A department store had an ad for an assistant manager. College degree, retail experience.

I had a college degree, retail experience.

They wanted someone with a degree in business and experience in a department store. But they offered me a job as head porter.

I would be in charge of cleaning up the store every morning, getting merchandise from the truck from downtown out on the floor, and sending merchandise from our branch back downtown, or to other branches. Also, during the holidays, keeping Gift Wrapping supplied with wrapping paper, boxes, and ribbons.

Also untangling coathangers thrown in a box for recycling.

I would have a crew. Two black guys, working second jobs, in the mornings, and a white high school kid, working a part-time job, in the afternoons.

I would be a working supervisor, and would clean the store with my crew.

I would do light maintenance. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, painting, and assembling and disassembling fixtures.

The pay was the same as at the factory but for 40 hours a week, instead of 60.

So when I quit I got a raise.

Of course, now I was a supervisor.

I was like a barracks chief supervising the bay orderlies.

After I started stealing, there was a Majolica pitcher in China with Porter written on it. It was for combining draft beer and stout. I wanted it, but thought the symbolism would point to me. I couldn't afford to buy it.

That's why I started stealing. I couldn't afford to buy a pair of baby shoes for Owen, even a pair of cardboard K Mart shoes. We sold a pair of leather, Yuppie-actually, rich person-baby shoes you could pass down through several rich person generations. I had motivation and opportunity and there was no effective deterrent. Security was lax. I was security.

Who will watch the watchers.

I think I wanted to get caught, fired, have to move back to Florida, move in with Brenda's mother, and find a college degree job in Florida, as a technical writer.

But I rationalized it as getting back at the store, getting back at Nixon's wage and price controls, that is, wage controls on labor but not on management and no price controls whatsoever, and getting back at business majors, managers, Hessians, apparatchiks, rabbits, sheep, conformists, milquetoasts, hypocrites, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Why don't I have a book contract to cover the Enron trial? It would be the best thing since Hunter S. Thompson's coverage of the Pulitzer divorce trial, "A Dog Took My Place."

This was John Barelycorn doing my thinking for me.

At least Nixon was having to throw his henchmen to the wolves.