Life of a Thief - Chapter Three

                Chapter Three







                                                    -Puberty, sex, FFA, and pot. I can’t remember anything else.













Let’s move forward a bit to high school shall we. I’d love to stay and reminisce about my awkward and horribly unforgettable preteen years but it’s a scar I’d rather forget. So off we go, zoom zoom flash flash bright lights psychedelic tunnels and a final whoosh. High school. The only thing really relevant to my story here besides the mass quantities of drugs, mass quantities of sex with foreign exchange students and freshman year in itself is the fact that I found acting. On a dare, me and my best friend at the time decided to take drama. 101 if you will and fuck you if you won’t. This might seem like a weak and uninteresting dare to you but to me it was the most fearless thing I’ve taken on, before or since. I absolutely abhorred public speaking to the fact that I’d get barely passing grades in any class requiring such a feat. I had managed to go through my miserable excuse for an existence in my school years sitting in the back of class and hiding. This was working for me so far and I saw no reason really to change the pattern. But you try keeping a full credit load when the only available classes were Agriculture, Typing, Home Ec., and Seminary, which was unfortunately excluded to only church goers, which is too bad because the laugh would have been worth the time. I need to rant a bit. Let me just say to all the Mormons out there who shunned me and in general made my life more unbearable than it already was; eat my nonconforming nonsatanfearing drug induced Buddhist wannabe shorts. Or to make it more plain, kiss my liberal ass. Okay, I’m done.

As stated in the previous paragraph we were short of credits and the need arose for a desperate act. So we checked the little box, handed in our list and prayed to some also previously mentioned God to help us out. Did he, no. But gods never did like being shunned.



On the good side, acting class led me to do all sorts of wondrous things that I never would have done otherwise. It brought me out of the shell I carried and opened me up to a world only glimpsed at in sitcoms and home movies. Those being friends, a sense of belonging and power. Power coming from the fact that I had decided to create a club, a drama club, that included all ages. The available classes at the time only allowed junior and senior classes to attend, which I deemed unjust and unfair. Unsurprisingly the club was a huge success. We had to do two different showings of our first production just to fit all the people who wanted to act. I believed, and still do, that if you have the love and the will than there will be a part for you. So I was voted president and almost always the director and even the teacher, till I graduated. Last I heard the club is still going strong. I mentioned this part of my ageing because it becomes relevant later in the story, and I like to relive that as much as possible. I continued with my acting hobby all through college and on to the next college and on to my predestined fate of which it helped me immensely. I would later be told that the dare itself was preordained if you will and all part of a well thought out plan. Much to my surprise added with a bit of remorse and a little deflating of my ego for I thought it was very brave and fearless of myself to take on such a dare and have it turn out so well. It’s the thought that counts. Or so I tell myself.

One of the other hobbies I partook in was the continuation of my twelve step program to debauchery. I had grown bored, and we all know that a bored teenage mind is a time bomb waiting to happen. So I took to roaming the streets at night, hiding from cops and causing mischief. This invariably led to breaking and entering and sometimes just entering. I started to enjoy the rush of walking through someone’s house while they slept away in dreams of security. I never stole from anyone’s personal possessions, bad karma, but I would move things around and change furniture positions so they would have a bit of a shock in the morning. Kinda like Christmas. Eventually this escalated to businesses and of course burglary. I gathered partners and started breaking into my schools to start. There’s just something primal about going through your teachers and feared principle’s prized possessions. Kind of brings it into your head that anything is possible and even people in power are still no better than you. Just don’t tell them that.  During this time me and my best friend, at the time, broke into a bar and stole all the beer we could fit into his Volkswagen bug. Sound familiar? This time we were old enough to appreciate the drunkenness gained and were quite excited to indulge in it. However, we were smart enough to not do it that night. So we drove a whole half a block down the alley and stashed it all in a shed behind an abandoned hotel. Then we left smiling and in full color knowing that the next coming weekend would be a good one. That weekend rolled up and we went back to the shed to gather our spoils and low and behold, the beer was gone. Now if this was just like a few six packs or even cases it might not have been so surprising, but we’re talking about an enormous amount of alcohol. Stacked it was at least twice as tall as the shed roof twice over. And it was gone. By by, see you later, have a good life, gone. To this day I have no idea who took it. But in the papers that month were tales of robbery and of the sheriff departments hunt for the culprits who robbed the local bar. I was never worried because in the long run we weren’t the ones who stole it. Sort of.

I was approaching my sixth or seventh step when I got caught. One night after a particularly good movie about the nighttime we got busted breaking into a spa wanting to use the hottub. We were caught with our shorts down, so to speak. The most memorable part of the whole ordeal was when the police tried to put us handcuffed into the squad car. Amid the confusion I guess the ageing and probably now retired police officer had locked his keys in his car. The other officers were justly pissed off, especially since this seemed to be a recurring habit. Now you would think that the other officers would just put us in their cars and be done with it, but no. They decided to teach the grandpa of the bunch a lesson and have him WALK us back to the station. Granted it was only a few blocks but for him that might take all night. The only thing keeping us from dropping on the ground and laughing the maniacal laugh of desperation was the fact the we were in deep shit. Not only did they write us up for this they tried to slap all the other break-ins I did on us as well. Of course they had no proof of the previous acts but you gotta give it to them for trying.



This was my last act of night walking and cat-like burglary but in no way the last step I achieved in my program. The judge in all his wisdom knew I was the bad egg in the town and also knew I had been the one making the papers so often so he decided to throw me into a juvenile detention center for all of a day. That’s right, one day. About the time it takes for George Bush Jr. to get an erection I was incarcerated. Now this might sound like a waste of state funds and a definite waste of my time but you would be surprised of the change it brought in me. There’s no way to explain the total loss of freedom. The loss of all privilege, all choice, all things that make being alive on this planet bearable. I stared out my slot in the wall and cried. That’s really all one can do in such a situation. If I would have been allowed to just sit in my cell and read for those twenty-four hours than I would have been fine. However, they had other plans for me. Whoever thinks that social interaction i.e., sports, class room participation, singing, and any other general bullshit is good for you, than you haven’t been to juvi. Nothing’s worse than playing basketball with guys who would as soon put my head into the basket then the ball. They tried, twice. Probably because I had previously called them primates for not knowing what the “red” stuff was that poured out of mountains during an ecology lesson. By the way it was lava. I’m not sure what was worse, them not knowing the word lava or primate. Needless to say that was the end of my misdemeanor phase. 

High school invariably ended and with it my habits, my rut, my reason for living. No more drama clubs, no more free and abundant teenage sex and no more living under my parents wing (metaphor for roof and money). I now had to take the leap into the big grown-up jungle they call hell, or I call hell, some naive hopefuls might call it life or some such but the rest of us know the truth. Hell is real and we are in it. Look at Phoenix.