. The city covered the open hole with plywood and put up a sawhorse with blinking lights, but overnight both those things were stolen as well. When I got home from work today, someone rang, and I buzzed in a guy from the sewer department. He asked if I was the manager of the building, and I said no. Then he asked about the missing manhole cover, and I offered to take him out back. It was bitterly cold, and the guy seemed happy to be in my warm apartment. He looked to be in his sixties, about my size, wearing a brown coat and a ski cap pulled low on his forehead.

  I went to put on my shoes and jacket and he said, “No rush. Take your time.”

  We walked through the kitchen, and he stopped and looked at the radiator. “You know how to keep that from hissing? You need to take yourself a skinny nail and unclog that hole right there. That’s your problem. But don’t do it now because you might burn yourself.”

  “OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “What you want to do is wait until later, then take a nail, a long, skinny one, and ream out that hole. That’ll solve your problem.”

  I thanked him again and then took him to the alley, where we saw that the manhole cover had been replaced. While standing there looking at it, I learned that getting a new one had been the landlord’s responsibility. “I love to catch people stealing them,” the man said. “You can get sent to prison for taking one of these babies.”

  He could have walked around the corner to get back to his truck, but instead he followed me into the apartment. In the living room, he paused to look at some drawings. “Did you do these?” he asked. “What are you, some kind of…drawer?” He bent forward and chuckled. “Man, oh, man. These are great.”

  I always offer coffee to people working in my home. The guy who fixed the stove, an electrician, the cops who came once, everyone. I offer and they decline. I had a feeling this guy would have said yes and then stayed until five o’clock or whatever was quitting time for him. Since he wasn’t working in my home, I didn’t offer him any, but now I wish I had. I liked him.

  March 23, 1989

  Chicago

  The president of the NRA was on the radio today, speaking before the Commonwealth Club of California. I was working at Linda’s, refinishing her banister, and when she came in, we listened together. The guy started defending the sale of assault rifles. It’s not the guns that are the problem, he said, but the birds who use them. “These birds who are psychos and should be locked up in the nuthouse. These birds who break into houses and try to rape people.”

  The guy was very folksy. “Just like my dad,” Linda said. “That could be him on the radio!”

  Her father is a farmer and she grew up with guns. As a child she shot a robin. Shocked at what she’d done, she tried to set it back in the tree, thinking it might spring to life once it was returned to its rightful place.

  The head of the NRA kept using the term birds. He said that sportsmen across the country enjoy the responsible use of assault rifles and that a few sicko nut birds shouldn’t ruin it for the rest of us. He wasn’t particularly articulate, but he believed in his cause and didn’t evade questions the way so many speakers before the Commonwealth Club do.

  March 26, 1989

  Chicago

  Walking to the L, I passed two men on Leland, both of them fully grown. One of them asked for a cigarette and the other, not hearing my answer, grabbed my arm. “I said we want a cigarette!” he shouted.

  You can’t go around grabbing people like that. I’m sick of how trashy it is here. It’s filthy and depressing and every day it gets worse due to the warm weather. Living in Uptown, I get the idea that people are basically stupid, cruel, and violent.

  The lease runs out at the end of April, and I think I’m ready to move.

  In other news, I heard that a man’s waist should be twice as thick as his neck.

  March 31, 1989

  Chicago

  The blind man was at the IHOP tonight, eating dinner with a sighted companion who brought up a friend of his who had hoped to open a combination café/theater in the Loop and offer light meals and plays during the lunch hour. “Of course, you’d have your soup of the day and your salads and so on,” he said. “I’m talking sandwiches and so forth.”

  The blind man nodded.

  “But it turned out he didn’t go through with it,” the sighted man said. Apparently the friend didn’t have enough money. “So I said to him, ‘Well, money’s not everything.’ Then he said, ‘Maybe not, but it’s about ten thousand goddamn miles ahead of whatever it is that comes in second.’” He sighed, then stole a french fry off the blind man’s plate.

  I graded L.’s paper today. She always arrives late to class, then settles herself in and starts eating a snack. She likes potato chips in cellophane bags. Then she’ll decide to clean out her purse, taking out papers and crumpling them up. A couple of times I’ve turned to her, saying, “Are we all done now? Got everything squared away?”

  Then she’ll say either “Yes” or “Almost.” Sarcasm is lost on her.

  L.’s story was among the worst things I’ve ever read in my life. How on earth did they allow her to graduate from high school? Even Tomoko, who is from Japan and can just barely speak English, is a better writer. Plus Tomoko is spirited and she tries, unlike L., who just snacks and cleans out her purse.

  April 12, 1989

  Chicago

  Money:

  $33 from Lower Links reading

  $50 honorarium from Randolph Street Gallery

  $83 total!

  April 18, 1989

  Chicago

  This evening I feel fat, stupid, and ugly. I was a lousy teacher again today, completely incapable of holding an opinion. I’ll make a statement, then, at the slightest resistance, I’ll retract it. How can they respect me?

  There are several students in this class whom I don’t like. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, I just don’t like them. Can they tell?

  April 21, 1989

  Chicago

  At the market underneath the Wilson L, I pulled the shopping list out of my pocket. Just as I realized there’d been money in there too and that I’d dropped it, I turned to see a man swoop down and pick it up off the floor. He had sand-colored hair and a red, boozy face crosshatched with wrinkles. I told him politely that that was my dollar he’d just picked up, and he said, “What dollar? I didn’t pick anything up.”

  “Yes, you did. I saw you.”

  “You didn’t see nothing,” he told me.

  I followed him to the back of the store, where he grabbed a quart of beer and a bottle of Four Roses. “Come on,” I said. “I saw you take my money. Give it back.”

  This guy was in his late forties, at least, way old enough to know better. If I saw a dollar bill fall from someone’s pocket, I’d say, “Excuse me, you dropped something.” If there was no one around, I’d claim it as my own, but this was different.

  At the register the man untwisted my dollar. Then he took all the change out of his pocket and slowly counted it out. When the cashier told him he was short 10 cents, he turned to me and said, “Give me a dime.”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  There were two men behind me in line. One of them rooted in his pocket and handed the man who’d stolen from me two nickels. Then he looked a
t me with mild disgust, the way you might at a skinflint, and said, “What’s a dime?”

  May 5, 1989

  Chicago

  I really need to avoid red wine. I drank it last night at Rob and Lyn’s house and awoke hours later with a terrible fire in my throat. My uvula felt like a pilot light. When I got up this morning, my face was very white. I feel fragile today but don’t have what I’d define as a hangover. I remember what went on last night. At one point, Rob showed me his computer and explained that you can plug one into a telephone jack.

  On Tuesday I handed back seventeen papers I’d gotten from the beginning class, including one from L. It’s about a little girl who gets out of bed on Christmas Eve to spy on Santa. She never sees him but gets a shiny new bike the next morning. The final line is “I knew that this was going to be a very special Christmas.”

  It was something a fifth-grader might write, and it made me sad that I was reading it. Her other story, “The New Me,” was about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. I was talking about it to Sandi in the teachers’ lounge, and she told me she’d gotten the exact same story from someone else last semester. I looked in the right-hand corner of the title page and saw that L. had just whited over this other idiot’s name and then typed in her own. When I confronted her later in the day, she said, “Look, just tell me. Am I going to pass the class or not?”