My Life of Crime by Rory Laverty

At first we stole only from the stores in Midtown. In the fall of 1984, those included a co-op grocery, a pharmacy, a 7-Eleven and a two-story department store called Bergman's. The strip was a few blocks from where I lived, with my mom, in eastern Palo Alto.

Sacha and I favored the co-op for its bulk bins and the pharmacy for its comics rack. We never stole from the 7-Eleven because it had convex mirrors and watchful Arab clerks; when we went there, we played Dig-Dug and paid for our snacks. Bergman's was a wild card, with good stuff to steal but lots of employees and a confusing layout.

We were nine years old.

Sacha had an intuitive knack for crime. His only drawback, as a shoplifter, was his appearance: he had dusty hair and orangeish skin. He didn't care enough about clothes to steal them, so he wore third-hand skater shorts and a black Members Only windbreaker with a big, hidden pocket under a flap on its back. Clerks knew better than to trust him.

They did, however, trust me. I looked freshly scrubbed. I was the wholesome accomplice.

The first time was at the pharmacy. We parked our bikes around back but didn't lock them. As we came to the entrance, Sacha was almost swaggering. It wasn't his first time, but he knew it was mine. He said we should go in separately. I went first, pulling open the glass door. Its bells jingled.

The pharmacy was a big, family-run place with mint-green walls. Employees wore lab coats with pocket protectors. The cashier, a heavy-set woman in a black hair net, met my eyes and then ignored me. As I walked to the candy aisle, I saw her watching Sacha.

He headed toward the comics. I rummaged through the candy and picked up three Twix bars. I didn't watch the cashier because I was afraid of looking suspicious, so with my head down I rejoined Sacha at the comics rack, in the farthest corner of the store. I put two Twixes in his hidden jacket pocket and read a few pages of X-Men. I preferred Marvel comics, but at that point I wasn't reading for pleasure. The shelves were at eye level for adults, so it was hard for the employees to keep track of a pair of four-foot-ten criminals. Sacha scanned the store as I slipped ten or twelve comic books into the hidden pocket, zipped it up and checked to make sure the bulge wasn't obvious.

“Go,” Sacha said, his gypsy eyes peering over the shelf to watch the cashier.

I walked to the register with the remaining Twix.

“Umm, excuse me, how much is this?”

“35 cents,” the woman said, her jowls quivering.

“Do you have 100 Grand?”

“I wish,” she said, laughing at a joke I didn't know I had made. “I'm sorry, honey, which one is that now?”

“100 Grand. It's the one with the two little humps. It's caramel and chocolate and it has those little rice krispies,” I said. I heard the door jingle open. Sacha was exiting. I felt wobbly and euphoric.

“Son, I'm not sure. You'll have to just see if it's over there.”

“OK, umm—I'll just take the Twix,” I said. I gave her a quarter and a dime. “Thank you ma'am.”

“No problem. You have a nice day.”

I walked out the door, taking my time. I met Sacha around back. He wore a wide grin.

“Told you it was easy,” he said.

We got on our bikes and headed to a vacant lot to split up the loot. I opened a Twix and gave Sacha one of the bars. We sat under a tree reading Spiderman and Captain America until it was almost dark, and I had to go home for dinner.

That summer and fall weren't easy. After a drawn-out separation and divorce, my dad stayed in Los Angeles while my mom moved to Palo Alto for grad school. She studied psychology, and she brought me along.

I didn't adapt well to being the new kid. I showed up at Ohlone Elementary wearing the wrong clothes and using the wrong slang. I had a first name my classmates couldn't pronounce without saying it twice followed by “lavatory.” During recess, I threw dirt clods and engaged in questionable slide-tackling. I was a grade-level ahead of the class in math and spelling. If I had been in their shoes, I might not have liked me either.

Sacha was even less popular. He smelled like old milk, for one, and he guessed and mumbled his way through simple lessons. As the outcasts of the fourth grade, we developed a certain intimacy.

My mom and I moved into a house around the corner from my school. This was Palo Alto before it became the headquarters of Silicon Valley, and the eastern edge of town, where we lived, was a quiet flatland of Eichler homes, one-story wood houses with huge windows. Oaks and the occasional redwood grew tall in our neighborhood, and their roots erupted from the sidewalks. I was supposed to stay within a few blocks of home, but I violated my borders daily. The only thing I wouldn't do was cross Highway 101, a mile east, and go into East Palo Alto. At the time it was California's murder capital.

After school, I always wanted to go to Sacha's house, which was a block west of 101. It was a ramshackle Eden of lawn-parked cars and half-finished puzzles, unspoiled by nutritious food or vigilant adults. I took pleasure in making living-room messes with Sacha, leaving them there and then coming back a week later to see nothing had been touched—or more likely, that something had been added.

Sacha never wanted to go to his house. As we would approach the front door, he would put his index finger to his lips, eyes wide, whispering, “Shh—Dad works nights.” He preferred roaming the streets.

We had plenty of time to find trouble. No one cared where Sacha went as long as he got home by dark, and with my mom taking a demanding course load, I had freedom to roam, so long as I made it home by dinner. I kept a low profile in hopes that my mom wouldn't sign me up for after-school care. She didn't.

From last bell until dark, Sacha and I wandered eastern Palo Alto's drainage creeks and back alleys. Along the way I studied petty crime. I learned to hide beneath bushes and chuck fruit at passing cars, to build huge forts from the wood at construction sites, to start brush fires with a magnifying glass and to pick basic door locks with a screwdriver. Sacha was my mentor, and soon I was an able accomplice. His specialty was shoplifting, and in due course, it became mine as well.

When we started, I did it for the stuff. Not to consume it, though I ate my share of stolen candy, but to own it, to possess it and squirrel it away in the closet. Sometimes I didn't even read the comics I stole, just collected them.

Long before I moved to Palo Alto, I knew stealing was wrong. When I started doing it regularly, I assumed I would pay the bill in the afterlife. I gathered as much from the occasional Sunday morning my mom forced me into slacks and a polo shirt and dragged me to the Episcopalian church down the street.

“I hate church,” I said.

“That's what you always say,” my mom said, rebuttoning my dress shirt, “but every time we go, you have a fine time.”

“I don't believe in God.”

“You don't have to believe in God to go to church.”

“The Bible's stupid,” I said.

She sighed and opened my closet. Once my church clothes had been taken from their hangers, the die was cast. When arguments became overt contests of power, my mom would never submit.

So we went. The truth is that church scared me. I wasn't convinced of God's existence, but if he did exist, I knew he would never forgive me for making trouble on such a grand scale.

Once I was in the mottled light beneath the stained glass, though, I felt calm and reassured. My feet, cramped in shiny shoes, were cooled by a draft across the church floor. I begged my mom to let me stay with the congregation and listen to the sermon instead of trudging off to Sunday school with my peers, all of whom seemed to have become friends during infancy. To this request, she submitted.

I have a clear memory of the young pastor, a kind-faced, brown-haired man who smiled from behind the high pulpit. On this day, after a long and charming tale about the difficult choices each person faces in a lifetime, he came to the moral of his address: Heaven and Hell, he said, were places inside every person, on their “moral landscape.” The heart knew right from wrong, and Hell was knowing you had done more wrong than right.

After the service, my conscience was heavy. I was certain of my damnation. Just based on Sacha's and my November take, which might have qualified us for grand theft charges, it was clear we were doomed. We never talked about such things, but I did enough worrying for both of us. Our lifetimes weren't long enough, I figured, to do all the good deeds that would be required to get back in the clear. And since we were already damned, there was no reason not to pursue a life of crime.

I suffered from this reasoning that evening after church. My mom, in an affectionate mood, pulled me onto her lap and said, “Darlin', I am so proud of you. You're just so talented. You really can do whatever you set your mind to, and whatever you do, I'll love you.”

I had the urge to list all the reasons not to love me. I needed to be forgiven. But I resisted. I knew her “I'll still love you” line was a trick; she might still love me, but not as much as before. So I said nothing. I stood with my arms limp as she hugged me, feeling the physical presence of Hell growing inside me. It was too late for setting my mind to anything.

My mom may have read my teary eyes as evidence of my sadness over the divorce, or my struggles with our move up north. I let her believe whatever she believed. I just wanted to protect her from the truth.

Come winter, basic shoplifting no longer sufficed. Our tolerance had grown, and one way to kick up the rush, we found, was to take adult stuff.

One afternoon I stole a bottle of wine from a liquor store, something dark red in a green bottle. After pounding in the cork and grimacing through a couple of sips, I grabbed it by the neck and threw it as high as I could. Sacha shrieked with laughter as the lurching bottle spit red spirals and smashed on the concrete.

Another day we stole a box of Maxi-Pads and chased each other around with them, squealing as if to be touched by one was to be irreparably feminized. When we got tired of that, we pasted them all over a wall behind the pharmacy.

By Christmas of 1984 we wanted dirty magazines. Sacha spoke with reverence of a Playboy he had kept under his bed for two months until his older brother claimed it. I couldn't imagine what naked ladies looked like, save for the intimidating largeness of my mother in a bra or nightgown, but some of Sacha's fascination rubbed off on me.

We planned our raid while sitting in our plywood fort in my weedy side yard. First step was a reconnaissance trip to a bodega-style liquor store a mile down the road. Sacha was determined to get a magazine called Oui, which we pronounced ow-eee. By the day of the heist, we had worked out our plan: I would distract the clerk, who sat near the door, by telling him it was my mom's birthday and I wanted to get her something nice. Meanwhile, Sacha would snatch the Oui from the rack on the side wall, and rather than risk a dash past the clerk, he would head toward the locked bathroom in back, where he would leave the magazine near the door. Then he would take off. Clerks were easier to play once Sacha was out of sight.

I would then run a variation on our usual con, pretend the gift I had picked was out of my price range or I had to think about it some more, then ask to use the bathroom. We figured I looked so cute and harmless the clerk would give me the key in spite of the Employees Only sign, and I would grab the Oui on my way in. As we could see from the alley, there was a high window in the bathroom. I would toss the magazine to Sacha, waiting below.

When we entered the store, the radio was blaring a talk-show discussion of the newly released Kramer vs. Kramer, a movie my mom wouldn't let me see because it was about divorce and was “too disturbing.” I interpreted the radio chatter as something of a negative personal omen, and it gouged at my facade.

Nevertheless, I steeled myself and went up to the clerk. He was a slim, leathery man with a handle-bar mustache and a Harley-Davidson shirt. When I asked about gifts, he didn't move, just pointed. When I asked about prices, he had them memorized. He never took his eyes off Sacha. The guy was a pro.

Finally I asked an absurd question—I think it was whether I could buy a bottle of champagne—to which the clerk responded with a booming belly laugh, then turned to relay the question to the deli chef, behind the food counter. Sacha knew his cue: he snatched the Oui and headed toward the back.

Beneath his Rollie Fingers upper lip, the clerk's smile vanished, and his voice boomed, “What do you want back there, boy?”

Sacha was spooked. I heard him drop the magazine on the floor. As I stood awkwardly at the counter, he slunk out the front, looking every bit the shoplifter interrupted mid-thievery.

The clerk turned to me with a yellow glint in his eye and said, “You boys better not be stealing from me.”

“No sir,” I said. But he saw right into my black little heart. “He's just nervous because . . . his dad's an alcoholic.”

The clerk raised an eyebrow. “Mmm.”

With Sacha outside, I deviated from the plan and spent several weeks of allowance on a wooden snack bowl, hoping the purchase would make the clerk trust me. After I had paid, I asked if I could use the bathroom. Still looking at me suspiciously, he said, “Sorry—employees only.”

I had prepared for this. “But I have diarrhea real bad.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, trying to look desperate.

He turned his face away, flared his nostrils, and gave me the key.

A few steps from the bathroom door, I saw the Oui on the floor, half-concealed by a rack of wine-openers. To get it, I would have to bend down, and with the clerk watching that didn't seem an option. So as I passed, I kicked it toward the bathroom. It hissed horrendously as it slid across the floor.

It stopped, and opened, just short of the threshold. With the clerk's eyes on my back, I couldn't bend down for it on my way into the bathroom.

My pulse was ticking like a bomb. I wanted to walk out of there and give up the life of crime, start being a normal kid. But I also wanted that Oui, which promised to reveal all of life's mysteries. I tried to pee but I couldn't. I was imagining I heard the clerk standing outside the door, Oui in hand, gun out of his holster. I almost wanted him to be there, if that would stop my freefall from grace.

After a minute I flushed and ran the tap. I had made up my mind: I would open the door quietly and look for the clerk. If his eyes were on me, I would bring him the key and leave, but if he was otherwise occupied, I would grab the Oui, stash it in my waistband and make a casual exit.

I opened the door. He was helping another customer. I knelt to grab the magazine and stuff it safely into my underwear, then walked up to the counter and dropped off the key. I mustered a much-relieved-looking smile as I said, “Thank you, sir.”

“No problem, son.”

I was doing my best to act natural on my way out, but I had cement feet. I had almost made my exit when, just like in the movies, I heard him: “Hold it.”

Next stop, Juvy.

“You don't want to disappoint your mom, now, do you?”

My first thought was that the clerk had an uncanny view into my psyche. Then my eyes focused on what he was holding in the air, next to his smirk. A plastic bag. The bowl.

Almost in tears, I took it from him, and this time no one prevented my exit. Around the corner, Sacha was standing under the window, looking panicked.

“What happened?” he asked. “Did you get it?”

“He was watching me the whole way. I couldn't bring it into the bathroom.”

“Shit.” He kicked an empty milk carton across the alley. “Fuck.”

“One thing, though,” I said—and then, slowing for dramatic effect, I pulled from my back waistband a slightly moist copy of the January 1985, issue of Oui. The grail.

“Oh my god,” Sacha said.

We rode home in a delirium. The rest of that afternoon we sprawled on our stomachs beneath a bush in my front yard, studying our prize. I had an empty feeling in my stomach, a squirmy sort of heartburn. Sacha and I were arm to arm. I leaned in and smelled one of the pages, then kissed one of the pictures. He snorted, and I flushed.

Later we stole two more magazines, Hustler and Penthouse Forum. The latter was a revelation, with all its graphic play-by-plays of sexual encounters, and for weeks I pored over it, memorizing euphemisms. With each turned page I felt myself floating further from the life of the normal kid I had been before I moved to Palo Alto—a kid for whom homework, Boogie-boarding, Little League and The Dukes of Hazzard had been amusement enough.

One afternoon that winter, Sacha and I put all three magazines in a thin, cardboard Walgreen's box and buried it in the dirt beneath our fort. It rained that night, and when we dug up the box later on, the magazines disintegrated in our hands. All those forbidden words and genitals had melted into one another. We couldn't read the magazines after that, but I kept them anyway.

As the days got longer in the spring of 1985, Sacha and I had to up the ante to get the same rush. We never talked about it, but we started roaming farther from Midtown, stealing better stuff from bigger stores.

For my mom's real birthday, in March, I gave her a crystal sculpture that probably cost twenty times my allowance. When she opened it, she gave me a piercing look.

“Umm, thanks . . . ” she said. “Where'd you get the money?”

“I saved up my allowance.”

“Where'd you buy it?”

“At Bergman's, Mom,” I said. “Geez.”

She pursed her lips and looked at me, saying nothing. She was waiting for further explanation. I stayed silent.

“Well, thanks . . . I guess,” she said. Then she stood up and went into the kitchen, leaving the half-unwrapped sculpture on the table.

From then on, when I brought home any loot, I hid it in my closet, or in the fort.

There was so much of it I had to throw some away. Our criminal exploits became less about the loot and more about the taking.

One day Sacha smuggled a small glass lamp out of a store, and since I had the better arm, he gave it to me. I chucked it at the wall. The explosion was tremendous, and as we tore down a side-street at dusk, my sinuses were so dilated I couldn't feel my head.

We finally got caught in one of our old haunts. Sacha's older brother had given him a thrashed skateboard, and our plan was to decorate it with a fancy paint-pen from Bergman's, the old department store. By May, after an entire school year of shoplifting, we thought Bergman's was beneath us: no security guards, no anti-theft tags, no cameras. Where was the challenge?

But my partner wanted that pen in particular, so we headed up the escalator to run yet another updated version of our old con. School supplies, toys and the like were in the store's second-story loft, above which, on the ceiling, were several large mirrors to which we paid no mind.

Sacha, wearing a backpack, asked the cashier the price of something, pencils or a notebook. While he counted out nickels and pennies on the counter, playing the poor kid with a good heart, I went to the art supplies aisle, found the pen in question and left it in the girls' aisle, near the escalator. Then I went over to the boys' aisle and fiddled with Transformers.

After informing the cashier that he was a little short of funds, which undoubtedly he was, Sacha put away his change and trudged dejectedly toward the escalator. Then, while I brought a Decepticon to the counter and did my innocuous question routine, asking about this helmet and that death ray, Sacha veered into girls' toys, slipped the paint-pen into his backpack and slipped onto the escalator. I waited ten seconds before telling the cashier, “Forget it, I'll come back later,” and then I made my own exit.

When I was a few feet from the door, I flinched. Just around the corner, a store employee had Sacha by the upper arm. I can't remember the man's face, but I haven't forgotten his thick, hairy arms or his black-rimmed eyeglasses. He pointed at me, and in a commanding voice he said, “You—come here.”

I turned to run but saw another employee behind me. Then the hairy man's hand clamped on my arm, too. He marched us back up the escalator, through a door and into his cluttered office. After planting us in wooden chairs twice our size, he went behind his desk and sat upright, a grim look on his face. He had on a stiff, white shirt with expanding sweat circles. For at least a minute, he said nothing, just stared. Sacha squirmed, his eyes distant.

“You boys have something to tell me,” the man said.

For a moment, we were silent. We were strong. Then I started bawling.

“We stole a paint-pen,” I said. My stonewall needed work.

“Not only did you try to steal a paint-pen, but you stole two figurines, three packs of Magic Markers and God knows how many action figures.”

Sacha and I looked at each other. We hadn't been inside Bergman's in at least two weeks, but this guy had our recent loot down cold.

“Let me give you boys a clue, since you obviously don't have one. Did you see those mirrors above you? They aren't mirrors: They're one-way glass. There are security guards watching every inch of the store, and we've also got cameras. When you boys came in here a few weeks ago, one of the cameras caught you stealing, and while you got away that time, your faces have been on our bulletin board ever since. Today we tracked you from the moment you walked in. We saw you move the pen, and we saw him put it in his knapsack.”

So much for Bergman's being a cakewalk.

“Now,” he went on, “you will tell me your names and your parents' phone numbers. I'm going to have them come in here and talk this over.”

I was terrified at the thought of my mom learning the truth about the kind of person I had become. That was far worse than Juvenile Hall, and now it seemed inevitable. But like a pint-sized superhero, Sacha swooped in.

“My name is Benjamin Smith,” he said. “I live in Escondido Village, on Stanford campus. My parents just moved into a new apartment and their phone isn't set up yet.”

This was brilliant.

“That's not good enough,” the man said. “You're going to have to give me a number where I can reach them.”

“My father's name is Stephen Smith,” Sacha said. “He's a graduate student in the History Department. You can get in touch with him through the department secretary.”

The man stared at Sacha, made a few scratches on his notepad, then turned to me. I was wracking my memory for a name that didn't sound ridiculous.

“My name is Matt Bailey,” I said, the words coming off my tongue awkwardly. Matt was a tall, popular boy in my class who I had hated since he ignored several phone messages I had left suggesting we get together to play after school. “My phone number is 873-4586.”

He picked up the phone and dialed the number. To my relief, he got the Baileys' answering machine.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, this is the assistant manager of Bergman's Department Store over in Midtown,” he said. “I need to speak to you about your son Matthew's shoplifting, which we've observed on several occasions. Please call me as soon as you get this message so we can discuss appropriate redress and punishment.”

After hanging up, he stared at us and sighed. He reminded me of how my dad looked when he was disappointed in me. Sacha glowered while I wiped tears from my cheeks and mumbled, “We're so sorry about this, sir.”

The assistant manager ignored us, then, and for the next hour we sat there silently as he did paperwork, wiped his brow and called the Bailey household and the Stanford History Department. By the time he gave up and let us go, it was dusk, and we were late getting home.

At a safe distance from the store, Sacha started making a high, forced sound that I knew was supposed to be laughter. He punched me on the arm and said how we really pulled one over on that guy. And we had. But something had changed. I was broken, and I knew that beneath his grin, Sacha was bitter. Even if my mom had not forbidden me, after my confession that night, to spend any more time with him outside school, I would have avoided him from then on. He disgusted me, even more than I disgusted me, with his overgrown, licey hair, the sneakers held together with safety pins and the rotting cheese smell that always came from his clothes.

I also knew I could blame Sacha for my behavior. I could say he was a bad influence, and I just got swept up in it. Most people, including my mom, would believe me.

At an intersection near school we went our own ways. I came home to a quiet, empty house, and without turning on lights or raiding the fridge, I crumpled into the couch. I stared at the blank, gray TV screen, fuzzy with lint. The shadows around me soaked up the deepening gloom.

After dark, I heard the garage door open. My mom came in, looking harried. She dropped her backpack, flipped on lights and asked how I was; I gave her a meek “Fine.” To “What's wrong?” she was given an equally unconvincing “Nothing.”

She let it be, although I knew she was wondering what was up. She wasn't any better at hiding her emotions than I was. Nevertheless, she went about her routine, changing clothes, feeding the dog and cooking dinner.

At the table, I ate a few bites before excusing myself, saying I was sick. I went to my room and lay on the bed, facing the wall. I felt Hell inside me. A few minutes later, my mom came in.

“Honey, look, I know there's something wrong, and I think I know what it is,” she said. “I promise you, I won't judge you for it, and I won't get mad. You're the one who deserves to be upset, and I want you to know that it's OK if you are. It's hard, being up here. I haven't been here for you enough. If we can just talk about it, you'll feel better.”

At that point I lost it. I didn't know why I was crying so hard, but it felt good. She put a hand on my side, and when I finally turned to face her, I saw she had been crying, too. I had let her down.

“I got caught stealing at Bergman's,” I said. “And then when the guy made me give him my name and phone number, I gave him Matt Bailey's.”

I awaited her condemnation, but to my surprise, her face brightened. She looked as if she were trying not to laugh. It dawned on me that if I played this right, I might use the whole episode to my advantage, for she would blame it on herself, on the divorce.

“It was the first time I ever stole anything,” I said. “I promise, I'll never do it again.” •

Rory Laverty lives and writes in Wilmington, North Carolina. After four years as a reporter and two as a columnist for The Oakland Tribune and its chain of newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, he enrolled in the MFA creative writing program at UNC Wilmiington, where he is currently at work on a memoir. In 2001, he earned a first place award for feature writing from the Associated Press Executives Council.

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