Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

the guy get thrown into the water and so forth. It was…no, maybe that was Venice, or rather they made
it in Amsterdam because of course everything’s so hard when it comes to the Italians. But Amsterdam,
that reminds me of, oh, he was this great old guy who was up near…I think it was Greenland and he
got lost somehow and, well, what with the weather and so forth he got…the thing with, the disease
and he had to cut off his own feet, which is what’s happening right now to Bradbury with the diabetes.
They didn’t remove the entire foot, but they took a part of it and, oh, it’s just been a rough couple of
weeks here.”
October 2, 2001
New York
I called Amy at four a.m. Paris time and finally got through to her. She told me that, a few days
after the World Trade Center collapsed, she went to a play rehearsal on the Upper East Side. The
trains were moving faster than she’d anticipated, and she wound up arriving early, with half an hour
to kill. There’s a Gucci boutique up on Madison Avenue, and, although the brand has never appealed
to her, she went inside and looked around. The saleswoman was pushy, and within ten minutes, Amy
was strapped into a pair of shoes with very high heels. They were uncomfortable, and when she
removed them, she noticed that the insides were stained with blood. Wet blood. Her blood.
The shoes had caused her to pop a blister, but rather than writing it off as an accident, the
saleswoman told Amy that now she pretty much had to pay for them, to the tune of $500.
I can’t fault Amy for giving in, as I would have done the same thing. She bought the shoes she’d
never liked in the first place and was leaving the store when she was approached by what she
described as two hippies. She meant the new, anti-globalization hippies, who are even more selfrighteous
than the old ones. The pair moved up the street, and as they passed her one of them spat,
“The world is falling apart, so let’s all go shopping, right.”
Feeling now both shallow and taken advantage of, Amy went to a deli and asked for a brown
paper sack. She transferred the shoes into it, threw the box and the Gucci bag into the trash, and
continued on to her rehearsal. Eventually she got the bloodstains out with an ice cube, but she
couldn’t return the high heels, as she’d thrown the receipt into the trash can. The world is falling apart
and now she’s stuck with this pair of shoes.
October 6, 2001
Paris
A stranger called and left a message saying that he too knew someone who’d attempted to “talk
pretty.” “My friend tried to say he was hungry, but instead he said, ‘I am a woman’! Ha! Anyway,
keep writing!”
I’d never anticipated that people would want to work the book title into a sentence, though I guess
I should have expected as much. They did the same with Naked: “I told a friend to get Naked. Ha!” or
“I was reading Naked—but, hey, not literally!” Yesterday’s stranger phoned from the airport and
apologized for not having called me sooner.