By Anonymous
Sometimes I like to steal. Usually, this amounts to little more than petty pilfering. Yanking a discount Cadbury Crème Egg from CVS after Easter, that sort of thing. Let me be clear: I’m not a kleptomaniac and it’s not a compulsion. You can have me over without worrying that something will be missing after I’m gone. And I do have some rules. I don’t steal from individuals or from stores that aren’t major chains, and I don’t take things that are unique or whose absence would attract notice.
None of those qualifying remarks excuses this behavior or makes it OK. Nor did I earn cosmic credit for times like when the guy ahead of me at Safeway dropped a twenty and I ran after him with it, much to his bewilderment. The thing is, I don’t care. I like stealing. It’s a rush and a thrill and a departure from my otherwise slightly-better-than-average conduct. Sure, I jaywalk and I speed on the open highway and I brown-bag it in Dolores Park, but I’m not especially depraved — and I like to think of myself as thoughtful and conscientious, most of the time. Usually when I steal, I share. It’s way more fun that way, and if anybody were to react with horror when I said, “What you’re eating? I didn’t pay for that,” then I would feel embarrassed. But they never do, so I keep on stealing.
Of course, it doesn’t matter how generous I am with the fruits of my clandestine, illicit labor because it’s still stealing. In college, I sold Cutco knives and neglected to return the $800 demo set after quitting. A purist might say that every meal I’ve ever cooked is somehow tainted, but nobody actually thinks that way, really. The statute of limitations ran out years ago, and now I chop onions with gleeful abandon. Humans are capable of the oiliest rationalizations for their actions, and lots of people who take what isn’t theirs believe their personal ethics to be overdeveloped because they set easily fulfilled conditions for theft, and proceed to obey them. (I just like my knives.) Maybe there is some kind of honor among thieves, maybe not. But there is definitely some exuberance. I always think of Kathy Bates’ character on Six Feet Under, gleefully shoplifting in plain sight because “nobody pays any attention to women of a certain age. We’re invisible. See?” I can’t claim that when I steal, say, acidophilus, it’s a defiant gesture against ageist patriarchy, but her brazen confidence is admirable and totally badass.
I was such a goody-two-shoes when I was a kid, and eventually I realized that I could get away with way more than the known bad children because adults all had their eye on them all the time. Not that I was or am a master manipulator, but it’s the furtiveness of occasional stealing that’s so delicious. The sense of being sneaky and getting away with something is way more exciting than the actual enjoyment of the stolen good. Because gobbling a candy bar is a small pleasure compared with the threat of getting arrested or to sitting in shame in the back of a dingy Walgreens after the guard busts you on your way out.
My college boyfriend stole something from Whole Foods and got banned for life. He had to sign a promise never to return after the entire security team appeared and threatened him with prosecution, and although he didn’t explicitly say so, I suspect they scared him so bad he cried. I hope I cheered him up by cooking him dinner with my stolen knives.
There are other circumstances when I steal, or used to. I jumped the New York City subway turnstile exactly twice, but used to dodge fares on Muni a lot. Pressing an expired transfer stub to an all-night transfer from earlier in the same month so that they lined up was my scheme. I pay the two dollars religiously now, because I feel bad about the system being so broken for people who truly depend on it, but also I came really close to riding an escalator at Civic Center straight into a phalanx of fare-checkers once, and only escaped by pretending to be a very distressed tourist who got off at the wrong stop. I ran down to the platform as the agents nabbed an elderly woman whose transfer had expired, and took the next train to Powell, panting.
When I was a bartender at parties, I would take it upon myself to boost morale among the staff with alcohol, especially if the client was rude or high-maintenance. A couple of unnecessarily chilled bottles of white wine that sat in an ice bath all night until the labels came off could not be resold, so I would offer half of them to the client with a shrug and an apology and distribute the remainder to my coworkers. This was even easier at big events where wine gets placed at every table; you can end up with dozens of half-empty bottles that, when married, provide something of a bonanza to the otherwise harried servers — although this is arguably closer to the cost of doing business than to employee theft. Once, at a very lavish retirement party for a rich attorney who was moving to New Zealand, I walked out with a bottle of absinthe. The fact that the dude was probably not going to ship it to the Southern Hemisphere with all his worldly belongings is no justification, but that thought did enter my mind as I slipped it in my bag, 50 Sazeracs ago.
I did get caught shoplifting once, in 2009. I was cooking dinner for friends who’d volunteered to dog-sit over Christmas for me, and I needed basil to make pesto. I ran to the market in a hurry but as I approached the cashier, he walked away from the register without acknowledging me, so I just kept going. I was on Howard Street, barely half a block from home when a car zoomed to the curb and the same cashier burst out, demanding, “You got the receipt for that?” My first thought was, “Oh, shit,” but later, I thought, “Wow, good for him.” It served me right, stealing from a non-chain like that, even though it’s overpriced and the produce is often expired. I handed the bag over, let my guests in, drove to Trader Joe’s, paid for basil, and served dinner an hour late. I haven’t broken my cardinal rule ever since.
However, when I was a barista at a horrible café in the Mission (long since shuttered), I stole money. More precisely, the other baristas would sometimes zero out transactions in plain sight of the cranky regulars and put the money in the tip jar later, and I followed suit because that’s just the way we ran the place. It’s funny, the road that type of thinking can lead you down: “When in Rome…” and “Well, who am I to judge?” I assume that working there was a low point in everyone else’s life, too, as it was in mine. Eventually, the owner figured out he was losing money and rather than go through the bother of comparing schedules with perceived losses in order to ascertain the culprit, he just closed down the café that he wasn’t willing to improve anyway, in spite of our many suggestions. Be nice to your barista, because in addition to getting up at 4:45 a.m. twice a week, they’re also going straight to hell.
People have stolen my shit plenty of times. I’ve lost two iPods, two wallets, a digital camera, jackets, and no fewer than four bikes (plus one wheel) to thieves. I keep my current bike dirty and scuffed up, with gay-ass pink handlebar grips, so nobody messes with it. I’ve been burglarized and robbed at gunpoint, and all of it was awful. I guess I’m in the company of the perpetrators, but there’s probably no one who hasn’t downloaded music for free or run errands on company time. Theft, all of it! Just as people will brag that their great-grandfather was a murderous pirate but bristle if you say your father once committed insurance fraud, I’m of two minds about it. But somewhere out there, there’s a Cadbury Crème Egg destined for my pocket without an accompanying receipt, and a sense of feeling gloriously alive shortly to follow.
This story is part of our week-long anonymous package. To learn about all the juicy secrets being revealed this week, go here.
