Stealing Makes Me a Modern Girl

a record of petty theft in Portland

Item: A two-pack of Refresh Tears Lubricant Eye Drops, 15 mL, from Walgreens
Location: Foster-Powell

Soothing a corneal abrasion I got from looking up at the snowfall, my first ever (ocular injury and snow day). To think a flake could cut like that. The fake tears proved good for countering smoke-induced irritation from the fire seasons to come and other things I couldn’t cry out myself.

Illustrations by Ellen Robinette

Item: A roll of “EGGS” stickers, 500-count, from Safeway
Location: Woodstock

Revolution. Like bullet shells after pounding the Pink Whitney, unpeeling and slapping bright ovals all over campus until the brick buildings looked like yellow-spotted lizards. The shit-faced squadron of freshmen (whose friendship didn’t survive the semester) rewrote our small world’s signage: Emergency EGGS. All EGGS Bathroom. Caution: EGGS. The next morning resulted in an uproar. A proper whodunnit ensued—upperclassmen chattered conspiracies in the Commons while professors raced to efface their sticker-studded office doors. Even an Instagram account was created to document the most creative EGGS placements. We made sure to keep a few stickers to accessorize our own surfaces. Micki stuck EGGS on her Hegelian reader and Sophie, her iPad case. I had three to partition: one for my Yamaha amp, one for my Nalgene bottle, and one, on a blackout night a few weeks later, for my forehead, thinking little at the time of what it meant to be an egg.

Item: A copy of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, paperback, from Powell’s
Location: Old Town

Swiped from the “trans stories” display case in the Blue Room. Iffy ethics for sure. Lent it to a friend for her boyfriend to read after I finished it, unaware he didn’t like two things about me.

Item: Two six-packs of Japanese rice lager, expired, from a closet in the Student Union
Location: Reed

A bonus for custodial work. Got a summer “apprenticeship” cleaning out the many neglected corners of campus on account of my student body government campaign, which advocated for boosting “accessibility” in recreational spaces. I spent my birthday week scooping years-worth of litter and loose hardware into industrial-sized trash bags, at one point picking up a shit-covered condom with my bare hand. I didn’t want to be there—in the closets, on the campus, in the city. Any sense of “home” I expected to find in Portland, much less college, evaded me. Where was my knight in shining Gore-Tex? Yearning preoccupied me as I rolled out empty kegs from the Beer Nation storage unit, breathing from my mouth to avoid the stench of thick yeast. Under a rubber chicken I found stacks of unopened six-packs, presumably from the previous drinking season, expired by only a month or two. Google said it was mostly fine to imbibe and so I did, alone, later that night, approaching comfort until asleep. I woke up and was twenty.

Item: My copy of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, paperback, from a friend’s ex-boyfriend’s house
Location: Ladd’s Addition

Reclamation.

Item: A Pleats Please Issey Miyake Midi Skirt, black, from Crossroads Trading Co.
Location: Hawthorne

Affirmation. I didn’t know him very well then, but he had a line of credit he proffered to split. Turned out to be zero dollars and forty cents, the negligible remnants from his last shopping spree. Regardless, we indulged each other in the dressing room, trying on lacy tanks and pink pants, catching glimpses of each other’s bodies, which were not entirely familiar yet. Looking at his bare abdomen, the excitement it evinced of me, made putting on the skirt awkward, thin pleats spilling over an incongruent lump. It was definitionally embarrassing until he brought me to his smile and, for the first time, kissed me. A kiss to confirm an internal surge. Well, the skirt was over a hundred bucks and had a few stains, but it fell so perfectly off my hips into his messenger bag. No credit needed.

Item: Two bottles of La Quercia Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, 750 mL, from New Seasons
Location: Richmond

I saw a lot more of the boy and his messenger bag that winter. He stuffed it with handkerchiefs and sex clinic condoms and loose-leaf sheets scrawled over with poem drafts—poems about us and the garden he wanted to start. Soon enough, I was helping him load his bag with seed sachets swiped from the health food store. By late spring, we were celebrating the first bursts of flowers. Common yarrow, wild sunflowers. I borrowed his bag on special occasions to get things I felt we deserved—despite our crust punk predilections—such as imported red wine for our six-month anniversary dinner. We finished the bottles in a flash, drunkenly filling their necks with the Maximilians of our combined efforts.

Item: A pair of Knockoff Ray-Bans, non-polarized, from Space Age Fuel
Location: Mt. Scott-Arleta

Material and moral compensation. Was having a go of it—got rejected from an internship in New York, meaning I was stuck in Portland for at least a summer longer. Was on my way home from a commencement rehearsal when the gas tank, which I hadn’t filled in weeks, rumbled on its bottoming-out dregs. Rushed to the Space Age near my house—the one across the street from the Pentecostal cult campgrounds—and entered from the wrong side so I had to reverse my way to the open pumping station. Sun got in my eyes as I backed straight into a safety pole, bludgeoning my bumper. I thought of my dad red-in-the-face and felt my lips tremble, but instead of crying I went inside to pay for my fill-up in cash. That’s when a swiveling display of flimsy eyewear taunted me, saying, you could’ve prevented all of this. As I drove away, a pair ended up in my sweater sleeve, then my face. The plastic lenses didn’t protect my eyes from the blaring sun—which, even during the drizzly test of attrition that is April in Portland, I did not welcome kindly—but at least they kept the pedestrians from witnessing my tears once they came.

Item: A roll of Scotch Shipping Tape, with dispenser; a bag of M&M’s Peanut Milk Chocolate Candies, 10.05 oz; a bottle of K-Y UltraGel, 1.5 fl oz; a three-pack of Little Trees Air Freshener, Supernova scent, from Walgreens
Location: Creston-Kenilworth

Miscellaneous.

Item: One driver-side mirror cover for Toyota Prius 2010, cool grey, from a parked car
Location: Hosford-Abernathy

Moral and material compensation. Mine was taken the day after I moved into my partner’s house in late May. Maybe my fault for parking on the street, but the driveway had already been claimed by the other roommates’ cars. My partner and I shared a bed on the second floor overlooking lower Division, where we relished in the vista of DILFs from the concrete distro center across the street on their smoke breaks. Still we didn’t catch the culprit who pried the minor surface from my car, its rump already crumpled past redemption. I didn’t mind the cosmetic faults, but I feared the wrath of my father’s materialism, which was waiting for me back home at the end of the summer I didn’t want to end, having finally located some murmur of love here, between freightliners and rose bushes.

Come the second week of September, a month designated for transitions, I organized my possessions into a heap on my partner’s low pile rug. It was my last night in Portland. I was moving out in the morning, driving down to California to see my family before relocating to New York. My partner and I spent the evening grieving the separation before it happened, attempting to delay its arrival by ordering a beer at every dive on the street until we were shitfaced, as in, lawless against time. I wore his Digable Planets shirt, the vinyl graphic cracked like pavement. He wore my black skirt; it was now his, as were my bargain bin LPs and half-bottles of Sally Hansen. My paperbacks and corkscrews and shoplifting tactics. My knight in shining polyester. He cried with pride as I latched my fingers onto the innocent car’s side mirror near midnight, tugging with the crescent of my nails until the plastic cover popped off. We staggered back home and disassembled straight into bed for the last time. Woke up naked and heavy in the 9:00 AM brightness, unable to stomach the finality. And like a bandaid on an ax wound, we snapped the stupid accessory into place as we loaded up my car.