a Denver felon was asked in court why among the stuff he burgled from a neighbor’s house he bothered to steal a box of empty jars, jars the man had gathered for recycling, he answered, “It’s what there was.”
ABC News publishes an annual “crime blotter” devoted to the year’s weirdest delinquencies, and the competition is always fierce. There was an outbreak of gumball banditry all over greater metropolitan Newark that was so extensive and so prolonged that only a coordinated gang operation could account for it. During the same week that a Nebraska man was arrested for stealing garden gnomes, an Iowa man pleaded guilty to swiping 35,000 toy Hot Wheels cars. There was a spate of parking meter robberies in Pittsburgh—214 meters beheaded and absconded with in a span of two months. Then there was the case of Melvin Hanks, who swiped ninety-six ponytails that had been donated to a charity for the making of wigs for sick children. He was brought to justice, but the person or persons behind the theft of a sixty-five million-year-old dinosaur footprint from Bosque County, Texas, which had to be chiseled out of the surrounding rock to accomplish the crime, remain at large. So does the Condom Crook of Little Rock, Arkansas, whose pilfering of dozens of cartons of condoms has lifted him to folk-hero status and suggests a brand of criminality at once profligate and oddly, in terms of proper sexual precautions, responsible. In countless as yet undiscovered headquarters, under assorted mattresses and piles of clothes in closet corners, in mud-choked crawlspaces and in plots dug at night in backyards all over America lies the enigmatic stash of indecipherable crimes. Presumably, the perpetrators can hardly contain themselves for the thought of the classic hubcaps, Hummel figurines, or trick handcuffs their respective estates now secretly contain.
In the film Arthur, the amiable alcoholic title character, played by Dudley Moore, marvels at Liza Minelli’s Linda, whom he accidentally observes stealing a necktie from an upscale men’s store. “It’s the perfect crime!” he gasps. “Girls don’t wear ties! Well, admittedly some do, but it’s a good crime!” He responds to the pure aesthetic gesture of useless, inscrutable shoplifting. It is the movie’s inceptive moment, too: love at first crime site.
Although TV cop shows would have us believe otherwise, forensics cannot always track the damage back to a coherent, triggering grudge. Such was the case at the Tri-State Mineral Museum, where a Saturday night’s vandalism struck both the museum curator and the detectives assigned to the case as arbitrary and impenetrable. They—for it did appear to have taken more than one crook to accomplish so thorough a trashing in a single visit—had shattered the glass cases where the better pedigreed gems were kept and scattered their lines of ascent all over the floor. They had dislodged the plutonic tools from their wall mounts and toppled the reef of semi-precious stones that had stood for more than half a century against the north wall. They had scattered the sullen plunder of Joplin’s founding excavations and spilled the fittings and gears of bygone machinery like the black castings of titanic worms. Displays that had taken the proprietors months to construct and patrons even longer to fund were overturned. Even the reporters on the scene, stepping gingerly through the muddle of base metals, could not restrain themselves from commenting on air about the loss to community history and the shameful conduct of teenagers—for the consensus was that this was the handiwork of teenagers, evidenced in part by the lingering aroma of beer and (a clue discreetly kept off the air) a soiled prophylactic—who had no conscience and no resources for finding something more worthwhile to do on a Saturday night.
Within the year, however, the museum restoration was essentially complete. In a follow-up interview, the curator expressed his relief that almost the entire collection had been recovered piecemeal from the wreckage. Although the place had “looked like West Hell six months ago,” he said, he was confident that it would soon reopen to the public “good as new, that is, if you can say that about a history museum.”
So robbery was not the point, which was some comfort in the wake of catastrophe. The instigators did not steal the lucre from the filth or load their every rift with irreplaceable ore. It seemed that their sole incentive had been the thrill of trespass itself. Breaking into and breaking down the Tri-State Mineral Museum might have been a logical extension of their alcoholic and sexual transgressions, nothing more.
On that latter subject, wistful citizens definitely had trouble appreciating the appeal of having intercourse in such glum and loveless confines. How plight troth amid the mangle or wrest pleasure in this subterranean context, where thoughts must eventually turn from carnal urgency to the somber way of all flesh? When in From Here to Eternity Burt Lancaster dropped knees first to the sand, paying no heed to military protocol and sharp coastal deposits, millions of women envied what Deborah Kerr was about to succumb to. (Some couples like it rough, they say, and we may remember Howard Nemerov’s “The Goose Fish,” a poem about another beachfront liaison, whose guilty lovers “had thought to understand / By violence upon the sand / The only way that could be known / To make a world their own.”) But Burt and Deborah suffered nothing compared to the injuries the anonymous guilty parties at the Tri-State Mineral Museum must have endured to exercise their desire among the rocky debris. What romance could flower in the dank and gravel there? “If kids are going to risk juvenile records for a little erotic adventure,” a neighbor commented to me, “why not break into a furniture store? At least there’d be mattresses. I mean . . . ouch! You know?” To which I could only reply that the course of true love never did run smooth.
The inside dope is that there is still at least one item missing from the museum inventory. They have yet to recover a shard of alexandrite, small enough to fit into a pocket—not the rarest or most expensive loss they might have incurred, but by no means negligible. The single souvenir of an evening’s ardor in the dark: perhaps it betokened a birthstone. The police should be advised to focus their investigation on the whereabouts of high school students born in June.
Hoarding can be its own reward. It can be its own indictment as well.
“Well, he left, see. And the secretary went out. I was all alone in the waiting-room. I don’t know what came over me, Hap. The next thing I know, I’m in his office—paneled walls, everything. I can’t explain it. I—Hap, I took his fountain pen.” This is from the testimony of Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Reduced to feckless, petty revenges for imagined slights against him, he cannot reason his own need. “That was an awful dumb—what did you do that for?” his brother asks. “I don’t know. I just—wanted to take something,” Biff replies, lost and foundering.
War, retribution, and romance—all come with spoils. But acquisition is not the only means of establishing a relationship between the taker and the taken. Witness the example of Alcee Arobin, that paragon of self-involvement in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. When Edna Pontellier, the novel’s heroine and his current paramour, calls his attention to a photograph, surely a memento of their affair, Arobin rejects it without sentiment or ceremony: “What do I want with it? Throw it away.” Thus dispossession may be self-possession on another plane.
“It was a part, at once of Mrs. Sparsit’s dignity and service, not to lunch. She supervised the meal officially, but implied that in her own stately person she considered lunch a weakness.” As an entrenched luncher myself, who for that reason views noon as the zenith of the day in more ways than one, I am stung by the self-righteous abnegation of this Dickens original, who turns up her nose at the very enticement that captivates mine. She maintained her pinched and disdainful manner as others indulged in eating, “looking quite cast down by the popular vices,” of which lunching struck her as among the more vulgar.
I can well imagine Mrs. Sparsit wincing as I dig in to my own midday meal, with her minatory expression tightening nearby as though someone had yanked a drawstring on her bag of a face. A world purged of lunch? Hard times, indeed!
The contrast between Mrs. Sparsit and me explains why I’d be the more
