A Thief at Heart
By KorskiI have been a thief for as long as I can remember. And I have not changed through the years. All that has changed have been the objects of my desire, and my means of treachery and trickery in getting what I wanted, and then covering my tracks so that I would not be caught.
There is always, of course, the question of motive, and in my case I think I can say that it is embarrassingly simple. All I have wanted from all of my acts of thievery is the thrill, the high, of planning, scheming, getting what I was after, and then for a short while—never as long as I would like in my small conceit—privately gloating, more for the fact that I got away with it than what I could put in one of my little brown notebooks, a careful description of what I got, and when, and from whom, and some notes on the more difficult obstacles I had to overcome to be successful.
I cannot put a precise date on when it all began, but my memory tells me that I was no more than three or four when I got my first thrill taking what did not belong to me, and, I hate to say it, at my father’s expense. It all happened like this. I had been playing on the floor in my parent’s bedroom one afternoon—put there because my mother had some friends over and wanted me out of the way, playing with some toys and watching cartoons on the TV—when I found one of the bottom drawers on one of the dresser’s open. My father, because he was into woodworking at the time, had built the cabinet and was proud of the ball-bearing mechanism that made it easy for anyone, even someone of my young age, to slide the drawer in and out. In my youthful curiosity, that is exactly what I did. Pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled…and then I began snooping. At the rear of the drawer, beneath a pile of papers or an envelope, I am not now sure which, was a large collection of quarters and half dollars. No doubt it was all this shining silver, and the sheer number of coins, that caught my eye. And for a reason that’s as mysterious as to why I was born into a family in northern California, rather than one in faraway Bangladesh or Mongolia, I just decided to take one quarter and one half dollar piece that first day and hide them, and henceforth think of them as my own.
After that, I began to up the ante. A week or so later I took not two coins but five, three of which were half dollar pieces. Now I needed a new hiding place, or more than one, and so I began putting my take beneath the house’s carpets, in corners. The carpets were old and curling and it was easy, even for me at such a young age, to pull them up.
I don’t know how long it took my father to get wise to the fact that something was amiss, because I continued taking his coins for several months. I am reasonably sure that he never said anything to my mother about the losses at that time, and in all probability suspected that she was the person responsible, that she was trying to send him a subtle message to the effect that she was on to his little scheme and she wanted him to stop. I can only guess at this distance that my father, who was on a tight budget by my mother, was taking the coins from her purse, at about the same rate I would later steal them from him. What he was saving them for I would never know, for as far as I knew my father never had any vices; he did not smoke or drink, and I don’t think it ever occurred to him to have an affair with another woman. For my part, I never felt the slightest guilt about taking my father’s coins, certainly not then or even later when I found myself going to Catholic school and I was being indoctrinated about heaven and hell and venal and mortal sins and the need to confess and about the meaning of mortality and everlasting life.
If you’re the moral sort, then I guess it could be said that my life as a thief, and a happy one at that I must note, only continued to get worse and more reprehensible. By the time I was in the third grade I was hitting grocery stores and supermarkets. Initially, it was for candy bars, but then I got bored because this was so easy, and so I turned to one of my friends, who liked to accompany me on some of these small adventures. He had an idea. And a good one he had indeed. We’d go to the fruit side of the store and take a bite out of a pear or an apple, or peel back a banana and take a couple of chomps before moving on. If we could find some packaged ham or turkey, we’d pretend to be looking it over while in fact we were tearing or cutting it open to get inside and grab enough meat for a good mouthful or two. I think once or twice I tried to come up with a rationale for my behavior—these were the years when I was an altar boy and still attending mass regularly. But the best I could do—and lame it was indeed now reflecting on this time—was to tell myself that when I went to stores and turned on my “nasty rat nature” (as one of my dear friends who I confided in described what I was doing)-- these were the times of the day when I was hungry. I was a growing boy and needed lots of energy, and my mother was not a person (may she forever rest in peace in God’s heaven) who kept the refrigerator well stocked or had an inviting fruit bowl in the kitchen.
I didn’t start breaking into houses until I was finishing the fifth grade. The idea, the first time, wasn’t in fact mine, but an older friend by the name of Dean, whose sole purpose—or so he told me and I always believed him—was to add to his stamp and coin collections. Which meant that it was very much a hit and miss affair, because there was no way of knowing ahead of time that houses that had been boarded for a vacation in fact had stamp or coin collections in them. For my part, I wasn’t after much more than a small memento to later remind me of a particular home and how we had entered it. I was, by this time, assiduously keeping notebooks full of lists and other details about my thieving ways, what initially I called “my secret accomplishments.” Those were the exact words I used then, and still use to this very day. All that has changed is that as my emotional stake in this life I had so come to embrace grew, the “a” in the word accomplishment became capitalized. This was, too, a measure in my mind of the various little books that had grown in number and I now had hidden around my bedroom and the garage. Yes, those books: then and now, I think, they are among the few possessions I really care about. But as I have noted, I was secretive about what I was doing and especially the incriminating records. As much as I loved and confided in each of my first two wives, I can say with a certain amount of pride that I never slipped once about the existence of these prized little brown leather books.
It’s a long story about how Dean found out when people were away on vacation, and I will not go into it because it is a distraction. What does need to be said is that after the fourth or fifth house we’d broken into, I came to realize that what we were doing was far more dangerous than anything I had done up to this time. I not only knew that I could be facing time in a juvenile detention center if caught, but that my father—one mean and unforgiving bastard if I must say so—would whip me until I begged for mercy if he even suspected what I was doing. And sure enough, I did get caught, once. Fortunately, my insistent denials of culpability to the police worked; worked, I am sure, because the one good thing I always liked about Dean was that he would never rat on me, and he would stick to the story we had agreed on. We had both talked about how we would behave if caught after the fact (obviously not if caught in the act), many times in fact, and our preparation in this regard worked just as it had been mapped out. Deny, deny, deny, and always the message, and sometimes quite explicitly to those who interrogated us: prove it. They couldn’t break us, and they couldn’t get any hard evidence, and so this one time we got caught (were really just good suspects because Dean had blabbered to a friend) we got off without any kind of police record. I should note, however, that my father right away learned about the police being on us (they had come to the school, not our homes), and he was as unforgiving as I feared he would be. He hit me several times with a 2 X 4 when he first spoke to me about it, and after that the punishment was that for three weekends in a row, beginning Friday night and ending Monday morning, I was to be locked in my bedroom. I could only leave to go to the bathroom; my mother brought my meals to me, each time crying, as much for my father’s behavior as for what, in her worst moments, she thought I had in fact done. My father had no more evidence than the police did, and he got the identical cries of denial from me. But I thought then, and down to this very day, now a little over nine years after his death, that he knew what I was up to. And what kind of life I had been leading for many years. He never mentioned to me, not once or as he was dying, anything about all the coins I stole from him, but I’ve long had the suspicion that he came upon one or more of my hiding places, and those discoveries convinced him that it was me and me alone who had stolen from him for so long. Why he never confronted me, I cannot be entirely sure. Perhaps it was because he had taken the money from my mother, and in a sense he was every bit as guilty as I had been.
It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school that I got the idea of a different kind of thievery, and this was getting hold of exams in my more difficult classes. I only went down this path in one class in my sophomore year, in one called The American Experience; but by the time I had graduated I had managed to steal exams from about seven different teachers. I had a number of ways of doing it: giving excuses to the after-school cleaning ladies that I was a son and needed to get a few records for my teacher father; and jimmy the lock on the door (the most common method), and then in a few cases on the file cabinets. I did not, of course, take the exams home. I just gave them a careful look and took down notes on questions I knew that I wouldn’t be able to answer. The net effect of these thefts were some As and Bs rather than Bs and Cs. But this was of little real significance. As always it was the adrenaline rush when I worked on the door, or sat on the floor behind a desk in an office knowing that to be caught had consequences I could barely imagine. And that—not knowing what could happen—made me feel, of all things, big, smart, a step and then some ahead of everyone around me.
I’ll skip over the various areas that I branched out into in these high school years, and even more so once in college, except to say that after I got my terminal degree and moved into a good faculty position, I was now in the business of stealing the ideas of others, including those of my colleagues. If I might be a bit modest, I didn’t do it because I didn’t have enough ideas to keep me busy and get promotions on time, I did it for the same reasons I always did it: the pure thrill, and the edgy hot rush from wondering if anyone would catch on to me. Catch me, catch me if you can! I would sometimes chime to myself as I strolled between the library and my university office, or on the short walk to my apartment. I must confess that I was not as good at this venture as I wanted to believe, and a couple of times there were “questions” and a few innuendos about where pieces of some of my published, and single-authored, research came from. But there was never enough interest or probing for anyone to dare take me before the administration or even to my department head.
This fascination, this obsession with various forms of thievery, and the rather intricate methods I have developed to avoid getting accused or caught (always different as might be imagined) continues right down to the present. I confess to getting a bit bored with it, or aspects of it from time to time, but it is the minutiae of how I do it and get away with so much that continue to hold my attention. Whatever, this now brings me to what I really wanted to reveal in these modest confessional notes on my hidden life.
My first marriage lasted a little over a year and a half, and the second one, which I entered eight months after the first one went bust, lasted just over three months. There were no kids, there was love, there was plenty of sex, there were arguments, and then the need to get out. Fortunately, the splits in both cases were as amicable as can be expected. In both cases I was quite happy to move on. After the second marriage went south, I had a rough time for about four months. I could not find anyone to my satisfaction that I really wanted to see more than twice, and no one to speak of that I wanted to sleep with. Toward the end of this dry period, as I think of it, I found a whole new kind of venture to sink my wily teeth into. It is hardly novel, and I can claim no particular expertise, but what I can claim are numbers. By my latest count, 234, and a success rate that I recently calculated at roughly thirty-one percent.
Let me explain what this is all about. For the past six years I have dedicated all my free time to trying to steal women’s hearts. Now I know that this makes me sound awful, and worse than what one might have concluded to this point. Believe me, I certainly understand that to those of you reading this who have a sense of principle, and believe in such things as moral and ethical behavior, you are now, no doubt, on the point of retching. Or stopping at this very point, throwing these printed pages onto the floor or pushing the delete button on your keyboard, concluding that I am far worse than a hustler, a cad, a rake, a reprobate. I understand, I do! Let me put it simply, directly. There is no other way to say what I should have said before. I am amoral, immoral in a Christian universe. Let me say it again: I am thoroughly and completely amoral (or immoral in your world) in almost everything I do! I lack anything resembling an ethical or a moral compass. I am, too, insensitive toward others, it would seem, though I would contest this vigorously!
Anyway, I do not want these semi-reflective notes to devolve into a discourse that is philosophical and ethereal and chockablock with ethical and moral underpinnings. Rather, I must move ahead and add a few details about what I have been up to—an adventure, a grand adventure, I must say! One unlike any of the others that I had so resolutely undertaken in this life of thievery, which I unashamedly embrace.
I found myself, when I realized I wanted to get into the business of stealing women’s hearts, faced with a daunting task. Did I want to spend all the time and money I had to court in my local environment someone until I could measure somehow that I had “stolen” her heart, at which point, of course, I could then move on to my next target. Well, the simple answer is that I did not want to do this. I had too many other things going in my life, and other little thieving venues that I did not want to give up (stealing from stores packaged computer software, movie and song DVDs, shoes—this is an interesting story I must relate some day, valuable equipment from the university, and so on), and so I had to do what I had never thought of doing before I thought of the idea at the young age of 33. I would have to turn to getting hookers to fall in love with me, an idea that only came to me when I read about a marvelous phenomenon in Thailand, and, I would soon discover, in the Philippines, one called the Girl Friend Experience. The gist of this is that unlike other parts of the world where whores are readily available for quite short periods of time, in these two Asian countries, a goodly number of the young hookers will not only go with you for ten or twelve hours at a time, and quite cheaply I should note, but they will give the illusion of falling in love with you. And, as it happens, with a little work and persistence, many of them will in fact do so. That is to say, the illusion they are peddling can be turned into, for lack of a better word or phrase, a “committed heart.” At which point I’ve got what I want, and I have no interest whatsoever in ever seeing the girl again. And I can honestly say there has never been an exception to this rule, that is, once I feel assured that I have a committed heart in hand, I am gone, never again to return to that girl or woman again.
So it was, nearly six years ago now, that I made my first trip to Thailand and the Philippines, and within a week I began my single-minded mission to steal as many Thai and Filipina hearts as I could during the three summer months when I did not have to teach. I cannot say, as I have noted, that I have had great success. Although who knows what would constitute great success given the time constraints I impose upon myself to get the job done, a week at the outside, four days in most cases working around the clock with the hustling young whore whose heart I am after.
No doubt you are wondering what my criteria are for deciding that a theft of a heart has been successfully pulled off. It’s all rather straightforward from my perspective. They don’t ask for money. They profess their love multiple times. They want to be with me all the time, and me alone. They bring marriage up, and seriously, and not just once or twice. They cry and even sob when I hint that marriage is not on the table. And they are insistent that I meet their parents and siblings and that they would do anything I ask of them—move to my country, forego kids if I say I don’t want them, and give me any kind of sex that I should request.
So, to date, to slightly reiterate, I have 234 Thai and Filipina young women (in ages running from 18 to 31) recorded in my brown books, and with all kinds of fascinating details about them and how I carried out the seduction, how they behaved when I broke things off and moved on, and the extent to which they met my extended list of criteria (I use a fourteen point scale developed in the 1930s by a student of Sigmund Freud, and used, of course, for something quite unrelated to my needs.). The breakdown, incidentally is as follows: 159 Filipinas (they’re much easier) and 75 Thai women (wily sorts they are, and much harder work, several of them requiring six and even seven days or hard work).
But—and this I hate to admit—at this critical moment, I find myself in a serious bind.
Near the end of my most recent trip to the Philippines I found myself in Dumaguete (in Negros Oriental), a somewhat remote if beautiful little city that few foreigners visit or know about. It is a charming place that only has four small go-go bar—brothels. But this said, I did not meet Kasandra (she will turn 24 next month)—the object of my affections and where this is going-- in one of these dark go-go bars where I invariably begin my next search for a committed heart. No, what happened, is that I took a girl out of one of these places—the Blue Light by name, and she proved to be on ya-ba and acting absolutely nuts, which I did not like. I blatantly told her to get lost, and right away. I did so in front of several couples in a restaurant, literally throwing money at her and pointing to the door. It just so happened that Kasandra was there with some friends. I don’t know what so caught her attention about my behavior, since I was actually quite loud and rude, but on paying the bill—the hooker now on her way with the money I had given her—Kasandra came over and introduced herself and said she would like to get to know me. She gave me a number to call, and, on a whim, I did so the next day around noon. We got together that night, slept together for the first time three nights later, and I have now been seeing her steadily for two and a half weeks. We have, yes, talked of getting married, and her moving to the States with me, and starting a family.
And this is where one major dilemma comes into play. I honestly do find Kasandra an incredible young woman. She is attractive, she is thin and tall as I like my women, she is intelligent and inquisitive and funny, and she is certainly more than good enough in bed, and that’s saying a lot given my experience in the last six years!
So the question before me is this. Should I marry her and begin the production of children, a practice that Filipinas are so good at, and rarely with a sight set on a limit short of eight or nine? Or should I just quickly get rid of Kasandra and continue racking up the number of committed hearts to see if I can reach a total of 400 or more Thai and Filipina women, and at the same time up my success rate to a more respectable forty percent? This thought has certainly come to mind.
But, and here is yet another dilemma—or is it really a dilemma?
Can I get Kasandra on the baby production line, and also get two or three or four other young and eager Filipina women producing babies, one after another? This will, of course, force me to expand my definition of theft, or perhaps abandon it altogether in this particular case. But what a challenge! What a magnificent challenge! Not the marriage to three or four women simultaneously, which is no big deal in my amoral universe—but the idea, the possibility that by the time I have reached the half century mark here on earth I could be the father of forty, or fifty, or even possibly sixty children. What a challenge, and what a perfectly imagined strategy! Indeed, this is nothing less than the best of all fits with everything we now know to be the first two fundamentals of all life (with a small nod to conceits held by a very minor and insignificant species—Homo sapiens): life is amoral, indifferent to cruelty and suffering, and wasteful; and the only thing that is immortal are genes.
Stickman's thoughts:
Busy like mad today so comments will have to follow.
The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
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