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A Burglary
Oct. 22nd, 2014 01:41 pmSo-o, at 4:30 Monday morning, Ben wakes me up. (I’m on the couch.) “Robin just called. His house was burglarized. He wants us to come up.”
“Shit,” I say. “Did they get his computer?”
Because that, of course, would be a fucking nightmare.
We drink coffee. I cadge a cigarette.
We set out for Syracuse in pitch blackness. I don’t drive very well in pitch blackness; either my eyesight or my mental status has deteriorated to the point where it’s very, very difficult for me to plunge ahead into territory I cannot actually see at speeds greater than 50 miles per hour. Old age. But, of course, I was never a really comfortable driver to begin with.
The guy broke in through Robin’s window. Robin was sleeping in the living room. Robin heard the break-in, woke up, and caught the guy in the act. Which I suppose makes it a robbery rather than a burglary in legal terms.
The only stuff that was stolen was Robin’s.
“Was Robin targeted for some reason?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Ben says.
“Because Robin told me last year that he was planning to augment his meager loan payouts by selling dope. I told him in no uncertain terms he was a fucking idiot if he did something like that – the risks were too great. But he never listens to anything I say to him.”
“I don’t know,” Ben says. “At the beginning of the year, he took all his loan money and invested it in tee-shirts –“
“He what?”
“Calm down. Fraternity tee-shirts. For the whole country. He figured he had a captive market –“
“Why didn’t I hear about this?”
“Calm down! He did well with it. Him and his partner ended up making a few hundred dollars apiece.”
“Well, I guess he’s got the entrepreneurial spirit,” I say. “So -- what? They burglarized his house for his unsold tee-shirt samples?”
“There’s no reason to assume he was the target,” Ben says. “In certain cities, students are like herds of cows, put there to serve the economic needs of the predators in the adjacent ghettoes. That’s certainly the way it is in Ithaca.”
“Berkeley, too,” I say. “Well, I will be really pissed if it turns out they broke into his house because they heard he was selling dope.”
###
We arrived in Syracuse around 8 a.m. The cops and the forensics specialist had already come and gone.
The loss was even worse than I’d imagined, though, because Robin had never put the money he’d made from selling the tee-shirts back in the bank. It was all in his sock drawer, a fat roll of hundreds and twenties – Benjamin Franklin, meet Andrew Jackson! Which, of course, was the first place the guy looked. Robin’s living expenses for the next three months.
Oh, dear.
They also got Robin’s phone, his keys, and the mushroom collection he’d been putting together for his mycology class.
I cannot imagine why he didn’t put that money back in the bank. Some sort of gangsta thing, I suppose. When he was feeling down, he could always go to his sock drawer and ruffle his cash. Cheaper than therapy.
Until it isn’t.
He put an iCloud tracer on the phone and so was able to alert the cops to the fact that it was lying on the floor of a lobby in one of the Fayette Street projects. The phone was actually broken, so the burglar had discarded it.
The theft of the mushroom collection was actually most on my mind because the mushrooms had not yet been mounted, but were lying around in plastic baggies. Many of the mushrooms were poisonous. It makes me sick to my stomach to imagine that the idiot burglar would think they were psychedelic mushrooms and either take them himself, or sell them to students. I wanted to call St. Joseph’s and alert them to the fact that they might be looking at an epidemic of liver failure among Onondaga Community College students.
Robin was completely freaked out, scared shitless of going back in his room. Total sense of violation. This was not the time to bring up the inadvisability of keeping large sums of cash (fungible!) in his sock drawer.
Well. I suppose everybody does one amazingly stupid thing when they’re that age. One late night when I was really, really drunk in Paris, during my modeling days, I managed to lose the equivalent of $600 and my passport on the Metro. In those days, of course, it was a relatively simple matter to get a passport replaced.
Another time, Steve Raffanti and I were jetting to London. We’d driven cross-country on one of those You Deliver My Car types of arrangements, and ended up in Washington, D.C. We were too naive (read: stupid) to realize that D.C. itself was a viper’s nest and so took a room at a deadbeat hotel where the air conditioning unit was broken and made a loud, rattling noise. We were exhausted and managed to fall asleep anyway – only to awaken in the morning to find our passports and all our travelers checks missing. We’d been set up.
Again. A relatively simple matter to replace them.
First order of business now was to make Robin feel safe enough to go back in his room.
Ben and I drove to Lowe’s, bought window locks and window alarms. Installed them.
I talked to one of the other roommates who told me the lease specifically mentioned safe locks on the windows. By no stretch of the imagination could any of the window locks in that flat be described as safe. In fact, I’m not even sure they could be described as locks. They’re those plastic swivel thingies with a companion serrated piece along the window frame.
Robin’s window was locked, and the burglar jimmied it, which could be done easily with a simple screwdriver.
So, I am thinking there may be a landlord liability issue here, which I may be able to exploit once I get my hands on the police report in another week or so. I took a bunch of photographs. Called the landlord and got the locks changed.
Robin understandably was in a foul mood – all this took place on the night of his birthday, so it kind of felt like a double whammy.
At the best of times, Robin is not easy for me to deal with. I mean, I love the kid loads, but I don’t think he particularly loves me – he pays lip service to the idea, but we’re never really comfortable talking with one another.
Our personalities are really, really similar, which may be part of it. I dunno.
He has that thing – I have it, too – whereby he is completely immersed in whatever present tense he happens to find himself in. We have always been at war in Eurasia! Part of it is that, like me, he stops eating when he’s under stress, so his blood sugar plummets, creating an environment for all sorts of bad brain chemicals.
“You have to eat,” I said.
“I don’t fucking want to do anything!” he screamed. “Just leave me alone.”
“Well. Come out with us and watch us eat,” said Ben.
Of course, the fear is that he will spin out into another one of those episodes like he did last spring when one of his roommates called the 5150 team on him. Of course, they didn’t admit him to the psych ward; he doesn’t really have a mood disorder. He tends to splinter when he’s under stress. So do I.
My splintering tendencies, I’m fairly sure, are behaviors I learned from watching my mother decompensate on a regular basis. She was a borderline personality.
I suspect Robin’s splintering tendencies are behaviors he learned from watching me. I feel guilty about that.
The operative term there is “learned behaviors.” Learned behaviors can be unlearned.
He had a great summer and seemed to be having a great fall, so of course, he never did therapy, which is something I’ve been after him to do for years now. Some sort of cognitive behavioral therapy, which would give him an arsenal of tools he can use when he spins into those dark places.
“I hate my fucking life! I wish I was dead!” Robin snarled.
“So, what should I do?” I said. “Call the psych techs now? I mean, why wait?”
“Patrizia! Stop,” said Ben. He sighed and looked at Robin. “It’s gonna be okay,” he told Robin. “I understand that you’re really scared now, you feel violated –“
“I spent a hundred hours collecting those mushrooms!” Robin said. “It was the best mushroom collection in the class.”
Ben sighed. “I’m going to tell you a story. When I was in my early 20s, I spent three years in Florida putting together maybe the best rattlesnake collection in the United States of America. With a representative of every known rattlesnake genus. Maybe three zoos in the United States have rattlesnake collections that good. And then I got a phone call – my father was dying. So I had to go back up north.
“I took the rattlesnakes with me.
“My father died the day after I got there. So the house was in an uproar with visiting family and friends, and funeral arrangements. I figured it would be best to house 65 rattlesnakes elsewhere – my mother was in no mood to appreciate them.
“I called a friend – brought them over to her house. And then the day after the funeral, her power went off and every single one of my rattlesnakes died from the cold. Every single one!
“Well, of course, there’s no comparison between the death of a father and the death of some rattlesnakes. Still. I was crushed. So believe me, I understand how you feel.”
This perked Robin up enough to nibble a burrito.
###
We bought him a new phone.
I guess unless I can scare the landlord, I end up paying Robin’s rent and buying him food for the next three months since I have an income and Ben really doesn’t.
There goes my discretionary income till 2015.
Robin doesn’t get a free ride on the idiocy of keeping large sums of cash anywhere but in a bank account, but timing is everything, so that conversation will need to wait.
I mean, I don’t want him to drop out of the University.
He is at a really good school, and he is doing very well academically.
On the other hand, it would never occur to him to be the slightest bit grateful that I will be bankrolling him for the next three months at some sacrifice to myself. Gratitude would be nice. My own mother would never have done something similar for me, which is one of the reasons I would – of course – do it for him. Good parenting is if you do everything the opposite of the way my mother would have done it. By definition.
###
Ben and I ended up having a lot of fun together just hanging out, crisis notwithstanding. He did not end up coming back down with me for Big FDR Fun, though.
And I felt very low on the drive back to the Hudson River Valley. Through those strange little Catskill towns I’m so obsessed with.
Basically the deal is that the family's cursed, right? That there’s some supernatural force at work. That there will always be some monumental crisis bubbling up that will get in the way of having simple, wholesome fun.
I’m at a safe remove from it now, protected by the psychic powers of Linda, the Good Witch.
But Ben, of course, is at the epicenter. Nothing in his life has ever or will ever work out right. Ben is just fucking doomed.
And I don’t have enough maya to protect Robin from the curse of being Ben’s son.
The karma will be way worse if that creepy burglar ends up selling those fucking mushrooms, and somebody dies as a result. I certainly hope the Syracuse cops are hip to that risk.
“Shit,” I say. “Did they get his computer?”
Because that, of course, would be a fucking nightmare.
We drink coffee. I cadge a cigarette.
We set out for Syracuse in pitch blackness. I don’t drive very well in pitch blackness; either my eyesight or my mental status has deteriorated to the point where it’s very, very difficult for me to plunge ahead into territory I cannot actually see at speeds greater than 50 miles per hour. Old age. But, of course, I was never a really comfortable driver to begin with.
The guy broke in through Robin’s window. Robin was sleeping in the living room. Robin heard the break-in, woke up, and caught the guy in the act. Which I suppose makes it a robbery rather than a burglary in legal terms.
The only stuff that was stolen was Robin’s.
“Was Robin targeted for some reason?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Ben says.
“Because Robin told me last year that he was planning to augment his meager loan payouts by selling dope. I told him in no uncertain terms he was a fucking idiot if he did something like that – the risks were too great. But he never listens to anything I say to him.”
“I don’t know,” Ben says. “At the beginning of the year, he took all his loan money and invested it in tee-shirts –“
“He what?”
“Calm down. Fraternity tee-shirts. For the whole country. He figured he had a captive market –“
“Why didn’t I hear about this?”
“Calm down! He did well with it. Him and his partner ended up making a few hundred dollars apiece.”
“Well, I guess he’s got the entrepreneurial spirit,” I say. “So -- what? They burglarized his house for his unsold tee-shirt samples?”
“There’s no reason to assume he was the target,” Ben says. “In certain cities, students are like herds of cows, put there to serve the economic needs of the predators in the adjacent ghettoes. That’s certainly the way it is in Ithaca.”
“Berkeley, too,” I say. “Well, I will be really pissed if it turns out they broke into his house because they heard he was selling dope.”
###
We arrived in Syracuse around 8 a.m. The cops and the forensics specialist had already come and gone.
The loss was even worse than I’d imagined, though, because Robin had never put the money he’d made from selling the tee-shirts back in the bank. It was all in his sock drawer, a fat roll of hundreds and twenties – Benjamin Franklin, meet Andrew Jackson! Which, of course, was the first place the guy looked. Robin’s living expenses for the next three months.
Oh, dear.
They also got Robin’s phone, his keys, and the mushroom collection he’d been putting together for his mycology class.
I cannot imagine why he didn’t put that money back in the bank. Some sort of gangsta thing, I suppose. When he was feeling down, he could always go to his sock drawer and ruffle his cash. Cheaper than therapy.
Until it isn’t.
He put an iCloud tracer on the phone and so was able to alert the cops to the fact that it was lying on the floor of a lobby in one of the Fayette Street projects. The phone was actually broken, so the burglar had discarded it.
The theft of the mushroom collection was actually most on my mind because the mushrooms had not yet been mounted, but were lying around in plastic baggies. Many of the mushrooms were poisonous. It makes me sick to my stomach to imagine that the idiot burglar would think they were psychedelic mushrooms and either take them himself, or sell them to students. I wanted to call St. Joseph’s and alert them to the fact that they might be looking at an epidemic of liver failure among Onondaga Community College students.
Robin was completely freaked out, scared shitless of going back in his room. Total sense of violation. This was not the time to bring up the inadvisability of keeping large sums of cash (fungible!) in his sock drawer.
Well. I suppose everybody does one amazingly stupid thing when they’re that age. One late night when I was really, really drunk in Paris, during my modeling days, I managed to lose the equivalent of $600 and my passport on the Metro. In those days, of course, it was a relatively simple matter to get a passport replaced.
Another time, Steve Raffanti and I were jetting to London. We’d driven cross-country on one of those You Deliver My Car types of arrangements, and ended up in Washington, D.C. We were too naive (read: stupid) to realize that D.C. itself was a viper’s nest and so took a room at a deadbeat hotel where the air conditioning unit was broken and made a loud, rattling noise. We were exhausted and managed to fall asleep anyway – only to awaken in the morning to find our passports and all our travelers checks missing. We’d been set up.
Again. A relatively simple matter to replace them.
First order of business now was to make Robin feel safe enough to go back in his room.
Ben and I drove to Lowe’s, bought window locks and window alarms. Installed them.
I talked to one of the other roommates who told me the lease specifically mentioned safe locks on the windows. By no stretch of the imagination could any of the window locks in that flat be described as safe. In fact, I’m not even sure they could be described as locks. They’re those plastic swivel thingies with a companion serrated piece along the window frame.
Robin’s window was locked, and the burglar jimmied it, which could be done easily with a simple screwdriver.
So, I am thinking there may be a landlord liability issue here, which I may be able to exploit once I get my hands on the police report in another week or so. I took a bunch of photographs. Called the landlord and got the locks changed.
Robin understandably was in a foul mood – all this took place on the night of his birthday, so it kind of felt like a double whammy.
At the best of times, Robin is not easy for me to deal with. I mean, I love the kid loads, but I don’t think he particularly loves me – he pays lip service to the idea, but we’re never really comfortable talking with one another.
Our personalities are really, really similar, which may be part of it. I dunno.
He has that thing – I have it, too – whereby he is completely immersed in whatever present tense he happens to find himself in. We have always been at war in Eurasia! Part of it is that, like me, he stops eating when he’s under stress, so his blood sugar plummets, creating an environment for all sorts of bad brain chemicals.
“You have to eat,” I said.
“I don’t fucking want to do anything!” he screamed. “Just leave me alone.”
“Well. Come out with us and watch us eat,” said Ben.
Of course, the fear is that he will spin out into another one of those episodes like he did last spring when one of his roommates called the 5150 team on him. Of course, they didn’t admit him to the psych ward; he doesn’t really have a mood disorder. He tends to splinter when he’s under stress. So do I.
My splintering tendencies, I’m fairly sure, are behaviors I learned from watching my mother decompensate on a regular basis. She was a borderline personality.
I suspect Robin’s splintering tendencies are behaviors he learned from watching me. I feel guilty about that.
The operative term there is “learned behaviors.” Learned behaviors can be unlearned.
He had a great summer and seemed to be having a great fall, so of course, he never did therapy, which is something I’ve been after him to do for years now. Some sort of cognitive behavioral therapy, which would give him an arsenal of tools he can use when he spins into those dark places.
“I hate my fucking life! I wish I was dead!” Robin snarled.
“So, what should I do?” I said. “Call the psych techs now? I mean, why wait?”
“Patrizia! Stop,” said Ben. He sighed and looked at Robin. “It’s gonna be okay,” he told Robin. “I understand that you’re really scared now, you feel violated –“
“I spent a hundred hours collecting those mushrooms!” Robin said. “It was the best mushroom collection in the class.”
Ben sighed. “I’m going to tell you a story. When I was in my early 20s, I spent three years in Florida putting together maybe the best rattlesnake collection in the United States of America. With a representative of every known rattlesnake genus. Maybe three zoos in the United States have rattlesnake collections that good. And then I got a phone call – my father was dying. So I had to go back up north.
“I took the rattlesnakes with me.
“My father died the day after I got there. So the house was in an uproar with visiting family and friends, and funeral arrangements. I figured it would be best to house 65 rattlesnakes elsewhere – my mother was in no mood to appreciate them.
“I called a friend – brought them over to her house. And then the day after the funeral, her power went off and every single one of my rattlesnakes died from the cold. Every single one!
“Well, of course, there’s no comparison between the death of a father and the death of some rattlesnakes. Still. I was crushed. So believe me, I understand how you feel.”
This perked Robin up enough to nibble a burrito.
###
We bought him a new phone.
I guess unless I can scare the landlord, I end up paying Robin’s rent and buying him food for the next three months since I have an income and Ben really doesn’t.
There goes my discretionary income till 2015.
Robin doesn’t get a free ride on the idiocy of keeping large sums of cash anywhere but in a bank account, but timing is everything, so that conversation will need to wait.
I mean, I don’t want him to drop out of the University.
He is at a really good school, and he is doing very well academically.
On the other hand, it would never occur to him to be the slightest bit grateful that I will be bankrolling him for the next three months at some sacrifice to myself. Gratitude would be nice. My own mother would never have done something similar for me, which is one of the reasons I would – of course – do it for him. Good parenting is if you do everything the opposite of the way my mother would have done it. By definition.
###
Ben and I ended up having a lot of fun together just hanging out, crisis notwithstanding. He did not end up coming back down with me for Big FDR Fun, though.
And I felt very low on the drive back to the Hudson River Valley. Through those strange little Catskill towns I’m so obsessed with.
Basically the deal is that the family's cursed, right? That there’s some supernatural force at work. That there will always be some monumental crisis bubbling up that will get in the way of having simple, wholesome fun.
I’m at a safe remove from it now, protected by the psychic powers of Linda, the Good Witch.
But Ben, of course, is at the epicenter. Nothing in his life has ever or will ever work out right. Ben is just fucking doomed.
And I don’t have enough maya to protect Robin from the curse of being Ben’s son.
The karma will be way worse if that creepy burglar ends up selling those fucking mushrooms, and somebody dies as a result. I certainly hope the Syracuse cops are hip to that risk.
