Bandit (12 page)

M
ost people who go to prison, about 90 percent, get out. Consider that for a moment.

If it’s true that most people get out, what kind of place should prison be? It shouldn’t be a machine that people pass through and come out
worse
on the other side. Ideally, it should be a place that teaches you how to never return there.

And when your loved one is in there, you are so certain he is learning this lesson. He says he is learning this lesson. He appears to be learning this lesson. I can’t speak for other people’s experience with prisons, but I can tell you that this lesson was lost on my dad.

In my favorite childhood movie,
The Point,
an animated hippie hero’s journey from the seventies, featuring a soundtrack by Harry Nilsson that my mom pressed on to us, the pivotal scene of the main character’s banishment to the
wilderness never elicited the correct emotion in me. The boy is banished from his pointed town, in which everything has a literal and metaphorical “point,” because he has a round head, no point. Of course the wild world outside of the pointed town is rich and interesting and of course at the end he returns to the pointed town wise and triumphant, which causes, for some reason, everything there to lose its point. It seemed obvious that for this freak, this round-headed boy, being banished from his hometown of pointed people and pointed things ought to be taken as a reward not a punishment. Why was exile always framed as a punishment? Not only did the boy get to escape all of those horribly judgmental people, he became
activated
in banishment—challenged, strengthened, enlightened.

The message, as it always is presented, is that banishing a transgressor for some grave wrongdoing—sending him to prison—is the worst punishment short of death. The message is crucially prosocial in a culture that thrives on regulated cooperation. It didn’t resonate with me because I already felt alone, I suppose, and some kind of formal release would have seemed like a blessing. How I felt staying on the Amish farm. Living on the other end of this, though, as a person left behind by someone banished to prison, I started to see another angle.

Typical social connections to family, friends, coworkers, even strangers, which keep an average person afloat, have some other purpose for the sociopath. Not some other purpose, rather the same purpose—just intensified one thousandfold. Instead of benefiting from mutual respect and
concern, always with an eye toward fairness and responsibility, the sociopath takes from the network but doesn’t give. He cheats.

And the cheater relies, fundamentally, on the honesty of everyone else. He skates over these networks to dissemble, manipulate, or to just take whatever benefits him. His rewards, at no cost, are enormous. His receiving these rewards is especially painful for noncheaters to observe. It makes sense that there is not only formal punishment for cheating, but social shaming as well, which can be a hugely powerful motivator against cheating.

In prison, the cheater has no access to his quarry. In theory. The theory fails when the quarry is his family.

“M
OLLY.”

The secretary hollered my name from within the glass cube of the principal’s office waiting room, out into the hall where I was sitting between one boy with a bleeding nose and another boy with a DIY tattoo of half a smiley face he’d just punctured into himself in the bathroom with a safety pin and Bic pen.

Moving from middle school to high school, I’d transferred from regular visits with the school counselor to regular visits with the principal. She looked up at me from over her glasses when I entered her office, then looked back down, and remained looking at the papers on her desk or writing while she spoke to me.

“Mrs. Higgs says you were doing needlepoint in AP English instead of participating and you refused to put it away when she asked you to.”

“Yup. A tableau. Vase of hydrangeas,” I said. I gave it to Mrs. Higgs at the end of the year. The principal remained stoic, writing something on a notepad.

“Explain that to me.”

“She’s making us read
Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park?
It pisses me off that she thinks this is AP English material. I even asked her if I could read something else, and she said no, so whatever. I tried.”

The principal looked up to glance at the book I held in my lap.
The Revolt of the Masses,
by José Ortega y Gasset. She sighed heavily. “Have you ever read the
Tao Te Ching
?”

I shook my head. “It’s in the library. Where you always are.” I nodded. “Don’t forget that you are in
high school,
Molly.” I laughed with some disdain. She continued, “If you want to get through this, you’ve got to go with the flow. For now. It will be easier on you, and hopefully I’ll see less of you in here.” The advice disheartened me, as advice to “just give in” always does when offered to young idealists. “You have to go to gym class, you have to read
Jurassic Park,
you have to stop correcting the grammar in Mr. Kasprzak’s study guides, you have to
stop
working ahead in your Chem I book so that you’ll have to
start
paying attention to lectures and
stop
getting sent down here for writing
poetry
during class.”

I am certain I rolled my eyes. “Or I will have to call your parents in here,” she added.

“Yeah, you go ahead and do that. Please do that.”

I meant it sarcastically at the time, but see how much I meant it.

I don’t think my teachers knew I loved them. I just wanted them to do better. I wanted to test them because I couldn’t test my own parents, a mundane emotional drama enacted in high schools as often as any other. I turned to testing myself in the library, tearing through the poetry section, then the odd names in fiction: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. In my head I slowly practiced the syllables of their names in case I was ever asked what I spent all of my time doing.

I didn’t get the chance to say their names out loud, nor did I get to hear anyone else speak them, not for years anyway.

I didn’t talk to anyone about what I was reading or writing. Then I stopped reading novels. Too many families in novels.

I didn’t like to see people caring about their families, or insisting that their private family story should be meaningful to others. I’d given up on books and movies in which any character primarily concerned him or herself with wistfulness or anger or adoration or fear or envy or desire or disgust or regret or bitterness or plain love toward a brother or sister or mother or father. I hated stories of wonderful mothers or fathers especially.

And regular stories couldn’t fool me anymore. I felt their falseness. Their rounded, finite arcs, tidy rise and fall, buttressing values, their little lessons, like solved equations. Insulting. I’d look up from a book, or away from a movie, and see the world again—its mutant patchwork, invalid formulas, no arcs—and feel akin. I started to read only nonfiction: honest history, deep science. Plain subjects, but not understood. At home in tangles of chemistry formulas, mute images of
anatomy, senselessness, empty action of animals, clouds, the plates of earth shifting. The bloodless categorization of geology textbooks: metamorphic, sedimentary, igneous. The textbooks trusted me to learn the names of everything and to fix the equations. I loved them for that. I didn’t love what stories asked me to do: to join, to hope, to trust. Those books, the novels, felt like propaganda.

I fossilized my idea of family with cold logic, and left it. At some point in my high school reading life I told myself that my family members were just people I happened to be related to, nothing more. It was utterly random that I emerged from this lineage and not another—my appearance among these particular people didn’t mean anything special, and whatever bonds of affection existed among us were forged merely out of a combination of obligation, hormonal chemistry, and an unthinking survival imperative. I didn’t choose them and they didn’t choose me, so it couldn’t be love. I left love
as a concept
and moved toward anything else—science, philosophy, art.

I just wanted something genuine, some real ideas, some challenge; I wanted to read the opposite advice the principal had given to me:
don’t go with the flow, don’t give in, reach.
The library did not, in fact, have the
Tao Te Ching,
so I drifted to the philosophy section and picked the shortest book I could find:
Ecce Homo
by Nietzsche.

Without any real understanding of this man’s story or what he’d written before, the book ruffled me open with how bleakly
funny
it was. I didn’t know books could be like that, alternately insightful and proudly psychotic, loose with
ingratitude toward his whole field and most of his influences, Socrates to Schopenhauer. The ridicule of chapter titles alone (“Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books”) jolted me into a private adoration for black, very black humor, intentional or not (I hadn’t yet learned about his reported descent into madness, during which this book was written). I clearly saw the parody: skewering the egocentric genre of the memoir, which, as far as I could tell, allowed entrance only to those who’d suffered some preciously interesting trauma and survived inexplicably only to inflict on the rest of us smug and simplistic platitudes from their hard-won moralism; or those who’d achieved something grand, like becoming vice president, often just out of luck, selfishness, and privilege dressed to look like honest hard work.

From there I read more Nietzsche, then Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, whatever philosophy they had, slowly reading, then rereading the chapters with a dictionary on my left, but without context I often settled on the spells the sounds made alone, their strangeness and patter, like chew-songs on my brain.

And I started writing more in my journal, not just reporting the facts of my days but processing them as my own. I wrote about the books I read, one notebook dedicated just to
Moby Dick,
for example; and I wrote about my teachers, about my mom and sister, about painting and drawing, about crushes, friends, bullies, dreams, plain days, weather, and the landscape. I filled a dozen notebooks with reflective writing just in the last two years of high school. I wrote poems too,
drew comics, made zines, made art. But it was the journals, the nonfiction, where I felt best about writing; after all, in nonfiction I was only coauthor, I was witness, articulator—the world itself the other author with whom I collaborated.

It was to no one, for no one. I threw each completed journal into a large plastic bin, sealed it, and shoved it back under the bed. I was terrified that they might be read. I was certainly afraid of finally having to admit that I had been a person who lived and knew things.

At the end of high school I gave up my science track and veered off to an art school on the other side of the country. After graduating high school without much fanfare, I left immediately, alone, and with joy.

“I
t would be the most extreme sign of vulgarity to be related to one’s parents.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Ecce Homo

E
arly in college I shoplifted. This is hard for me to say.

It didn’t start how it starts with some kids, as a dare among friends, or as a way of getting high or proving something; I was alone in it. It started as it started when I first stole that book of baby names in the aisle at Kroger: out of unresolvable desire.

It was a sterling silver mood ring, the next first thing. I was holding it in my hand on the way to the cashier in this little boutique and I realized it was either the ring or dinner with friends at Denny’s later, where we’d hang out and eat cheap sandwiches and drink coffee. I wanted both so bad. I liked the idea of the mood ring, what a novelty:
this will tell me how I am,
I thought, examining it in the tray. I was fifteen, working in a kitchen, and spending my money on my own
phone line at home and whatever food or CDs I bought for myself. Dad was in jail by this time.
This will tell me how I am.

I just held it in my hand and walked out. Later, as I became more serious about stealing in college, I felt so bad about this time, stealing from an independent boutique in my hometown. I suppose I felt more justified stealing from the corporate places at the mall, so I allowed myself to continue.

I stole for financial reasons, on the surface anyway. It was just a few years, this phase. I know it was childish greed. On eBay I’d sell mostly clothes, designer dresses, cashmere sweaters, popular brands, whatever was easy, and besides the small seller’s fees it was pure profit, a small hobby, not a career, and nothing I wanted to look too hard at, because,
how ridiculous,
could I really be that ridiculous. My dad is apparently a sociopathic criminal. And myself? What was it about this passionless, calculated theft I could convince myself to perform? What did this make me?

I was careful and certain about it. I’d go to the mall or nicer department stores dressed up to look older and richer, usually a black dress or suit, nice shoes, big businessy purse. The jacket over my arm had two purposes—one was for stealing small items in hand, easy to make disappear under the jacket, in my palm but under the jacket, with fingers over the edge so it looked natural. Its other purpose was to have an easy pocket in which to keep my tools. Each tool had a different purpose for different security devices. First a small pair of scissors, nose-hair trimmers really, the kind with rounded
tips so fabrics couldn’t get poked or snagged. Those are simply for cutting off the sewn-in sensors some stores use.

The other two items are more serious, felt more intense and evil to have; both were used to remove two different types of plastic security sensors. The first is a small hook, just a thin curve of metal with a flat end and a groove along its length. This removes the most common kind of sensor, the plastic rectangle with a bulge near the end where the pin connects through the clothing. There’s a little hole in the top edge of those sensors, made just for this hook, to remove it in case the electromagnet under the counter at the registers fails. The hook slides in and the sensor comes apart, instantly, soundlessly. You can buy these hooks online for about ten dollars.

The third item is a small stack of cylindrical neodymium magnets, rare earth magnets. The smaller pin-and-tab security sensors and the large dome-shaped ones simply pull apart with the magnets placed around them. The magnets are incredibly strong, but brittle and easily break if they snap back together too quickly. They are difficult to work with for this reason. Pinches and blood blisters covered my fingers when I first tried these. They are sold online, mostly for scientific experiments, toys, wind turbines, hard drives, magnet motors, audio speakers, stop-motion animation, and fishing-reel brakes. I often wondered if anyone ever saw the corner of my jacket strangely attached to a metal fixture or a car I passed by too closely, as occasionally happened, and my yanking it away with pretend calm. All of these tools stuck together in
a weird clump because of the magnets, and seemed more evil for it.

Of course, I had to use these tools in the dressing room. I knew which stores had unattended dressing rooms, or didn’t count your items on the way in, or if they did, which ones didn’t count them on the way out. Most stores do not count your items on the way out, and the nicest shops do not count your items at all. I knew to go during the busiest hours on the weekends, when salespeople were distracted, rushed, or focused on their regulars, not paying much attention to what I had in my arms. If one of them noticed one of my items, suggesting something to go with it or complimenting it somehow (“Oh that is
just
your color!”), I’d put it back. If they asked me if I was ready for a room I’d say yes, even if I wasn’t, because I didn’t want them to take the items from me and see for certain what I had. Mostly the people working in retail simply don’t care enough, or get paid enough, to worry about shoplifters. I was quiet in the dressing room, zipping and unzipping my huge bag with my finger behind the zipper to silence it, rolling up $300 cashmere sweaters with the tags tucked in neatly, without damage. I was friendly but neutral to the salespeople, smiling, in no hurry. I’d bring dummy items in with me, just to have something to leave behind. Once removed, I’d hide the sensors behind the mirror, or on the top of the partition between rooms, or simply attach them to some item I’d leave behind. I’d steal the hangers too. I didn’t want them to know, even when I was already gone, that anything had been stolen.

I saw security guards or mall cops following the wrong people. Sometimes I saw other shoplifters. I mean, I saw the bad ones. They were young girls mostly, and they’d be carrying overloaded shopping bags—an obvious sign they’d been added to, since salespeople are taught to use multiple bags for big purchases instead of stuffing one bag full. Also the girls would look around, making eye contact with everyone, which real shoppers don’t do. They’d sometimes even be looking straight up, nervously checking for cameras. They looked plainly sneaky, worried.

The color of my skin protected me from suspicion, I know. This makes me feel sick.

Being a successful shoplifter is not about pretending to be fine; it’s about being fine. You must convince yourself first. It is hard in the beginning because it feels evil. But then, it’s not like lying at all. This is how people change anyway, in any direction, good or bad: I’m going to be the person who doesn’t smoke anymore, I’m going to be the person who writes poetry now, I’m going to be the person who trusts this person. I’m going to be the person who isn’t shoplifting. You transform yourself all the time, and a new self sticks if you keep choosing it.

I was calm, bored looking. Shoppers have that dreamy drift, especially women, especially in nice clothing stores. I drifted with them, focused on the clothes. I didn’t look around nervously, I didn’t hesitate or hurry out afterward, didn’t act like anything was wrong. After a while, this was no act. I was just shopping, absorbed. I felt utterly safe, at ease, like everyone else.

I didn’t think about my dad at the time, but I do now. I’m saying this because I know what it’s like to make the wrong choice, over and over, as if taunting the consequences, practically asking them to come straighten you up.

And to act secretly, build a whole small, bad world in private, like an invisible dimension running just under the one everyone else lives in.

You prop up a better self to your loved ones. A dummy self that is you, really, the you they love, but without the evil element. Exactly how theft works. That cover, that safe self who appears to be shopping honestly and not stealing, you realize, must now come home, make her boyfriend dinner, do her homework, go to work, be a gracious daughter,
keep it up.

The distance Dad placed between himself and every regular person, all of us, made sense to me when I saw it from the inside. It was a residue, I suppose, that builds, this safety in distance, to keep loved ones
especially
away from the truth. Protection. Which is a kind of love. And also a margin for his actions, a pivot point upon which his selves could turn.

I knew enough to stop. I did think of myself as different from my friends and almost everyone else I knew. There was a stain on me. A lack of trust in honest methods. It came out of something beyond him—beyond us both, as thieves—a little corner we didn’t keep clean enough.

I often thought about his crimes and decided he could have gotten away without being caught if he had just stopped sooner. Perhaps just not done the very last one, the eleventh robbery, and everything would have been different. It is hard
to stop when things are going well. Criminals get greedy. Maybe you need a reason to stop: a fear, a little imagination for the future, your future, your family’s future.

I didn’t think shoplifting was good or cool, or that it was vigilante justice against the fashion industry or big corporations. It was simply a way to make money when I had none. To me, high-end clothing stores were perfectly ridiculous. The thick, clean mood of luxury, pinched offerings, blind admiration of the shoppers, how they smelled like empty want, wanting to look more beautiful, more happy: they all seemed like suckers. I didn’t see what they saw in the stuff. I didn’t get the people who bought the clothes from me on eBay, new with tags, for near-retail price; I didn’t feel how they felt about these pieces of fabric.

I didn’t enjoy the thrill of it; I hated the thrill, hated walking through the doors expecting an alarm but knowing it wouldn’t come. When I had extra money I would stop, for months even, and never think about it. I didn’t justify it to myself. I didn’t brag or tell anyone about it. My boyfriend in college certainly knew what was happening; with clothes and money appearing weekly it would’ve been hard to miss. He’d confront me, remind me of how horrible it would be to get caught, tell me this was the last time and to never do it again. I’d agree and get better at hiding it from him. Over a couple years I made thousands of dollars doing this. The money went to car repairs, medical bills, trips home, rent, practical things. I was never caught, never came even close to being caught.

I felt guilty. I could block the guilt, though.

Then the upscale department store I’d frequently milk installed a security guard just inside their doors. The steady shrinkage had become apparent to them, I could see. I’d nod and smile at the security guard on the way out, like all the other tidy white women did, and he’d sleepily nod back. I felt a little sick with this exchange, and maybe a little triumphant.

And then, I just stopped.

I want to say I took a hard look at myself or found some moral or mystical reason compelling me to mend my ways. But honestly, I just wanted to get away with it, as he hadn’t.

I knew it would be only a matter of time until I made a mistake or got sloppy with my methods and found myself with a criminal record, even if just a misdemeanor. I resolved to quit while I was ahead. Now, here’s where I did have something to prove.

It was a way of acting through—then resolving—the pattern of theft that destroyed my family. I see that now.

I was lucky, so lucky I got to play this out. Maybe I was lucky, too, that I wasn’t predisposed in some way to become addicted to stealing. Maybe I wanted to prove that you couldn’t become addicted to stealing.

I lived without the extra padding in my bank account and felt fine about it. After all, I didn’t crave it. I just had to adjust my spending. Then, I didn’t miss it. Even now I still see kids stealing in stores all the time, and I start to feel nervous suddenly, like it exposes me by just being around it. A lifelong nervousness around stealing: I think of this as fair, at least something close to fair, as a punishment.