The Steal (18 page)

For Dahlia, a novelist and former personal assistant who lives in Los Angeles and dabbled in shoplifting for years, the thrill lay in the loot amassed. But for others, the thrill came from proficiency. “You begin to believe that it’s a craft and a skill. You get better at it . . . You figure out which store has better security,” said Donna, a single mom and ex-journalist who once shoplifted a gym bag on the way home from a court date. “Getting away with it is an adrenaline rush. It evens the score.” But, she complained, the rush only lasted for a few minutes. “And you’re back to yourself again. In your mind, you think, It was all for a stupid blouse, or stupid soap. For this, I risked everything.”

B, an actor who shoplifted with a friend, liked the moment-to-moment unpredictability: “[I shoplifted] every day, like someone with a drug addiction. I could look at G from across the store and that look meant, Go ahead, it’s clear. We hadn’t planned on taking anything.”

Christine, who used to be a flight attendant, found shoplifting apparently unshopliftable items especially thrilling: “Sometimes I’ll challenge myself, like one time I took . . . like a door stop, it was a monkey, and it was heavy. It was made out of brass. It was as big as a roll of toilet paper. From a home furnishings store. I put it in my pocket, which is something that I rarely do. It felt great.” Adam Stein, an actor and writer who shoplifted for years until he was arrested, said, “I was caught at Barnes & Noble by a floor detective. By that time I had gotten a false bravado . . . I didn’t think that anyone would be watching.” Sarah, a sixty-one-year-old advertising executive, the daughter of a wealthy judge from a prosperous town, talked of the secret of shoplifting, which “compromised me and made me feel good.” Alice, a shoplifting housewife, felt “euphoric and tingly.” She said, “I was exhilarated . . . satisfied in a way I had not been for many years.” She used to spend hours planning shoplifting. She smuggled cuticle scissors into the store under a big coat, and then she ripped off a plastic wrapper from a DVD, which she would then stuff in her pants while she “made a break” for her car. She shoplifted “at” someone—she didn’t know whom. Jennie, another housewife, said, “I had to keep on stealing to keep from remembering all the stealing I had done.”

The self-described “elder of filth,” John Waters, shoplifted to finance his first films, which were about the crime or used it to advance the plot. Though Waters no longer shoplifts, his obsession with the subject belongs to his brand as much as his caterpillar mustache or designer smoking jackets. In a tongue-in-cheek National Public Radio essay in 2003, Waters joked that he liked Christmas because it was “easier” to shoplift during that holiday, and in an interview for
Filmmaker
magazine the same year, he fondly recalled a shoplifter whose technique involved setting small fires between racks of clothing.

In the spring of 2006, Waters, sixty, a petite, elegant man in a black Isaac Mizrahi jacket with white piping and tuxedo pants, spent a few minutes of an hour-long talk at Columbia College in Chicago lamenting the passing of his salad days of shoplifting. “We were really good at it,” Waters said, standing in front of a set consisting of a couple of aluminum trash cans overflowing with garbage. He leaned toward the microphone. “I had a special jacket for stealing LPs,” he confessed, adding, “I don’t feel bad because today I have to pay $25,000 to use some of these songs in my films, so it’s all worked out in the end.”

In 1966, around the time Waters made his shopliftungsroman
Roman Candles
, he noticed that Divine (
Pink Flamingos
’ obese cross-dressing hero) was talented at the crime. “I saw him walk out of a store once with a chain saw and a TV.” Waters minced across the stage mimicking Divine in the scene where, to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ doowop number “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” he slides a slab of raw meat into his panties and humps it.

Later, I asked Waters why he praised shoplifting in his talks, his movies, and his books. The first thing he said was, “Shoplifting is a cinematic crime.” But he was also proud of his own prowess. “I never got caught.” He began at age ten, with a 45 of Lawrence Welk’s “Tonight You Belong to Me” and continued for reasons whose soundtrack was more Rolling Stones: “It used to be politically correct to shoplift, except from a mom-and-pop store.” The thrill egged him on. “You felt a rush of adrenaline when you have that thing under your arm.” Besides, he said, shoplifting was as good a standard as any by which to measure friends and foes. “I don’t trust anybody who hasn’t shoplifted.”

Nan, a red-haired, middle-age director and playwright, whispered at a restaurant in Greenwich Village, “If you shoplift once, you forever think of yourself as a thief.” The scion of a wealthy suburban family, she (according to her story) shoplifted from the seventh grade until recently, stopping briefly when she became a mom. “During the children’s infancy, I had no time to shoplift. . . . I slipped back into my life once they were in school. I went back to that behavior, but never with consistency. I can’t risk it.” Nan shoplifted solo and in a team, for pleasure and for profit. “I shoplifted a watch that I know I didn’t get enough for. It was from a store in the East Seventies, a jewelry boutique. It was $3,500.” She stole as foreplay: “This guy who wished he was a girl. I stole with him. I would order him to steal for me and he would and we also stole together.” She shoplifted prosaic items and ones that had special meaning to her. She saw herself as a hero in the store, hugging the shoplifted item to her body as she escaped through the aisles. She bragged about it, leaning across the oiled, checkered tablecloth and winking. “I have a close, personal relationship with shoplifting. That sounds glib, but it’s true.”

Everything was connected to shoplifting, including recycling: “When you get a vintage Balenciaga jacket for six dollars, that’s almost shoplifting,” she said. One story was more harrowing than the last. When she was twelve, she shoplifted over $500 worth of clothes from a local department store, which was a felony. “It was easier to get sloppy then pre-EAS.” What she wanted was a peasant blouse. She put on jeans over the jeans she was wearing. She folded a sundress flat. Her mother bailed her out and treated her to a peach Melba. “Shoplifting was part of a bigger picture, a scary picture in retrospect,” she said, alluding to the sex and drugs that lured her. Nan remembered the language of shoplifting as if she had learned it in a school for thieves. “Did you
get
it? If you ‘got’ it, you’d stolen it.”

After she first moved to New York for college in the late 1980s, Nan lived “on the fringe,” and not seeing herself as “part of the regular day-to-day world,” she went “underground” and shoplifted things she didn’t have the money to buy, like spices from a gourmet food store in Greenwich Village. One time a security guard caught her, but instead of reporting her, escorted her back to her apartment. They did not sleep together. Another shoplifting story with an “I escaped in the nick of time” denouement began when Nan and a friend were exiting Bergdorf Goodman with a fur coat, which the friend had slung over her arm. The security guard grabbed the friend but got a handful of fur from the sleeve. The duo pushed through the revolving door and bolted down Fifth Avenue. The guard did not give chase.

Shoplifters like Nan described how they felt while getting ready to shoplift: Their hearts beat quickly; their faces flushed; they knew that shoplifting would release excitement, and they craved that release. Sometimes the excitement began hours before shoplifting and sometimes minutes before they lost the ability to concentrate on anything except going to the store. The thrill of belonging to an exclusive club, and also of being damned to it. The shoplifters were swept up in a dance of pleasure and agony.

Steve, an ex-shoplifter I met in Detroit, leaned toward me and worried that to share his methods was to promote shoplifting, which he was averse to do. But when he spoke of the thrill of it, his face lit up. In Home Depot, “I feel like I know what I’m doing,” he said. The crime was his “best friend.” Like Nan, he bragged about his technique: “I was the reason why prepaid phone cards had to be activated at the cashier.” He shoplifted an X-Acto knife and a price-tag gun so he could shoplift other stuff. “Survival of the fittest,” he joked.

In college, Scott Harris shoplifted as others drink Red Bull—for a jolt of adrenaline. His heists included a snowblower and a water ski. “I would get out of class, desire to go down on University Drive or on State Street and hit the stores. It was literally a daily thing. . . . Before long I had over a thousand music CDs, dozens of hats, things that brought no value to my life other than superficial value. Filling voids made me feel better.”

In his 1988 book
Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil
, Jack Katz writes about “the neglect of the positive, often wonderful attractions within the lived experience of criminality.” Katz, for many years a professor of sociology at UCLA, refers to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty to tease out shoplifting’s affinity with pleasure. He calls shoplifting a “sneaky thrill” and “a thrilling melodrama about the self seen from without and within,” and, drawing on the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, compares it to magic. He means that, for transcendence’s sake, we create our own sleight of hand when we shoplift. We imagine the borders where objects end and we begin, and we shoplift to shorten the distance. Quoting Merleau-Ponty, Katz muses that we are “seduced and repelled by the world,” especially by experiences “present[ing] a thrilling demonstration of personal competence.”

After
Seductions of Crime
appeared, a number of novels and memoirs were published in which the heroines shoplifted to demonstrate “personal competence” or to play out a “thrilling melodrama about the self.” Ellen Lesser’s 1990 short story, “The Shoplifter’s Apprentice,” describes shoplifting as inspiring “a terrible freedom.” The heroine, “as much prey to disproportionate longings as anyone,” falls in love with a shoplifting rogue. On shoplifting excursions, she feels “benign even pleasurable panic like she felt at the movies worrying, but knowing deep down that the hero would prevail.” After the rogue abandons her, she shoplifts to regain the feeling that “anything could happen now.” As a child, Miriam, the heroine of Myla Goldberg’s 1999 novel
Bee Season
, shoplifts a pink rubber ball that “tingles against her palm.” Years later, shoplifting as an adult, she “luxuriates in the store’s atmosphere, lingering over a blue scarf.” She is ecstatic when her lover tells her about
tikkun olam,
Judaism’s reconstituting of shattered pieces, because it explains her shoplifting.

In Kathryn Harrison’s novel
Exposure
, Ann shoplifts at Bergdorf’s and Bloomingdale’s to block the memory of her father’s abuse years earlier and to stop thinking about everything that bothers her. Crystal meth helps, as does Ann’s acute impulsiveness. Seconds before she is nabbed, she wonders why she shoplifted. “All she needs in the world is one crummy formal dress so why is there a blue silk jacket, one that she doesn’t particularly like, in her camera bag?”

 

I spent a couple of hours with Harrison one snowy day in the winter of 2006 in her Brooklyn brownstone talking about shoplifting in
Exposure
and in her life. Reclining on a velvet chaise longue in her living room, the novelist said, “Dumbo has his feather and we have our stolen objects, which are more powerful for having been acquired illicitly.” Harrison launched into a story about her own shoplifting as part of a girl duo in California, complete with monikers—hers was Edwina—and wigs. “I had this friend Nicole—she and I were quite opposite physical types in every way. She was sort of this very dark creature. Daydreamy. We were good girls, late bloomers. This was when we were twelve, thirteen.”

After a while a guy named Jeff joined them. Harrison resented Jeff. He changed the character of their crime. But she nonetheless deconstructed shoplifting as a girlhood rite of passage and as a force that focused her chaotic spirit. She kept shoplifting until she was sixteen or seventeen, when a supermarket detective at Ralphs in Sherman Oaks ended her career. “They called my grandfather, who was apoplectic. . . . My grandmother . . . believed the worst of me. It was Tampax—all the checkers were guys. I didn’t want to pay for it.”

But, Harrison mused, shoplifting was also a game grown-up women played, like flirting or courtship. There is a secret language that shoplifters speak, she said. “Intuitively, I know which women among my friends steal,” she added, repeating that shoplifting amplified the value of any object because of the trouble one took to acquire it. “When you steal, there is a frisson of being connected. If I said, ‘Can you give this to me?’ that would be less powerful. Stealing can make you feel
more
than you are, arriving at yourself in some way. The act in and of itself is a fetish. Objects then lose their value and you have to do it again.”

“My little shoplifter,” Gaston coos to Lily in
Trouble in Paradise
, Ernst Lubitsch’s movie about two thieves disguised as wealthy Europeans. For the bounders in evening wear sharing dinner in their hotel room, stealing is an aphrodisiac. By the time Gaston utters his endearment, gazing into Lily’s eyes, they are already entwined on the couch. In the next frame, a Do Not Disturb sign hangs on their hotel room door. The movie ends happily as the thieves escape in a taxi. For these sexual shenanigans and for its celebration of lawbreaking,
Trouble in Paradise
was censored by the Hays Code in 1932.

After that, the movies depicted lady shoplifters as femmes fatales who feel toward objects the way they are supposed to feel toward men. We learn so much from watching the movies—everything from kissing to smoking—so it’s not surprising that Hollywood’s definition of shoplifting sticks in our minds. Or that we’re still saddened to learn that the reality of movie stars shoplifting is grimmer than that of the lovestruck kleptos that you see on the screen. In the golden age of film noir, at the dawn of postwar American consumerism, some of the era’s most ambitious directors saw the kleptomaniac as a woman driven by the contradictions and ambiguities of the genre to shoplift clothes. Preston Sturges’s
Remember the Night
(1940), a romantic comedy with noir accents starring Barbara Stanwyck; Otto Preminger’s
Whirlpool
(1949), starring Gene Tierney; William Wyler’s
Detective Story
(1951), starring Lee Grant; and later, Alfred Hitchcock’s
Marnie
(1964), starring Tippi Hedren, begin with a mysterious woman shoplifting (or having stolen). This woman lacks a history, perhaps an identity. She doesn’t know why she steals. A wry, troubled man—sometimes a detective—investigates her. He is trying to solve a crime, but also to find out who killed her capacity to love. Mostly, that villain is the woman’s father. As in most noir, even when the hero saves the girl, the story does not necessarily end with a wedding.