فصل 04

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Shoplifting (and Hitchhiking) Saved My Life

We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were to be lived. Life serves the risk taker.

—Evasion I don’t remember the first thing I stole. However, I do remember (with zero pride) that it happened a lot. At one point, someone tried to recruit me to shoplift an Apple MacBook for him, and that was when I realized that holy shit, I have a reputation as a thief. There are plenty of things I’d like to be known for (armpit farting, photography, my legendary dance moves), but being a fabulous shoplifter is not one of them.

I’m not proud of this phase of my life. And it’s so far removed from who I am now that it sometimes seems surreal. Recently, I had a meeting with executives from Nordstrom, and then a few days later, a meeting with the CEO of Michael Kors. And the whole time, I’m sitting in this meeting, thinking, Oh, my god, I stole a Michael Kors watch from Nordstrom when I was seventeen. . . . These were my lost years, and there were dozens of times when I could have irreparably messed up my future. It is a miracle, and through no fault of my own, that I didn’t.

On Anarchism, for a Sec

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

—Emma Goldman

For the latter half of my teen years, I was pretty lost. Though I knew who I was and always refused compromise, I had no clue what I wanted. I was willing to try almost anything, but my incessant desire to simultaneously reject everything created a challenging paradox. Another way to describe this attitude would be “immature.”

When I was still living with my parents, I made the drive from Sacramento to the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco every year. As you can imagine, I listened to a lot of angry music in those days. When I was fifteen, I discovered Refused’s album, The Shape of Punk to Come, and that turned me on to Guy Debord and the Situationists. I’d already been heavy into Emma Goldman, and was frequenting a Marxist study group in which my friends and I were the only people under forty. As I said before, as a teenager, I thought that life sucked and that my life—“oppressed” as I was by school and the suburbs—especially sucked. The ideals of anarchism were perfect for me. I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world. I thought that big corporations were running the world (which I now know they do) and by supporting them, I was condoning their evil ways (which is true, but a girl’s gotta put gas in her car).

I wanted to live outside the capitalist structure, to live free and travel free, and to exist outside a nine-to-five lifestyle. I was like an old bearded hippie trapped in a teenage girl’s body. I wanted to live spontaneously and to find myself in wild places, with wild people, and have wild times. Let me remind you, I was naïve enough to believe this was how I could live my life indefinitely. But thinking back now makes me scared for my former self the way any mother would be scared for her teenage daughter doing what I did.

Do not knock a dumpstered bagel until you’ve tried one.

At seventeen, before I even graduated high school, I moved out. My parents were in the midst of their divorce and too busy dismantling two decades of marriage to keep me safe any longer. I embarked on my dream of an adventurous life, trying on as many different experiences as I could. I was vegan. I was freegan. I hitchhiked to an Earth First! Rendezvous in the middle of the forest where I ate magic mushrooms and watched people set a pentagram made of sticks on fire. I refused to buy new wood; too angry with capitalism’s disregard for sustainability, I furnished my places with a mix of sidewalk freebies and lifted merch instead. I dumpster-dived at Krispy Kreme, dated a guy who lived in a tree house, and had hair upon my legs.

While this all may sound extreme, it didn’t seem that way to me at the time. I’d felt like an outsider my entire life, in every school and at every job, and had finally thrown in the towel on finding anyplace that I completely belonged. Discomfort was where I was most comfortable.

Sun’s Out, Thumbs Out

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

—Junot D?az

When I was seventeen, I decided to hitchhike to Olympia, Washington. Joanne, my travel companion I’d known for a total of twenty-four hours, and I stood on the shoulder of an on-ramp in Downtown Sacramento, holding up a cardboard sign. The first person who picked us up was a Russian guy named Yuri, who was driving a little Honda with a busted-out back window and a bashed-in steering column. In outlaw terms, the car was likely stolen. NBD, right? Nothing weird about that. I had a switchblade on my belt (it was for cutting apples!), and besides, we were invincible. Disclaimer: Please don’t ever, ever do any of the stupid things that I talk about in this chapter.

We asked Yuri where he was headed, and started to get suspicious when he said West Sacramento, which we had already passed and was many miles behind us on the freeway. After some negotiation, he finally agreed to drop us off in Redding, which was at least on the way to where we were going. Then he threw in the deal breaker.

“For love?” he said.

“No!” I shrieked back, too grossed out to be scared. We demanded that he let us out, and he started to apologize right away. But if the hot-wired car had somehow not tipped us off to the fact that he was a creepy dude, the “for love” deal breaker left little doubt. Yuri let us out at a gas station, still apologizing profusely in broken English, and this was how we found ourselves stuck outside a town called Zamora, backpacks in tow, and not another building in sight.

I looked around and saw two cars gassing up, but both were breeders (aka families), which any intelligent hitchhiker knew better than to approach. There was a big rig idling on the on-ramp, so figuring that this was our best option, I walked up to it and knocked on the cab.

A big guy named James answered the door, and informed us he was en route to Eugene. That seemed close enough to Olympia, and because we had no other option, we got in. James was from the South, and had a friend’s son with him, as he was teaching the kid how, as he called it, to “drive truck.” As we started up the highway, Joanne—who was a complete and total idiot—asked James if she could use his mobile phone, which in 2002 was a giant Nokia. He said sure, as long as she gave him a back rub, which she did! And of course, as soon as she was finished, he changed his mind. He told her that no, she couldn’t use his phone, but he’d pay for her to use a pay phone. She got very upset as I sat there rolling my eyes, thinking, You idiot, that’s why you don’t give strange men back rubs! At this point, I had probably never touched another person’s pubes, so there was no way at all I related to this freak I was traveling with.

By law, truckers have to pull over every certain number of hours to sleep—a law that keeps them from snorting speed and staying up for days on end. James’s truck was huge, and had plastic, prisonlike bunk beds in the back. He pulled over to the side of the road, and quickly outlined the sleeping arrangements. “She’s with him,” he said, pointing at my idiot traveling companion and his friend, then at me: “And you’re with me!” James had already told me that he was attracted to my hairy legs, which I thought was revolting because part of the reason I had hairy legs in the first place was to keep guys away from me.

“No way!” I said. “We’ll share one, and you guys share one!”

“I ain’t sleeping with no man.” He chortled, making clear his disgust.

“Well, I’m not sharing a bed with you!” I responded, and told him that if necessary, I would sit on the floor and wait it out. This did not go over well with James, who made us decide: Either do what he said or get the fuck out.

For the second time, we found ourselves on the side of the highway with nothing but knives, backpacks, and a flashlight. It was three in the morning, and we were standing on the shoulder of the freeway, on the side of a mountain in southern Oregon, twenty miles south of the nearest exit. Joanne was really tan, like a homeless woman or someone from Maui. I don’t even know how she got that tan, but that’s an aside. I suggested that our safest bet was to throw our sleeping bags down in the forest until daybreak, but like the idiot she was she refused, citing she was “afraid of animals.” Not afraid to give a giant freak a back rub, but afraid of getting nuzzled by a baby deer, apparently. Our flashlights being the only light available, we waved down another big rig, which stopped about a hundred yards away because those things are so goddamn heavy. We ran through the darkness to see what surprise we might find behind door number three.

Seattle, where I spent almost as much time cutting my own hair as I did shoplifting. 2002.

The next episode seemed simpler: just the driver and his massive, drooling canine. The guy was a Bible-thumper who went on about Jesus and smacked his dog whenever it barked. He told us that his mom was a prostitute and that his brother burned a house down at age five. He was pretty cracked out, but for the first time all night, we were riding with someone who wasn’t interested in Yuri’s proverbial “love.” Um, that was a relief. And the ride got better when the sun came up, as the driver let us get on his CB radio and harass the logging trucks, blasting them with insults like, “Hey loggers, do you know you’re ruining the environment?” as we passed them on the highway.

This guy’s trip ended in Eugene, and as we pulled into a truck stop, he got on his radio and found us a ride the rest of the way to Olympia. Our final chauffer was a very nice trucking dad who riffed about his wife and kids the whole way, dropping us safely in Olympia.

No Time for Crime

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

—Joan Didion

At eighteen, I decided to move to Olympia, Washington, semipermanently to establish residency so I could attend the Evergreen State College, an interdisciplinary school devoid of majors. No, seriously—you can major in Madonna. I still had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but Evergreen’s unconventionality made it seem like, just maybe, this was a school I could get along with. Because my political ethos at that time didn’t really jibe with working for the Man, I started shoplifting—and shoplifting a lot—to support myself.

Here’s some irony for you: The first thing that I ever sold online was stolen. At this point, I was palling around with full-time, bona fide anarchists. They were tree-sitters, activists, naturalists, hobos, feminists, radical publishers, thieves, scam artists, and one person who refused to accept gender, classifying him- or herself “z” instead of “he” or “she.”

My friend Mack (an assumed name as I later found out, as he was a fugitive at the time) was a bit of a celebrity in this world. He’d written Evasion, a book that was a universal anthem for the underground society we operated in. The cover read “Homelessness, Unemployment, Poverty . . . If You’re Not Having Fun You’re Not Doing It Right.” We were like Quentin Tarantino characters: a stylish duo with quick wits and grifters’ tongues. We valued “social engineering” over socializing, preferring to spend our days tricking corporations into thinking we were just your average, paying customers. . . .

Books were an easy entry point for a novice shoplifter like me. Each time, I checked Amazon to see what the top ten bestsellers were, then made my way to a big corporate bookstore, waltzed up to the front table, grabbed a stack of that bestseller, and waltzed right back out with as many as I could carry. Why didn’t I conceal my crime? Under Mack’s tutelage, I learned that the more you tried to hide, the shadier you looked. The best thieves are so obvious that they don’t even raise a brow, and with a stack of hardback thrillers under my arm, I was just another employee organizing the merch.

Once I got home, I listed the books on Amazon for ten cents less than everyone else, and they sold out overnight. Then I packed them up, shipped them out, and had a couple hundred bucks to pay my rent. In my mind at that time, I wasn’t doing anything wrong because I was stealing from corporations and not from people.

#GIRLBOSS, this is where I call bullshit on myself. I was stealing from people. I took an inspiring quote from Chief Seattle (“But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? [. . .] If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?”) and twisted it to justify my own purposes. Nobody really owns anything, I thought. I had deep discussions about how I didn’t believe in “property.” It was the world—not my shoplifting—that was really messed up. In the words of another famous West Coast philosopher, Ice Cube, I needed to check myself before I wrecked myself. Unfortunately, it took a while before this happened.

I stole anything—expensive wine, spirulina, once even a rug that, when rolled up, was taller than I was. I was constantly adding new techniques to my repertoire. There was left-handing, where you paid for one small, cheap thing with your right hand while holding something more expensive in your left hand that you didn’t pay for. No one’s watching the cash registers for shoplifters, and if someone stopped you on your way out, you could just pretend to be a total bimbo: “Oh, my God, what was I thinking? I’m so sorry; I wasn’t paying attention at all,” then hand whatever you were trying to steal right back. No cops, no fuss.

Some of my schemes were more elaborate, like one I ran on a major art-supply chain after Mack and I had learned that their computer systems weren’t synced from store to store. Each time, I went in and got two sets of the most expensive oil pastels I could find. They usually ran about $100. I put one in my bag and then walked up to the register to pay cash for the other one. I was super-chatty while I was checking out, telling the person ringing me up that I was buying this for my mom’s birthday, but was nervous that my sister was getting her the same thing. Mind you, I don’t even have a sister, so I’m sure this one carved me out a special place in hell. Then I left with two pastel sets and one receipt.

Five minutes later I walked back in acting flustered and found the same person who’d just checked me out, to whom I explained that my sister finally called me back, and sure enough, she got Mom the same thing! When I was asked for my receipt, I acted baffled. “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought it was in the bag?” This store’s policy was to refuse refunds without a receipt, but as I’d just been there and they remembered me, they always gave me back my $100 cash.

Then I left the store and headed straight to another location to return the second pastel set, this time with my receipt, for $100 in cold hard cash. Like I said: a special place in hell.

When I finally got caught, I was living in Portland, Oregon. I was at a large chain and had made my way around the store, filling my shopping cart until it was practically overflowing with stuff, having carefully picked the security sensors off each and every item before heading out the front door. The haul included a George Foreman grill, a basketball, fancy shower curtain rings, hair products, and tampons. I’m embarrassed to write this now and not because I’m the kind of person who’s embarrassed by tampons, but because getting caught stealing a box of OB is probably what we would all agree was a low point. This time, my walkout technique finally failed. As I pushed my cart of goodies across the parking lot to my parked car, a guy came running up and trotted beside me.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said back, my heart pounding as it dawned on me that he was a loss-prevention employee, in place specifically to catch people doing exactly what I was in the process of doing.

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, you know, just back to my car.”

“Actually, no, you’re not,” he said, “You’re going to come with me.”

I panicked and pushed the shopping cart in front of him as I bolted to my car, but not before he grabbed my purse off my shoulder—and with it my entire wallet, complete with my driver’s license. I made it out of the parking lot and all the way home as I watched my outlaw lifestyle fade quickly into the distance.

I was twenty years old and decided that a life of crime was not for me. In typical ballsy form, I drove back to the store, walked up to the customer service desk, and said, “I’d like to speak with your loss-prevention people. I just stole from you.” It was humbling and humiliating and a huge wake-up call. Fortunately, I got off easy. The store tallied up what I had stolen and fined me, which saved me from actually getting in trouble with the law.

This part of my life was probably the ultimate low. I had an alcoholic boyfriend and I frequently found myself in trashy situations like this one. I thought to myself, This kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me. Except that it did, and it was. I had always wanted to do something awesome, and instead I was just racking up a soap opera’s worth of skanky experiences. Getting caught stealing was the straw that broke the getaway camel’s back. I packed up my shit and drove my U-Haul-renting ass back to San Francisco, determined to do something legitimate and something brilliant. For a long time I kept the piece of paper that tallied up everything that had been in the shopping cart the day I got busted. It was a little reminder of how close I’d been to killing my inner #GIRLBOSS, and of how thankful I was that she lived.

Playing by the Rules. Or, at Least, Some of Them

The only way to support a revolution is to make your own.

—Abbie Hoffman

After that, I stopped shoplifting cold turkey. It wasn’t like I ran right out and got a job pouring concrete, but I told myself that there would be no more shortcuts, no circumventing the rules. I was experimenting with lifestyles and philosophies that were supposedly “sustainable,” but as it turned out, they weren’t sustainable for me. I eventually came to terms with the fact that living free doesn’t always mean living well, and there are certain truths I had to reckon with. I was starting to realize that I liked and wanted nice things, and if stealing wasn’t going to enable me to get them, I was going to have to try something almost too conventional for me—getting another job.

Being from the suburbs, I’d always equated comfort with ennui, and possessions with materialism, but I was beginning to learn that this wasn’t necessarily the case. Living a comfortable life can allow you the psychic space needed to focus on other, often bigger, things, and when you treat your possessions as emblems of your hard work, they inherit a meaning that transcends the objects themselves. Adulthood was a lot more nuanced than I had imagined it to be and by age twenty-one, I was already outgrowing the life I had thought I wanted. I knew that someday I would be thirty, and imagined that rooting through trash in search of a free bagel would likely not be so cute anymore. You heard it from me first: That Syd Barrett haircut and yesterday’s makeup won’t be cute forever!

In my teens I saw the world in only black and white. Now I know that most things exist in a certain gray area. Though it took a while to get here, I now call this gray area home. I once believed that participating in a capitalist economy would be the death of me, but now realize that agonizing over the political implications of every move I make isn’t exactly living.

Eventually, I got sick of listening to my friends whine about living in poverty while refusing to get a job. Compromise is just a part of life. We all, at some point, find ourselves either directly or indirectly supporting something we disagree with. There are ways to avoid this, but it generally includes eating roadkill and making tampons out of socks.

I was never one for accepting convention at face value, but through (plenty of) trial and error I have made working hard, being polite, and being honest a choice. It’s as if I invented it! Rules surround all that we do, and no one, no matter how saintly she may seem, follows all of them. I choose to obey explicit rules—like, you know, paying for something before I leave the store—but the rules that society implies we follow, well, those are the rules I have the most fun breaking.

I always dragged my feet over the mundane, little things in life. They made life seem like a big hamster wheel. I hated watching my money disappear each month when I paid the bills. I hated cleaning and doing laundry and having to stop to put gas in the car. And oh God, I hated taking out the trash. But if and when your hard work pays off, these things start to suck less. The first time I had enough savings to put my bills on auto pay it was like winning the lottery. Renting a house in Los Angeles with a backyard and my own washing machine was like being in a really happy musical (no, literally, I twirled and cried tears of joy when I moved in). Having someone to help keep my house clean makes me feel like I’m living in a fairy tale. Suddenly, you may find yourself with yesterday’s underwear clean and folded and the noise of that squeaky hamster wheel fading into the background.

There’s still a part of me that remains from my days of living beyond the law, and that’s my desire to just mess with things. Life is unwritten, like a great big experiment. Why not see how long the red string of my imaginary kite can get? And why not let it whisk me up into the sky with it when my dreams start to become reality? For that, I think it’s worth putting up with making some compromises, and even playing by (some of) the rules. PORTRAIT OF A #GIRLBOSS:

Alexi Wasser, IMBOYCRAZY.com (@imboycrazy)

I started my blog, I’m Boy Crazy, in 2008. It’s a mix of funny self-help stuff and hyper-personal accounts of my love, life, sex, dating, and relationship experiences—all different things that convey the voice and plight of the modern single girl who wants a great life, thinks too much, and feels a lot of feelings. As a result of starting my site, I’ve sold several shows to Showtime, E!, and Amazon. I sell merchandise on my site, have a weekly call-in advice show, contribute to magazines, speak at schools, and basically serve as the big sis you’ve always wanted but never had.

I had no idea I’d end up doing what I’m doing now. I always knew I loved writing and making people laugh. But I went from saying “I want to be a writer” to “I wanna be a model” (I’m not super-ugly and I’m very tall, I swear!) or “I wanna be an actress.” I did all those things, but writing continues to be what makes me happiest. Whether it’s a book, movie, blog entry, or TV show, I have creative control and it’s way cooler to be a writer than to be an actor saying the writer’s words.

I learned at a young age that people were happy when I asked them about themselves, and I listened and retained the things they told me. I found that by sharing my personal experiences, like through my blog, we’re not alone—that the most shameful, personal, specific things you’re going through are actually universal. You can laugh about it. I want to make a contribution that matters, and I want to be as vulnerable and raw as possible so other people feel less alone. I want to make people happy or make them laugh—even if it’s at my own expense.

I’m still trying to figure out how to balance work and a personal life. When you’re freelance like I am, if you don’t build structure for yourself, you feel like you always have to be working and it’s exhausting. I think this is a constant struggle for every freelance career girl. Make a schedule for yourself that incorporates time for phone calls to catch up with your annoying family and friends, sex with your boyfriend, exercise, dinners, therapy, parties, texting, social networking, mani-pedis, shopping, and the work that’s gonna get you paid to maintain the lifestyle you so desire! Create boundaries and structure! You have to be your own parent!

As for finding a guy who will support you on your #GIRLBOSS quest, I’ve accidentally dated variations of boneheads, such as the guy who appears secure and confident at the beginning of our relationship, but ends up being completely threatened by and uncomfortable with my personality, career, and how flirty or open my persona is. Another guy blatantly ignored what I do. He took no interest in it at all. I can only date a man I respect, am fascinated by, and consider interesting. If he can’t do the same for me, we have a problem.

Figure out what you love doing and don’t suck at, then try to figure out how to make a living doing that! Don’t be scared. We’re all going to die, it’s just a question of when and how—so be brave! You will never regret trying to fulfill your dream! Don’t get caught up in hanging out and drinking or partying. Celebrate when there’s something to celebrate. Take pride in what you do. Don’t do sloppy work. Be the best. Have something original and special to offer that makes people’s lives better. Don’t have sex with everyone in the world you work in. It’s a small world. Good luck. “When you treat your possesions as emblems of your hard work, they inherit a meaning that transcends the objects themselves.”