Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  Mom reads her horoscope daily, sometimes in two or three different places. It’s something she started doing a few years back, and while I don’t believe in astrology, still I find myself falling for it. This morning she told me that an older person will be giving me something in return for a favor, and that the gift has the potential to change my life.

  Dad is the only older person I know who owes me a favor—Paul and I painted that apartment he owns for free. So I waited for him to give me something. When it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen on its own, I asked him to give me something.

  We were in the kitchen and he said, “All right, hold on. I’ve got something for you!” He went into the basement and returned a few minutes later with a box of S&H Green Stamps. Some were pasted into books, and some were loose. This was a box he’d brought with him when we moved to Raleigh from Binghamton in 1964. I didn’t think anyone honored Green Stamps anymore, but Dad said they’re still redeemable in Florida.

  “How will these change my life?” I asked.

  “Well, I guess that’s up to you,” he said.

  January 23, 1990

  Chicago

  According to the mother of one of my new students, women whose last names end in the letter A tend to have larger breasts than women whose names end in any other letter. The student, Lisa, had her arms crossed when she said this.

  January 29, 1990

  Chicago

  I’m trying to replace the kitchen faucet for Shirley’s tenants and wound up going to the hardware store with a guy named Jack, a carpenter who’d come to give an estimate on the new closets. He’s been married three times. His first wife left when their youngest son was only two years old.

  I asked why she left, and Jack said she’d fallen in love with some hillbilly’s dick. He said, “Fuck it. I don’t give a damn what that bitch does. Who needs her?” He told me that she stayed away for three years before coming back to check on the kids.

  When Jack’s first mother-in-law died, his reaction was “Then fucking bury the bitch.” He started drinking heavily when married to his second wife, who was as bad as the first. Now, with the third, he’s been sober for five years. The two of them take nice vacations and went to Hawaii once, where whores charge $200 just for a fucking blow job!

  Jack uses the word tits to mean great. The hotel in Hawaii was tits. That red Camaro is tits. Replacing the valves beneath the sink was not tits. I stood and looked down at him on his back, his big belly exposed, while he cursed. In his own way, he’s a nice-looking man. In the late afternoon, we made a second trip to the hardware store.

  Jack honked at shapely women as we passed them. “Hey,” he’d yell, “turn around, you stuck-up bitch.” He wasn’t what you’d call the silent type, not at all, and he charges $20 an hour.

  February 6, 1990

  Chicago

  I asked my students if any of them had stolen anything lately, and two raised their hands. R. said he’d taken a sweatshirt at a party because he was cold. A few days later its rightful owner, a young woman, confronted him, and he ignored her. “She was rich and could buy herself another one,” he said.

  There are a couple of students this semester I have a real hard time liking.

  February 10, 1990

  Chicago

  I went to bed at three thirty last night and had just lain down when I heard a woman yell, “Somebody help me! Oh, God, help me!”

  I couldn’t see people out on the street, but I could hear them, so I called the police and opened the window, at which point I could make out two shapes. The man kept trying to yank the woman upstairs. She would say no, and after he hit her, she’d scream for help again. Then he told her to suck his dick and gave her what sounded like a real wallop. When I heard her being slammed against a chain-link fence, I stuck my head out the window and told him to leave her alone. “I called the police!” I yelled. “I called them and they’re on their way.”

  He must have heard me, but he didn’t stop. Just as I started looking for the baseball bat I don’t have—that and my missing courage—the cops came and flung open the doors of their squad car. I heard them call the man a son of a bitch and a motherfucker. They said, “You get your kicks from beating up women, asshole?”

  The guy yelled that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, and the cops told him to shut up. They handcuffed him, and then they talked to the woman, who wasn’t sure she wanted to press charges. Two more police cars came, and a few minutes later they took the guy away.

  February 19, 1990

  Chicago

  I spent all day waiting on Kool-T, who was supposed to deliver a bag of pot at one this afternoon and finally got it to me at nine thirty tonight. First his car broke down on the expressway, then his initial connection fell through. At nine I went over to his place. Then he, me, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter drove across town to some other connection’s apartment. It made me crazy to be inside all day. For a long time, I read. Then I graded student papers and wrote to a kid I had last semester who has since left town and wanted my opinion on a story he’d just finished. It was about his dog, Tipsy, having puppies.

  At around five I called the mother of the deaf child whose birthday party I was supposed to go to. Then I talked to Lisa and Mom and Amy. Mom told me that Tiffany is dating a mailman, and Amy and I made plans to send her postcards reading “The tests came back positive” and “I need that $10,000 you owe me.” At around seven I watched part of a TV show where a kid with Down syndrome sang “Fight the Power” for his high school talent show. On the radio I learned that Keith Haring died of AIDS.

  I really felt like I was in prison yesterday.

  February 27, 1990

  Chicago

  It looks like I’ve got a place to live in New York. It belongs to Rusty Kane, a two-bedroom in the West Village. The couple he’s been subletting to is moving out, so he’s moving back in and has asked if I’d like to be his roommate. My half of the rent would be $400, which isn’t much more than I’m paying here, plus the utilities are included. New York, finally. Or almost. I think I can make it by August or September.

  March 3, 1990

  Chicago

  I hailed a cab at four thirty this morning and got a driver with straw-colored hair. After I got in, he met my eyes in the rearview mirror and said, “Did you see any pussy out there tonight?”

  I told him I hadn’t been looking, so some might have slipped by unnoticed.

  “You can usually see pussy further south, on Montrose,” he said. “But a lot of that is sick pussy. ’Course, it’s a little bit cold out there tonight. Cold and late. A lot of that pussy is home now, home asleep.”

  I’m often talked to like this by taxi drivers, and it makes me think their cabs should be a different color than the others—that way women will know to avoid them. It gives me the creeps that this guy might pick up my sister. Then again, if anyone could destroy him, it would be Amy.

  March 22, 1990

  Chicago

  I taught today. Sometimes I go in with no idea of what to do. I have them write in class and then I go into the stairwell to smoke and try to think of something. Today I told my students about a friend of mine who is going through a breakup. “What do you do when you’re trying to get over someone?” I asked.

  They gave me the best advice.

  April 1, 1990

  Chicago

  Last night I watched the last half of A Patch of Blue on TV. I hadn’t seen it in ages and couldn’t help but wish that Sidney Poitier were my boyfriend. He’s so handsome and has such a great voice. At the end of the movie, Selina says that she knows he’s colored and that it makes no difference to her. He has arranged for her to attend a school for the blind, and just as the bus arrives to take her away, she announces that she loves him. He feels the same, I can tell, but needs to do what’s best for her. At the end, when he heads alone up the stairs to his apartment, I cried. I’d been wanting to do that all day, had tried most of the afternoon.


  “Boo-hoo,” I’d said, lying in a fetal position on my bed. I’d hoped it might trigger something, but it felt artificial. And so it was great to happen upon A Patch of Blue. I was crying more for myself than the movie, but that’s how it usually goes. I cried hard. I sobbed. I went to the bathroom mirror, watched myself cry, and cried even harder. “I loved you,” I said to my reflection.

  I wished then that someone would call so I could answer in my weary, broken voice.

  “Wrong?” I’d say. “No, there’s nothing wrong on my end. Why do you ask?”

  April 6, 1990

  Chicago

  Sarah Vaughan died three days ago. I have always loved her.

  April 13, 1990

  Chicago

  I told the beginning students that it’s a tradition for the class to buy the teacher a gift at the end of the school year. Then I said I’ve had my eye on a watch that costs $160. “That’s only fourteen dollars each.”

  After describing it in detail, I told them where it could be found. The end of the semester is approaching, so I’ll make a point to mention this again over the coming weeks. I want that watch. I must have it.

  April 16, 1990

  Chicago

  On Greek Easter, I drank Scotch followed by retsina followed by ouzo followed by Scotch followed by brandy, and today I feel like I’ve been raked over by an acetylene torch.

  April 18, 1990

  Chicago

  Again in class we talked about love. A.’s fiancé just slept with her best friend, and she’s written them both off. D. was beaten by her boyfriend twice before she left. R. confessed to hitting his girlfriend so hard, he knocked her out. Two students are married, two are engaged, three have mothers who have been married three times, one has children, three are heartbroken, three others can have sex tonight if they make a few phone calls and beg.

  April 25, 1990

  Chicago

  Amy and I decided a few years back to call ourselves the Talent Family. In the fake bio I’m constructing for us, I claim that two of our earlier plays were A Testament to Tansbury and Cassandra, Albeit Cassandra.

  May 6, 1990

  Chicago

  A bumper sticker I saw on a beat-up car: THIS AIN’T THE MAYFLOWER, BUT YOUR DAUGHTER SURE CAME ACROSS ON IT.

  A man at the IHOP tonight lifted his entire steak with his fork and held it before his mouth, chewing off hunks of it.

  May 20, 1990

  Chicago

  Mom called to tell me that, according to my horoscope in the Raleigh News and Observer, in two weeks I’ll get exactly what I’ve been striving for. That’s two weeks from yesterday, meaning June 2. She sounded excited, so I got excited as well. Why do I always fall for this?

  May 21, 1990

  Chicago

  Amy and I were leaving the Century mall when a guy approached and asked if we’d take part in a survey for a new candy. We answered two simple questions and thought we were through, but then he led us downstairs to a basement where we were shown a mock-up of the product and interrogated for what felt like hours.

  The guy who took down my answers had frizzy hair to his shoulders, and skin that was too white even for a white person. He wore a blue cotton lab coat and laughed nervously after everything he said. He was really a mess. This was a marketing test for a “lite” candy bar called Forever Yours. The pale guy told me it contained NutraSweet and was only 120 calories. One of the questions he asked was “Do you think this product fulfills a continental heritage?”

  I was like, “Huh?”

  Next he asked if I thought it had a traditional American flavor. I said I couldn’t eat chocolate, but that didn’t matter as they never offered us a taste of anything. Eventually I said that the whole idea was stupid. If you’re worried about calories, then don’t eat a candy bar, or eat only half of one.

  “Everything’s ‘lite’ now,” I said. “And the letters that spell it out are always yellow so our eyes won’t get fat looking at the label.”

  He asked what I thought of the name Forever Yours and I said that it was silly. “Because it’s not forever yours. You’ll eat it, then later in the day you’ll pass it, and the experience will be over. It has a beginning and an end. There’s nothing timeless about it.”

  The guy then asked if I was married, single, or divorced. This was perhaps his way of gauging how jaded I am regarding the word forever.

  May 25, 1990

  Chicago

  Katherine Anne Porter’s Collected Letters has been released, and the Times review included one she wrote to Hart Crane. “Your emotional hysteria is not impressive, except possibly to those little hangers-on of literature who feel your tantrums are a mark of genius. To me they do not add the least value to your poetry, and take away my last shadow of a wish to ever see you again.…Let me alone. This disgusting episode has already gone too far.”

  Ouch.

  June 4, 1990

  Chicago

  Amy’s neighbors were kicking a ball on the front lawn her boyfriend, Paul, had recently seeded, so she opened the window and politely asked them to play somewhere else. “We’re trying to grow grass,” she explained.

  “You’re trying to grow it now?” one of the kids asked, as if she could put it on hold for a while.

  June 18, 1990

  Chicago

  Summer school started this afternoon. They said they’d cancel the class if I had fewer than twelve students, then they changed it to seven. I started the day with eight. One was absent, two added at the last minute, and one dropped out, so now I’m at a relatively safe nine. That’ll be $2,300 ($1,900 or so after taxes) I can add to the $1,000 I already have saved for New York.

  June 26, 1990

  Chicago

  Amy and I went to Hoffritz to find Dad a Father’s Day gift. Our original idea was to buy him a knife, but in the end we spent $72 on a vibrator. It’s a Panasonic with a long stem and a thickish disk on top, designed so you can reach behind yourself and work out the kinks in your back and shoulders. We also figured he’ll use it on his dog.

  “Our father’s going to love this,” Amy said to the saleswoman as we laid the vibrator on the counter.

  The woman smiled.

  “The next time we see him, though, I bet his front teeth are all chipped.”

  The smile faded.

  June 28, 1990

  Chicago

  A few days back, at the library, I found the new biography of Jackson Pollock, who was surprisingly naive. On the advice of a Park Avenue “healer,” he started drinking a combination of bat shit and ground beets, this to establish a “proper balance of gold and silver in his urine.”

  In 1951 the doctor put him on a special diet for his alcoholism. No dairy and plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. The only meat permitted was fowl, which had to have been shot within the past two hours and had to be wild—“Eat no bird that can’t take off at fifty miles per hour.” Meanwhile, he could still drink as much alcohol as he wanted. The trick, the doctor explained, was to balance out the metals in his body.

  Jean Detzer came by the other night, and she and Evelyne swapped stories about the Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and the time they’d spent working there as meeting planners. American hotels have a rule that you can’t display a cadaver in any room where food is being served. “How archaic,” Jean said. “I mean, really. In this day and age!”

  Perhaps the rule had something to do with wakes, but for whatever reason, it was instituted, and both Jean and Evelyne have broken it. Evelyne once traveled with half a woman, a cadaver from the waist up, that she named Tracey and had to smuggle into a convention. Jean once sneaked an entire dead body into a meeting room at the Fairmont. She said they dressed the dead man in a suit and mussed up his hair to make him look drunk. “Then we carried him in supported by two sober doctors.” She took a swallow of her Scotch. “The only hard part was finding two sober doctors at the convention.”

  June 30, 1990

  Chicago

 
As I passed three teenage girls on the street yesterday, one was saying, “Don’t you just hate it when you meet a guy and he’s got the personality you always dreamed about but is ugly? I swear I hate that shit.”

  July 2, 1990

  Chicago

  Before leaving for class this morning I found out that I won another literary award. It’s $1,000 for “The New Music” from the Illinois Arts Council, which gives the same amount to the magazine that the story was published in (ACM). This was the final day for claiming the prize so I let my students go early and rushed out to get my money. I’m as shocked as I was the last time. “The New Music” was written two years ago, right after I graduated.

  July 7, 1990

  Chicago

  I finished the Jackson Pollock biography and started a new one about Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in Gone with the Wind and was married four times, once to a man named Wonderful Smith.

  July 12, 1990

  Chicago

  For the third time this week, a man approached me and asked if he could have $1. He pointed to a van and said that it was his. “It broke down and if I don’t get to work, I’m in big trouble.”

  Each time it’s a different guy, but it’s always the same van. A scam, obviously, but even if the story was true, who goes to work with no money in his pockets? What if you ran out of gas?

  When I taught my night class in the Fine Arts Building, I was often asked for money by a woman who said she’d been robbed and needed to take a commuter train to one of the northern suburbs. Even the first time I saw her I thought, Really? You can’t call a friend or a family member? You’re honestly going to hit up total strangers for your fare? Like the men with the van, she was always well dressed and acting frantic.