The Steal Read online

  I asked Tamara, the ex-booster, “Who buys boosted Crest Whitestrips and Rogaine?” She said, “Everyone.” Doctors, lawyers, she elaborated.

  So if boosters are shopping warriors, that makes every person who buys boosted cosmetics and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals accomplices.

  Economists disagree about how boosting affects the legitimate economy. One view is that boosting, which feeds the black market, is “constructive,” allowing people to buy luxuries that they could not otherwise afford. Another argument is that boosting is linked to terrorism, although there is little hard evidence. A third argument is that the creation of black markets where boosters operate suppresses competition and leads to violence. In this theory, boosting not only drains resources and saps productivity from legitimate stores, it fails to protect buyers from harm or faulty products. To me these theories—especially the second and third—miss the point. The majority of the most-boosted items are cosmetics, not necessities. If the explosion of boosted Crest Whitestrips, Rogaine, razors, and EPT tests furthers the American economy’s drift toward that of a third world country, then, though we will have shiny white smiles and full heads of hair and be clean-shaven and know whether we are pregnant, we will also be able to say that we have shoplifted until we dropped.

  PART THREE

  PATHOLOGY

  I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief.

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  8. THE THRILL OF THE STEAL

  Many shoplifters talk about the crime like a love affair. Here is how they sound: Shoplifting punctures despair, at least temporarily. Shoplifters enjoy stealing. The objects mean something to them, but taking them feels dirty. Shoplifting is a spasm or a seizure. The lesson they learn from the crime—yes, I can!—they might apply to other areas of life. Shoplifting gives them courage to take chances. One shoplifter, who, according to him, over the years stole $25,000 worth of merchandise, wrote:

  It’s knowing I’m doing something wrong and the sense of superiority over the store owner or clerk. As I got older and developed more sleight of hand, I had to start stealing more expensive or hard-to-get items . . . to get a bigger rush. There’s also this inner fear that a hand is gonna drop on your shoulder as you walk out the door, and when it doesn’t, you feel invincible. Making it seem as if I belonged in a place, being so normal that I was overlooked by all. But as I’ve aged the reverse has happened, in that I’ve now become the guy nobody notices or pays attention to. Think of the movie [The Vanishing]. I identified with the Jeff Bridges character, only my fascination was stealing. . . . Although I’ve thought I would make a good hit man, if I had been given the opportunity.

  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.”

  “A THRILLING MELODRAMA ABOUT THE SELF”

  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.”

  9. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SHOPLIFTING CELEBRITY

  “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 depicte
d 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.

  Remember the Night opens in Meyers jewelry store in Manhattan at Christmastime with a close-up of Stanwyck’s arm in an opera-length velvet glove; a bald salesman is fastening a diamond bracelet watch around her wrist. While he dives into the cabinet to look for a different bracelet, Stanwyck escapes. Briskly walking down Fifth Avenue in her muff, matching fur jacket, and diamonds, she blends into the crowd. Her pawnbroker turns her in. Fred MacMurray, the prosecutor with the heart of gold, is reluctant to send Stanwyck to jail over Christmas. He finagles her bond. They go out for a bite to eat at a supper club. As a torch singer croons, Sturges sets the stage for their romance by making MacMurray hope that Stanwyck is a kleptomaniac.