I’m very lucky not to have been caught for the majority of my shoplifting exploits, because they were pretty extensive. It got this stupid: on a dare, I lifted an inflated rubber raft from a sporting goods store. It took some planning but I pulled it off, and somehow I didn’t get caught.
It’s no big deal; I’ll reveal my “methods,” such as they were: the raft was hung on a wall near the back door of the store, near the hallway that ran right into the back alleyway. Once I managed to get that back door open without arousing suspicion, pulling the raft off the wall was easy. And once the raft was off the wall and on the floor, hidden from general view by some display of camping gear or whatever, I just waited for the right moment to carry it outside and walk it around the corner to where my friends were waiting for me. I didn’t even keep that raft. Once I’d proved that I’d pulled that dare off I dumped it one block away on someone’s front lawn.
I’m not proud of it, but all things considered, when I was ten miles from home with no money and my bike got a flat, I’m glad that it was easy for me to steal an inner tube from Toys “R” Us. Otherwise, I might have been out there hitching home into God only knows what kind of situations. Still, like anyone who repeatedly tempts fate, I must admit that however often you convince yourself that your actions are necessary when you know that they’re not quite right, they will catch up to you in the end.
In my case, in as much as we’re talking about shoplifting, in the end, I got nabbed at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, which was my parents’ favorite record shop. I remember that day all too clearly: it was one of those moments when I’d known something was wrong but embarked on the adventure anyway. I was fifteen, I think, and I remember thinking, as I parked my BMX bike outside, that I should be careful in this store in the future. That revelation didn’t help me in the short term: I greedily stuffed cassettes in my jacket, down my pants, and glutted my clothing so much that I thought I should probably buy a few albums just to throw the cashiers off. I believe I walked up to the counter with Cheap Trick’s Dream Police and Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, and after I was rung up, I was home free in my mind.
I was outside, straddling my bike, ready to jam when a hand clamped down hard on my shoulder. I denied everything but I was busted; they brought me up to the room above the store where they’d been watching me steal through the one-way window and they showed me the footage. They called my mom; I gave up all of the tapes in my pants and they arranged them on a table for her to see when she got there. I got away with a lot as a kid, but getting busted for shoplifting cassettes at the store my parents had frequented for so many years was an offense that meant more within the confines of our family than it did within the letter of the law. I’ll never forget Ola’s expression when she came up to that office above the store and found me sitting there with everything I’d stolen laid out before me. She didn’t say much, and she didn’t have to; it was clear to me that she was over thinking that I could do no wrong.
In the end, Tower didn’t press charges because all of the merchandise was recovered. They let me go on the condition that I would never set foot in their store again, most likely because some manager there recognized that my mom was a well-liked regular.
Of course, when I was hired at the very same store six years later in the video division, during every shift for the first six months, I was convinced that someone was going to remember that I’d been caught stealing and have me fired. I figured that any day now, someone would figure out that I had blatantly lied on my application form and presumed what I knew to be true: that what I did manage to lift until I was caught was worth more than a few months’ paychecks.
Usually we had weed, which was always a crowd pleaser
ALL OF THOSE PERMUTATIONS WERE going to work themselves out over the next eight years of my life, but only once I’d found a stable family of my own design.
In the vacuum that my family’s dissolution left in its wake, I made my own world. I’m lucky enough that, despite my age, during a period of testing my boundaries, I made one friend who has never been far from me, even when we’ve been worlds apart. He is still one of my closest confidants, which, after thirty years, says a fuck of a lot.
His name is Marc Canter; his family owns the famous L.A. institution Canter’s Deli on North Fairfax. The Canter family moved from New Jersey and opened the restaurant in the 1940s and it’s been a hub for show-business types ever since, because of the food and the fact that it’s open twenty-four hours. It’s only a half mile from the Sunset Strip, and in the sixties it became a haven for musicians and has remained so ever since. In the eighties, bands like Guns had many a late-night meal there. The Kibbitz Room, which is their bar and live music venue next door has hosted too many great nights of music to name. The Canters have been wonderful to me; they’ve employed me, they’ve sheltered me, and I can’t thank them enough.
I met Marc at Third Street Elementary School, but we didn’t really become friends until I almost stole his mini bike in fifth grade.
Our friendship was solidified from the start. He and I hung out in Hancock Park, which was next to the affluent neighborhood where he lived. We used to go down to the ruins of the Pan Pacific Theater, which is where the Grove shopping center is today. The Pan Pacific was an amazing relic; it had been a glamorous 1940s movie palace, with an arched ceiling and huge screen that showed news reels and defined a generation’s worth of cinematic culture. In my day, it was still beautiful: the green Art Deco arches were still intact, though the rest was reduced to rubble. Next to the lot was a public library and a park with a basketball court and a pool. Like Laurel Elementary, it was a meeting point for kids aged twelve to eighteen, who, for one reason or another, found their way out at night.
My friends and I were the young ones on the scene; there were chicks so far out of our league that we couldn’t even count the ways—though we did anyway. There were flunkies and dropouts, many of whom lived in the ruins of the theater and subsisted on the food they stole from the farmers’ market that took place next door twice a week. Marc and I were fascinated; we gained acceptance among them because usually we had weed, which was always a crowd pleaser. Meeting Marc triggered a change in me; he was my first best friend—he was someone who understood me when I felt no one else did. Neither of us have had lives that one might call normal, but I’m proud to say that we’re just as close as we were then. That is my definition of family. A friend still knows you as well as they used to even if you haven’t seen them in years. A true friend is there when you need him; they’re not around just on holidays and weekends.
I found that out firsthand a few years later. When I barely had money to eat, I didn’t care, so long as I had money to promote Guns N’ Roses. And when I didn’t have money to print flyers or even buy myself guitar strings, Marc Canter was there for me. He’d front me the cash to take care of whatever needed to be done. I paid him back once I was able, once Guns got signed, but I never forgot that Canter was there for me when I was down and out.
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