Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  February 16, 1998

  New York

  Lots of domestic violence on Cops tonight. A young woman is punched in the face and her boyfriend goes bananas when officers enter his trailer to arrest him. He’s strong, and it takes three men to bring him down. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is screaming, “I only want to talk to you, baby.” To the cops she pleads, “He didn’t mean to hurt y’all. He was askaird.”

  As the boyfriend is taken away, he yells, “I ain’t never gonna forgive you for this, Randi. When I get out I am going to fuck you up.”

  She answers, “Do you want me to pay your bail?”

  “See,” the guy says to her as he’s pushed into the car, “they don’t know what you’re like. They don’t know how you talk to me, how you make me have to beat you up.”

  “I’m sorry,” she cries. “I’ll get you out tonight.”

  February 22, 1998

  New York

  They’re broadcasting the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympic Games in Nagano. This means I can return to writing without having Hugh yell every five minutes, “David, get in here—hurry!”

  I sat him down the other night and explained as gently as possible that I do not care about ice-skating. I do not care about Michelle Kwan or Tara Lipinski and would be happy if I never hear the words triple lutz or double axel again. I told him that on Friday and walked into the kitchen an hour later to find him in tears. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said, watching his beloved skaters.

  Last night he called me in to watch Michelle Kwan do her final routine. The competition is over, but they’re allowing the skaters to come back and do whatever they want without fear of judgment. They don’t let the bobsledders do it, but apparently the ice-skaters have a lot of fans like Hugh, who can’t get enough. Right now they’re killing time with a soft-news segment explaining that “rice is very important to the people of Nagano.” The narrator is taking his three-minute story and stretching it out to ten. The secret is to t a l k v e r y s l o w l y.

  March 4, 1998

  New York

  I called my drug-delivery service and they sent a young white man named Luke. Like all of them, he arrived on a bicycle and knocked on the door with four different grades of pot. I complained about the construction noise coming from the hotel they’re building next door, and he said, with sympathy, “Oh, dude.”

  I asked where he lived, and he said Williamsburg. “It’s like a party place but really laid back.”

  Luke was like a parody of a stoner. I think that’s what I liked about him. I’d hate it if the person selling me pot in the middle of the day was super-articulate. That would make me feel like even more of a loser.

  March 13, 1998

  New York

  Helen fell this afternoon and I watched the paramedics carry her down the stairs. According to Joe, she’d been up on a chair changing a lightbulb and may have broken her hip. Her daughter arrived, dressed in a fur coat, and said, “You must be Dave, the one she drives crazy. Welcome to the club.”

  March 19, 1998

  New York

  Hugh goes through phases with the New York Times crossword puzzle. He’ll do them religiously for a few months and then drop off entirely. Sometimes I’ll look over his shoulder and whenever I get a correct answer, I’ll feel so smart and capable. Before she died, Mom started doing the crosswords from the Raleigh News and Observer. She bought a book of easy puzzles and it broke my heart to find them in the bathroom wastebasket. Three-letter word for “Placed out of sight,” and she’d have written put instead of hid.

  I never cared about puzzles one way or another until this weekend, when I completed the crossword in this week’s People. The clues were, I’ll admit, pretty simple. “All ___ ___ Family.” “Singer once married to Sonny.” It was on a fifth-grade level, but after I’d finished, I couldn’t stop staring at it.

  I showed it to Hugh and then went through the recycling pile on the curb and found two more Peoples. I love getting stoned and doing the crossword, but they’re even better first thing in the morning.

  March 27, 1998

  New York

  Ken Shorr is in town and dropped by this morning. We went for a coffee on Sullivan Street and were sitting at an outdoor table when an elderly man approached and asked if we could help him lower a plant into a hole he’d just dug. It was a strange and unexpected request, so we said yes and allowed him to lead us up the street and into a building I must have passed five hundred times. It had an elevator, and he pushed the button for the basement, explaining that this was his son-in-law’s apartment. “He’s Chinese,” he added, “and is composing an opera. I hoped the maid could help me with the plant, but unfortunately she’s not strong enough.”

  In the basement, we walked down a dark narrow hallway and into a clean-smelling apartment. It opened onto a small backyard, where the man gestured to a good-size tree, its roots contained in a sizable burlap ball. It must have weighed three hundred pounds, and he needed it carried up four steps and then dragged to a hole six feet away.

  Ken and I tried to lift it, but it took all we had and within seconds it was back on the ground with us over it, panting. “I can’t believe…your maid couldn’t…handle this on her own,” Ken said, gasping for air. “Mine could carry two…trees and still manage to…breast-feed…the children.”

  The man blinked.

  On the second try, we got it up a single stair. Then another and another. On nearing the hole, we realized that it was way too shallow. Someone needed to make it deeper, but it wasn’t going to be either of us. The man was so frail that it might have taken him hours, so we said nothing and lowered the tree into the too-shallow hole, where it looked pathetic.

  March 28, 1998

  New York

  Hugh and I went to visit Helen in the hospital and throughout our half-hour stay I wondered if we didn’t have the wrong room. She’s been literally defanged, and without her teeth, it was difficult to understand what she was saying. “How are you?” Hugh asked.

  She pointed at the wall and told him to open the refrigerator.

  Her hair has grown out since I last saw her. The copper-colored henna is gone, and she looks a good twenty years older. She later told her daughter, Ann, that two men had stopped by. She didn’t recall our names and had no idea why we’d come.

  March 30, 1998

  New York

  Because I was in a bind with my BBC story, I devoted most of my day to defrosting the freezer. In the afternoon I called the delivery service to order some pot, and an hour later a guy named Stogie came to the door. After counting my money, he looked at the papers on my table and said, “Hey, are you David Sedaris? My wife really likes you.” He asked if he could have my autograph and I was so flattered. I mean, here he was, a big-time pot dealer, and he wanted my autograph? It was sweet of him to ask, and his attention made it much easier to finish the BBC story.

  April 10, 1998

  Hanover, New Hampshire

  I was met this morning by a woman named Georgia who took me across the river to do a radio interview in Vermont. Afterward we went to a restaurant where she seemed to know everyone. On leaving after our lunch, she introduced me to an eighty-year-old Japanese American woman named Bea who said, “We just got back from our annual Good Friday March for Peace!”

  Bea, I learned, lives part-time in a local Quaker retirement community. “The rest of the year we live on the farm.”

  “You farm?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, have for decades. My husband and I are tied to the land.”

  I asked what she farmed and was slightly disappointed when she said, “Christmas trees.” Because, come on, that’s really not the sort of thing that forces you out of bed at five a.m. I could be wrong, but don’t Christmas trees pretty much take care of themselves?

  April 15, 1998

  New York

  I passed the Black Israelites on 7th Ave and 50th Street this afternoon. These are the people who wear outlandish robes and talk about
how much Jesus hated white people. I was walking along, minding my own business, when the guy with the microphone called me a cracker faggot.

  April 17, 1998

  New York

  Rakoff was on As the World Turns today, playing a talent scout for the Visage Modeling Agency. His lines included “Are you kidding, I’d never miss a Rebecca Drake fashion show. I’m simply mad for her work.” I’d never seen this particular soap opera before but will watch as long as he’s on it. On Monday he’ll appear again and say, “Excuse me, miss, but do you think I might look through your portfolio?”

  April 20, 1998

  New York

  On my way home tonight I passed a fistfight taking place in front of the pizzeria on the corner of Spring and Thompson. I’m not sure who started it, but the kickboxer won, literally hands down.

  April 27, 1998

  New York

  I’m reading a book Amy suggested by Maria Flook. It’s about her sister, who took off at the age of fourteen with a fifty-year-old man she met at a bowling alley. He led her to Norfolk, Virginia, where she started working as a prostitute. At one point, the two of them go off to steal a fur coat. They’re in the store and he tells her to wait by the door while he stands beside “the Jewish piano.” That’s what he calls the cash register, the Jewish piano. It’s such a good book.

  May 7, 1998

  La Bagotière

  On my way to Ségrie-Fontaine I passed three teenage girls lying on their backs in the middle of the road. It was a dumb place to relax, as they were surrounded on both sides by winding curves. I walked by, and then two of them stood and asked if I had a cigarette for their friend. I indicated that mine were menthols and they said that was fine.

  Teenagers in Normandy always seem so innocent—even when they’re hanging out in a village square, they always smile and say hello.

  Hugh passed the girls an hour later on his bike and they stopped him to ask if he was English.

  “American,” he told them.

  When they learned that he lives in New York, they asked if he’d ever seen Leonardo DiCaprio. “Well, yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact…”

  I was there, too, and remember it clearly. DiCaprio was with a beautiful young woman, stepping out of a cab in front of the Museum of Natural History. He tried to pay with a $50, and when the driver said that the bill was too big, the movie star stood in line at the hot-dog cart and got change there. That’s what being famous gets you in New York: change.

  The girls asked Hugh what other famous people he’d seen and he said something unsatisfying like “Oh, you know.”

  I keep a list of the stars I see, but even without it I’d have made things up, just to get a reaction out of them. I would have given them the New York they imagine, the one where you can’t leave your house without seeing Madonna and Michael Jackson breast-feeding their babies. If you were going to give these girls one star, though, Leonardo DiCaprio was definitely the one. Hugh got back on his bike and as he took off, the girls resumed their position on the road, so small-town, it must hurt.

  May 12, 1998

  New York

  Helen died the other night at six o’clock, five days after being transferred to a Staten Island nursing home. At the funeral parlor on Bleecker Street, I met her sister, Minnie, who had a voice as deep as a man’s. “We used to call Helen ‘Baby Hippo’ because she was always so fat in the hips and rear,” she said.

  Hugh told her that we thanked Helen in all our play programs. “She’s the one who gave us the sewing machine we used to make curtains.”

  “That was my machine,” Minnie said. “You should have been thanking me, not her.”

  The sisterly resemblance was striking.

  May 23, 1998

  New York

  My friend Doug is visiting from Los Angeles. He’s been single for as long as I’ve known him and went out recently with a guy who took him to bed and whispered, “Let’s pretend we’re cousins.”

  “It’s one thing to act like you’re somebody’s brother or to role-play a father-and-son fantasy, but how do you pretend to be cousins?” Doug asked.

  For the rest of the afternoon we came up with possible dialogue, standouts being “Isn’t it funny how our dads look so much alike?” and “How come I call my mother Mom and you call her Aunt Sharon?”

  June 6, 1998

  Chicago

  A joke told to me by the media escort Bill Young:

  Q. Did you hear about the Polish lottery?

  A. You win $1 a year for a million years.

  He then said, “The good thing about French drinking water is you know nobody’s taken a bath in it.”

  June 10, 1998

  Birmingham, Alabama

  I was outside the Atlanta airport having a cigarette when I saw a mentally ill person wander over and search the ashtray for salvageable butts. He hobbled, wearing what looked to be too-tight shoes, and his pockets were bulging, I guessed from all the ashtrays he’d visited before this one. I was seated on a bench and as he stood in front of me, I looked at the tag on his knapsack.

  Name: E Dog

  Street: My Street

  City: My City

  State: My State

  June 14, 1998

  Nashville, Tennessee

  While waiting for my flight, I took a seat beside an elderly man and his six-year-old granddaughter. Just before our boarding was announced, the girl climbed into his lap and pounded on his colostomy bag. “Is that your wallet?” she asked in a singsong voice that told me she knew very well what it was.

  “Oh, May-June,” the man said wearily, “you know it ain’t my wallet.”

  “It’s all filled with poody,” the girl said. “When you go home, will you throw it down the toilet?”

  “Prob’ly so,” the man said, no doubt counting the seconds until one of them—it didn’t matter which—got on that plane and flew far, far away.

  June 21, 1998

  San Francisco

  In Los Angeles yesterday I met a former book publicist.

  “Why did you quit?” I asked.

  She sighed. “I was tired having authors call and say, ‘My shower cap’s too tight.’”

  A joke told to me by a media escort, Frank:

  Princess Diana and Mother Teresa are in heaven, and the latter isn’t too happy. “It isn’t fair,” she says. “All those years I lived in squalor, devoting myself to the sick and suffering. All she did was attend cocktail parties and model clothes, so how come she has a halo and I don’t?”

  Then God says, “That’s not a halo, it’s a steering wheel.”

  June 29, 1998

  New York

  This morning I began my French class at the Alliance Française on the Upper East Side. There are eight students ranging in age from a woman in her mid-fifties to a boy who looks to be around fifteen. I worried I might be the worst, but that honor goes to an Australian who accepted a phone call during class, braying, “Bonjour! No, it’s me. I’m in French class!”

  Our teacher is a beautiful, mournful-looking Parisienne with long brown hair. It’s an intermediate rather than a beginners’ class, so I assumed that everyone, like me, had studied a little before signing up. One of the students is Japanese American, and when the teacher asked her a question in French, she answered in English, “What? Are you asking me what I do? I guess I’m a student, OK?”

  June 30, 1998

  New York

  Don called this afternoon just as I was getting ready to leave. I said I’d phone him tomorrow and he suggested I try at around twelve thirty. “Tell Cristina it’s you, and if I happen to be gassing to somebody, I’ll get off the blower.” I love how old his slang is.

  July 1, 1998

  New York

  Today was my second French class, and I got to play Fabienne in the “Comment trouvez-vous Paris?” dialogue we were asked to memorize. She’s a brooder, Fabienne, and I worked hard to master her inflection, especially her line “Me, this town. I don’t like it. I
prefer my Normandy.”

  The Australian didn’t show up today, but the Japanese American student was there. When the teacher asked her to play the role of Carmen, she shook her head, saying, “I don’t think so.”

  The Brazilian guy hadn’t done his homework either—just didn’t feel like it. The teacher, Cécile, is very shy and blushes easily. It took all she had to say, softly, “The next time, you should come prepared.”

  Last night Hugh helped me with my memorized dialogue and this afternoon I started on our next assignment, in which Jean-Claude bitches about the subway.

  July 10, 1998

  New York

  Rosalie transferred to our class last Wednesday because her previous teacher wasn’t challenging enough. She’s clearly the best student, and is always well dressed and quick to help the rest of us out. This as opposed to the Australian, who Rollerbladed to class, arrived late, and then opened the window because she was cold. She didn’t ask—just did it.

  July 20, 1998

  New York

  Class was strange today. We spent ten minutes on the future tense before switching to reflexive verbs. The teacher asked if there were any questions and someone asked where she had learned her Spanish. She told us her husband is Puerto Rican, so she’d picked it up from him. Then someone asked how long she’d lived in Paris. I then asked where she lived before moving to Paris, and when she said Morocco, everyone started in. “Where do your parents live? What does your father do?”