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I, Petty Thief | Jan 01 2002

The newspapers would be in a pile in the foyer, if that is what that is called—the space between the two doors; the space where the mailboxes were.

They had, the papers did, apartment numbers written on them with black marker, which always struck me as rude because what if you wanted to read an article and this article had this big black number right through it? Although perhaps I am remembering this wrongly in that perhaps the delivery person wrote the number above the masthead, in the big open space up there, rather than directly over the articles, which the more I think about it is probably what that person did.

Of the eight apartments, four received the Boston Globe, two the New York Times and one the Wall Street Journal, with the two Times people also being Globe people, so that in sum five apartments received one or more papers.

I favored the Times, although to reduce the chance of taking multiple papers from one apartment, I sometimes read the Globe from the two apartments that received the Globe only, and even occasionally read the Wall Street Journal.

I lived on the third floor.

I don’t know why I mentioned that.

Generally I “operated” in the late morning, after most people had left for work or school or wherever they left for.

My “cover” was that I was checking my mail. Thus I brought my mail key. If someone appeared suddenly, I would switch to checking my mail.

Sometimes I checked my mail anyway, since the mailboxes were right there.

Whatever else I wore, I always wore a sweatshirt so that I had a place to conceal the paper on my way back to my apartment. The way I did this was that I would tuck one end of the paper into the front of my pants and pull the sweatshirt over. The whole operation took perhaps three seconds; I practiced it in my room with a folded magazine.

The key moment was when I was holding the inner door open behind me with my foot and was about to grab the paper. This was key because once I grabbed a paper, it could happen that the outer door would be opened by someone coming in and I would be found standing there, foot in door, paper in hand, busted. There was no way to eliminate this risk; it was built into the configuration of the space. I once considered opening the outer door first, to see if anyone was coming up the front stairs, only it struck me that a person could always appear from the other direction, down the stairs, which would be worse in the sense that I would not necessarily see or even hear this person coming, facing, as I was, the opposite direction.

Of course I never intended to steal the papers; I intended to borrow them.

The way I thought of it was that a newspaper doesn’t any lose value when read by more than one person. Compare this to a pie, which is diminished with every bite.

Granted, there were times when I would for whatever reason neglect to replace a paper before my neighbors began returning from work, in which case it seemed better not to return that paper at all, as it might happen that someone might find a previously missing paper and realize that someone had stolen it for a day, as opposed to thinking that perhaps the newspaper person had fucked up. It was shameful, but in cases such as these, I preferred to have the newspaper person fall under suspicion. Of everything, this was worst thing. I didn’t feel so bad about the stealing, for it didn’t feel like stealing, it felt like forgetting; but this business with the newspaper person was difficult to reconcile.

In what was some kind of miracle, no one ever put a note on the inside door saying: HEY, FUCKBALL, STOP STEALING MY PERSONAL NEWSPAPERS!

I confess I was expecting this and more or less planned to stop once the note appeared. But it never did.

And I am perhaps implying a greater frequency of “thefts” than actually occurred.

Still, it happened, I can’t deny that.

And when it did, I faced the problem of what to do with the inadvertently stolen paper, once read. I solved this by hiding it in the recycling bin between a mass of other recyclable paper so that a., my roommates wouldn’t ever see it there, particularly the apartment number written in black on the front page, and b., so that it wouldn’t appear on top of the pile when we emptied the bin into the big recycling bin out back, the one that got wheeled out to the curb on recycling day.

I didn’t think of this then, but it occurs to me now that someone could have gone through the big recycling bin and found the missing papers and had proof of what was happening and also possibly figured out which apartment was responsible based on the surrounding papers in the recycling bin. Only this too never happened.

Anyway, the reason I went to all this trouble to do this was not because I was too cheap to buy my own subscription (instead of subscription, I just wrote prescription), but because I was hopelessly addicted to reading the newspaper, particularly the sports section, which I would read in its entirety, even the horse racing page, and then hate myself for doing, which is to say that I didn’t want to receive my own paper because I knew that I would read it every day, even the days I left early for work, as opposed to just the days I happened to be around to steal my neighbor’s papers, that’s the reason.