THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP

With Johnny Paul out of the way, I didn’t have to spend time worrying about the pro’s and con’s of alleged mysteries, so I could concentrate all my energies on being civil to Mrs. Gravitts five days a week. The problem was the weekends. Just being around Johnny Paul gave me the thumps too bad to want to play football or build trolleys or go crawfishing or do any of the neighborhood things he might be involved in, so I was hard pressed to find a lot else worth doing all day long on these winter Saturdays. Reading the dictionary can only take you so far.

One night after the show was over at the Rio, I went next door to Green’s Drugstore to get a chocolate ice cream cone. I noticed on my way back to the soda fountain all kinds of new-colored ballpoint pens; there were turquoise, purple, and metallic gold pens that came not only in fine points but in those smooth-writing broad points that I just couldn’t get enough of. Not having much of a sweet tooth, except for seven or eight Cokes a day and an occasional chocolate ice cream cone, I guess a fascination with and craving for writing instruments replaced what most kids felt about candy. I spent lots of time using all different types of pens and pencils while working on trying to duplicate the writing of everybody in fifth grade. I was pretty good too: you’d have thought I had some sinister motive the way I stuck at it until I got everybody’s signature just right, but it was all completely innocent.

The thing that happened as a result of my trip back to the drugstore that night, though, was anything but innocent. It was what I would later learn to be a prime example of the saying that idleness is the devil’s workshop.

Right after I noticed all those colorful pens, I also noticed that there weren’t very many people working in the drugstore. There was somebody in a white coat in the pharmacy, a lady filing her fingernails in the cosmetic department, a couple of ladies behind the counter making malts and grilled cheese sandwiches, and that was about it.

I should have honed in on the dangerous thing that was happening inside my head because the scenario that was developing in there was the graphically focused photograph that I would inevitably turn into reality. I began picturing myself moseying over to the pen aisle and after innocently taking one off the shelf to further investigate, I’d just slip it under my blouse and into the waistband of my jeans and saunter casually out the door into freedom with a brand new broad-point turquoise pen with no one the wiser and without spending a dime. I could visualize perfectly how it would all go. Then I snapped back into reality and shook my head at such a ridiculous notion that I might ever actually steal something that I didn’t even need but if I did my parents would certainly buy for me.

But even after I had walked all the way down to the corner by the barbershop and stood waiting for someone to come pick me up, the vision would not abandon my brain. There it all was in vivid Technicolor collaborating with my conscience — trying to make some sort of sinister deal.

I should have struck up a conversation with my daddy on the way home about how things were going with his attempts to get the Birdman of Alcatraz out of prison and into Toledo Lodge, his nursing home, or what all he planned to put into his survival kits he was planning to market since we were all involved in the Cold War and under the threat of a Russian bomb. The only thing I knew for sure he was going to put in them was Kotex because all of our closets all over the house were so full of boxes of Kotex that none of the doors would even close anymore. It could have been embarrassing, but once you’ve lived through the trauma of enduring a week with a chair growing cockeyed out of the sheetrock above the deepfreeze, you get pretty immune to embarrassment.

But I didn’t inquire about any of his projects. I just rode in silence under the spell of shoplifting while he kept elaborating about the spaghetti sauce he had made that was, as he described everything he cooked, “larrapin’ –– the best thing you ever flopped a lip over.” My imagination’s foray into crime was a spell that was even stronger than the anticipation of good food. I had heard Mr. Pete read a psalm once about God’s love being better than the finest of foods. This was the devilish side of that same coin: wickedness had consumed my mind, and not even the thought of my daddy’s larrapin’ spaghetti could break the enchantment.

And sure enough the next Saturday I hauled off and became the very pen thief that the devil had shown me I could be. It went just as I had envisioned it. It was so pitifully easy that before long I was swiping pens left and right without even thinking about it. I had a whole cache of pens — one of every color in fine, medium, and broad points. Shoot, I could have set up shop at the Dairy Queen after school and made more money than you could shake a stick at, if I had needed money, that is, and of course, I did not.

That was the big, shocking shame about the whole thing: I was practicing being a juvenile delinquent not because I was desperate about needing anything and not even because of rebellion; I was becoming every bit as bad as Jesse Pugh and the Beckhams for no other reason than boredom. I just plain had too much idle time on my hands and not enough gumption or religion to know what to do with all of it.

Somebody probably should have been teaching me skills like how to clean the bathroom, change the sheets, or sweep the floor because not only was I flirting with a lifestyle encumbered with lots of trouble, I was at a total loss at Girl Scout Camp, Whispering Pines, every summer when it came time for our cabin to clean the dining hall and I drew sweeping as my chore. But nobody was teaching me any of that because we had a maid named Hearice, and so I was teetering on the brink of true hoodlumism.

But then just as suddenly as it had struck, it ended. God reached down and took hold of me by the scruff of my neck and brought my thieving ways to a screeching halt. Nanny used to say that God worked in mysterious ways, and I believe it because He chose to deliver me from evil through blackmail, or at least alleged blackmail which works just as good as the real thing when you believe it’s real as much as I did.

One day at recess Mary Nell Bobbitt hollered across the playground, “I know ALL about your little secret, Jen Crocker!” The only other person who knew about me stealing was Carla Nations, whom I had decided to teach the ropes so that I would not rot away in jail alone, and I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t have told Mary Nell. But still, you could just tell by her voice that somehow she knew. I wondered if maybe it was the Great Whisperer again, letting Mary Nell in on our secret in a supernatural way so that she could scare at least this part of the devil out of us. It surprised me that I cared so much about what other people might think about me doing this, but something about being labeled an out-and-out thief put enough fear in me that I quit thieving but fell into something even more shameful: I pretty much became putty in Mary Nell’s hands.

Even though she never came right out and named the sordid secret she hollered across the playground about knowing, I was so scared that she would blab all over Azalea Heights that I was a kleptomaniac that I fake-laughed at all her corny jokes and told her everyday how pretty she looked for a whole year. She might not have really had any idea about my ever having even a dishonest thought, much less a vision of becoming a thief that had come true, but it was enough to set me on the straight and narrow about stealing stuff.

A little later on I read this saying by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” As I thought back on those days when I was lured by ink pens and thus bewitched by thievery, I wondered how I had been lucky enough to have fallen out of Mr. Emerson’s deadly cycle so that my destiny was not to end up a hardened criminal behind bars for the rest of my life for armed robbery.

( Chapter 14- Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, by Jan Doke)