Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

on what he’d rather be eating.
Spook girls have good legs, he says. “There’s a pretty little spook girl works over to the nigger
store. I’d like to take her home to my wife and say, ‘Here you go. Treat her like a sister.’ Get me some
pigger nussy, some soul hole.”
“Monkey and the baboon playing in the grass. Monkey sticks his fingers up the baboon’s ass.”
“It was easier to get pussy back when girls didn’t have no cars and had to depend on men for
rides.”
“Slippery as a puppy’s peter.”
“Get me a granny raisin cake. It’s got a pitcher of an old granny on the cover with her hair all up in
a bun. If they don’t got none, buy me a male Hershey bar—you know, the kind with the nuts.”
To a fifteen-year-old girl he called out, “C’mere so I can smell of it.”
At the end of the day he decided that I’m too shy with women.
August 13, 1981
Raleigh
Today T.W. asked, “Did you get any cootie last night?” At the sight of one girl, he said, “She could
make a bulldog break her chain.” When a young woman passed on a bike, he yelled after her, “Don’t
you know it’s illegal to peddle pussy in this town?”
August 14, 1981
Raleigh
Today I helped T.W., mainly fetching tools. He says my problem is that I had me some college and
that all those students at Kent State should have been lined up and shot. T.W. is a member of the
Johnston County KKK. At lunchtime he said he was so hungry he could eat a horse dick fried in tar.
We went to the Big Star to buy lunch. It’s my grocery store, the one I shop at, and I withered when he
started barking at women like a puppy.
T.W.’s best hunting dog just died. He has her kidneys and her spleen in a jar in the front seat of his
truck. After work he planned to take them to the vet.
August 27, 1981
Emerald Isle, North Carolina
Dad wants to buy a beach house and name it Apedia, after Yia Yia’s hometown in Greece. He does
this every year—gets us all cranked up about a cottage. The real estate agent told him at the start of
our vacation that the age of the private beach house is over, that times are changing, and that he might
want to consider a condo instead. One of the ones we’re staying in is for sale, so Mom sits up late,
drinking wine and thinking of how she might rearrange the interior. If we buy a place, we’ll need to
rent it out at least ten weeks a year. That means furnishing it with stuff we won’t cry over when it gets