July 1, 2002

• Becoming an Expert Shoplifter

  This is part three of the current saga, in which my faithful readers finally learn how I became a booster.  It begins here.  Part 2 is a protected post, here.  By now at least a half dozen of you realize that there is a whole lot more to this story than just stealing.  It continues… well, really it has continued for more than forty years, but I think I can wind this particular episode up in just one more installment after this.

  One day, sometime after Larry dropped me, I met two young men while I was walking home from Kroger‘s. They were brothers, both within about a year of my age. I was visibly pregnant and they offered to carry my groceries. Each of them took a bag, and they saw me to the door. A week or two later, they came back one evening when for some reason I was there alone, Marie probably having gone home with Mama so I could make an early start on sales calls in the morning. They brought a bottle of wine and we all ended up in bed together.

  The next time I saw them it was another street meeting, and we were all a bit embarrassed over our impromptu threesome, and uncomfortable when we said hello. They had a friend with them, someone the older brother had known in the Hutchinson Boys’ Reformatory. They introduced me to Gary Wayne Metzger, and when Gary and I looked at each other we were both thunderstruck. I know that was how I felt and I saw it in his eyes.

  Gary was tall, like Larry, but more muscular, not thin and wiry as Larry. His hair was brown with a natural blond streak in his forelock, just like the Ayn Rand character, John Galt, the hero of my favorite book at the time, Atlas Shrugged. I don’t think I ever saw the two brothers again after that. When Gary learned how strapped for money I was and how hard I was working in my futile attempts at commission sales, he declared that I deserved better. He expressed a wish to take care of me and my daughter and unborn child. Within days Gary and I were lovers and before my next month’s rent was due we had moved together into an upstairs apartment two blocks away, at 1614 South Broadway.

  He and Marie were crazy about each other. Gary shared my new-found interest in ESP and we played with it a lot. We discovered that he and Marie and I were all very good at telepathy, less so with precognition and clairvoyance. We were delighted that Marie could move feathers and small bits of paper with telekinesis, even though both of us were total washouts.

  He didn’t have a car, but his friend Danny did. We spent a lot of time with Danny and his wife Rita. The car was an old, late-forties vintage black coupe. I don’t think Gary had a job during the time I knew him. He got out of Hutch just days before we met, and had been living with his mother. Not long after we moved in together he began the indoctrination that radicalized me. For most of my generation who eventually formed the “Hip Revolutionary” subculture, the process started a few years later. In this I was precocious, as in many things.

  Gary told me that, “property is theft,” echoing Rousseau, Proudhon and Marx. He very quickly overcame my learned-by-rote moral arguments with well-thought-out and practiced socialistic reasoning. He expressed indignant concern at my struggles to support myself. I listened to his insistence that I deserved much better than I was getting, and couldn’t argue. He told me, and showed me examples to prove, that those who really valued their possessions took care to safeguard them. He said that anyone who had so much more than he needed that he didn’t bother to secure it, was inviting theft. I remember sometime recently, in just the last few years a British cleric was censured for saying much the same thing in regards to supermarkets being invitations to steal. Gary told me that if someone had something I needed and had more than he needed, I was doing no wrong to take it.

  I was ready to hear this. I was sick of the poverty I’d known in the decade since my father’s death, of living with bugs and rodents, eating macaroni and beans, trying to give my unborn child enough nutrition without taking the milk away from Marie. I had toxemia in this pregnancy and my doctor had given me a strict diet which I could not follow on the budget I had. I was staying married to a man I feared and despised because the Army gave me a hundred dollars a month and provided medical care. Being an outlaw didn’t seem so bad. My parents and their friends made heroes of Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Robin Hood was a hero to everyone I knew.

  We started shoplifting food. I went from being barely able to afford hamburger once or twice a week and a little salt pork for the beans, to steak and liver and such every day. We shoplifted baby clothes and pretty things for Marie to wear, and new toys for her. We got a puppy and we fed him fresh horsemeat. We didn’t go to movies. Stealing was our only form of entertainment or recreation. With Danny and Rita we formed a plan to get to New Orleans by Mardi Gras, buy new identities and get out of the country, to South America.

  To get money for the trip, our crime spree escalated. Gary and I visited several banks where, at that era, “counter checks” could be picked up and filled out with one’s account number and used just like an imprinted check. Gary wrote checks to me and I used my military dependents’ ID to cash these forged checks.

  The four of us hit the downtown department stores during the Christmas rush and shoplifted everything we could pick up and carry out of the stores. This was before shoplifting was such a big business and security was all but non-existent. Small appliances in their boxes were just paid for and carried out of the store by customers. We skipped the checkout process and took care not to be observed picking up the boxes. We sold them to a fence at a barbershop on Harry Street.

  Being a pregnant woman, I seemed to be able to slip in and out of stores with more loot than the others without being noticed, or else I just had more chutzpah. Anyway, I discovered an absolute gift for this occupation and we would sit around in the evenings talking over the day’s adventures and recapping some of my more daring scores. One especially large box containing some household appliance that I had snagged off a top shelf as I was riding down on an escalator, looked so burdensome as I balanced it on my belly and peered around it to see where I was going, that a man helped me carry it out of the store.

  After midnight, we hit the 24-hour laundromats, breaking into the coin boxes with huge screwdrivers I had shoplifted. We returned to several of them more than once. They were easier to crack the second time around, with the coin box latches already bent. At one of these, we heard a siren. Knowing that it might or might not be for us, we played it safe and scrammed out the back door to where Danny was waiting in the black coupe. As Gary and I tried to scramble into the back seat, I put my foot on the door sill and then rammed the screwdriver into the top of my foot. I still can see the scar there.

  Casting about to find more sources of cash, we started picking up newspaper dispensers, emptying the coin collectors, then dumping the dispensers in the river. The Eagle and Beacon must have had a lot of spares. Next day there would be fresh boxes set out for us. Soon we learned which corners did the briskest business and didn’t bother with ones where we got only a few dimes. If a dispenser still had most of its papers, we left it and looked for the ones empty of papers and full of coins.

  I don’t recall how we got the word that the police were after me for the checks I’d cashed using my own ID. It might have come from my mother. It was the winter solstice and we decided the heat on us justified getting out of town. We would go to KC where we might have richer pickings for the end of the Christmas shopping season, be a few steps ahead of the law, and a little closer to New Orleans. We had used the spare tire on the coupe to replace a flat not long before this, and decided it was wise to get the flat fixed so we’d have a spare before we left Wichita.

  I had been having Braxton-Hicks contractions (“false labor”) for several weeks. Being familiar with them from the weeks before Marie was born, I wasn’t concerned about them. We were waiting in a gas station, with the car up on a lift, when my water broke. I was immediately in hard labor and knew I didn’t have very long. Gary put me into a cab, and I left him and Danny and Rita with the car and headed for the hospital.

  The cab driver pulled up to the ambulance entrance and got some attendants with a gurney to haul me into the hospital. They were cutting my corduroy pants off in the hallway of the emergency ward. They wheeled me into a room, and I told the guy I didn’t need it, but he put the anesthetic mask on my face anyway. I woke up a few floors up in the maternity ward and the last memory I had from before the anesthetic took me was someone telling me I had a girl. I was especially pleased that nobody had time to shave my pubic hair.

  They told me my husband was in the waiting room, and I had a moment of panic until Gary walked in. He had to use Ford’s name to get around the “family only” rule in the OB ward. He seemed to have no difficulty at all acting like a new father. He wheeled my chair to the nursery and we looked at the new baby and did all the new parent things.

  Marie was not allowed on the ward, but she stood outside across the street with Danny and Rita and we waved to each other through a window. She wanted very much to see her baby. She never said “sister”. The baby was simply hers. Since it was Christmastime, Marie wanted to name her baby Carol. Gary and I added Yvonne as a middle name, because it was pretty.

  Carol and I stayed in the hospital for two days, getting out on Christmas Eve. While we were there, Danny, Rita, Gary and Marie stayed in the car in the hospital parking lot. They exchanged license plates with another car parked there, took turns hanging out in the hospital lobby, cafeteria, or one or another of the waiting rooms on various floors, and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. It was a tense time for the adults, and one of frustration and eager anticipation for Marie as she waited to see her Mommy and meet her new baby.

  As soon as I was out, we headed toward Kansas City, MO.  We found a one-bedroom apartment, which Gary and I rented. Danny and Rita slept on a convertible sofa in the living room, and Marie slept on a pallet beside our bed in the bedroom. A drawer from the bedroom dresser, laid across two straight chairs, made Carol’s bed.

  The hospital had given me some bottles of prepared formula for Carol. I had fed some of it to her, but my breasts were full and uncomfortable. I started breast-feeding her on the road before we got to Kansas City, and continued after we found the apartment. It was simple, it relieved my discomfort and  comforted her, too. Marie would sit beside me as I nursed Carol, stroking her baby’s arm or head, cooing to her. Marie and I had always cuddled a lot, and now we were often all three in a cozy pile.

  Crime-protection-wise, Kansas City was far ahead of Wichita. This was the shopping lull between Christmas and New Years, so even shoplifting our necessities of food and toiletries was difficult. We knew no fences there, so there was no point trying to collect a bunch of merchandise. All-night laundromats had attendants. Rita and I stayed home with the two girls while Danny and Gary scouted possibilities. They came back and told us there was not much available.

  Counter checks were not available there as they had been in Wichita, and there were more hoops to jump through to cash checks. Gary and I used $30.00 of our treasury and opened a checking account in my name (since I was the only one with good ID), and then Rita and I went shopping. We went through all the printed checks the bank had given us, buying small amounts of this and that and always asking if we could make the check for a bit over the amount of the purchase. The return was small, barely better than nothing, but it kept the gas tank full

  We had paid a week’s rent on the apartment, and when it was up, we left.  Our course was generally south. Between us and our destination was Fort Leonard Wood, where my husband, “Ford”, had been stationed in training, and the little town of Waynesville, where I had joined him briefly before he was transferred. I thought that its being an Army town would make it easier to pass some checks using my Army ID, so we made that our immediate destination.

  We stopped at a country store for gas and snacks. We had talked it over in the car before we went in, and agreed that it was not a good idea to try any shoplifting or other “funny business” at such a small store. Rita, who had all along done very little of the stealing, chose this moment to make up for it. She saw a sweatshirt with some clever message on it, and stuck it under her coat. We got out of there, but someone noticed a sweatshirt was missing. The theft was reported to the local sheriff.

  In Waynesville, we had no plan to stay, but just to hit a few stores with bad checks and move on. We had bought a jacket for me at the first stop and were driving around to find another place to try, when we were stopped by police. We had no firearms, but the cops didn’t know that. We had some tense moments with half a dozen guns aimed at us until they got handcuffs on all of us and locked us into the police cars. They searched our car and found the stolen sweatshirt. They checked our identification, radioed in, and discovered that we were wanted in Kansas. Some of us were wanted in Kansas, that is.

  Danny and Gary were wanted for parole violation. I was wanted for the forged checks I had passed. Rita’s parents were called and they came that night and took her home. The two men were taken to nearby Springfield, Missouri,  to a more secure jail. My girls were taken to the home of a sheriff’s deputy whose wife kept temporary foster children. I was taken to the little red brick jailhouse on the corner of the courthouse square.

  The story concludes with part 4.

  • 12:17 pm
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