Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

by David Sedaris

I told Dad I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be graduating in a cap and gown—the Art Institute doesn’t swing that way—and he said, “I’ve got your old cap and gown from high school. Want me to bring them when we come up?” Then he said, “Do you think it will still fit?” A person would be in pretty serious trouble if his graduation gown no longer fit. It’s like outgrowing a tent, basically.

Today I worked for Marilyn Notkin. She had company coming and needed her storm windows removed, and knobs applied to her bathroom linen closet. I was taking out one of the windows in the sunroom when I broke it. Then I dropped one of the porcelain knobs she had special-ordered for the linen closet. “I guess this just isn’t our day,” she said when I confessed. It was the “our” that got me. It was my bad day for breaking things and her bad day for hiring me. “You don’t need to pay me,” I said. She insisted on giving me something and settled on $7. I honestly would have felt better if she hadn’t paid me anything.

On Saturday, when the whole family was here, we got dressed up for cocktails and dinner. Lisa, Gretchen, Amy, Tiffany, and I were walking past the vacant lot on Leland that’s always full of drunks and drug addicts. Any time of day or night they’re there—white, black, American Indians, but strangely no Mexicans. They have fistfights, they build fires and pass out. As we walked by on our way to the L, a drunk woman fell in behind us and put her nose in the air, bringing up the rear in what she saw as a snooty parade. Then someone yelled out, “Hey, they’re people too!”

Last week, after being drunk for two days, F. came to. It was Sunday, and the last thing he remembered was Friday night. He woke up naked with no furniture left in his living room. The front door was open, and there were piles of shit on the floor.

This afternoon I found a $50 bill in the foyer of the building near the mailboxes. It was folded thin and full of cocaine. Some of it spilled when I opened it up, but there’s still plenty left. So that’s $50 in cash and around $80 worth of cocaine—$130! If I find $50 every day, I won’t need to get a job.

The woman was holding a beer bottle and put it down so she could grab my window frame with both hands. “Turn it loose,” she said, and the several drunk people behind her cheered her on. Then a man who was slightly less drunk told her to let it go. “Leave him alone, Cochise,” he said. “This here’s a working man.” I haven’t worked in more than three weeks, but it was nice to be mistaken for someone with a job.

The guy was really beside himself, and I’m lucky I was so close to the ticket window. I worried he’d panhandle enough money to reach the platform before the train arrived, but luckily he didn’t. And what baby? I didn’t see any baby. Why did I have to break that window, and on a dare, for God’s sake?

I got a few days’ work painting for Lou Conte, a nice guy in a high-rise. On Tuesday afternoon the doorman in his building chewed me out for riding in the elevator. He said, “How did you get upstairs this morning? How?” The main elevator is burled walnut. It was very clean, and riding in it, I wondered why anyone might ever think to deface anything so beautiful. Not that it was defaced. The doorman marched me around back to the service entrance. He said, “Our tenants don’t want to come home and find people like you in the lobby.” I just happen to be a college graduate, I wanted to say. But of course I didn’t, as it never works to get huffy in these situations. If I have to, I’ll just take the nice elevator from Lou’s floor, then change to the service elevator on two. The service elevator is like riding in a cat-food can.

Betty’s Lounge

The bartender singled out the one who was bareheaded, saying, “I’ll close up shop before I ever sell to a nigger, and that’s what you are: a white-faced nigger.”

Bad teenagers hang out in the alley behind our building, and whenever they see me on my bike they call me Pee-wee, after Pee-wee Herman, because I have an old one-speed that cost $8. It gets on my nerves, but if I had a better bike they’d just steal it.

At around five, I took the L home. A woman near me had a three-year-old child on her lap, a girl, who looked at me and said, “Mommy, I hate that man.”

“I don’t smoke,” I told them. Then I thought of the guy who wanted a steak sandwich and of the little girl who hated me and thought, What the hell. I handed the guy in the car one of my cigarettes, and he scowled at me and said, “Fucking liar.”

Amy said loudly to Paul’s girlfriend yesterday, “Hey, did that bleach ever work on your mustache?” They were in a crowded ladies’ room, and everyone turned to look at Angie’s upper lip. Later she said to Mom in line at the grocery store, “It’s great they gave you your license back so soon after that DWI.”

I saw a family—a mother, father, and ten-year-old boy—walk down Leland Avenue today. It was raining, and when the mother told her son to put up the hood on his Windbreaker, the boy said, “Aww, lemme alone. My fuckin’ hair ain’t wet.” She responded, sweetly, “Maybe not, but it will be.”

And the woman said, “We was hongry.”

I mean, tiny. If you wanted him to suck your thumb, you’d have to grease it up first. The article says he belongs to a skinhead group and has tattoos, which is strange, I think, because Jews in concentration camps had shaved heads and tattoos. You’d think the anti-Semites would go for a different look.

Tiffany left this morning. Last night we sat around in the basement with company and she told us that she often gets gas trapped in her neck. She pointed to a spot beneath her ear, saying, “It’s right here.” I never heard of such a thing. She spent most of her vacation on the telephone arguing with black men who are a mystery to us. Some we’ve met once or twice, but she never tells us the nature of their relationships. It’s not normal to spend hours in your room crying over misunderstandings with people who are just friends. She left herself out of a lot this Christmas. Every night has ended with Amy, Gretchen, Paul, and me sitting on one bed or another and laughing until four in the morning.

1988

It was cold when I returned to Chicago yesterday—eleven degrees. I took the bus into town and was surprised when the driver kicked someone off. It was a belligerent man who’d been arguing with him over what seemed to me like nothing. After a few minutes the passengers started putting their two cents in, and not long afterward the guy was thrown off. “I hope you freeze to death,” the driver shouted after he’d closed the door.

The first Chicago baby of 1988 was born a few minutes after midnight. A suburban limo service had promised a special ride to the child and its parents, and other businesses had made similar offers. On the news tonight they showed the mother and father receiving a box of fine cigars and a dozen roses before getting into the backseat of a Rolls-Royce. According to the reporter, the two are not married. Both are sixteen years old, and black, and from the West Side. They looked very happy.

It is bitterly cold out tonight. I was on Irving Park Road walking past Graceland Cemetery, on my way home from the IHOP, when a van pulled over and the driver motioned to me. I ignored him, and he followed slowly behind me and honked. When the window came down, I saw that the guy was missing a few teeth and that he wasn’t much older than me. He asked where I was going, and when I said, “Home,” he asked if he

could do anything for me.

That stretch of Irving is usually busy with prostitutes. If he thought that’s what I was, then the rules have definitely changed since I left Chicago for the holidays. Here I was, wearing two coats, two hats, and glasses. I thought of accepting a ride but said that I was fine walking. Get into a car with a stranger on...

David G. was on Wilson Avenue, walking behind a large woman in a thin winter coat. The pawnshop hadn’t shoveled their sidewalk, and there was only a narrow path in front of it, bordered by snow-covered ice. Two Mexican girls were coming from the other direction, and just as they reached the start of the path, the large woman shouted, “Out of the way, bitches. This is my country.”

Last week on Montrose and Magnolia I noticed a flyer for a missing cat named Brutus, and this afternoon in a vacant lot I think I found him: big and black, with ragged ears. He was dead, and frozen solid. I called the number on the flyer and told the woman who answered where she could find the body. “I hope I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure it’s Brutus,” I said. She asked if the dead cat had nappy ears and I said yes. What I didn’t say was that I think the body had been kicked up and down the street. It was scuffed, and a lot of the fur had been worn away. The woman sounded very distressed on the phone. The poster mentioned a $100 reward, but I didn’t bring it up, figuring it only applied if Brutus was returned alive.

There’s a Wieboldt’s not far away so yesterday I ducked my head in. The store sells dress shirts for $6. They sell a line of denim jackets that have Love and Peace already written across the backs of them. One of the cashiers, a teenage boy, wore a Gucci sweatshirt and had a sketchy mustache. He was smoking, and when a customer stepped forward to pay, he laid the cigarette on the counter, with the lit end hanging over the edge. When it fell to the floor, he sighed and stepped on it. Half the shelves in the store were empty, not because it’s a popular place but because no one restocked them. They’re exhausted over at Wieboldt’s. Like the ALDI grocery store further down Broadway, their motto is “Leave us alone. Let us smoke in peace, for God’s sake.” Goldblatt’s is even worse. All of the mannequins in their front windows are missing their fingers.

At the underground Jackson L stop, I came upon a group of three rappers. The song they were performing was about AIDS, a message to all “fags, fairies, and dykes” that they are “history.” They will die and everyone will be better for it. One rapper said in an aside that he hoped there wasn’t anyone with that shit standing next to him. A big crowd had gathered to listen, and they loved it. Everyone laughed and applauded.

I called about a job writing for a young person’s cable show. The receptionist answered, saying, “Youff C’moonication.” “Excuse me?” It took me a while to realize he was saying “Youth Communications.” I eventually got through to the guy in charge who told me I didn’t want the job. He said he’d just had two people walk out on him and I’d no doubt be the third. I said all right and hung up.

February 16, 1988

Reasons to live:

9. Outliving my enemies

10. Being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air

When she tries to get aid, the people at Social Services tell her that she’s pretty, which means what, exactly? That she could become a prostitute, or find a wealthy boyfriend? She said that her five-year-old got sick, and that when he sat on his potty seat, his intestines came out.

They hired a waiter at the IHOP, a guy named Jace. He was OK at first, but now he brings in a portable TV and sits at the worktable smoking cigarettes and watching it. He tells customers it might be a twenty-minute wait before he can take their order, and one after another they leave. Last night there were three occupied tables. It was me, a couple, and a heavy man who waited for fifteen minutes before getting up to complain. Later at the cash register, Jace apologized for taking so long. “Sorry,” he said. “But I was watching a bullfight.” A bullfight?

It’s been painted umpteen times and there’s a Playboy insignia on it.

The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories

The poet Elaine Equi was supposed to teach a writing class at the Art Institute this fall. Instead, she and her husband are moving to New York, so Jim phoned this afternoon and asked if I might be interested. It doesn’t mean I’ll get it, just that I’ve been invited to apply. Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don’t, or couldn’t learn on their own if they cared to.

Frank, the super of the building I’m working in this week, is full of jokes. “Hey,” he said, “how come Puerto Ricans don’t pay with checks? Because they can’t write that small with spray paint.” Another joke was about a Polish man who, forced to shit in the woods, was advised to wipe himself with $1. In the end he winds up with shit on his hands and four quarters up his ass.

I got the job teaching a writing workshop at the Art Institute, and I owe it all to Jim, and to Evelyne, who typed up my résumé.

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Tobias Wolff’s In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, and an anthology called Sudden Fiction

because everything in it is short and it’ll make writing seem possible. They’re all great books, but between now and the start of school, I have to figure out why they’re great.

As a teacher I’ll have faculty meetings and cocktail parties. I can hardly wait. It’s only one class, but still I plan to buy a briefcase and play the part for all it’s worth. Now I can refer to all the Art Insti...

We took a cab home from the Hotel Belmont and the driver scolded me several times. “Hey, buddy, don’t be crawling in my taxi.” Then he got mad at me for running my fingers along the track where the window meets the top of the door. “You’re nervous,” he said. “I know you. You’re going to ruin all the rubber up there with your nervous touching. See that No Smoking sign back there? See how it’s all worried around the edges? Nervous people done that too.” Ronnie was catering a banquet where the guests were drunk and annoying. A man asked her if she was Italian and when she told him yes, he said, “I thought so. All Italian women have mustaches.” I’d never noticed that Ronnie had a mustache, but still it upset her. When she got home she told Blair, who said she’d probably feel a lot better after a shower and a shave.

I saw a man being handcuffed under the Sheridan L stop. He’d been beating a woman who wore a tight red pantsuit with an image of a cat stitched on each leg and the word Cat written above them. Her face was puffy from the blows, and she stood there threatening the handcuffed man, who tried to break free and kick her. “Look at what you done now,” he kept saying.

New American Writing published my story “Firestone” and sent me a check for $15. One of the things I bought with the money is a terrarium I saw at a yard sale. I was thinking I could put hermit crabs in it. I thought of a hamster as well, but they really stink up a room if you don’t keep on top of them.

They put him on a stretcher and told him several times to relax. When they wheeled him by, I saw his face. He looked like someone had woken him up in the middle of the night and told him to get packed because it was time to move. He was black, and very light-skinned. Do black people become pale? Why don’t I know that?

Last night Gretchen wore high heels, and the minute we got home she kicked them off, saying the sound was driving her crazy. “I swore to myself I’d never have a roommate who wore shoes like this,” she said. It’s been nice having her here. Every day she goes to the beach to revive her tan, and every day men fuck with her. They call out concerning all the various parts of her they’d like to have access to. Men on bikes, on the street, on the train. I forget how much crap women have to put up with.

Oprah had a show about people who have forgiven the unforgivable. One girl forgave the fellow who stabbed her twenty times and then stabbed her father, a minister, to death. She had pleaded for a stay of execution, as had the man whose grandmother was stabbed to death by a gang of teenage girls. I remember when that case was all over the news. The grandmother who was murdered taught a Bible studies class. A woman on the panel forgave the man who killed her son while driving drunk on Christmas Eve. He’s a frequent visitor at her home now. There were two other guests, a woman who would never forgive the man who raped and drowned her sister, and a black woman who was shot in the stomach by gang members who then molested her daughter. She said she could hear the girl crying out, and Oprah said, “Did you help her?” “No,” the woman said, perhaps feeling put on the spot. “I was shot and bleeding profusely.” She explained that she still has a bullet lodged in her kidney and doesn’t see the sense in forgiving anybody. “Hate is what’s kept me alive,” she said.

The subject on Oprah was profound handicaps.