Stealing

My old friend Rivers is still illing, so I thought maybe I'd tell this true little story here in an attempt to either cheer him up or piss him off enough to get him up out of bed.

About fifteen years ago, David agreed to help me try to steal a large, antique iron coat hanger from over in a junkyard across the alleyway from my loft in downtown Los Angeles.

It was wrong to do it, of course, because it was stealing. But it was also stupid to do it because it was dark and a little bit dangerous out there in that alleyway, and we were too old to be doing something like that in the first place.

But there we stood, silloutted by hazy streetlight in the L.A. night, staring at the coat hanger through the chain-link fence that surrounded the junkyard. The fence was 10 ft. high and there was razor-sharp concertina wire strung along its top. And, like I said, we were old men.

The hanger itself was an old, rusty 3-inch-wide iron bar, about five feet long, with big iron hooks welded along its length. I'm guessing it was off the wall of an old barn somewhere in the last century, used for hanging ropes and equipment and things, and had in time come to rest in the corner of that junkyard behind my loft. Honestly, it was probably worthless and might even had been ours for the asking. But I'd been eyeing it through the fence and thinking about stealing it for months, because I figured it would look great on the wall of my loft, and David shared my enthusiasm.

Just looking at it, we figured that either one of us might be able to lift it, but neither of us was willing to try climbing over that 10 ft. high fence and concertina wire, and then climb back over again carrying the heavy iron hanger. In the dark.

Then David, who was always thinking, got an idea.

Up alongside the fence, there in the alley, was a two-tiered platform scaffold on wheels that the work crews could stand on to paint ceilings or do high-up repairs on the lofts. Standing up on the top platform, you'd be about nine feet in the air.

Which David said was perfect. He had me roll the platform right up against the corner of the fence, while he tied a kind of loop in the end of a long piece of old re-enforced clothesline that the painters used to hoist up buckets to where they worked and had left coiled there on the lower platform. Carrying the clothesline, David climbed up the built-in ladder on the side of the scaffold and crawled up onto the top platform. And then he stood up.

O you just shoulda seen him standing up on that platform in the LA moonlight that night, well-dressed as always in a $500 form-fitted black leather jacket and holding the clothesline dangling down at his side.

You just shoulda.

Then David leaned out over the concertina wire and dropped his loop down towards the hanger below him, and after a couple of tries he managed to secure the loop to the hanger. Then he started to lift, and a couple of things happened pretty fast.

The weight of the hanger pulled him down onto the concertina wire and the sleeve of his jacket got snared on the wire. In trying to free his sleeve, he leaned out farther, and the force of leaning farther forward caused his feet to push the wheeled platform out away from the fence. And now he was sprawled across the concertina wire, ten feet in the air.

"Oh GOD, Terry, help me, please!"

And I stood very still alongside the fence below him. Something was very wrong with what he'd said. At work, I'd learned to be kind of a stickler about realistic dialogue, and what he'd just said didn't sound realistic. (O GOD, Terry, help me, please.") Maybe it was the "please." I'm not sure. But SOMEthing. It was too perfect. People don't talk like that.

So I whispered loudly up to him, "David, nobody talks like that."

"Just get me off this g*d**m fence!" he hissed down at me. "Get me OFF!"

And so I did. I rolled the scaffolding back up against the fence so he could leverage himself up off the concertina wire and crawl back down.

But something to bring away from this story:

David Rivers wears nice clothes and uses perfect grammar.

Even when he steals.

TDK (65)

• Last Time Around
  
• Charlie Nevins
  
• Young Men And Fire
  
• Austin Healy
  
• Cathy
  
• David River's Birthday
  
• Han's Pavilion
  
• Muscles, Our Neighbor
  
• John Browne, Learning to Dance
  
• Your Brother Mark Browne
  
• Buster
  
• Celluloid Lies
  
• Nuked
  
• Learning to Box
  
• Dog and Goose
  
• Buses and Such
  
• Stealing
  
• Hookybobbing
  
• Stiles Old Upstairs Apartment
  
• Sign Of The Time
  
• Learning to Drive