Missing Some Memories? I Might Have Stolen Them
By Tom Bentley | September 29, 2020 |
Remember when you were in high school and you told your mom you were going to Susie Straightlace’s house to study but you really went to Rachel Riskwhisker’s rager where you drank so much Grape Crush and vodka you had to crawl home with one eye shut and you peeked in your living room window to see if your mom was still up and you saw that she had removed her glowing, rutabaga-shaped brain from its cranial case and was recharging it with what you had once thought was a giant electric razor and you realized that she was an alien overlord?
I don’t, because that’s your memory, not mine. But gollyjeepers, I’ve got some doozies. (To be clear though, my mom was an angel.) Me, I had a tidy little enterprise in my high school years and beyond: professional shoplifter. I say “professional” because I ascended the ladder of five-finger skills through enterprise and gall, and because I sold the goods I lifted to high school acquaintances. Satan whispered in my ear a lot those days.
Well, I sold some of the goods–the significant amounts of liquor I stole were consumed by me and my cronies. Many of those were quaffed in the name of science, since items like blueberry schnapps and MD (Mad Dog) 20-20 “wine” weren’t actually meant to be ingested—by humans at least. And I was the guy who did steal Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book when it came out—Abbie, you asked for it.
Confessional memoirs have possibly peaked in popularity, but I’m always late to the party, so I recently wrote one. I have written essays over time about the impossibly poor judgment I had as a lad, but I hadn’t thought about writing a memoir until I was editing one for a client, hers being a 140,000-word composition about her years as a marketing executive in the senior care industry.
Part cautionary tale, part horror story about the dark side of aging, part song of friendship, part instructional on best and more humane industry practices, hers is a funny, sad, sharp and scary volume. Working with her on it made me realize that I could shape my misdeeds into a book, and at the least, terrify the parents of high schoolers who think their charges are studying at Susie’s.
Putting the Pieces Together
First, some mechanics: my book is 50,000 words, on the dieting side of memoir word counts. I can go on at times (just give me a pint of blueberry schnapps), but I wanted to write something snappy, and toward the end, the process of recounting my rips in the social fabric wearied me; being a notable ass has some intrigues, but at some point one must seek grace.
Though 50,000 words might seem a memoir appetizer plate, it’s still a full plate. And of course a memoir isn’t an autobiography: as William Zinsser said, “Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up off bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction.”
The walls of my construction are bound by my high school years, the full fruition of my thieving, with some leftover crimes trickling into my twenties.
The way I managed the writing, aligned with my other writing/editing assignments and related work, was to set a timer and write for 30 minutes, every workday. I can attest to the remarkable power of small, steady increments: I started with a sentence, and finished with a book. Beginning in February this year, I rarely missed a day, sometimes writing longer than 30 minutes, but never less, and I finished in six months. Having read James Clear’s influential Atomic Habits late last year helped me understand the power of incremental consistency.
I did read some memoirs during the writing (a re-read of Beryl Markham’s great West with the Night, two of Alexandra Fuller’s lunatic (and often sad) accounts of her southern African childhood, and good articles on memoir. Here’s a strong one by memoir-writing coach Marion Roach Smith on Jane Friedman’s site. And our own Sophie Masson wrote a piece a bit back on WU on how to memoir.
The Universal, the Personal, the Pestiferous
Me blathering about events in my Southern California middle-class microcosm nearly 50 years ago might not seem to have relevance to a broader audience. Smith’s essay on memoir tells us, “We want to read about how your experience reveals something universal that we either do not understand, that is weighing on us, or that is beckoning our wonder … Write about the universal as illustrated by the personal.”
My universal has a couple of components: coming of age in the Vietnam-war era, which my nascent political nose told me was a foul thing. There is a faint but detectable beat of 60s counterculture in the writing, though my surface efforts there were more Grateful Dead than Students for a Democratic Society. The other broader component was teenage life. Teenagers are yeasty creatures, in constant states of turbulence. If you have any, you know implicitly you should keep them chained.
But, in the specific, why be a high-school shoplifter? Well, for one, the hours were good. But my thinking (when I paused to think) about what I was doing then and why, over the course of my pilfering career, is a big part of the book—as my crimes escalated, the same kind of tensions you have in a conflicted character in a fictional work come to the fore. The work is an expiation of sorts: there is extended exploration of guilt, sifted through the netting of my nine years of Catholic school; those altar-boy hands worked some dark deeds. So, it’s an open-air confessional, with my inconsistent conscience as the patient priest.
I moved a lot of chapters and sections around, so initially writing the thing in Scrivener helped. I am lucky, in that I have many friends from that era who are still my friends, so I had 10 beta readers who read the whole thing in order to make sure their names were spelled correctly. Memory, of course, is a slippery fish, particularly in regards events from the cobwebbed past, so many of my peers had additions, elaborations and howls of protest apropos my interpretations. Some of my slippery fishes ended up stinking on the cutting-room floor due to their counsel.
I wrote a query, a proposal, and the dreaded synopsis, and began sending it out to agents and small presses, 26 so far. I have used the helpful Poets and Writer’s filterable databases for agents and small presses who look at memoir submissions. I also get the Writer’s Digest newsletters, one of which has a regular feature on agents that are looking for new authors to rep. Agent Query can be helpful too. (Do make sure to check out the submission guidelines on the agent/publisher websites directly; I’ve seen differences between the database sites and the specific publishing entities.)
If none of these pitches pan out, I’ll publish the durn thing myself.
Stolen Cars and College; The Hairy Days
To give you a taste of my tastelessness, here’s a quick sample from deep in the book, long after my initial high-school glory days, when I thought most of my theft-related lunacies were behind me. This squib is after I’d left my then home in Vegas, driving a car that had been given to me there, and after I’d begun my undergraduate classes at college in California:
A couple of months into my first semester, a uniformed police officer came to my English class and asked if there was a Tom Bentley there. I figured that it was my hair that had probably broken some law (my 1976 hairdo was very expressive). No, it seems I was in possession of a stolen car, of all things, and that I’d have to come to the station and straighten it out.
It was easily straightened out: My VW, the car Zack and I had been given and legally registered, wasn’t actually available to give. The car was owned by a woman in Vegas that had just loaned the car to our freeway doofus, and she’d discovered his poor stewardship upon her return from Japan, where she’d been touring with an entertainment group. Her particular talent was removing clothing from the profound grounds of her architecture. Zack and I had found a manila envelope in the trunk of the VW of black and white glossies of her in/out of costume; she might put you in mind of Elly May Clampett after five vodka tonics, wearing a mail-order Lady Godiva wig. Until the cop cruised in and I got the backstory, both Zack and I were baffled about those photos.
Her name was (and might still be) Angel Blue. Under her name, the tag line on the glossies read: The Heavenly Body. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. And neither were the cops, who despite my protestation (and my registration), took the car and gave it to Ms. Blue’s lawyer, who had tracked me to my academic lair.
The real question I wanted answered was this: what was a stripper of Lady Blue’s talents doing with a ’65 Volkswagen? This was a woman that should have been driving a ’59 Caddy, pretty in pink. Ah, America. My housemate, who worked in Santa Rosa, picked me up and drove us home from the college. And he took me back and forth from school for a while, until my brother, the brother whose first motorcycle I used to unhook the odometer cable on and steal for joyrides, that brother, gave me his Yamaha 250 to use while I was carless.
Wrap It Up (and I Might Even Pay for It)
So, it’s been quite a year, eh? We’ve got a still out-of-control pandemic. California, yea, the entire West is burning, and the South is flooded. We have The Prince of Darkness in the White House, a hollow man/child impersonating a president, plowing our common American values into corrupt, dead ground—indeed fouling the nature of democracy itself.
And my mom, my greatest influence as a writer, died in June. Because I am devious, she didn’t learn of my shoplifting career until 40 years later. She didn’t approve, to put it mildly, but she found a way to laugh about it. This book will be dedicated to her, for her unfailing kindness and her great laugh.
So why publish a memoir on stealing stuff in high school, in such perilous times? Well, Mark Twain held back the publishing of his autobiography (which he dictated) until 100 years after his death, reportedly worried that his musing were too scandalous for his time. Now, that’s excellent marketing, but I’m not as patient as Mr. Clemens. I want my scandals in circulation. I hope they’ll amuse and entertain, supply a caution to fellow shoplifters in training, and show the lead character’s evolution, which continues apace.
My next book, which will be about the time John Lennon called me because he was worried that Elvis was getting too chummy with Nixon, will be a barnburner.
Stalwarts of WU: ever find anything in your pocket that wasn’t paid for? Did you return it, or go back for something bigger the next day? Have you written essays or longer works about your youthful exploits or other significant periods in your life? How often do you use direct life experiences in your fiction?
Tom Bentley is a novelist, essayist, and business and travel writer. (He does not play banjo.) He’s published hundreds of freelance pieces in newspapers, magazines, and online. He is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, a how-to book on finding and cultivating your writing voice and a memoir of his sordid teenage criminality. His singing is known to frighten the horses. See his lurid website confessions at tombentley.com.
Loved this Tom. You have stolen some of my memories, the calmer ones. Growing up I yearned to move–maybe the quiet neighborhood south of Chicago was boring then–so I found my partner who also believed in that particular crime, we married, started a family and have moved seven times, California being the last. But now we are actually back in Chicago with time to read–the diaries I kept all through high school & college. Boring? Sometimes. And the stories I wrote–which before my mother died, contributed to a memoir. Writers often prize the largest and the smallest experience. My Memoir is definitely calmer than yours, but as a writer, it’s experience, it’s living, it pain and laughter that we hold on to. Thanks.
Beth, seven moves? How do you keep track of the socks? I didn’t keep diaries in high school and college, though recently one of my pal beta readers gave me some of the poetry that I wrote at 15—verse has never been so miserable.
You are so right about prizes being equally distributed to observant writers from the largest and the smallest experiences–a chunk of this memoir is of the “… and the messy jail cell reminded me of my sisters’ room” variety. So much of writing is the glint in the eye as well as the world the eye sees
Oh, Tom, your wicked ways! LOL.
Congrats on finishing the book. That in itself is a wonderful accomplishment. It might make up for your misdeeds when you’re standing at the gates of hell. Hahaha.
Fingers and toes crossed for you in your agent search, my friend.
Hugs
Dee
Dee, thanks! I likely have an appointment in hell, but I plan on being quite late. The agent search is interesting on several levels, one of them being trying to discern among a flat list of favored genres what they are actually most fond of, when that slant isn’t clear in the overview.
Perhaps Mr. Maass can elaborate on the secret lives of agents…
Hey Tom, In spite of whatever lingering negative side-effects your larcenous stretch caused, I imagine there were some beneficial ones. Nerves of steel, calm under pressure, an ability to keep that Peter Brady squeak from your voice under interrogation, etc.
I was an utter failure at shoplifting. The one-and-only attempt I recall was at a large five-and-dime on my paper route called Bellisle’s. The owner, Bob Bellisle, was a gregarious sort, always singing and whistling as he worked. On a dare from some of the kids hanging there, I slipped a large bag of Sugar Babies into my paper sack, and went to the counter with a handful of penny candy.
As Bob counted the candies and rang them on the register, he gave me a side-glance. “You would never steal from me, would you, Pete?” (He called me Pete because he said that was the name of his first paperboy, and he couldn’t be troubled to learn the names of the new ones.) Horrified to realize I was caught, I sort of stammered that I had put the candy in my bag for a moment and forgot about it. Then had to pretend that I didn’t realize that I didn’t have enough coin for it, and return it to the shelf. I’m sure I was redder than the red-hots I legally procured and left with.
As I returned the bag to the nearby shelf, he sort of mused aloud how he was glad that I would never steal from him, as he was responsible for my being born. He said that my parents had met at his soda fountain while my mother was in his employ, and that he’d allowed their romance to flourish in spite of her being on the job.
I barely heard it in the moment. And after I was out in the cool air, able to loathe myself and recount the ways, I was only struck by the fact that he knew me well enough to know who my parents were. But I’d never heard the story of my parents meeting at Bellisle’s, and didn’t know my mom had once worked there. It was probably about a year before I was able to ask them about it, as I was terrified that the tale of my attempted Sugar Babies heist would arise from my query (I was terrified of that even without asking, as my dad picked up his half-dozen various Sunday papers there every week).
I suppose I was “scared straight” by a very kind man who may very well have been responsible for me being born (it was true–my parents met there, while my mom was working the soda fountain… at age 19… My dad was a decade older… And married to someone else when they met! An all new series of scandals! I didn’t learn the extent of it until many years after this incident.)
Fun essay. Fingers crossed for you! Can’t wait to read about your nerves of steel!
Vaughn, Sugar Babies! The first chapter of the memoir details my first failed shoplifting attempt, which was stealing candy around age eight, because I lived for candy, and that sweet tooth pushed me toward delerium even in later days.
I love the story about Mr. Bellisle and his complicity in your parents’ marriage. My mother was summoned to the store and made me apologize to the clerks, who I knew well, as they’d dubbed me “The Candyman” because of how many times I came to that store to buy candy, like a standard addict.
But my failure on that attempt didn’t curtail the later wickedness, instead inspiring me to be more circumspect in my thieving. (By the way, don’t try eating Sugar Babies after age 50–they will pull your fillings right out of your head.)
LOL on eating Sugar Babies after 50. So true! I’m sure they did their fair share of damage even then. Love the nickname they gave you, though I was never a fan of the Sammy D. Jr. song.
BTW, got to thinking about Bob Bellisle, and googled him. Seems he played a big part in more families’ lives than mine. If you get a sec, it’s worth checking this out:
https://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/2013/08/robert_bellisle_obit.html
That is a fine tribute to Bob–what a guy! Love that his store was called “Bob’s Cut Rate” store. The skateboard price story was good too. That was actually one of my dark methods, switching price tags on products in the old days before bar codes and scanners. Durn technology!
Ha! You guys made me think of my adolescent theme song. When you grow up in Los Angeles among mostly over-priviledged and undersupervised friends….
https://youtu.be/VMDljoM5JFI
Yeah, Axl was probably drinking Night Train when he sang that. Another wine that would make a fine solvent.
Ludd was right.
Vaughn, what a wonderful tribute! I wonder how many kids he saved from a life of crime. Requiescat in pace, Mr. Bellisle.
I found myself laughing through much of your post, so I think you have done a great job of showing the universal in your personal. :)
Yes, I had two incidents of sticky fingers when in elementary school, actually. I stole a flower from someone’s yard (it was a gorgeous tulip!) and root beer candies from the Brach’s bins at the local Pamida store. I knew it was wrong, but I really wanted to believe Tina when she said it was okay. I’m not sure how old I was, but both incidents took place before First Communion, because I fessed up to the priest at my first confession. I thought I was going to be flogged, so imagine my surprise when I just had to say one Hail Mary. The guilt and fear I had leading up to the confession was more of a penance! And, apparently, a good deterrent because I decided to go straight, and have become obsessively rule bound. :P
Lara, Tina made you do it, that’s clear. Anyone who steals a flower has a gentle heart, so the root beer candies were an aberration. (Mmm, root beer candies…)
However, that priest was a slacker. We had rotating confessional priests at my school, and they would never let you get away with less than three Hail Mary’s and three Our Father’s, and sometimes more, dependent on the depth of the crimes.
Good that you are clean now. However, you keep out of my flowerbeds.
Tom, you scoundrel, I really enjoyed your post and the ensuing comments. I too, have a bit of a thieving past. I stole the neighbor’s mangos from his tree and the fruit was definitely sweeter than the one bought at the market. Much later, as a teenager in the US, I lifted little things, not from need but from the high of it, getting away with something. I was a church-going kid too, only to sing in choir. I’d tell Almighty God that I did not believe what I was singing…though I had my doubts when I sang Mozart or Bach.
And yes, I use bits of real life to write my stories–the germ of truth always remains. But I enjoy writing memoir for the chance it gives to reflect deeply. Love the Zinsser quote. And memoir is a wonderful way to open kids up to writing, all those small moments. They want to tell stories!
So, I just have to crow about my newest PB–Little Thief! Chota Chor! It’s right up our alley. Do take a look. https://www.reycraftbooks.com/books/Little_Thief_Chota_Chor.html and I hope the right agent and editor snap up your book! I especially loved how a client’s memoir put you on this path. I’ve always learned so much from my students too.
Vijaya, of all people, I thought you would have a stainless past. A mango rustler, of all things! So true for me, that getting away with it was part of the motivation. I was too big for my britches early on.
Zinsser’s book, On Writing Well, is one of my top three nonfiction writing books. He is clear and warm at the same time.
A banana-eating thief? It takes all kinds (and they’ll take what they can get). Love the cover of that one too. You are so right that kids are great storytellers—and big kids like you continue to be so.
Stainless? Ah, you’ve not read my love story. It is on my blog though… And Zinsser’s book is one of the best. I bought it for my dad who is writing his memoirs–he’s 92 so I am grateful. Thanks for taking a look at my chota chor :)
Tom, in terms of confessions, would you accept a bout of willful vandalism? I have an aunt whose family I always secretly envied. On the surface her family seemed perfect–tightly knit, their clutterless home filled with nice decor, perpetually clean.
I visited once as a teen and was taken with a new piece of art done with oils. I don’t know the name for the technique the artist had used, but they lifted a well-loaded brush from the canvas, leaving a cresting-wave-like bead of paint behind. It added texture in a way I haven’t seen since. I have no idea what possessed me at the time, other than my envy, but I broke one off with a satisfying snap. Then did another, and another. Over the course of my visit, I pretty much denuded the painting to the point I had to find a hiding place for the remnants.
That episode troubled me for years until I finally gave a tearful confession to my aunt. She shrugged it off. She had attributed it to a bad choice on her part by placing the painting in the hallway where it could be bumped and damaged on the regular. It hadn’t even been a particular favorite.
So I got off lightly and learned a thing or two about my conscience, and how much it tortures me when I don’t listen to it. As a result, I’m afraid I went on to have a largely boring personal life.
Wishing you luck with your memoir’s sale. It sounds like good fun, as is your post here.
Wow, Jan, an art vandal, who woulda thunk it? That was an interesting demon possession that came over you. Could make for a good sub-character in a piece who does one single inexplicable bad thing in his/her life and it tortures them forever.
It took a long time for the full guilt of my doings to catch up with me because I was running too fast.
I enjoyed this so much! And of course, you lured me in with the title, which means you already won.
The only thing I remember stealing was someone’s lunch at school when I was six or seven. I don’t even know why, but the guilt stayed with me.
Memory is such a tricky thing. I have so little of it for the time period I have committed to for my memoir: 1985-1989. Strangely, although I have no journals for those years (what a gift they would be now), I have every single desk calendar from 1979 to the present, so that’s handy for dates. But when you’re trying to write about arson it’s hardly helpful when the only entry in the calendar is a very spare: “Ocala fire”. And when the second and third arsons occurred, the same paucity of detail: “2nd Ocala fire/1st Ft. Myers fire.” Fortunately, I also have newspaper accounts and court documents and I’m cobbling together memory from those.
My theme is definitely universal, never more so than the present time. My task will be to give it resonance and hope my writing brings the story to life for a broad range of readers
Deborah, mine was the lunch often stolen at school because my mother often baked chocolate chip cookies (the best!) and she always baked a huge one for me to put in my lunch. I was the envy of St. Joseph’s.
I do have some regrets I didn’t keep journals back then, but I’m lucky in having so many folks around now who were there. Of course, their pock-marked memories have to compete with my crystal-clear ones, but I’ve been liberal enough to allow for the few corrections (say, two hundred), they’ve offered.
You may discover that just looking through those desk calendars more than once that memories will bubble up all on their own, as has happened to me. (I got another crazy one from my Vegas days just yesterday that I’d forgotten.) Good luck with the writing!
I enjoyed this post very much, Tom. It took me on a little ride through my own penny-ante junior-high crimes, my very illegal but no-regrets hippie drug use, and right to the present day, where my crime is avoiding work on my next novel and thinking vaguely of writing my “memoirs.” Good luck with your own.
Michael, I always tried to up my crimes to quarter-ante, but I was never good at poker. As for the drugs, well, yes, it was part of the general atmosphere, and I had to keep breathing.
I am avoiding work on my next novel as well, so we are kindred souls. But keep the faith and move (even if sauntering) ahead.
Well, that was fun! Thanks for sharing, Tom. I confess! In high school I used to pickpocket combs from my fellow students and one time I slipped a stolen comb into someone else’s backpack. My parents were much more honest. They accused a grocery store of charging them for a pie they couldn’t find when they unpacked their groceries. They found it later. Two months later. It had slid out from the grocery bag in the back of the SUV and all the way up to the front, just under the driver’s seat. They went back to the store and paid for it! Kudos on being able to share your wild h.s. experiences.
Carol, I’m suspicious of your comb story. I suspect you had hidden microfiche in that comb, or a transmitter of some kind, and that the devil was afoot. I forgive you though.
Your parents were good sports about that pie, and I hope that whatever ice cream they put on it after its discovery was strong enough to offset its fine aging. Thanks for reading the piece!