I am a Fool (with apologies to Sherwood Anderson)
Why some things take longer to write about than others
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Sylvia’s fifteen-year-old nephew Robert greeted me at the door of my apartment the afternoon I returned from Winter break in grad school. “I think someone broke into your apartment, man,” he said. “I saw some guy lurking around the house and then I found your door open.” Sure enough, the door was cracked open, and I ran up the stairs with Robert in tow. “Check to see if anything’s missing,” he said. I looked around the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen. Everything looked the same as when I left it. “I don’t think anything’s missing,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I must state here that not noticing things, present, missing or otherwise, is one of my quintessential character traits. For a writer, I am pathetically unobservant. One of my wife’s favorite tricks is to wait for me somewhere, say at the end of Security at the airport (she always threads through security more quickly than I do), and see how long it takes me to notice her. When I do finally notice her – invariably laughing – she remarks, “You were looking right at me.”
A few years after Robert and I stood in my apartment trying to determine if something was missing, my apartment in Chicago was broken into and robbed. When the police showed up (my housemate later related), they pointed to my room and wondered why it had been singled out for “ransacking”
That’s just the way my housemate keeps his room,” she told them.
Another character trait of mine that I’m not particularly proud of, but that plays a part in this sad story: I am messy.
Robert once again asked me if something was missing.
Everything seemed to be in its appropriate pile. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Wait,” he said and pointed to my stereo (this was in the days of stereos). “What happened to your cassette deck?”
Good eyes, I thought. Robert had been to my place a few times with his aunt Sylvia and her boyfriend, the cartoonist Berke Breathed. Sylvia lived downstairs from me and we were often in one another’s apartments, chatting or watching TV. Berke was the first millionaire I ever met. At 26, his comic strip, Bloom County, had taken off, and he was so rich he didn’t know what to do with all his money. He and Sylvia had moved up to Iowa City from Austin, where they had met at school. Sylvia was attending medical school in Iowa and I was attending the Writers’ Workshop. Robert had come to live with his aunt for a while because he needed to get away from a problematic school situation. What that situation was, no one specified and I didn’t pry. In sixth grade, I had gone to live with my grandmother in Florida to get away from a bad school situation, so I was sympathetic to Robert. He seemed like a good kid, friendly and talkative the way I had been up until his age.
Yes, my cassette deck was definitely missing. I thanked him and called the police. I asked Robert to stick around so he could describe the guy he saw “lurking around.” This was Iowa City in the early 1980s. Not a lot was going on at the old police station, I guess. We’ve got a report of a stolen cassette deck. Let’s put a detective on it right away. Amazing to think this happened, but it happened. Within minutes, I was speaking to a detective. I told him what had happened and he asked if there were any witnesses. I put Robert on the phone and the detective asked him to describe the lurker. “He was of average height,” Robert said. “A Black Caucasian.”
I probably laughed. I wondered what Robert thought “Caucasian” meant. Just something people said in cop shows when describing suspects? When I was little and Bewitched cut for a commercial break, an announcer would say, “Bewitched is brought to you by Chevrolet. See the USA in a Chevrolet.” I thought broughtoyouby was a single word, more incantatory than meaningful, like Bless you after someone sneezes. Maybe “Caucasian” was the same for Robert.
The detective asked me to come down to the station so he could get some more details, and I obliged right away. The police station was only a couple of blocks away on the same street on which I lived.
To me, all detectives are named Frank. My grandmother’s tenants, a homicide detective, Frank Siriani and his wife Joanne, a nurse, lived above her in Atlantic Beach, NY. Frank was a little more troubled than your typical TV cop of the time, and he was real. He was tough and racist and he visited his brand of trouble on his wife and the people whose doors he regularly kicked down in Nassau County. I mostly avoided him because he scared me. This other Frank, this Iowa City detective, dressed like Columbo in a trench coat, talked a little tough like Frank, which was odd because this was Iowa City and he was investigating the theft of a tape deck. After he interviewed me, he interviewed Robert. He said he would call me if there was a break in the case.
The next day, miraculously, there was a break in the case.
Robert was again waiting for me near my door, and this time with my tape deck in hand. He had an incredible story to tell. He had been walking around the Old Capitol Mall. He saw a guy selling some stuff outside from the trunk of his car. When he went to investigate, he spotted what he thought was my tape deck. “That’s my friend’s tape deck,” he told the man, who was not the same man as the Black Caucasian. The man expressed surprise. “I got it off some guy who sold it to me for ten. You can have it for twenty-five.”
I told Robert he should have gone to the police but Robert said it would have been hard to prove that this was my tape deck. He figured the guy might just run off if he didn’t buy it, so he bought it. “I had the money,” he said. “Anyway, it’s worth a lot more.”
I could see his point and I was grateful to him for his noble action. I promptly reimbursed him and brought my tape deck upstairs.
The next day, I received a call from Detective Frank, and I told him about my lucky break. Instead of sharing my amazement at my good fortune, he was silent. When he spoke, he sounded like the Assistant Principal who had once caught me running in the hall of my Junior High.
“I think you know who stole your tape deck, Mr. Hemley,” he said finally.
“No, who?” I asked. I truly had no idea. I imagined that he had deduced something that a non-professional such as myself would have overlooked, something so subtle yet so obvious that it was staring me in the face all along, something so brilliant –
“Robert, of course,” he said as though speaking to someone incredibly dumb and childlike.
As soon as he said it, I aged at least a dozen years. I still can’t believe I was ever that gullible to the point of idiocy. Of course it was Robert. Why had I not seen that? Why had I believed him when he was practically begging me to accuse him of stealing my cassette deck? Add gullibility as one of my shameful traits.
I’m pretty certain that Frank told Sylvia what her nephew had done. It wasn’t me. I might have carried the shame of it to my grave if not for Frank solving this caper and telling everyone about it. I’m surprised it didn’t make the headlines. The next time I saw Robert it was in the hallway in the company of his aunt. He gave me back my $25 and apologized, head hung, avoiding my eyes. I never saw him again. Within a day, he had been shipped back to Texas where his fate lay either in a military school or one for juvenile delinquents. I can’t remember which.
I did not think, Good, serves him right. I just felt . . . well, sure, betrayal, but more just draped in sadness. I suppose that such sadness came from my own fifteen-year-old self who had sometimes acted out self-destructively. When I was fifteen, I was failing some of my subjects, my older sister was dead. I was fatherless and left more or less to my own devices. I was an inveterate liar and selfish, not so much a thief, but in no way superior to Robert at fifteen.
The way I process difficult feelings is by talking to someone – in this case, it was the director of my writing program. I was sitting in his office, chatting with him about something else, when I blurted out what had just happened with Robert. Maybe not all of it. Maybe I left out a few of the more self-incriminating details that made me seem especially naïve.
I can’t really blame him for his reaction, which was flippant. After all, this hadn’t happened to him, would never happen to someone as worldly as he was. He had not been a Robert or a me when he was fifteen, or he hid it well.
“Well, at least you can write about it,” he told me. “It’s a free story.”
I didn’t reply, but his reaction angered me. Not everything needs to be a story, I thought. You’re trivializing it. I remember thinking that there was nothing I would like to write about less than this story. It’s only now, forty years later, that I have wanted to say anything about it – and ironically, I guess. I never thought I would write about this and now I have. But even now, I don’t understand the person I was back then.