Brad Walsh

What I Did

When I was fourteen I was caught shoplifting a lava lamp at a really low-end freestanding department store. It was during the summer and in the afternoon, and my mom had to leave work to come and get me from the little detention center at the back of the store, where a security guard (round and dirty, as I remember, though mom remembers differently) tried his best to intimidate me. He caught me outside the store, barking at me on my getaway, actually. I didn’t know at the time that I could have just kept walking because 1) I was out of the store already and 2) what was he going to do? Grab me? Pull me back into the store? Trade a $14 lava lamp and $80 minor shoplifting fine for a multi-thousand dollar lawsuit? I should have kept walking. Klept walking.

When he told me he had to check my bag, I went with complicity back into the store with him like a total idiot fucker, pretending out loud and reassuring myself that I had some imaginary receipt in my bag for this lava lamp that I’d dropped in there earlier in what I thought was a hidden part of the infant toys aisle. I followed him all the way through the entire building and to the back, then sat down across from his desk where he told me he’d seen me drop the lava lamp into my bag on a security screen. Long story short, he called my mom, pretended to call the police, and I sat there silently tearing up as employee after employee came into his office to ask questions and look at me funny. Middle aged women with Ohio hair – permed and ratted and bottle blonde, high on top with dog ears on the side, an extreme mullet, or a chic style from 1982 on a big fat head in 1996 – looking at me like I was the absolute devil.

The security guard pointed to a pink paper tacked on his cork board and told me that it was a list of all the shoplifters in all the other locations of that particular low-end freestanding department store, the items they tried to steal, and the fines they paid. He also showed me police blotters from multiple cities, and black and white faces sketched on Most Wanted posters. Because putting a lava lamp directly into your bag is the same thing as stabbing a baby.

After about ten years of waiting, mom arrived. She walked in red-faced and immediately slapped me across the cheek. That’s when I broke down and cried for real; my fear that my mom would absolutely hate me was realized. She gave the guard her info, our address, shuddered and glared at me when he mentioned the fine that would be imposed, and grabbed me to leave.

She didn’t talk to me on the way out of the store or to the car. It was very warm outside in the parking lot. In the car she told me how disappointed she was, and that this changed things. I sat in the back seat, my mom and little brother in front. He didn’t really understand why I would steal anything. He didn’t understand that we had no money, we had actually no money, that I was bored in the summer, that I coveted all the things that all of my other friends had, that I had stolen with my best friend that entire summer from other stores and never gotten caught, that I thought I was invincible, that cash was for food only and anything beyond that was left to tricks, or that the pointless lava lamp sitting on my shelf already at home was for myself but this pointless lava lamp was meant to be a surprise miracle gift for him because he had told me for a week how much he liked my own pointless lava lamp. He didn’t understand any of that, so he kept asking me why I would do such a thing. Mom said other kids did this, but she thought I was above it. She never thought I would break goldenness and do something so low. “Guess I was wrong.”

We got home and I went to my room and cried. My life was over. This is where mom’s memory combined two stories. After failing to shoplift the lava lamp, I went home and cried in my room. The next day I went to work at the YMCA. I was a Junior Counselor. I was convinced beyond any doubt that the store had called the YMCA to tell them what I had done, and that the real adults had told all the little day campers before I got there. Every strange glance from a new divorcee or a six year old was the look of “I know exactly what you did, you horrible shit.” After work I went home to my room and put on music, like always.

What mom’s thinking of in her blog post linked above is when I stole a roll of quarters from the next-door neighbor the same year. She was dating the next-door neighbor. He was a short little weirdo. He counted his rolls of quarters before we visited because he thought the kids were going to steal from him. Well, I did. When he counted again after we left and one was missing, he told my mom. I think that’s why she broke up with him. That’s kind of the dumbest story I have ever heard.

When that happened and there was a temporary relapse of all these feelings (“Why don’t we have any money? Why did I steal? I am disgusting!”), I felt even lower and more horrible than the last time. I was still fourteen, old enough to think I was an adult but young enough to still be terrified that I did something so wrong my family was going to hate me forever.

The shame of getting caught again for something so small and stupid combined with hating myself, my new school, the rich kids who called me gay and poor and made me feel ugly, everything all at once… I swallowed a lot of pills. Cut my arms with scissors a little bit. I wasn’t in the habit of doing these things and I didn’t know how to do them, so I cried and took a bunch of Tylenol PM, Advil, maybe some of my mom’s prescription strength Ibuprofen. I don’t really remember what exactly I took, but it knocked me out at 7:00pm for a full 24 hours. I woke up very dizzy with a little bit of dried blood on my arms, took a shower, and then went to school the next day with long sleeves to cover up.

When she picked me up from school that afternoon I sat in the passenger seat not forcing my own music into the CD player for once because I was still ashamed and afraid. Mom saw that I was not letting it go, and she hugged me. She told me then, finally, that everybody steals. Every kid steals, especially kids who have nothing and are surrounded by a multitude of somethings. She told me that she stole when she was my age. Everybody steals, but it’s whether or not you grow out of it that matters. It’s growing up and realizing that other people exist and have feelings and money problems of their own. You are not the only one in need. It was wrong, and I shouldn’t do it again, but it was not nearly as big a deal as it was in my head. She admitted to me that she had misplaced her anger at the security guard, at her idiot bosses, at her remarkably diminutive and childish boyfriend, and put it on me. She wasn’t going to do that any more.

She may not realize it, but my mom has saved my life twice. The first was when she picked me up out of Lake Erie when I was upside-down and drowning as a baby – I even remember being underwater and seeing sunlight but not knowing how to get back to it – and the second was when she simply told me that stealing a lava lamp was not the same thing as stabbing a baby. I don’t know how the rest of the night would have gone if she had been silent on that ride home and let me go back to my bedroom.

So, the morals of my story are the same as the morals of my mom’s: 1) HUG THAT CHILD! and 2) SLAP THE SECURITY GUARD!