Theft by Finding

by David Sedaris

  July 26, 1990

  Chicago

  Last night I read at the Park West as part of the Orchid Show, and it seemed pretty full to me, maybe five hundred people. I’m hoping that a year from now I’m not regretting my decision to leave Chicago. It was always my dream to read in such a fancy place in front of such a big audience. Now I want a bigger audience, but in New York.

  One of the other acts last night performed a rap number with two other guys. Backstage he’d hogged the dressing room and made a big deal out of having a manager. Then he got out there and I saw that his fly was down.

  July 30, 1990

  Chicago

  I read in an interview that David Lynch used to go to Bob’s Big Boy in Los Angeles. Every day for seven years he’d have a milk shake and six cups of coffee and take notes before going home to write. I sure will miss the IHOP when I move to New York. Every night Barbara carries a menu to my table and says, “Just coffee this evening?” Every night I cross my fingers as she hands me my change at the register. Every night as I leave, she says, “Take care.” The few times she hasn’t said it, I’ve worried I’ll get hit by a car while riding my bike home.

  At the IHOP I go through phases of sitting in different booths. I can look at the one in the very back and think, I remember those days. I recall sitting near the front where I could hear people on the pay phone. Each phase lasts about six months. I always stay at the IHOP long enough to smoke three cigarettes. I never have four. I love for things to stay exactly the same, but I can’t have this IHOP and New York.

  July 31, 1990

  Chicago

  Again tonight on Addison a man approached me and said that his van had broken down. “I need you to give me a quarter,” he said, as if that’s what it would cost to have the thing towed and repaired.

  August 7, 1990

  Chicago

  Today was my last day of teaching at the Art Institute. The summer-school class was so sweet, one of the best. I brought my black-and-white Polaroid camera and Ben stepped in from the office and took group photos, one for each person. Students read their stories out loud while we ate cake. We all said how much we’d liked one another.

  Seeing as I had my camera on me, before leaving the IHOP tonight, I took a picture of Barbara, who has worked evenings on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays the entire six and a half years I’ve been coming here. In the background of the photo I took are the rotisserie chickens, the ones what spin around.

  August 13, 1990

  Chicago

  As a going-away present, Amy gave me some sort of a paw. It’s mounted on a thin slice of mahogany, and beside it, written in pencil, is 1888. I thought it maybe belonged to a sloth, but the fingers are splayed. It’s like the hand of a Dr. Seuss character. Amy really is the best gift giver. “It’s beautiful,” I told her. “Every time I look at it, I’ll think of our paw.”

  She gave it to me at the going-away party. It was held at the Quinns’, and when vegetarian Janet saw it she flew off the handle. How dare I bring this into her house? Did I have any idea what this animal had gone through, etc.? She put a sort of curse on me. This morning she left to attend massage school.

  August 17, 1990

  Chicago

  I passed a fight on Broadway near Belmont tonight, a chubby white guy and a black kid who was maybe fifteen. The white guy seemed a little crazy and I got the idea that the kid and his friends had provoked him into being just that much crazier. At one point he screamed, “Go back to nigger town, nigger!” The black kid took off his belt and charged, swinging it above his head, but the white guy just grabbed it. The two friends, meanwhile, hung back and laughed.

  August 28, 1990

  Raleigh

  Dad, Paul, and I spent eighteen hours in the front seat of a Toyota pickup truck. Eighteen hours through Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and North Carolina. At one point I fell asleep. Paul reached into my Dopp kit then, got out my shaving cream, and covered a good three-quarters of my face before I woke up. Later he elbowed me in the ribs while I was pouring coffee. It went from the thermos to my bare legs and burned me. If I tried to read a magazine, he’d take the page and crumple it up. He dumped a cup of water over my head. He grabbed the skin beneath my arm and twisted it until I begged for mercy. The three of us were crowded together side by side. It was hot, but I never lost my temper. It was all funny to me, and I laughed while Dad drove and we all three listened to the radio.

  August 30, 1990

  Raleigh

  I told Melina, my parents’ Great Dane, that we were going to have her put to sleep on Saturday, and Dad got super-angry. As if she could understand me! So I said to her, “OK, we’ll wait until Monday.” This made him even angrier, and he ordered me to leave his house.

  Yesterday I told him I’d ridden my bike to the grocery store and bought a chicken.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said. The chicken was right there on the counter, along with the receipt, but still he insisted for absolutely no reason that I hadn’t bought it. He refuses to be wrong.

  August 31, 1990

  Raleigh

  I would rather be a Klansman

  In a robe of snowy white,

  Than to be a Catholic priest

  In a robe as black as night;

  For a Klansman is AMERICAN

  And AMERICA is his home,

  But a priest owes his allegiance

  To a Dago Pope in Rome.

  That’s a 1925 Klan song verse in the Jean Stafford biography I’m reading. Like many good biography subjects, she became a mess toward the end of her life. One of her last ideas was for a recipe book called How to Cook for One While Drunk.

  September 7, 1990

  Emerald Isle

  Mom left the beach a day early. Paul drove her. She seems to be in poor health lately. She coughs and hacks a lot more than usual. The sound of it brings out the worst in me (said the guy with a cigarette in his mouth). It’s bad, though. We call her Mount Vesuvius. She spent a lot of time indoors on this trip.

  September 19, 1990

  Raleigh

  A joke Dean told me:

  Q. What is it in the air in San Francisco that keeps women from getting pregnant?

  A. Men’s legs.

  September 25, 1990

  Raleigh

  Last night Dad predicted that six months from now I’ll regret ever having left Chicago. He’s been a real terror lately. An hour later he yelled at me for picking up a meatball with my fingers. It was on a dish in the refrigerator and he accused me of touching a lot of them before deciding on the largest. I think he worries that I’m spreading AIDS. He doesn’t like me drinking out of anyone else’s glass either.

  Dad doesn’t pay attention when you talk to him, so Paul’s taken to throwing the term IRS into his sentences. Then it’s suddenly: “Hold on a second, what did you say?”

  October 2, 1990

  Raleigh

  I’m in the breakfast nook, drinking a cup of coffee, when, out of nowhere, Dad wants to talk. “I have something important I need to discuss.”

  Then he decides that he has to take Melina for a walk. Ten minutes later, he returns and slams a coaster on the table—which is made of Formica, not wood—and anyway I have my cup on one of the ten catalogs that arrive in the mailbox every morning. Then we go to the A&P and the entire time we’re in the car, he talks to the dog instead of me. As we walk into the store, he confides that his biggest regret is that Melina never got to have sex, that he ruined all that by getting her spayed.

  At the A&P he walks around eating things—free samples, pieces of fruit he should be paying for, whatever’s open. He charges into the back room, demanding the freshest tomatoes and discounts on wilted lettuce. He berates the cashiers and bag boys. On the way home, he finally gets to what he’d wanted to talk about: Paul. “That guy is going nowhere fast,” he says. He predicts that he’ll become an aimless alcoholic and I remind him that Paul is only twenty-two and deserves to live a young p
erson’s life.

  “Aw, baloney.”

  October 5, 1990

  New York

  Before leaving for the train station, Mom and I watched part of a Today show segment about monkeys that are trained as helpers for handicapped people. They showed a quadriplegic fellow in an electric wheelchair instructing his little servant, Lisa, to pick up a cassette tape off the floor.

  The monkey did as she was told, and when the guy ordered Lisa to put it in the machine and press Play, she did that as well. Sometimes, to demonstrate their love, the monkeys will stick their filthy hands into the mouths of their masters, who are completely paralyzed and can’t swat them away.

  When the time came, Mom drove me to the station. The train was there waiting, and when we said good-bye, her eyes welled with tears. I had a terrific time with her this past month. I sure do love my mother.

  And now I am in New York City. The train took eleven hours, and during that time I accidentally walked in on three people who were sitting on the toilet, two women and one man. Once every hour I’d go to the bar car for a cigarette and listen to the drunks, who were always saying something like “When I say you’re a friend, you’re a motherfucking friend. I’m not bullshitting you, man.”

  I took a cab from Penn Station, and Rusty was waiting at the apartment when I arrived. It’s much bigger than I’d imagined. The neighborhood is too beautiful for me. I don’t deserve it. Or, OK, my block I deserve. It’s more industrial than the ones around it, and we look out at a parking lot for trucks. Two short blocks away, though, it’s perfect. Tree-lined winding streets, restaurants and coffee shops. It’s enchanting. I can’t picture myself in any of those places, but still. How did I get to live here? Rusty says that some of the apartments in the area are going for a million dollars. I’m not sure about that, but I do know that a ginger ale costs three dollars. Three dollars!

  At two thirty a.m. Rusty took me out on his motorcycle, and we went all over. At six thirty I went to bed, and three hours later I got up. First I heard a siren, then trucks, then car horns, then every noise in the world. I can’t get over it. I walk down the street and I can’t get over it.

  This morning I went to the nearest supermarket. Chicken was 89 cents a pound. Other things—Wesson oil, orange juice, butter—were generally 15 cents more than they should be.

  October 7, 1990

  New York

  Everywhere I go in New York, people are selling electrical tape. They sell it in stores, on the sidewalk, on card tables, and at street fairs. There must be a terrific demand for it here.

  On Rusty’s TV, on a cable channel, I saw a nude woman say, “I want to wipe my pussy with your face, motherfucker.” On TV!

  At last night’s Feature (gallery) opening, I heard someone whisper, “Is she the one who sets herself on fire?”

  I saw lots of chicken today for $1.50 a pound.

  October 11, 1990

  New York

  Today I saw a woman with no legs who said, “Can you give me a dollar, sweetheart? I’m trying to buy an electric wheelchair.”

  I think beer is expensive here. A six-pack of Bud, for instance, is $6. For Bud! So tonight I’m drinking Schmidt’s for $2.89. Lily told me that an ounce of pot goes anywhere from $320 to $400. I felt bad in Chicago paying $60 for a quarter.

  I haven’t worked out my coffee situation yet. Each night I try somewhere different. Chock Full o’Nuts has too many distractions, so the best place so far is the Bagel Buffet on 6th Avenue. The IHOP gives customers a whole pot. It’s awful coffee, but at least you don’t have to flag someone down every ten minutes. Plus you could sit at a booth for as long as you needed to and they never hustled you out. At the Bagel Buffet, you get a paper cup of coffee for 60 cents so it’s just $1.80 for three cups, which I can afford if I cut back a little in other places. Now I need a library card.

  October 14, 1990

  New York

  Tonight on 6th Avenue I saw a completely naked woman. She was black, disturbed, and her breasts hung down to her waist. I saw her yesterday in the same spot, but dressed and yelling, “I’m getting drunk!”

  I previously enjoyed walking down 6th, but tonight it was rowdy and humid and someone threw a bottle that smashed on the sidewalk ten feet away from me. Who threw it? The nice thing about crowds is that someone can throw a bottle and you don’t take it personally.

  I saw two more people without feet today, one before and one after I walked to the Central Park Zoo. It’s not nearly as big as the one in Lincoln Park in Chicago, or as well stocked. For example, they have ants at the Central Park Zoo. From watching the original Cat People movie, I was expecting panthers, but the wildest things they had were polar bears. Then there were penguins, monkeys, bats, and tortoises, which really made time when the guy showed up with their food. It was funny to see them run, their necks stretched out, their eyes bulging.

  At a store called Gay Treasures on Hudson Street, I heard a man in his mid-fifties talk to the cashier, who was around the same age, about his new boyfriend. “He spanks me raw at least twice a week. Last night he used an umbrella!”

  “He should have stuck it up your ass,” the cashier said.

  The customer leaned forward. “Who said he didn’t!”

  October 15, 1990

  New York

  I screwed up my courage this afternoon and called Philip Morris. Rusty then told me that I wanted William Morris. They’re the talent agency. Philip Morris is the cigarette company.

  I walked around today and saw a man get chased and kicked in the ass for taking an apple from a fruit stand. Tonight it’s cool and the air is dry. The city smells like burned coffee.

  October 19, 1990

  New York

  Lily has been painting and doing light carpentry work in the town house of an antiques dealer. He has a little dog named Crumpet that acts pitiful and lame when it wants food and attention. She told me about him at a falafel restaurant in the East Village, and then I told her about my downstairs neighbors, who have been complaining about the sound of my footsteps. “Because of them I now go barefoot when I’m at home,” I told her. “And I tiptoe.”

  A woman sitting near us finished her meal and said to me on her way out, “Listen, you pay rent too. There’s no need for you to tiptoe around your own apartment.”

  October 21, 1990

  New York

  Every day I get the paper from the same trash can on Abingdon Square and look through the want ads. Tomorrow at nine I’m applying at UPS. Then Lily is paying me $20 to help her carry a ladder. So for days, I can feel resourceful. I hope that UPS hires me. Even if it means I have to work through Christmas, I want a job so I can buy things.

  October 22, 1990

  New York

  I went to 43rd and 11th to apply for the driver’s helper job at UPS. It was maybe ten o’clock when I arrived and there were a good three hundred people in line ahead of me. Many of them were dressed in suits. Others looked like they had just been passing by and saw the sign. While waiting for my interview, I listened to the two men in front of me. One said that his wife had just had a baby and that he’d lost his job because a friend had borrowed his driver’s license and had a wreck. “So it went on my record,” he said.

  You can’t tell that story to a potential employer. They don’t want a guy with crummy friends who ask you to do things like loan them your license.

  The UPS interviews were conducted by ten people. Some of them—a Japanese man, a black woman—talked to applicants for a long time and wound up scheduling callbacks. I got stuck with a white guy, Mr. Hardball, who did not even shake my hand.

  At five I met with Lily, who paid me to help her carry a ladder. We picked it up on Canal Street, at the loft of a guy named Hugh and his two roommates, Scott and Leslie. Their place was spacious and homey, like a log cabin. Hugh had a wet bar in the shape of a tree stump. Leslie was making an apple pie and they were listening to All Things Considered. Hugh is handsome, a nice guy. Gay. Lily and I walke
d the ladder to a studio apartment on the corner of Jane and Greenwich and she gave me $20. For the first time since arriving in New York, I feel like I’ve plugged a leak.

  October 24, 1990

  New York

  “Macy’s Herald Square, the largest store in the world, has big opportunities for outgoing, fun-loving people of all shapes and sizes who want more than just a holiday job. Working as an elf in Macy’s SantaLand means being at the center of the excitement…”

  So I called and have an interview next Wednesday at eleven o’clock.

  October 25, 1990

  New York

  Lily and I saw a dead man on West 11th. He had jumped from a sixth-floor window, landed on a car, and rolled into the street, where he was lying in an ever expanding pool of blood. You could see that on the way down he’d hit a tree. I wondered if, at the last minute, he’d changed his mind and tried to grab hold of the branches, many of which were broken now. A crowd formed and some boys who’d seen him jump claimed to have heard his skull crack. People passing said, “What happened?” and the two kids, celebrities now, acted as spokesmen.