#GIRLBOSS (7 page)

Shoplifting (and Hitchhiking) Saved My Life

We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were to be lived. Life serves the risk taker.

—
Evasion

I
don’t remember the first thing I stole. However, I do remember (with zero pride) that it happened a lot. At one point, someone tried to recruit me to shoplift an Apple MacBook for him, and that was when I realized that holy shit, I have a reputation as a thief. There are plenty of things I’d like to be known for (armpit farting, photography, my legendary dance moves), but being a fabulous shoplifter is not one of them.

I’m not proud of this phase of my life. And it’s so far removed from who I am now that it sometimes seems surreal. Recently, I had a meeting with executives from Nordstrom, and then a few days later, a meeting with the CEO of Michael Kors. And the whole time, I’m sitting in this meeting, thinking,
Oh, my god, I stole a Michael Kors watch from Nordstrom when I was seventeen. . . .
These were my lost years, and there were dozens of times when I could have irreparably messed up my future. It is a miracle, and through no fault of my own, that I didn’t.

On Anarchism, for a Sec

People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

—Emma Goldman

For the latter half of my teen years, I was pretty lost. Though I knew who I was and always refused compromise, I had no
clue what I wanted. I was willing to try almost anything, but my incessant desire to simultaneously reject everything created a challenging paradox. Another way to describe this attitude would be “immature.”

When I was still living with my parents, I made the drive from Sacramento to the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco every year. As you can imagine, I listened to a lot of angry music in those days. When I was fifteen, I discovered Refused’s album,
The Shape of Punk to Come
, and that turned me on to Guy Debord and the Situationists. I’d already been heavy into Emma Goldman, and was frequenting a Marxist study group in which my friends and I were the only people under forty. As I said before, as a teenager, I thought that life sucked and that my life—“oppressed” as I was by school and the suburbs—especially sucked. The ideals of anarchism were perfect for me. I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world. I thought that big corporations were running the world (which I now know they do) and by supporting them, I was condoning their evil ways (which is true, but a girl’s gotta put gas in her car).

I wanted to live outside the capitalist structure, to live free and travel free, and to exist outside a nine-to-five lifestyle. I was like an old bearded hippie trapped in a teenage girl’s body. I wanted to live spontaneously and to find myself in wild places, with wild people, and have wild times. Let me remind you, I was naïve enough to believe this was how I could live my life indefinitely. But thinking back now makes
me scared for my former self the way any mother would be scared for her teenage daughter doing what I did.

Do not knock a dumpstered bagel until you’ve tried one.

At seventeen, before I even graduated high school, I moved out. My parents were in the midst of their divorce and too busy dismantling two decades of marriage to keep me safe any longer. I embarked on my dream of an adventurous life, trying on as many different experiences as I could. I was vegan. I was freegan. I hitchhiked to an Earth First! Rendezvous in the middle of the forest where I ate magic mushrooms and watched people set a pentagram made of sticks on fire. I refused to buy new wood; too angry with capitalism’s
disregard for sustainability, I furnished my places with a mix of sidewalk freebies and lifted merch instead. I dumpster-dived at Krispy Kreme, dated a guy who lived in a tree house, and had hair upon my legs.

While this all may sound extreme, it didn’t seem that way to me at the time. I’d felt like an outsider my entire life, in every school and at every job, and had finally thrown in the towel on finding anyplace that I completely belonged. Discomfort was where I was most comfortable.

Sun’s Out, Thumbs Out

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

—Junot Díaz

When I was seventeen, I decided to hitchhike to Olympia, Washington. Joanne, my travel companion I’d known for a total of twenty-four hours, and I stood on the shoulder of an on-ramp in Downtown Sacramento, holding up a cardboard sign. The first person who picked us up was a Russian guy named Yuri, who was driving a little Honda with a busted-out back window and a bashed-in steering column. In outlaw terms, the car was likely stolen. NBD, right? Nothing weird about that. I had a switchblade on my belt (it was for cutting apples!), and besides, we were invincible. Disclaimer: Please don’t ever, ever do any of the stupid things that I talk about in this chapter.

We asked Yuri where he was headed, and started to get suspicious when he said West Sacramento, which we had already passed and was many miles behind us on the freeway. After some negotiation, he finally agreed to drop us off in Redding, which was at least on the way to where we were going. Then he threw in the deal breaker.

“For love?” he said.

“No!” I shrieked back, too grossed out to be scared. We
demanded that he let us out, and he started to apologize right away. But if the hot-wired car had somehow not tipped us off to the fact that he was a creepy dude, the “for love” deal breaker left little doubt. Yuri let us out at a gas station, still apologizing profusely in broken English, and this was how we found ourselves stuck outside a town called Zamora, backpacks in tow, and not another building in sight.

I looked around and saw two cars gassing up, but both were breeders (aka families), which any intelligent hitchhiker knew better than to approach. There was a big rig idling on the on-ramp, so figuring that this was our best option, I walked up to it and knocked on the cab.

A big guy named James answered the door, and informed us he was en route to Eugene. That seemed close enough to Olympia, and because we had no other option, we got in. James was from the South, and had a friend’s son with him, as he was teaching the kid how, as he called it, to “drive truck.” As we started up the highway, Joanne—who was a complete and total idiot—asked James if she could use his mobile phone, which in 2002 was a giant Nokia. He said sure, as long as she gave him a back rub, which she did! And of course, as soon as she was finished, he changed his mind. He told her that no, she couldn’t use his phone, but he’d pay for her to use a pay phone. She got very upset as I sat there rolling my eyes, thinking,
You idiot, that’s why you don’t give strange men back rubs!
At this point, I had probably never touched another person’s pubes, so there was no way at all I related to this freak I was traveling with.

By law, truckers have to pull over every certain number of hours to sleep—a law that keeps them from snorting speed and staying up for days on end. James’s truck was huge, and had plastic, prisonlike bunk beds in the back. He pulled over to the side of the road, and quickly outlined the sleeping arrangements. “She’s with him,” he said, pointing at my idiot traveling companion and his friend, then at me: “And you’re with me!” James had already told me that he was attracted to my hairy legs, which I thought was revolting because part of the reason I had hairy legs in the first place was to keep guys away from me.

“No way!” I said. “We’ll share one, and you guys share one!”

“I ain’t sleeping with no man.” He chortled, making clear his disgust.

“Well, I’m not sharing a bed with you!” I responded, and told him that if necessary, I would sit on the floor and wait it out. This did not go over well with James, who made us decide: Either do what he said or get the fuck out.

For the second time, we found ourselves on the side of the highway with nothing but knives, backpacks, and a flashlight. It was three in the morning, and we were standing on the shoulder of the freeway, on the side of a mountain in southern Oregon, twenty miles south of the nearest exit. Joanne was really tan, like a homeless woman or someone from Maui. I don’t even know how she got that tan, but that’s an aside. I suggested that our safest bet was to throw our sleeping bags down in the forest until daybreak, but like the
idiot she was she refused, citing she was “afraid of animals.” Not afraid to give a giant freak a back rub, but afraid of getting nuzzled by a baby deer, apparently. Our flashlights being the only light available, we waved down another big rig, which stopped about a hundred yards away because those things are so goddamn heavy. We ran through the darkness to see what surprise we might find behind door number three.

Seattle, where I spent almost as much time cutting my own hair as I did shoplifting. 2002.

The next episode seemed simpler: just the driver and
his massive, drooling canine. The guy was a Bible-thumper who went on about Jesus and smacked his dog whenever it barked. He told us that his mom was a prostitute and that his brother burned a house down at age five. He was pretty cracked out, but for the first time all night, we were riding with someone who wasn’t interested in Yuri’s proverbial “love.” Um, that was a relief. And the ride got better when the sun came up, as the driver let us get on his CB radio and harass the logging trucks, blasting them with insults like, “Hey loggers, do you know you’re ruining the environment?” as we passed them on the highway.

This guy’s trip ended in Eugene, and as we pulled into a truck stop, he got on his radio and found us a ride the rest of the way to Olympia. Our final chauffer was a very nice trucking dad who riffed about his wife and kids the whole way, dropping us safely in Olympia.

No Time for Crime

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

—Joan Didion

At eighteen, I decided to move to Olympia, Washington, semipermanently to establish residency so I could attend the Evergreen State College, an interdisciplinary school devoid of majors. No, seriously—you can major in Madonna. I still had
no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but Evergreen’s unconventionality made it seem like, just maybe, this was a school I could get along with. Because my political ethos at that time didn’t really jibe with working for the Man, I started shoplifting—and shoplifting a lot—to support myself.

Here’s some irony for you: The first thing that I ever sold online was stolen. At this point, I was palling around with full-time, bona fide anarchists. They were tree-sitters, activists, naturalists, hobos, feminists, radical publishers, thieves, scam artists, and one person who refused to accept gender, classifying him- or herself “z” instead of “he” or “she.”

My friend Mack (an assumed name as I later found out, as he was a fugitive at the time) was a bit of a celebrity in this world. He’d written
Evasion
, a book that was a universal anthem for the underground society we operated in. The cover read “Homelessness, Unemployment, Poverty . . . If You’re Not Having Fun You’re Not Doing It Right.” We were like Quentin Tarantino characters: a stylish duo with quick wits and grifters’ tongues. We valued “social engineering” over socializing, preferring to spend our days tricking corporations into thinking we were just your average, paying customers. . . .