On one grocery-shopping trip, I asked my mama to buy me a bag of Hershey's Miniatures and she said no. From my seat in the shopping cart, when my mama wasn't looking, I took a bag and stashed it inside my cute little navy blue with white polka-dotted raincoat. Seriously, that was an adorable little coat and I wish I could find a replica in an adult size.
Once we were driving back to the country house, I decided it was safe to start gobbling up the Hershey's Miniatures. I smashed them into my face, even the dark chocolates I still don't like. My mama was busy with my screaming infant sister in her car seat up front (it was the 70s) and didn't have time to pay attention to me in the back seat. My silence eventually caused her concern, and when she finally looked in the rearview mirror, she saw me: face and hands smeared with chocolate.
She whipped that Chrysler to the side of the road and yanked me out. That was one of only a handful of times my mama spanked me. She then turned the car around, drove back to the grocery store, dragged me inside and made me apologize to the owner, Mr. Gerald, as she paid for the candy.
I learned my lesson, and I didn't shoplift again for eight years. My mama went back to work when I was in middle school, and my sisters and I went to my daddy's Western Auto store to hang out after school until she got back from her office job. Each day, Daddy would give us each two quarters, enough for a soda and a candy bar from the five and dime next door. Unfortunately, the grocery store two doors down installed a Ms. Pac Man machine. And I started pocketing candy from the five and dime while supervising my little sisters before going off to play Ms. Pac Man.
I never got caught. Was never even considered a suspect. It was, after all, a small town where everyone knew me as the child of my upstanding-citizen parents. I was the kid sent into a store to buy Vantage cigarettes while my daddy sat in the idling car. Oh if times were still that innocent. If I could have a child to send into a store to buy my smokes, I'd be tempted to have one.
My shoplifting spree didn't last very long. My Methodist upbringing instilled in me a healthy dose of guilt, especially after the one time I had to call the preacher.
When we Methodist kids were still young, but too old for nursery and children's church, we all had to sit on the front pew where our parents in the choir or my mama, the organist, could see us during the service. But when we became adolescents, we started ducking out to the Zip Mart between Sunday School and service to stock up on snacks, which we'd take with us into the balcony. One particularly boring Sunday, my best friend and I, all hopped up on M&Ms, cracked ourselves up and apparently disrupted the service.
Once we got home, my mother called the preacher to make me apologize. I was beginning to feel my oats at that time, so when she passed the phone to me, I said, "My mama says I'm sorry." Bad, bad decision.
After being grounded for several decades, I got the bright idea, as my middle school was walking distance from my house, to invite my two best friends to skip school and come over. So we met up and hid on the outskirts of the kickball field then walked back. It was the funnest day ever! We watched Nickelodeon, made Pizza Quick for lunch and had a water fight indoors, managing to break one of my mama's favorite vases in the process. We found some glue, put it back together, and stuck it in a corner, where she didn't notice it for months. And I blamed one of my sisters.
Then came high school. West Brunswick still had a clause, originally intended for children of tobacco farmers, wherein students could miss up to 30 days of school each year. We crafty kids mapped out each new school year with a plot of days we'd skip. And we did.
Getting caught was nothing more than a slap on the wrist for us. My daddy actually spotted us in town in my bitchin' Camaro senior year and turned us in. In-school suspension was nothing, at best, I actually got my schoolwork done. A few months later, my best friend and I got caught skipping and were sent to the vice principal's office at the same time. When he told us we were suspended for two days, we snickered and rejoiced that the weather was good, so we could go lay out on Ocean Isle. And we did.
For us, it was all about laying around on the beach slathered in Afro Sheen during the day (really, it clogged up all the pores but turned us a lovely shade of orange), and cruising the boulevard in Myrtle Beach at night. I had too many (insert Bruce Willis Vocals) Seagram's Golden Wine Coolers and let a friend drive my Camaro home on King's Highway (Highway 17) one night and she decided to try to drag race a Maserati. And she blew a rod in the engine.
I managed to limp the car home, turning up the Cure on the cassette deck to drown out the pinging sound. The next day, my daddy went out to check on the car, and I saw tears in his eyes for the first time ever.
So I got grounded. I was allowed to go to the prom, but had to be home by 11. My friends all had an awesome place at the beach and partied like rock stars, but I stayed home. Same went for graduation a few weeks later. But then, a week later, after the Superintendent's Excellence Awards banquet where I accepted three awards, my mama decided to let me and my best friend take her Pontiac 6000 down to the boulevard.
If you aren't from the South and have never experienced the Redneck Riviera that is Myrtle Beach, let me explain the cruising experience to you: Bumper-to-bumper traffic of teenagers, college students and too-old weirdos creep along at maybe 5 mph yelling at and flirting with each other. My best friend was driving my mother's car that night and a drunken, be-mulleted redneck staggered up to the passenger window and said, "Y'all are some pretty little mother------s." Standard compliment in Myrtle Beach. And we went home and told my mama we'd been to Swenson's, the best ice cream parlor ever.
That was a big old lie. I'm sorry.
Now that I'm getting things off my chest, I want to admit to all these things that I've done.
* I stashed crib notes for AP biology tests in the palms of my Madonna-inspired, fingerless, lace gloves in high school.
* I did nothing but party in college. I made great grades in my major (English), but I put in the least amount of effort possible, which is why I failed so many maths and sciences.
* When we were studying abroad in London, I just watched English TV and went to pubs.
* I only enrolled in grad school so I wouldn't have to get a job.
* In my first job at a vanity press, I encouraged people to buy the books, knowing it was a total fraud and not worth the paper they were printed on.
* I went three calendar years without an inspection sticker on my car before the state started enforcing it.
* I hooked up with two of my friend's exes and never told that friend.
* After promising not to, I cussed in a courtroom.
* I tricked car salespeople into giving me samples, which I used to further my career in advertising.
* After advertising, I found myself working in an ultra-corporate environment. I hated everything about it. I was tasked with writing a management memo and, to entertain myself, I worked in every corporate buzzword bingo phrase I could think of. I got an "atta-girl" note for it. (I just wrote "I was tasked," the stink is still on me. Shudder.)
* I had free cable in my house for 10 years. When the cable company figured it out, I asked Steve to move in with me and transfer his cable account to my address.
Wow. That felt good. Weight of the world off my shoulders. I hope you don't think less of me.
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