It was really kinda silly when I think about it now.

I mean… all I took (the first time) was a big canned ham, a big block of cheese, a big jar of mayo and two big loafs of bread. You know… to make ham n cheese sandwiches. And since all these items were restaurant sized, I had enough to make a BUNCH of sandwiches. For everyone at the East Center Street apartment. For a while.

Mark was impressed so… that was something.

Anyway, even my nineteen-year-old good boy self was pretty sure that stealing stuff from Tinkler’s was justified at this point. I’d be gone soon enough so again, why the hell not? The management had lied to me after all, Ted seemed to no longer be my friend and now I was getting let go. The only reason I could think of as to why I was being let go, was that I didn’t vote the right way about unionizing the staff.

I guess I was beginning to learn a thing or two about the shenanigans of the powerful. They can lie, and I’m punished. They ask me to choose and I’m punished… for choosing “wrong”.

Sound familiar?

So I felt like they deserved to get took. Even though I wasn’t really taking that much. Their shenanigans seemed to be just begging for some shenanigans right back at em.

Still… it was hard to bring myself to actually do it. I’d like to say I remembered my brief little restaurant rebellion three years before at Perkins Cake & Steak. It would have been nice to think that the memory of me and Wayne sticking it to that mealy mouthed assistant manager Rick, is what got me inspired. It probably would have helped. But that younger me was far from my mind.

Once again, my naive (but soon to be significantly less so) and always eager to please self, really just wanted that “same old same old” thing everyone wants and needs. You know…

Then I got caught taking two bottles of champaign. Shit! That sucked. I only had a few days left to work and now, I didn’t even have that. I remember sneaking down the ally next to the building, to the side door where I’d put the bottles (just as I did with the food a few days earlier) and seeing the note. It said… “Hi Brain, enjoy the champaign but don’t bother coming back tomorrow, or EVER! Sincerely, Phil.”

Great, now I could add trying to get my last paycheck out of a pissed off Phil, to my list of pains in my ass. I knew Phil was going to make it next to impossible and rent was coming due real soon. Never mind the fact that I hadn’t made a car payment on my broke down Fiat in I didn’t know how many months.

I had to get a job and deal with this shit real quick, but what I ended up doing… and if you read my previously posted stories starting with this one, you’ll know exactly what I ended up doing.

What I ended up doing, was to run away. And if you read that story, you’ll also know that by running away, I was about to be exposed to some people who pulled shenanigans for a living!

I think I’ll preamble this transition, this convergence of stories if you will… in tomorrow’s post. Telling this whole thing has brought up certain emotions so I’ll probably post it in one of my non-memoir categories.

Till then, then…