I’m sitting in the hard plastic chair with wires taped and running off my middle and two other fingers, a cuff strapped around my right arm, and three wires taped to my chest and belly.
“Is your name Martin?”
“Yes,” I answer.
“Do you live at 1237 Cypress Lane.”
“Yes.”
“Is everything you written on your employment application truthful.”
I pause a brief moment, but then, trying not to be obvious, say “Yes.”
And then, the next question: “Have you ever stolen anything...”
It was 1970. Even at thirteen, Nate and me were sticking it to “The Man.” Or that’s what we said, what we told each other. But maybe it was just the thrill of the act, the getting away with it, and the getting something for nothing. Who knows. Looking back at it, call it rationalization, an excuse for bad behavior. But what’s bad and what’s good, and who’s the judge and jury? He who casts the first stone, and all that. And, it was just kid stuff, right?
It was my idea. It started like this: I would buy one candy bar (a Snickers) and ask for a bag at the front checkout. Then Nate, who, unlike me, had that clean cut look, with his button up shirt and his short haircut, would stand at the end of the candy aisle as a lookout and I’d hurry up and shove as much candy in the bag as possible, close the bag up tight, and walk out the other side of the store, Nate following me out the door as we walked out into the air of the open air mall. Easy as that. Never once caught.
We considered ourselves expert candy criminals.
Splitting up the takings on his bedroom floor after, democratically, me choosing one, then him, them me, until we had them all divided evenly and bagged separately. Munching on a Snickers (me) as the negotiations were in progress.
From there we progressed to other such ventures, Nate following my lead.
Riding our bikes the four miles from our suburban Chicago houses to the E.J. Korvettes store where the ceiling cameras visibly rotated to watch the customers. Standing in the fishing aisle, stuffing our pockets with lures when the cameras swiveled away from us (a defect of surveillance systems in those days -- letting us know when they weren’t looking).
We’d use the lures to go fishing at a beach in Wilmette (another four miles from our houses) when we’d go with a few other guys in the neighborhood, a regular bicycle caravan, riding with their poles on the handle bars on the road sides to fish near the power plant where the carp, attractive due to their sizes, but dirty, inedible from Lake Michigan’s polluted waters, were drawn to, barely. Nobody ever really caught anything but it was fun to try on lazy hot summer days.
Later on, when I was sixteen, Nate got me a job at that same drugstore in the mall where I worked beside him as a stockboy three or four times a week.
Back then I was wearing the wide-bottomed bell bottom jeans that were so popular and a little ridiculous looking. Nate dressed a little more conservatively, “square” I guess you would say back then, no bell bottoms, even still wearing his hair short. He didn’t like to stick out in the crowd, but being that way, in those times, he somehow did. (I had one pair of tie-dyed pants I’d worn to the bus stop when I was still in junior high that was brown with big yellow splotches on them, being the adventurous kid that I was (not!) or just one looking for a little attention somewhere in my life (from girls?) Immediately upon reaching the bus stop one of the kids in my grade (Neil Harderson) said to others at the stop -- look at Youngman and his…his…smashed egg pants!” to which all the other kids at the stop, of course, snickered or outright guffawed (a word I learned in one of my recent reading assignments at the time, a word I’m sure I would never -- and who would! -- use now!))
You could stuff four eight tracks, big as they were, off the rack in your socks under the bell bottoms. That would make one Creedence Clearwater Revival, one Steppenwolf, one Doors, and one Uriah Heep 8-track. Walk right out after the doors were locked by Assistant Manager Dickerson, smile and wave, “See you tomorrow,” get in my mom’s yellow Impala, plop the Uriah Heep 8-Track in the 8-track player, and crank up the song “Stealing” (“Stealing…when I shoulda been buying!!!”) for the short half mile drive back home, taking the long way, a couple loops around the mall to hear the song a time or two.
Nick, shrugging, with my not too subtle head nods, shoved a couple of rolls of 35 millimeter film to feed his picture taking habit, and candy bars (just like old times) in his pockets.
Other times, after punching out upstairs at the manager’s office, Ron Danko, a coworker of ours would give us a knowing smile and look while Dickerson was working his adding machine and entering numbers on his reports, and Nate and I would follow him around back to the liquor department, pull a six pack of beer (Heineken’s, the good stuff, Danko said) out to the loading dock and Ron and I’d split them and gun them, two each while Nate watched (he didn’t drink), before pushing the garage door button and running out the door before it shut down on us, empties in hand which we’d throw in the dumpster (and Danko pocketing the two remaining cans), with our Assistant Manager of the night totally unawares, in the office in the store behind us. (No surveillance equipment back then at that store).
Yeah, we were bad.
After that the four finger discounts died down some, for me at least. It happened after my sister, Nora, got caught shoplifting at the Turn Style department store. It was little things – makeup, nail polish, those sorts of things -- that she’d shoved in her purse, but not surreptitiously enough, unfortunately. A store dick had followed her right out the door where he’d accosted both her and her best friend, Fiona, and hauled them back to their little windowless security office/interrogation room.
Our parents had gotten the call and rushed out the door while I was oblivious, as usual, to what was going on in our house, upstairs mangling a song on my guitar that I’d been practicing for weeks. (I got blisters on my fingers! I wanted to do my Pete Townshend impersonation and smash my guitar on my bedroom floor, but the blue shag carpeting made any real destruction difficult. The closest I would come to rising to guitar star. Pitiful.)
When they came back, the first thing I heard was the car door slam in the driveway, my parents both yelling (my stepfather in a bass pitch, my mom in the higher falsetto voice she usually used when she was hysterical) at Nora, then the squeaky kitchen door opening, the screaming intensifying, my sister yelling inaudible things back “Well if you only…(inaudible) or if you would only (inaudible again) this never would have happened!” Then storming up the stairs and slamming her door shut and turning her stereo up playing The Dark Side of the Moon album, probably with the lights out, maybe sneaking a joint out of wherever she hid it, and opening the window to blow the smoke out to avoid suspicion.
Yeah, family life -- wasn’t it great?
So, after that I eased up on my wayward ways (petty theft, that is) thinking, yeah, maybe that could have been me, maybe I could have lost my sole source of income at the drugstore. Probably not worth it.
But I still drove around, hair falling in my face, thinking I was cool (but knowing, really, that I was not) playing that damned 8-track, turning it up loud whenever I was lucky enough to borrow my mom’s car -- it was hard to get it with three other kids in the family, none of us with cars of our own -- singing, shouting the words loud out the window, the warm spring air whooshing through the Impala -- “STEALING…STEALING…WHEN I SHOULDA BEEN…SHOULDA BEEN BUYING!”
The job is for a summer position between college semesters at Carson, Pirie, Scott as a sales clerk.
I stare at the white walls, and say, in response to the inquisitor’s question about stealing: “No,” swallow and wait for the walls to crash in on me.
A week later I got a letter from the store stating simply that they are very sorry, but they are unable to offer me a position at their store at this time.
No walls crashing, no cops hammering at the front door.
And … no job.
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