Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

neither of us saying anything until the record had ended. For me it’s ironic that, on a certain level, all
my nineteen-year-old fantasies have come true. All I do is travel from one place to the next, staring
out my hotel windows.
What’s missing, what made the idea so incredibly romantic, was the instability, the series of
boyfriends bound to run off with someone else the moment your back is turned. That’s the sort of thing
you write songs about, not zucchini fingers and a perfect 1-2-3-4 cake sitting in the refrigerator. In that
regard, I’m an equal disappointment to the nineteen-year-old Hugh, who twenty-five years later sits
across from me at the dinner table, kindly allowing me to hit replay after “Song for Sharon.”
July 31, 2001
Paris
Our next-door neighbor returned yesterday afternoon to complain about the noise. Hugh was
chipping out the wall behind the bookcase and I was in the bedroom, waxing the floors. I missed the
whole thing, which is good, as hopefully she’ll forget what I look like. The woman works at home
and wanted to know when the noise would end. She wanted a definite cutoff point, so Hugh told her
he’d be finished by four o’clock. She said that contractors should put up signs stating that the noise
would start on one date and end on another—which would be great but is never going to happen.
We’d been told the work on our apartment would end in April and here it is, almost August.
The woman then started in on the building across the street, and Hugh cut her off, saying that she
was bothering him just as the noise was bothering her. He won’t own up to it, but I’m assuming he
shut the door in her face. A few months back, while they were installing the bathtub, we were visited
by our neighbor on the other side, a man in his forties. He complained about the noise, saying that he
didn’t get off work until after midnight and couldn’t show up at his job with circles under his eyes.
Hugh asked what he did for a living, and, with great importance, the guy said he sold tickets at a
movie theater. He wanted the plumber to do quiet work—dusting or whatever—until the early
afternoon and start with the loud stuff at around three. Everyone has a plan except for the workmen,
who show up whenever they want to.
I turned on the TV last night and was delighted to find Cops, which translates to It’s Worth the
Detour. It was dubbed in French, but you could still hear faint bits of English in the background: “He
claims”; “The suspect”; “Knucklehead.”
The first segment involved a long, high-speed chase along a California freeway. The driver was
shirtless and you could tell he took great pride in his feather-cut, shoulder-length blond hair. When he
was dragged from the car, his first impulse was to comb it out with his fingers and then gently fluff it
up. He was the kind of guy you’d see hanging out at Atlantic Beach, and I wondered what the French
would make of him. Who do they think our criminals are? Mexicans were behind the wheel in the next
high-speed chase, and because they were juveniles, their faces were covered with diamond patterns.
My favorite segment involved a truck driver wearing a leopard-print one-piece woman’s bathing
suit. Someone had apparently taken his wallet, but I couldn’t understand the details. I’m hoping that
Cops comes on every night and that the French will eventually develop their own version. Who are