Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

by David Sedaris

On All My Children, Erica is being stalked by a dwarf. For a long time they just showed a hand that would draft ugly letters to her and turn off the local news whenever she appeared. I get the feeling I’m supposed to know who this person is, but I’ve been watching regularly for only four years so I’m at a loss. Meanwhile, on One Life to Live, Vicki has been shot in the stomach. Megan watched it happen and hasn’t made a sound since. I’ll bet anything she inherited Vicki’s multiple-personality disorder.

I was right about Megan. Vicki’s shooting triggered her latent inherited multiple-personality disorder and turned her into someone named Ruby Brite, who likes gambling and speaks with a Brooklyn accent.

Amy gave me her old toaster, which I put in the pantry and forgot about until last night at two a.m. I’d already had dinner, and plenty of it, but still I made two peanut butter sandwiches with canned peaches on them. I don’t eat like this when there’s no pot in the house, but now I’m back to sucking up everything in my path. Peanut butter and peaches? Since when do those two things go together?

New Woman titled “Infidelity: How to Keep Your Man from Straying.” It included several warning signs, as you need to know when your boyfriend or husband is feeling insecure and neglected. You need to take notice when he loses interest in sex, and you have to fight, fight, fight to win him back. The article suggested that a man’s infidelity is always the wife’s or girlfriend’s fault. It never considers that maybe he’s just an asshole.

Anatole Broyard on Jane and Paul Bowles in this week’s New York Times Book Review: “Their marriage was so open it yawned.”

The blind fellow was at the IHOP last night with his father, and I listened as they discussed geography, particularly the states that make up the Great Plains, the Sunbelt, and the original thirteen colonies. Then he asked his dad about New York City, saying he’d heard they have no alleys there and that the people are rude. “Rudest sons of bitches on the face of this earth,” his father said. “It’s crammed full of rude people and rich foreigners—Jews, Arabs, Japs—and they make it so you can’t afford to shit.”

reached behind himself and used his knife to scratch his back.

I was at the liquor store, buying a bottle of Canadian Club as a thank-you gift, when a drunk man approached and told me not to be frightened. He was absolutely hammered, this guy, and said he wanted me to buy him some potato chips, the kind in a large-portion bag—Big Grabs, they’re called. I brushed him off, and when I got to the register, out of nowhere he laid the chips on the counter beside my bottle of Canadian Club. The cashier saw what was going on and snatched the bag away. Then he pointed to the door and shouted, “Out of here, you!” When I stepped outside after paying, the drunk was waiting for me. He was very angry and got up in my face, demanding that I give him money. I handed him a quarter and he said, “A dollar and a quarter.” I needed to unlock my bike, so was in a bind. Drunk or not, this guy had clearly been in a lot more fights than I had. I didn’t want to give him $1 because by this point, I hated him, and it was more like getting robbed than doing someone a favor. Luckily, just then a friend of his walked up and said, “What are you, begging for money again, Ronald? Begging? Dogs beg, man.” This gave me a chance to unlock my bike and ride away.

Mom was in a terrific mood and talked about her father, who was an alcoholic but a cheery one. Whenever Mom or Aunt Joyce came home late with friends, he’d get out of bed and cook for everyone, make spaghetti sauce, pies, anything anyone wanted. He’d fill the tub with water and let ducklings splash around in it. As a teenager, Mom was allowed two sweaters per winter, but she sweat so badly that they were ruined in no time.

While looking around, I learned that last Christmas, S.’s sister-in-law sent her a half-eaten box of candy. The year before that, she gave her a broken jewelry box made of stained glass.

I never know what to say when I’m getting a book signed.

but one kid’s amounted to hate mail and was addressed to his mother. He wrote about being shit out of her cunt. Then he reminded her that he was not her fucking boyfriend, and on and on. Afterward no one knew what to say.

Joy Williams.

I fantasized about moving to New York and living in the apartment of that drug dealer I visited last June. It wasn’t huge, just a one-bedroom on the third floor facing the street. In my fantasy, people come to visit me, but I don’t have time to see them because I’m so busy. Because of the book I’ve had published, I am often recognized when I go out. I am very trim and lots of people call me. I don’t know how I’d ever get the drug dealer’s apartment or, more important, the book. There’s still a lot to work out.

E. started off by talking about his hometown girlfriend, who he’d just learned had been cheating on him. “That’s because she’s trash,” I said, trying to make him feel better. “She’s a liar and a skunk, and this is how she gets attention.” I said that what goes around, comes around, and in time the guy she was seeing now would be cheating on her, just like she cheated on E. He was glad to hear it. Next came M. and A., who both had good stories. Then it was J.’s turn and she ran out of the room crying. K., a young woman who is always tardy and wears lots of makeup, said that she’s not currently involved with anyone but is pursuing a guy who is already in a relationship. Boo. Hussy. Troublemaker. No one came out and said this, but our attitudes conveyed it. I love teaching college lately.

I was on the L, reading a book, when someone said, “Sir?” I looked up to see the most terribly disfigured person imaginable. He took my breath away, a black man who’d been horribly burned. His head looked like a candle in the shape of a head, the skin slick and dripping down like wax. He was missing both his hands, and there was a can attached to his bandaged stumps. Taped to it was a sign reading NEED MONEY FOR OPERATION. Man, it scared the life out of me.

Mom left today at four. She was a big hit with my beginning students. I brought her in for my Ask a Mother segment, and she was fantastic and answered everyone’s questions with humor and wisdom.

A new decade, even, one I am entering with an electric typewriter. (Christmas present from Mom.)

Dad drove over and the three of us painted while listening to the FOXY 107 countdown. Everyone in our family listens to black music, everyone, all the time.

Mom reads her horoscope daily, sometimes in two or three different places. It’s something she started doing a few years back, and while I don’t believe in astrology, still I find myself falling for it. This morning she told me that an older person will be giving me something in return for a favor, and that the gift has the potential to change my life. Dad is the only older person I know who owes me a favor—Paul and I painted that apartment he owns for free. So I waited for him to give me something.

On the radio I learned that Keith Haring died of AIDS.

I hailed a cab at four thirty this morning and got a driver with straw-colored hair. After I got in, he met my eyes in the rearview mirror and said, “Did you see any pussy out there tonight?” I told him I hadn’t been looking, so some might have slipped by unnoticed. “You can usually see pussy further south, on Montrose,” he said. “But a lot of that is sick pussy. ’Course, it’s a little bit cold out there tonight. Cold and late. A lot of that pussy is home now, home asleep.” I’m often talked to like this by taxi drivers, and it makes me think their cabs should be a different color than the others—that way women will know to avoid them. It gives me the creeps that this guy might pick up my sister. Then again, if anyone could destroy him, it would be Amy.

I taught today. Sometimes I go in with no idea of what to do. I have them write in class and then I go into the stairwell to smoke and try to think of something. Today I told my students about a friend of mine who is going through a breakup. “What do you do when you’re trying to get over someone?” I asked.

A Patch of Blue

I sobbed. I went to the bathroom mirror, watched myself cry, and cried even harder. “I loved you,” I said to my reflection. I wished then that someone would call so I could answer in my weary, broken voice. “Wrong?” I’d say. “No, there’s nothing wrong on my end. Why do you ask?”

Sarah Vaughan

On Greek Easter, I drank Scotch followed by

retsina

followed by ouzo followed by Scotch followed by brandy, and today I feel like I’ve been raked...

A man at the IHOP tonight lifted his entire steak with his fork and held it before his mouth, chewing off hunks of it.

“Your emotional hysteria is not impressive, except possibly to those little hangers-on of literature who feel your tantrums are a mark of genius. To me they do not add the least value to your poetry, and take away my last shadow of a wish to ever see you again.…Let me alone. This disgusting episode has already gone too far.”

Jackson Pollock, who was surprisingly naive. On the advice of a Park Avenue “healer,” he started drinking a combination of bat shit and ground beets, this to establish a “proper balance of gold and silver in his urine.”

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.

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.”

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.