I stole my best friend's big brother's Star Wars laser pistol when I was eight. I was quickly found out, beaten up and thrown in a rose bush. Harsh toke.
But I didn't learn my lesson and carried on stealing whatever I wanted. Flash Gordon figures, Gobstoppers, Piers Anthony books and a plethora of miscellaneous crap from school.
When I was 15 I decided that I wanted a Slush Puppy t-shirt. The only way to get one was to save up 50 proofs of purchase from the short lived and godawful Slush Puppy bubblegum. So I'm not going to chew the shit so I'm sure as hell not paying for it. So every day at lunch the whole grubby skater crew would pile into my Mazda truck and we would go wherever for lunch. This time we went to Circle K which was good because I needed some proofs of purchase for my quest. It was always a big scene at that particular place. So amidst 25 rowdy high school fucks I snuck over and put 14 packs of Slush Puppy gum in the inside pocket my jeans jacket. I proceeded to mill about with my people. In a nonchalant way. Well fuck next thing I know two cop cars pull up and the lady behind the counter points at me and the jig is up. So I got cuffed and stuffed in front of dozens of my peers. I spent the rest of the day in jail. My dad was pretty riled up when he came and got me and I was put on massive punishment. But of course with the friends I kept at the time, I was a hero around school and being publicly arrested helped solidify an image that I wanted right then.
The band teacher decided I was fuckup and wasted no opportunity to belittle me in front of everybody. Mostly accusing me of anything that went wrong and then throwing in some spicy namecalling. So one day when I would have had an orthodontist appointment but didn't, I asked to leave marching practice early like always. He had no problem with this because it was already an established routine. So I went in to the band room, put away my tuba and then stole all of the money I could find out of the flute and clarinet girls' purses. They were always bitches to me. Then I went in the teacher's office, called my buddy and we tore off and bought an ounce of weed.
Senior year things started getting a little more ugly. I was running around with this crew of guys that liked to drink beer, sniff meth and go jockeyboxing (car prowling as it's known in some areas). Every night of the week we would get shitass drunk and then go steal shit from cars. Dozens of stereos, fancy sunglasses, knives, guns, CD's, clothes, jewelry etc etc etc. Anything anybody might leave in a car, we would take. And to go into this guy's house where we used to hang, it was obvious. He had this long wooden countertop in his room like a workbench. The whole thing was covered on top and packed in underneath with unsold, unused stolen gear.
Well one night, the main dudes got one of the lesser dudes who was absolutely soiled drunk to drink piss out of a High Life bottle. Everybody got a laugh. It grossed me out and I realized that these guys were fun but not my friends. So I just stopped hanging out with them all at once. Within a month's time there was a massive snafu and all of those guys got rolled up and most went to jail. Two dudes, twin brothers, haven't been out of prison for more than one single year since this went down about 18 years ago.
After that I just hung out with my skater/snowboarder buddies. Several of whom were big on old Volkswagens. So you know what that means. Yes. Late night parts thievery. We would go all over town and perform some fairly amazing strip jobs. I always thought it was just movie stuff. But a couple times we'd go to an obviously underappreciated bug and clean out all the little stuff. Then watch it for a day or two. If nothing changed we'd go back and clean out the big shit and leave it sitting. I eventually grew tired of this and just stuck to snowboarding, skating and smoking reefers with these guys.
I repo'd a guy's Range Rover once and while I'm not sure it was handled entirely within the bounds of the law, it was definitely a different circumstance. I never stole anything after that aside from copious amounts of Playstation and Saturn piracy. But I guess that's copyright infringement.
