Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

by David Sedaris

I think I’m the ideal viewer for a show like this. After watching, I felt so lucky, like it’s a blessing just to be broke and have bad teeth. I worked in Linda’s garage today, and at one point the kid who lives across the alley came over to me, asking, “Are you a boy or a man?”

Amy made it into the Second City touring company. They chose six people out of two hundred fifty. Nothing can keep her down. Amy’s success means success for the whole family. I’m so proud I’m splitting open with it. She has something extra. Anyone can see it.

I listened to AM radio church shows while I worked yesterday. One preacher denounced feminine men. “Now, when God took Eve out of Adam, He took all of her out,” he said. “He didn’t leave any behind. Then I see these men with the weak elbows and wrists, dressing like women, and I say, ‘No.’ I say ‘No’ to that.”

Last month, Evelyne’s electric bill was $345. Kim’s was $109. Shirley’s was $280. Mine was $35.

I came upon two evangelists on State Street this morning, both conservatively dressed white women in their late thirties. One handed out pamphlets while the other preached. “Oh, just look at that,” she said into her microphone as a young woman walked by. “The way she’s dressed, she’s asking for it, begging to be raped. And when she is raped, she’ll deserve every single minute of it and eventually burn in hell.”

Nancy Sipes.

Amway,

Nehru

She walked out of here too happy.” The waitress ignored him, so Amy went in and reported that there was water all over the floor. The john was packed with toilet paper, paper towels, and part of the Sun-Times. All the soap had been bitten in half, and there were crumbs in the sink.

This afternoon Professor Sedaris addressed a dead audience. Even S., the mother of two who answers questions with questions and is usually confrontational, said nothing. I drowned in the silence. Then I babbled, hoping someone would maybe stick an oar in just to shut me up. “Sometimes that just happens,” said Sandi, a fellow teacher, when I saw her in the office. Jim says that maybe next semester I can teach two classes, but right now that sounds like a nightmare. It would make me eligible for health insurance, which I’ll need after I slit my wrists. What did I do wrong today?

“Zeshan, you gut to take dis because I hate people what cough.”

The boy described the medicine as “ugly.” His voice is raspy and I like how reasonable his questions are. He’s only five but told me he has four children, the oldest of which is nine years old. I want this kid.

At the departmental potluck, I kept my mouth pretty much shut, afraid that if I spoke, everyone would realize that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Not that I didn’t ask a few questions. A couple of teachers talked about throwing people out of their classes—troublemakers. Their talk made me realize the subtle ways I’m being taken advantage of by certain students. I’d been looking for the criminal with the livid scar on his face and all the while I’d been getting my pockets picked. M., the independent-study kid I picked up last week, is a liar and a poor student. I shouldn’t have let her in after the third week, and allowing it has marked me as a teacher chump. Teacher chumps get a reputation, as do easy teachers. Come next semester, your class is full of lazy people expecting just to coast along.

I met with a woman named Betty who owns a three-flat on North Kenmore and would like to have one of the apartments painted. Someone started the job a few weeks ago but was fired for laziness. Asked to remove the hardware and spray it with gold paint, he left the hinges and doorknobs in place and spray-painted them anyway. It looks beautiful, much better than it would have if he’d followed directions. It’s like the knobs are spreading good cheer to the comparatively sober white doors.

I have been a bad employee lately. I went to Betty’s with a drug hangover and fell asleep on her floor. I had a terrible headache and woke up several hours later with a carpet burn on my face.

1989

Last night I wondered if other teachers get stoned at night. Can I be the only one? Classes start next week and I am not at all prepared.

Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time. Meanwhile, my diet is working. I went down a belt notch and was comfortable.

This is the last day of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and on All Things Considered they asked a variety of people how he had affected their lives. The person I most identified with said that after the past eight years, she will never trust a Republican again. There were many people who cheered him, and a few who hated him in a personal way. One woman blamed Reagan for her parents’ divorce. She was from a farm family and said that the stress brought on by the president’s agricultural policies ruined the marriage, which under previous administrations had been happy. A Brooklyn man blamed Reagan for his AIDS, speaking almost as if he’d caught it from him. I hated Reagan but stopped dwelling on it after he became such an easy and popular target. My eyes never welled up when he spoke. They narrowed.

when, by mistake, I picked them up, he let out a little cry and accused me of trying to steal them. The man was in his seventies and though his glasses had plastic frames like mine and were a similar shade of brown, his were aviators. Mine was an honest mistake. I apologized, but still he called the waitress over, saying, “This guy was trying to steal from me.” The waitress talked to him the way you might to a child. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sure he wouldn’t do a thing like that.” The man, frustrated that nobody recognized the kind of person I really was, lifted his coffee cup and held it close to his chest, as if I might try to swipe that too. Just then a woman took a seat and the man turned to her and said, “Watch out. This one here just tried to steal my glasses.” I glanced over to give her my this-person-is-crazy look, but she was too busy locking her purse firmly between her legs.

“I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven”

Each of these would be a great story title.

That was always her thing. I remember nights when one out of every four people who walked through the door would get the bum’s rush. Someone would mutter something under his breath, and she would snatch the menu out of his hand and point to the door, shouting, “I heard that—out!” Not just crazy people and drunks but men and women who never imagined themselves being thrown out of a restaurant.

“Well, if you’re free sometime, I’d like to take you out,” he said. Mary put her hands on her hips. “Are you kidding? The only place I want you to go is hell. Understand? You can go straight to hell.”

I’d taught and was wearing a tie and carrying my briefcase. When I was a student, I always felt better when the teacher dressed up. It suggested that his or her job was a real one. As for the briefcase, I look at it like a safe. Students see me putting their papers into it, and it makes them feel that their stories are valuable, though it is a drag to carry. As I passed the woman in front of the L station, she said, “Oh, look at him. The little man. Thinks he’s a big fucking deal because he’s carrying an attaché case.” I crossed the street with my head down, shattered because she could see right through me.

Hungarians have the filthiest mouths in Europe and are known to say, “Get that cock out of my face that is covered with shit that you used to fuck Jesus.” According to her, fucking Jesus is a popular insult in that part of the world.

Tobias Wolff

This Boy’s Life.

Barbara has begun speaking to me. She’s from Tennessee, maybe forty-five years old, and has worked at the IHOP the entire time that I’ve been hanging out there. Tonight she told me that the new waitress, the black woman who started a few weeks back, has been fired for refusing to wear panty hose. Barbara said, “And of course we have to wear panty hose. We all do!”

I read an interview with an obsessive-compulsive woman who said that before she went on medication, she spent eighteen hours a day cleaning her house. After vacuuming, she would go over the carpet with tape in order to pick up dirt she might have missed. When guests visited, she’d make a mental note of everything they touched and wipe it down the moment they left. She said she’d miss important events in order to stay home and clean her keys or her checkbook, which, how do you even do? As for keys, it would never occur to me that mine were dirty, though they probably are. Filthy, actually.

A man approached me on the Wilson L platform this morning to ask me what I thought of the neighborhood. He said a woman he knew had just moved in and he was worried about her. I didn’t want to be the voice of doom and told him that nothing terrible has ever happened to me here, which is true. Then I said that I fully expected something terrible to happen, which is also the truth. Why live in a place where you expect trouble? He could have asked me that, but he didn’t. I’m surprised he approached me in the first place. I look terrible lately. I reek. A few days ago I was behind my desk at school and caught a whiff of urine. Then I realized it was me I smelled—my pants. My students must have noticed it. How could they have not? I’ll have to concoct some sort of a story. I could say that I take care of a baby every Wednesday morning and that last week it peed on me.

I read a story by a Chinese woman whose main character curses her husband by calling him a turtle and a salted egg.

Last week a manhole cover disappeared from the alley behind my building. I guess people sell them for scrap or something. The city covered the open hole with plywood and put up a sawhorse with blinking lights, but overnight both those things were stolen as well.

We walked through the kitchen, and he stopped and looked at the radiator. “You know how to keep that from hissing? You need to take yourself a skinny nail and unclog that hole right there. That’s your problem. But don’t do it now because you might burn yourself.” “OK,” I said. “Thanks.” “What you want to do is wait until later, then take a nail, a long, skinny one, and ream out that hole. That’ll solve your problem.” I thanked him again and then took him to the alley, where we saw that the manhole cover had been replaced. While standing there looking at it, I learned that getting a new one had been the landlord’s responsibility. “I love to catch people stealing them,” the man said. “You can get sent to prison for taking one of these babies.”

“Did you do these?” he asked. “What are you, some kind of…drawer?” He bent forward and chuckled. “Man, oh, man. These are great.”

I always offer coffee to people working in my home. The guy who fixed the stove, an electrician, the cops who came once, everyone. I offer and they decline. I had a feeling this guy would have said yes and then stayed until five o’clock or whatever was quitting time for him. Since he wasn’t working in my home, I didn’t offer him any, but now I wish I had. I liked him.

“These birds who are psychos and should be locked up in the nuthouse. These birds who break into houses and try to rape people.” The guy was very folksy. “Just like my dad,” Linda said. “That could be him on the radio!” Her father is a farmer and she grew up with guns. As a child she shot a robin. Shocked at what she’d done, she tried to set it back in the tree, thinking it might spring to life once it was returned to its rightful place. The head of the NRA kept using the term birds. He said that sportsmen across the country enjoy the responsible use of assault rifles and that a few sicko nut birds shouldn’t ruin it for the rest of us. He wasn’t particularly articulate, but he believed in his cause and didn’t evade questions the way so many speakers before the Commonwealth Club do.

Walking to the L, I passed two men on Leland, both of them fully grown. One of them asked for a cigarette and the other, not hearing my answer, grabbed my arm. “I said we want a cigarette!” he shouted. You can’t go around grabbing people like that. I’m sick of how trashy it is here. It’s filthy and depressing and every day it gets worse due to the warm weather. Living in Uptown, I get the idea that people are basically stupid, cruel, and violent. The lease runs out at the end of April, and I think I’m ready to move. In other news, I heard that a man’s waist should be twice as thick as his neck.

“But it turned out he didn’t go through with it,” the sighted man said. Apparently the friend didn’t have enough money. “So I said to him, ‘Well, money’s not everything.’ Then he said, ‘Maybe not, but it’s about ten thousand goddamn miles ahead of whatever it is that comes in second.’” He sighed, then stole a french fry off the blind man’s plate.

I graded L.’s paper today. She always arrives late to class, then settles herself in and starts eating a snack. She likes potato chips in cellophane bags. Then she’ll decide to clean out her purse, taking out papers and crumpling them up. A couple of times I’ve turned to her, saying, “Are we all done now? Got everything squared away?” Then she’ll say either “Yes” or “Almost.” Sarcasm is lost on her. L.’s story was among the worst things I’ve ever read in my life. How on earth did they allow her to graduate from high school? Even Tomoko, who is from Japan and can just barely speak English, is a better writer. Plus Tomoko is spirited and she tries, unlike L., who just snacks and cleans out her purse.

At the market underneath the Wilson L, I pulled the shopping list out of my pocket. Just as I realized there’d been money in there too and that I’d dropped it, I turned to see a man swoop down and pick it up off the floor. He had sand-colored hair and a red, boozy face crosshatched with wrinkles. I told him politely that that was my dollar he’d just picked up, and he said, “What dollar? I didn’t pick anything up.” “Yes, you did. I saw you.” “You didn’t see nothing,” he told me. I followed him to the back of the store, where he grabbed a quart of beer and a bottle of Four Roses. “Come on,” I said. “I saw you take my money. Give it back.” This guy was in his late forties, at least, way old enough to know better. If I saw a dollar bill fall from someone’s pocket, I’d say, “Excuse me, you dropped something.” If there was no one around, I’d claim it as my own, but this was different. At the register the man untwisted my dollar. Then he took all the change out of his pocket and slowly counted it out. When the cashier told him he was short 10 cents, he turned to me and said, “Give me a dime.” I couldn’t believe it. There were two men behind me in line. One of them rooted in his pocket and handed the man who’d stolen from me two nickels. Then he looked at me with mild disgust, the way you might at a

skinflint,

and said, “What’s...

I really need to avoid red wine. I drank it last night at Rob and Lyn’s house and awoke hours later with a terrible fire in my throat. My uvula felt like a pilot light. When I got up this morning, my face was very white. I feel fragile today but don’t have what I’d define as a hangover. I remember what went on last night. At one point, Rob showed me his computer and explained that you can plug one into a telephone jack.

On Tuesday I handed back seventeen papers I’d gotten from the beginning class, including one from L. It’s about a little girl who gets out of bed on Christmas Eve to spy on Santa. She never sees him but gets a shiny new bike the next morning. The final line is “I knew that this was going to be a very special Christmas.” It was something a fifth-grader might write, and it made me sad that I was reading it.

Her other story, “The New Me,” was about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. I was talking about it to Sandi in the teachers’ lounge, and she told me she’d gotten the exact same story from someone else last semester. I looked in the right-hand corner of the title page and saw that L. had just whited over this other idiot’s name and then typed in her own. When I confronted her later in the day, she said, “Look, just tell me. Am I going to pass the class or not?”

Man ordering at Butera’s deli/prepared-foods counter: “Hey, give me one of them chickens what spins around.”

Again this year I made Mom a Mother’s Day card. It reads: M is for the Morbid things you showed me O is for the Other things you did T is for the Thousand bucks you owe me H is for the things you found I Hid E is for the Error of my caring R is for the Ranch house you call home Mother dear, I wish that you had shown me how to shave and how to use a comb.

I have seen two fistfights this weekend. One was across the street from Steve Lafreniere’s, where two men confronted a skinny guy they’d seen beating a woman. “You ain’t supposed to hit girls, you stupid fuck, you asshole,” they said as they punched him. Later, on Beacon, I passed two men fighting over a small bicycle, just pounding on each other.

While on my bike I passed a woman walking with two young children. The little girl had a plastic six-pack ring wrapped around one of her feet, and her mother, noticing it, shouted, “What the fuck are you doing, bitch?”