“Just exchange it. Please.”
“No problemo, mamacita.” I grabbed the onesie back, and Jack and I walked out of there.
You can’t return a stolen item, so we’d just have to steal again . . . twenty minutes after the first time. Is this what they refer to as “spiraling out of control”? Perhaps!
We made it back into the Gymboree. On this caper, there was no time to chat up the cashier. We had to get in and out, unnoticed.
I lunged to pull Jack’s sunglasses over his eyes.
“Stop—stop it! Don’t touch my hair!”
The cashier spotted us. “Oh hey! Back again so soon.”
Jack panicked. “Yeah, well! We had some second thoughts and we know our little diva is going to want a selection of—”
“I’m hungry let’s go!” I interrupted, onesie already in my purse.
“Byeeeee!” Jack waved and we were gone.
The cashier watched us leave, confused. This whole debacle just confirmed that we were geniuses. Maybe our teachers didn’t see it, and our grades didn’t reflect it, but we were fucking smart and we were going to smoke another bowl to celebrate. But then the bowl was clogged. Good thing we had the wrong-size onesie to clean it out!
In our super high state, we totally forgot to discard the resin-covered onesie. My mom found it a couple days later in the back of the car. Or more likely, she probably smelled the stale drugs first. Finding out that the source of the smell was a Winnie the Pooh resin-smeared onesie was just the cherry on top, I’m sure!
That sounds bad, I agree. But I want to clarify that I wasn’t the “bad seed” in a perfect town. As I got older, the polished veneer of Downers Grove started to fade away, blemish by blemish. Suburbs aren’t immune from bad things! Some people there were just completely fucked up.
At the high school down the road, the school librarian, (the mother of a friend of mine, I might add), fucked like seventeen different high school boys. She’d leave notes in the books for them, detailing when and where to meet. Honestly, it sounds like she got the idea from a terrible rom-com. People started to notice something was awry when all the boys at school started clamoring to hang out in the library. Like, how is there a line to get in? And then the boys started gossiping with one another.
“Yo dude, don’t tell anyone, but I banged the librarian!”
“Wait. I banged the librarian.”
“Wait . . . but . . . so did I.” Aaaaand cue terrible moment of recognition that everyone had banged her.
But back to my story. I love my liberal hippie parents, and I love the values I was raised with, but looking back it’s clear I could have used a bit more structure. A few more consequences. Well, I guess they DID tell me to stop getting arrested. And the rest of the world DID try to slam me with consequences over and over again, whether it was my grades, or detention, or getting arrested for marijuana possession. Geez. Okay, maybe I just didn’t listen.
When I was fifteen, a few of my friends and I rented a motel room so that we could party in PEACE. Also known as . . . a place we could get wasted and high without our parents finding out. Things started to get rowdy, and soon enough, the cops knocked on our door. GREAT.
“We’ve received a noise complaint about your gathering here and we’re gonna need you to quiet down or disperse.”
Now, I was wasted. At this time, I didn’t know liquid courage was a thing. I thought I was just really fucking brave all the time. I was going to save us from the cops.
I’ll have you know that I did learn a few things in school. I found my psychology class particularly interesting. The better I knew how other people thought, the more easily I could steal and lie and get away with it.
The cops were only there on a noise complaint, but I grabbed my purse and slurred at them: “You want to check my purse?? Go ahead! Check it! Check it! I have nothing to hide!”
I smiled smugly. They were NEVER gonna check my purse, BECAUSE I asked them to. That’s what reverse psychology is! The two cops looked at each other and shrugged.
“Okay.”
They grabbed my purse and started to sift through it. The first cop lifted out a baggie of weed.
“Aaaaand . . . You’re under arrest.”
He enjoyed his job way too much.
After that, they made me go to something called Self-Management Skills class. Have you seen that show Scared Straight? It was exactly that. A bunch of other bad kids and I did a full tour of a women’s jail. And—oh cool!—the librarian I mentioned earlier was there, serving her eight years!
“Hey Mrs. Renworth! What’s up!” She didn’t respond.
After the tour we were separated into prison cells in order to be screamed at individually by a prisoner. I got paired with an ex-junky with especially colorful language and not enough teeth to ably pronounce all the words she was yelling at me. I came out of that program with a detailed knowledge of the prison’s layout and a bunch of new drug connects and friends that liked getting into trouble. It was awesome.
Through it all, I had a plan. I was going to graduate high school (although even graduating itself seemed a bit unnecessary at times), and then I was going to move to LA to be an actress. For me, it was written in the stars ever since the moment that I saw Maggie’s older sister in a high school play!
I’ll have you know I was good at acting. How did I know at only age fifteen, you ask? It’s a valid question. Downers Grove was fairly small, and I had only done high school theater and speech. But I knew I had a knack for making people laugh and making people believe me. I just combined my desire to do illegal things with my ability to become anyone.
In the absence of an actual agent or manager or sitcom to star in, the world was my stage, and I was casting myself.
My friend Andy Junk and I did theater and improv together, and we shared the desire to take acting to the next level. One time we went to a real estate open house in town pretending to be a pair of southern newlyweds, complete with terrible accents. We stared at every aspect of the house, acting really impressed because it was so much nicer than our respective mamas’ houses.
The bubbly real estate agent hopped over to us and started to chat us up.
“Don’t you two love the house?”
I smiled at her. “Yes, it’s so much nicer than Mama’s house back in Georgia!”
The real estate agent hugged her clipboard to her body as she leaned into the conversation. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear that! What part of Georgia are you from? I have family in Atlanta.”
“Down in . . . near the mountain—”
The agent nodded. “Do you two have any kids?”
Then, SIMULTANEOUSLY:
Andy responded: “Nope!”
While I responded: “Six!”
We looked at each other, wide eyed, struggling to explain. “Um . . . I . . .”
Andy stammered, “I . . . don’t have . . . per se . . .”
I finally thought of it. “Sorry. It’s just a sore spot for us. The six are mine. I have six kids. From different men. Andy here is just recently in the picture.” I grinned.
“Yes! She’s a bit of a whore,” Andy confirmed with a big thumbs-up.
“Oh . . . kay.” She left us alone after that. Success, kind of!
Another time, Jack and I wanted cigarettes, but we were both underage and had no money. Just a few hurdles there. I’ve always felt that where there’s a will there’s a way. (Is it still a positive attitude if you’re using it to do bad things?) Think, Laura, think: How are we going to get cigarettes without getting carded?