The Purse Snatcher Letters Page 3

Bernard,

  This guy I know, his name is Roger Jason Benson – I like that name – he’s a real crook sort of person, always, the sort of guy makes a whole elaborate thing out of being a crook, I’m surprised he doesn’t wear a burglar outfit and tip-toe everywhere he goes. He gets to be a bit much at times, but I was in the town where he lives and he was putting me up so I didn’t have to worry about spending on a room for awhile. We were drunk or high like all day every day and he wanted me to help him out with breaking into some store he used to work in - or one location where he had substituted, but the same company – it was a bad idea, but I wanted to keep in his good graces so we planned it out. It wasn’t the worst plan ever, he’d managed to – months and months before – nab a spare set of keys to the location and he was fairly certain he still knew the password to the safe, but even if he didn’t there was allegedly enough material that it’d be worth the trouble. Long story short, we robbed the place pretty thoroughly and wound up flush for awhile.

  Roger is good because he’ll sell all sorts of things I get out of purses for an even split, he takes all the possible trouble. I don’t understand anything about any of that - interesting as I find it, it just is a world I like to only be peripherally associated with. I could never be a burglar, never deal in something like that, man. But I’m glad I know him, because I cleaned up the time I spent in town, only had to grab a few pocketbooks and most of those I could do less aggressively, cherry pick. A good week or so, awhile back. Pleasant.

  It’s kind of dismal where I am, now. This is like one of the towns you wonder do they actually exist if someone takes a weird turn in a horror film. They have a library in what looks like an old auto parts store - a sign clearly indicating the library hours are from noon-until-five, but at one-thirty and then at regular intervals after this for two days straight I’ve tried the door and peeked in the window and no one is there. They have a building marked City Hall, but dig: this is just a rear door on a rusty colored brick building - no windows or anything, there’s just like a service door and a bronze plaque above it that says City Hall. I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t think it’s like a bar or a gentleman’s club – firstly because there is a bar, a busy one, just cattycorner and secondly because I cannot imagine there being a strip club in this place. I haven’t worked up the balls to go in.

  So, what am I doing here, you may be wondering – out of both curiosity and genuine concern for your big brother. Well, I signed up for a job off of a bulletin board at a highway rest stop – yes, that’s right, you read that sentence correctly – and this is where it wound me up. The job was advertised as Rock Clearing and, yes - yes fancy pants - that is just what it sounds like: there is a field, it is full of rocks, I and several other people go out into this field and we each have a wheelbarrow and we fill it up with rocks – like just rocks that are all over the ground – and we take these rocks to a big pile where a guy has a tractor and he scoops them all into a big dump truck kind of thing and apparently he can then sell these rocks, it’s his rock-selling business. As I understand it, there are allegedly many rocks interior to this soil, as well, so once the superficial rocks are cleared we are going to be given pick-axes and have at it.

  This pays me alright and I’m staying in a room at one of these houses out in the lost, lost middle of nowhere – yeah, I wouldn’t dare to steal anything out here, because it’d be the last anyone ever heard of me. Though honestly, I’m a little bit tempted to just see would I actually be tortured to death or is there an actual, basic civility that would just have me arrested and jailed or something. How could there be jail, here? You get a little bit away from things and these questions become serious. Like, were I arrested here - say I nabbed something and got caught, red handed, no prayer of defense - would I honestly have to submit to jail here? Or would I be sent someplace where it’s reasonable they would have a jail? Though, on the other hand I’ve seen documentary programs and jail seems pretty awful, so maybe it’d be better to be jailed out here - they still think it’s like in a spaghetti western, right? I just sit in a little cell, chat with the deputy all day, they get to know me, we play cards and all, it gets so I just lock myself in at night after doing the chores.

  I’ve tried to call mom - I don’t ever dial the whole number, but here’s something funny: if you dial one number wrong of mom’s number it connects you to a taxidermist. I don’t know why I find that so funny, but I do. If someone was calling the taxidermist and got one number wrong, they’d call mom, you know? I have to imagine it’s happened, so I sort of want to ask her but I think that would be a bizarre thing to ask her I suddenly call her up. Anyway, I had some make-believe conversations with her where she speaks highly of you and all, but I think she has the wrong idea, still has it that you’re her little baby thing, right? Or have you matured enough to air some of your dirty laundry to her? – that thing with Carmen and all of it, did you get some motherly wisdom, does she know what a rat you can be when the chips are down?

  I’m joking. Kind of.

  I get the feeling that I could marry one of these girls around here. They are none of them knock-outs, in any department, but after a few days one gets used to the local peculiarness of how folks look - and there is a curious sexuality to some of them. I’m mortified to get alone with a girl around here, just because I only had my few suits and had to buy some work clothes when I first got here and the day I walked around in a suit – a rack suit, you know, a K-Mart suit – I got all kinds of looks and people still ask me what I do for a living, back home. Please note: they ask me this, but no one has yet asked me if I do something else back home why am I clearing rocks in a field, all day. That’s just it though, to these people clearing rocks in a field is just the same as anything, it’s like working at a Sports Authority in a metropolitan area - so what, right, “But what do you really do?” Anyway, I’m starting to get a thing for some of these girls, but it’s more awkward than, for example, starting a relationship in a foreign country, because superficially it seems like we’re all on the same page, but I have absolutely no idea what in the world about these people. Obviously they procreate and all, but still.

  You know how much I used to shoplift, right? I don’t know if you were ever so hip to that, but I shoplifted like a loon when I was a little bit younger than you are now. I never tried for anything big, just sketch books and oatmeal cookies and cheese puffs and VHS tapes – oh yeah, you know about it, that’s where I got all of those double feature kung-fu movies we used to watch ‘Shaolin Temple versus Lama’, ‘Shaolin Against Lama’, ‘Shaolin Red Master’. Did you know that ‘The Bone Crushing Kid’ is also available called ‘Monkey In His Master’s Eye’? I guess a lot of those kung-fu movies probably are out there under all sorts of titles, but it makes me wonder - how does one person translate it to ‘Monkey In His Master’s Eye’, but them someone else translates it to ‘The Bone Crushing Kid’? Those are different things, entirely.

  I miss you pretty pointlessly sometimes. We were close, right? A few years ago, I was in a bad way, I saw a therapist for awhile and when she asked about family I mentioned you and she said “Are you close?” and I was so effusive that we were, so radiant about it, that we had a rapport like nothing else, like it didn’t matter how long we’d been apart - we get together and it’s Zam! we’re just chatting and close and like we’ve never been away for a minute, none of it matters. Is that true, though? I think it’s true, but some other weird stuff about how I feel about mom and like stuff about my adolescence I never ever had thought of before came up and so it made we funny for awhile. I love you. Am I just an idiot for thinking that you love me? Or not an idiot, but you know, is it something I shouldn’t just presume so much? Never mind.

  I read that back. I like that - “Never mind”. I don’t erase it, I just write “Never mind”. Christ. Well answer if you want to answer, but I’m practically in love with you I love you so much, man, and that’s fin
al.

  My therapist, getting back to something less awkward to write – and certainly less awkward to read, yeah? – she had to keep reminding me that she wasn’t a priest, because I’d start talking about purse snatching and stuff like it was the bloody confessional or like it was a dramatic monologue and she was there to enjoy the performance more than to function in a medically relevant way. It was sort of stupid to talk about - her being a woman and all - but she weathered it like a champion, even jabbed at my manhood. It’s just smarter for a man to steal purses than wallets, smarter on every level. It’s true - and I don’t deny it - that I am far too much of a coward to even think about getting up to something with someone my own size, but that’s just smart, considering my lifestyle. I said all that to her and she really got a kick out of it, like she really seemed to get a giggle from that. “You’re funny” she said and it was like the first time a girl whose getting a thing for you says it, like it was a good thing, something that she was relieved and excited about.

  I didn’t tell her bad stuff though, like I sometimes want to tell you. I didn’t tell her about how I’ve used like high school photos of some ladies kids to get off to - weird stuff like that - how when there was this pair of panties in this one purse, I wore them for a week and was disappointed that when I washed them they didn’t really smell like a woman anymore, so that’s the only reason I ditched them. I would’ve been too embarrassed to tell her that, right? But I actually told her about the time – this is when I was fifteen, fourteen or fifteen or something – I used some shampoo to get off with, but not in the shower and I fell asleep after finishing up without having really washed up and I woke up with my do-dad and balls so dried out it was like I had a bunch of crumpled up grocery receipts between my legs. So I tell her that – but did I ever tell her this: I actually wore a ring I found in a purse and kept the picture of the woman, pretending to myself - just to myself - that she was my wife and I’d have whole long pretend conversations with her in my hotel rooms - she’d make me laugh and we’d get down to it on the bed or in the shower, I just acted out a little make-believe life for a few weeks, in my spare time, just did my thing, but when I was alone I’d pretend this whole little life.

  Jesus. No, that makes me sound like a nutjob. But no really. I think it’s all pretty normal - it’s not like I got divergent about it, I was just lonely and probably really, really guilty feeling so my mind goes into a gentler, more nurturing mode and I need to convince myself I can be tender and loveable.

  Punchline is I wound up pawning the ring, right? Incorrect, my lad, incorrect. I buried the ring. I buried it in some mulch outside of a gas station.

  I really would have married Caitlin – but you probably never would have guessed that, right? But I would have. I sometimes like to think she would say the same in a letter to her little sister, that she would’ve married me - and then maybe we meet and we just say screw it and get married. But I obviously have a lot of time on my hands to think about things and live my active life of fantasy. Even in this fantasy life, though, let me tell you something: even in my fantasy life - say with that woman whose ring I wore or whoever - if it gets to the point that I tell some pretended woman about what I do, what I’ve done, I never make believe they stay with me. It always ends in disaster.

  Oh, how did I not tell you about the clinic, here? It’s like where everyone hangs out, for some reason – it’s a clinic/hospital and on breaks from clearing rocks everyone hangs out in the lobby – there’s a self-serve frozen yogurt machine and a television and I just can’t get over it. I mean, patients go in and out of exam rooms - there are two doctors on staff, I think one lives in an apartment in back - but it’s a hang out. Anyway, not so weird in and of itself, but get this: folks called “local presenters” come in, give speeches or lectures about whatever their little deals are and everyone – the locals anyway, I play along and imagine the few others who just drive in for the day play along, as well – everyone sits rapt to attention. This woman talked about how she put colored tissue paper on her windows in one room and so the light in that room is so lovely and she thinks it makes the ghost of her mother happy because it looks like a church. This other guy just talked about three different games of soccer he played when he was seventeen – nothing of importance happened in these games, there is no life lesson, he just blandly narrates what he remembers of the games. I’m going to do a presentation about stealing purses, I think, but not really.

  I’m picking up on this letter after leaving it around for two days, unfinished. I’m leery of writing when other people are in the house, think they just sit down there listening to the thack of the keys – not upset, just listening, listening.

  I got in a fight. I got in a fight at a bar. I apparently had offended this one fellow, somehow – I mean this fight was ridiculous, it was the biggest, oddest thing ever to go down – and he incoherently blathered at me, then he started pushing me and I was just trying to back away but got pinned up against the wall and so I just shoved back a little bit and it was like a bad movie, everyone went “Ooo” like I shouldn’t have done that and he swung at me to splat my head open. I could narrate the whole thing, but sufficed to say that I wound up having to stab his thigh with a dart - I stabbed his thigh with a dart. But afterward, we were both taken to the clinic and he seems like he’s forgotten all about it – I’ve seen him around and he just seems like I don’t bother him.

  Two more days clearing rocks. I could leave, but they’re clever, don’t pay you until the end. I really think even if I told them I’d learned that something dire was going on with the family, they wouldn’t pay me until the rock clearing was all done. Two more days clearing rocks and I’ll have some good money in my pocket and can take a vacation or something.

  My injuries – knew I’d forgotten something, that story seemed so much more impactful than I felt I’d written it – my injuries consisted of a swollen shut left eye, a cut across my right palm, my pants had one of the legs torn almost clean off – that’s not technically an injury, but understand what I’m saying, like in a cartoon or something, one of my pant legs wound up just hanging on by a handful of threads – and I have just a bruising up both sides of my ribs, I start convulsing if I sneeze, like I black out for a moment. I got roughed up by this barbarian. But, I think it proves my point from somewhere else in this letter that this is why I’m smart to only steal from girls.

  Okay, another gap in time – last days in town were torture, work wise, and I didn’t feel like writing. I’m in a hotel waiting on a four am train, been out of that town now a whole day.

  Checking in downstairs, there was a drunk lady in line behind me and she kept trying to scoot around in front of me – she’d disguise it that she was just taking another of these free mini-cookies, but then she’d slyly walk backward, try to wind up in line in front of me. Half of me was like “Let her get in line, first” but then I remembered that I can’t be a doormat to drunk women in hotel lines.

  I’m all the way up on the top floor and I can smell the fast food restaurant from way down below. I’m still awfully discolored and just walk around my room naked, twisting around to see myself in the mirror all sorts of ways – if I were a perv, I’d include photos for you, but I’m not a perv, you perv. The black eye at least now looks respectable, like I could come across as like I’d won that fight. I’m worried I should see an actual doctor, though, because I haven’t been able to get it up in days – not that there’s been much stimulation, but even my great imaginative faculties are not doing anything and I wake up in the morning flaccid and the whole dangle just seems a tad too grey looking. Detailed medical diagram to follow:

  I’m not really gonna draw you a picture of my dangle, you jerk.

  But I will see a doctor. These are the dangers of the life of the artist, you know? Thing happen to us, no one sympathizes - they say “Make it into your artwork – any godawful thing you endure, make it into your art, don
’t complain!” Artists shouldn’t complain, though. I agree with that. I guess there’s a grey area if someone went through something awful and then they became an artist – that’s fair, like someone had a dark time of it, somehow, and then later they’re a painter, they can still complain - but only about the past things, any new trouble they just need to suck it up, do another painting.

  That’s my advice to painters: I hope you’ve become a painter so it’s helpful to you or at least that you know some painters so you can pass it on to them. What do you do? I always figured you’d be an artist, figured you’d be one of those weird collage artistes, you were always good at pointing to various things and saying “Hey, look at this and this” and then saying something pertinent about why I ought to look at either, let alone both.

  Look, I’m getting on this train and want this letter done so it doesn’t seem like it’s hanging over me, unfinished. I miss you a lot and think I’ll call you in a day or two - or at the latest when I get in to the next town I decide to stop. I got a ticket all the way across the country - cheap seats, but I’ve been on a train before and the cheap seats are just as good as the compartments – the compartments can actually turn out to be a hassle, if you can believe it.

  Why did mom all of a sudden change her answering machine? It’s kind of eerie. And here’s what’s weird – I was reading this letter back, it got me thinking about mom, so I tried to call again and let it go to her answering machine, but it’s a new message. She’s had that same message for the last twelve, fourteen years and then this new one. I know it’s pretty new, because I kind of lied that I never dial her number proper - I have sometimes and I know I thought about leaving a message maybe two years ago and the message was the same as it always was. If you know anything about why she changed it, I’d love to know. Anyway, she sounds really good, she sounds happy.

  Alligator,

  (signed Hugo Cambridge)

  fifteen, October 2005

  Letter no. Three