From Mademoiselle - October, 1993

THE THRILL OF THE STEAL

They take things they don't need for reasons they don't understand. What is the perverse allure of shoplifting?

by KATHRYN HARRISON

I began shoplifting when I was 13 years old and living in the Valley in Los Angeles. Not occasionally, but with a vengeance, and ritualistically: the same day each week, the same stores, the same partner. At 13, my best friend, Paula, and I had already discovered the seductions of a secret life-the good girls that we were depended increasingly on the release offered by the secret "bad girl."

At our private, overly demanding school we were awkward girls who never talked to, let alone flirted with, boys. We made good grades and were never invited to parties. We spent every Friday night at Paula's (her parents were lax in their supervision), where we ran up the driveway from the school bus, dropped our books on her bed and changed from blue school uniforms into our shoplifting gear: voluminous army-surplus coats with dozens of pockets and two linings. I was "Donna"; Paula was "Jeanette"-names that sounded, to us, sexier than our own. We walked the mile to the mall, giddy, almost drunk with anticipation. En route we always stopped at an abandoned building site behind which we slipped and slid down a dry, grassy embankment to search through the trash at the bottom of the gulch. Someone - who? - left pornography here. Dirty, torn pictures of girls, young girls, pictured alone, their slender purple throats garroted with cords, or together with one, two, even three partners. We studied these pictures silently - this is what happens to bad girls-making no comment to each other. Sometimes we buried them.

A few blocks away we apprenticed at the drugstore: costume jewelry and makeup, false eyelashes-little things slipped into a wide sleeve. Our hands were much quicker than any salesperson's eye. After perfecting the technique of one girl distracting the employees while the other stole, we graduated to department stores: belts, skirts, blouses, dresses. Each haul had to be better and more daring than the last; from each store that we stole we bought one thing, the little bag with the receipt stapled to it a badge for the good girl to carry, the disguise that prevented the detection of the bad girl beneath, the one moving carefully past the register so that the bracelets and rings and sunglasses wouldn't clank together and announce their presence in her jacket lining. Perhaps the disguise worked, for we were not caught - at least, not then.

At Paula's house there was a small unused bedroom off the kitchen, and we hung our stolen clothes in its closets, put the underwear and jewelry in the drawers, set the wigs on stands before the vanity mirror. It was impossible for me to take any of my stolen clothes home to my strict grandparents, who had raised me after the permanent departure of my father when I was an infant and the de facto abandonment of my increasingly irresponsible mother. But Paula's mother and father, both vague and distant professionals, never seemed to notice the growing collection of stolen things. The next day, Saturday, we would each pack a small suitcase (of exclusively stolen items that was the rule) and walk to the Texaco station near her house. In the dirty restroom, flies crawling on the window, we changed our clothes, and our personalities. The clothes we wore were overtly sexual halter tops, high platform shoes. A lot of makeup and perfume. When we wore our "costumes" to the Halloween dance that year, my grandmother took one look at us and said, "What are you supposed to be? Prostitutes at Hollywood and Vine?" We looked at each other. Was that how Jeanette and Donna appeared?

Unrecognizable, even to each other, we called a cab from the gas station and we did go to Hollywood, where we discovered that we had lost even our youth, and that we could be served in bars. We drank Galliano (not knowing any better) and made brazen conversation with strangers, using lines cribbed from late-show movies. We let those strangers buy us drinks. And nothing very bad ever happened to us-though it might have quite easily: we were young, we knew nothing of men, we had no money beyond cab fare. And, what's more, I believe that my secret life as Donna helped me in that it was an initial, if skewed, exploration of sexuality-a necessary aspect of any adolescent's development, but one that was not allowed in the home in which I was raised.

Peter Berlin, the executive director of Shoplifters Anonymous (SA), which describes itself as a rehabilitative educational program, cannot be pinned down to statistics and will not give the profile of a "typical" shoplifter. "No such thing," he attests. They aren't any different from you or me. The only thing Berlin will say is that people shoplift to address needs they cannot articulate. They act out: Their behavior proclaims I need, I want, even if they themselves cannot say it, and the high that comes with a successful lift temporarily forestalls despair. This kind of shoplifting-motivated by emotional rather than material need - is estimated to account for retail losses of $9 billion annually in the U.S.

Why does shoplifting make some of us feel better? "It seemed like the stealing was the only thing that made my life even bearable," says Ann (all names have been changed), an architect with a beautiful penthouse apartment and an active social life. She runs her manicured nails through her long, dark hair, smiles self-consciously and agrees that her life doesn't seem so wretched that it would demand the solace of illicit pleasures. And at 30, after 15 years of shoplifting, Ann is finally reformed; she no longer steals. "But I'll always think like a thief," she says. "I've changed my behavior, that's all."

In talking to women I know, I am surprised to learn how many of them still shoplift, that it is not just some adolescent phase they endured. As a group they are attractive and successful; they have money, they have status. The reasons each gives for stealing seem different: taking a pound of cherries from a gourmet market in Manhattan's Greenwich Village that caters to extravagant tastes: "They cost way too much!" Stealing a watch for a Mother's Day gift: "It makes it a better present because I risked something for it." Lifting a $650 scarf from a display ca se in a department store: "When I saw it, I knew it was mine." But these "reasons" are, of course, rationalizations. In speaking of the experience and how the act of stealing makes them feel, these women all sound alike.

"It was mine," they say, or, more tellingly: "It was me," betraying that the object functions to confirm selfhood, identity. They recognize the object they will steal as if it were a favorite thing they had lost, with the theft bringing about a kind of reunion. Their voices betray a perverse self-righteousness. "How dare they keep it from me!" more than one of them say.

Most of these women are overtly sexy in their dress, their manner; several, I am surprised to observe, seem to grow more sexually charged as they talk about stealing: They become breathless and flushed, and when I ask, they agree that stealing is an enhancement of their concept of themselves as sexual. "I got through life on sex and charm," says Veronica, a divorced screenwriter who is not shy about showing her cleavage. "And if I ever thought about getting caught, I thought, Well, I can use my charm to get out of it. Now I don't think so." Veronica, older and perhaps wiser, says it's no longer worth the risk of getting caught. She adds that today she doesn't have the same faith she once did in her sexual charm She also says she misses stealing, maybe in the same way she misses her younger, sexier self. As a minor, Veronica was apprehended and nearly sent to reform school in New Jersey. She tearfully recalls her mother arguing with a juvenile-court judge on her behalf, but in spite of what she acknowledges was a generally unhappy existence, on some level she wants once again to be that girl: in trouble, perhaps, but alive in a way she no longer feels herself to be.

Some people revile the things they steal-their guilt makes those very things distasteful. Not these women. The conquest represented by a successful theft gives the object incalculably greater value. And these women all speak of competence and power, using the exact same words, spoken with genuine pride, "I'm very good at it."

I was good at it, too. But not good enough. And when I was caught, I stopped. I was afraid, of course. I still remember the feeling of the store detective's hand on my arm in the parking lot I remember how hot it was, August in Los Angeles, and that even at 11 at night I could feel the asphalt burning through the thin soles of my shoes. Drug King's store security called my grandparents, who arrived wearing pajamas under overcoats. My grandmother took one look at me and said, "What has she done?" She was always ready to believe the worst about anyone; she was a woman who was disappointed by unrelieved virtue, But my grandfather, who was 85 and had high blood pressure, attacked the store manager, "She did not do it," he said, throwing aside the bottle of red nail polish and the manicure tools the detective had caught me with. His face went the dangerous purple color that usually presaged a nosebleed, and he stood up straight and poked the store manager in the chest with his finger. "Don't you understand?" he said. "She is incapable of dishonesty."

I have never felt anything more keenly than my grandfather's refusal to accept that I had flaws as well as virtues, that I did bad things. My grandfather was the only father figure I had growing up, and that night he killed the incarnation of the bad girl. I never was Donna again.

In 1991, when I began to write a novel about a shoplifter, I found that though I remembered the fact of the rush I got from stealing, I didn't remember how it felt. Having cleaned up my act considerably in the past decade, mother of two and wife to an eminently law-abiding man, a remedial adventure didn't seem advisable, so I ended up doing some directed fantasizing about shoplifting. I stood for hours among racks and cases of beautiful things in Bergdorf Goodman, a tony Manhattan department store, and I remembered what it was like, and how my heart had pounded. That's what most women say, incidentally. They tell me how their hearts beat, how fast, how hard, and I am struck repeatedly by the way the pursuit of the stolen object follows the traditional arc of a sexual conquest: A woman goes to a department store, sometimes having cased it previously to discover what she wants. Like trolling at a singles bar, seeing whom you want to go home with, She takes it, that object in which she finds some reflection of herself-·for these are women, like me, who are fascinated with mirrors, with anything that will give back to them some image of themselves, confirm what they want to believe about themselves. The escape with the object is a climax, figuratively, although, as Louise Kaplan, in her nonfiction book Female Perversions might tell us, for some it is literally a physical thrill.

Obviously, human beings are creature whose symbolic lives me critically important. We can be broken, or saved, by events whose meanings are inferred privately. And we are constantly making symbols or metaphors of our lives; all of us have private ways of arming ourselves, like that lucky pen for taking an exam. On some level we all are frightened and want to capture the prize that will keep us safe. Aboriginal peoples take teeth or claws from animals they have killed, and they believe that these fetishes embody the power of the animal. Possessing stolen goods and wearing them, certain women believe, enhances their power as women.

"It's all I thought about," says Amanda, a stage actress whose blond good looks land her an occasional movie part, remembering a particularly compulsive spell of thievery. After losing a part that she had counted on, Amanda found herself spending part of each day shoplifting. "Even when I wasn't stealing, I was thinking about what I was going to steal. When I was home alone, I'd try on my stolen things, one after another. I always feel much more beautiful in some thing I've stolen."

Do all these women share some essential need that their stealing seeks to address? In speaking with them, I discover an unexpected commonality. Most of us have suffered the death or abandonment of a father, been raised in a sort of patriarchal vacuum. Julia, an art critic whose little dog jumps excitedly around her legs as she reminisces, tells me about her grandfather's death: "For a week all the grown-ups sat shivah [a period of mourning] in the house, and all the grandchildren went out and shoplifted. A whole week of it."

My own grandfather was a decent man, but he was distant and withholding. An able and active father for a young girl, he became an incompetent, absent one to a teenager becoming a woman. All my fond memories of him are from the years before I was ten; after that, I barely remember his living in the same house. Two of the women with whom I spoke had had to cope with the early deaths of their fathers. Those whose fathers remained talk of the same implicit abandonment I experienced: a father who cannot be a parent to a sexual daughter.

Shoplifting is widely considered a woman's crime. Female Perversions gives kleptomania its own chapter and gives voice to something I noticed in researching my novel, Exposure: The stores from which women steal, together with the apparatus for detection and apprehension, are often experienced as masculine, patriarchal worlds.

I spent days in Tiffany's New York City Jewelry showroom, which is a large, square box of a room, nothing obscuring tile vision of one corner from another. There are a lot of security guards In Tiffany's, and they aren't undercover. An announced presence, they are big, they are solid, they wear guns; they are, emphatically, men; and despite the coy seductions of what is offered in the glass cases (or because of it), the entire environment is male. The male control of, pardon the expression, snatch.

Snatch. A vulgar slang word for female genitalia, yes, but also a verb meaning to seize something suddenly without permission. Is it a stretch to compare the guarded jewelry to female sexuality, to equate tile entire machine of Tiffany's security systems to the father? The pressure of scrutiny and of law was so intense in that setting that I was aware that even my fantasies of theft were taboo. I dared not write in my notebook while ill tile store, so I exiled as unobtrusively as possible and wrote my notes next door ill the golden lobby of Trump Tower.

Perhaps what unites women who steal is that we all wanted something from our fathers, something we did not get, something, then, that we will take. I would go further and guess that the something is the healthy and safe affirmation of our sexuality. Remembering my own crooked past, I don't think it is any accident that Paula and I stopped to look at abandoned pornography before we went on our adolescent stealing sprees, to ponder, in the mud at the bottom of a gulch, what happened to the girls who went bad because no one protected them or provided safe affirmation of their desirability. It was a sort of prayer before our raid on the enemy camp, before we seized the amulets that would keep us safe.

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