The first time I go shoplifting with Tom Wheatly I feel a burning sensation in my ears and the back of my neck, and my palms tingle as if baby mice are nuzzling into the center of them.
I met Tom about a month ago. He usually wears the same pair of floppy bell-bottoms he dyed a deeper and deeper shade of purple until they turned black as the nighttime grass. Tom is over six feet tall, has round wire-frame glasses, isn’t afraid of shoplifting, skipping class, or creating a disturbance by shouting obscenities really loudly. But he is afraid of snakes. His fear of snakes, along with his pale skin color, is due to the fact that his family just moved down to Florida from upstate New York. He’d never seen a snake before moving to the Sunshine State.
I went up to him after lunch one afternoon and said, “I hear you steal records.”
He said, “Yeah, I do. Who are you?”
We’ve been hanging out ever since.
The old people in Woolworth’s know we’re up to no good. They stare menacingly at our jeans and the hair that covers our ears and they know our heads are full of sounds they never knew when they were young, a million years ago. They stand in small cobwebby clusters and whisper in croaking and creaking voices, pointing sharp invisible canes at us.
Tom’s life of crime is directly related to the times we live in. In an earlier, more innocent time and place of American history Tom might’ve stolen apples or candy. But we’re living in Florida, and the calendar just turned the page to 1970. The vibrant colors and music blared out of Tom’s TV all day every day, as his younger brothers come and go and make noise and bounce off the walls around us. Love American Style flows out of the screen, telling its tales of love. A good time to be 14-years-old, or at least that’s what our parents and teachers keep telling us. And in the whirling vortex of screaming pictures and brightly colored sounds we’re growing up in, he steals the objects he feels are rightfully his for the taking. Tom steals records. In the beginning, he only stole 45s, but soon he worked his way up to shoving albums under the long forest green wool coat he brought down with him from the north. It’s like one of those witless math problems at school: “If Tommy has two songs on one circle, and he can have twelve songs on a bigger circle, why the hell didn’t he think of stealing the bigger circles sooner?”
One night we’re hanging out at Park Plaza Shopping Center, talking about which girls at school have the biggest or best breasts (two distinct categories), and wondering when the early December cold snap is going to end. Tom is wearing his long coat, and I’m wearing a black sweatshirt over two T-shirts. While we’re busy talking someone appears next to us, my friend Marty Osborne. Marty has the glint of cleverness in his eyes that dares anyone more than two years older than him to tell him something he doesn’t already know. He loves The Doors, is addicted to Coca-Cola, and has great taste in movies.
“What are you guys up to?” Marty asks.
“We’re fighting against the war on mediocrity,” I say.
“War against mediocrity?” Marty says. “Someone’s been paying attention in Social Studies.”
“And we’re killing time,” Tom says.
“Yeah, nothing like a little time killing to pass the time,” I say.
Marty turns to Tom Wheatly. “Is it true you steal records?”
Tom nods and whispers, “Lately mostly Apple records. Instant Karma. Get Back. The good stuff.”
“A fruitful activity,” I add.
“Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” Marty says. “Doing anything later tonight?’
“Like what?” Tom asks.
“You know what I mean,” Marty says. He arches his eyebrow in a goofy way. “Anything interesting.”
“Oh, anything interesting,” Tom says. “So, what you’re actually wondering about is whether we’ll be involved in any interesting activities.”
“Not nothing uninteresting,” I say.
“Super interesting running into you,” Marty says. “I’ve got to go. Drop by later if you want to hang out and listen to music.”
Marty is gone for exactly four seconds when Tom enters the Woolworth’s like a cat burglar entering a New York Penthouse apartment in the dead of night in a bad made-for-TV movie. He motions at me with a twirl of his fingers to move toward the records racks. I walk slowly, but not too slowly over to the paperbacks near the records. Tom steps over to the racks and flips through the albums at lightning speed, zeroing in on the most delectable ones.
I pick up a random paperback and look over the top, watching the cluster of ancient checkout ladies. They are off in a blue-haired world of gossip, and could give a rat’s ass about The Beatles, Creedence, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, or The Doors. Tom quickly hands me three albums to stick under my sweatshirt, and he bundles up at least five or six more under his coat. He spins like an Olympic gymnast, striding past me with big eyes rolled up at the ceiling and zips past the cashiers and out the glass doors into the cold free air. As the glass doors shut behind him I turn and head after his heels, riding his slipstream of thievery. But I’m almost too late. One old lady with big thick glasses shuffles out from behind the register, poking a bent finger at me. She asks me what we think we’re doing. But like a miracle, the store’s door opens without my hands even touching it, almost as if my racing mind is willing it to be so. Tom props the door wide open with his foot and pulls me outside by my sweatshirt collar. Off we run. Into the night belonging only to us. We will always own this particular night, as surely as we own the music that means nothing to the gossipy guardians of circular sounds who haven’t a clue about what transforming treasures these black discs hold in their grooves.
Room in the City #5 / 2020 / Russell C. Smith
We stop to catch our breath in the overgrown field three blocks from the shopping center, breathing in great gulps of cold air, spreading out our cellophane-wrapped loot on the dewy night ground. Tom can’t stop grinning. It’s the largest haul yet, and he’s feeling the rush of a job well done. He knows he can’t take the records to his house all at once. Better to do it in stages. Best to avoid the bothersome interrogations his parents would begin when they saw his sudden good fortune. I tell Tom that Marty’s parents never asked those types of annoying questions, just forcing you to lie. On top of this, his bedroom was like a messy sanctuary, away from prying eyes and prodding parental curiosity. He had cool records from the San Francisco music scene his older sister had given him, and a lava lamp. His well-worn copy of Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and The Holding Company, with Janis Joplin letting loose on the live tracks, will be proof of our subversive minds. And from the way Marty put his invitation, it sounded like his parents were out for the night.
Tom and I manage to walk the half-mile over to Marty’s house without our musical loot being detected by the cop car passing by us on the dimly lit back streets. I’m dead certain Woolworth’s has already notified the authorities and given precise descriptions of the two thieves, down to our hairstyles, nuances of expressions, patterns of speech, exactly how many beads of sweat were on our foreheads at the moment of the theft, and how many feet-per-minute we were traveling at precisely that micro-second in time. If we didn’t get inside soon, we’d be nabbed. But even then it might be too late. I pictured the cop knocking on Marty’s front door moments after we were inside. The big-shouldered officer would slam open the door, look right through us with piercing policeman blue eyes, and read every minute detail of guilt on our faces. His partner will turn on a teenage mind-reading machine in the cop car, and all he’ll have to do is aim it at us, set to full force. Extra-special, deep-interior, teenage-brainscan-mind-read. A mechanical voice will whir, then pronounce us guilty as charged. Tom and I will be dragged away in handcuffs, and Marty will be booked as an accessory after the fact. His lava lamp will be confiscated. I’ve watched Perry Mason. I know how these things work.
Marty’s parents aren’t home, and Tom and I collapse just inside the front door on the living room floor and laugh our nervous guts out, until Marty casually picks up a few albums and takes them back to his room. We get up and bring the rest of the albums with us. Marty tells us the albums will be safe in his bedroom since his mom never cleans in there. And so, we enter the sanctuary, the vortex, the hurricane zone that masquerades as Marty’s room. Tom nods his approval, sniffs the dusty air, sits down cross-legged on the floor and begins pulling cellophane wrapping from our stolen treasure. The albums peek out of from their hiding places, and the cover art and photos on the inside sleeves tell tall tales of fun weirdness. We play The White Album and Jimi Hendrix Live at Montery Pop at full volume and are high from the thrill of not being caught.
After a couple of hours, most of the albums are slid under Marty’s bed. We say thanks and goodnight, and we slip back out into the cool winter night. The dark sky is open and luminous, and I can sense how all the teenage brain scanners in the cop cars are safely turned off again. I point up at the nearest stars, the ones just above the treetops on the horizon. We sing Beatles songs and grab metal garbage can lids and skim them along the damp and chilly streets. Tom kicks an empty Coke bottle on the shivering sidewalk. Our breath rises toward the fingernail slice of the new moon. Backyard dogs howl and we join them in a chorus or two.