Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

that I could no longer touch the bottom. He was farther out than I was, and the harder we swam
toward the shore, the farther away we seemed to get. “Try harder!” I yelled.
“Fuck you!” Paul yelled back.
Both of us started to panic after that. I thought of him drowning and of how much trouble I’d be in.
I could almost picture it, heaped on top of the grief I’d be feeling. I grabbed him then, and we both
gave it all we had and were eventually washed ashore. It was terrifying.
August 30, 1983
Raleigh
The woman next door seems to be moving out. Apparently there was a big fight while I was at the
beach and the police were called. Bessie told me this. “Those two was having a free-for-all,” she
said, meaning, I guess, the woman and her boyfriend. She added that the woman had two dogs that
would shit in the apartment. “Then she’d pick up the turds and toss them out the window,” Bessie
said.
September 22, 1983
Raleigh
Last night the neighbors had a huge fight. The woman, who it seems did not move out, is obese
with red hair. She works at a pool hall and lives with a thin, trashy man who’s around my age. They
hold hands a lot on the street and use the phone at Watkins Grill because they don’t have one of their
own.
Their argument started at midnight. I was up working, so I put a glass against the wall. The woman
was slurring and yelling about him running around with a hussy—such an old-fashioned word.
Apparently he can’t hold down a job and spends his days drinking, doing drugs, and watching TV.
They haven’t made love in three days. She won’t let him because all he wants is to get his rocks off.
“You want to climb on and climb off, but I’m a lovin’ kind of woman.”
He said she’s nothing but a cocktease, and when she brought up the hussy again he called her a fat
whore.
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
Then he said that at least he knows who his father is. “Your mother was just a whore like you.”
“No, your mother was a whore.”
“No, yours was.”
“No, yours was.”
She called him a sorry son of a bitch and then he threw her against the wall I had my glass against.