Five Dollar Wrench

The First, Premeditated

Meditation is what well-off people do in order to live with what they've done. Or should've done. "I know the neighbor kid gets beaten. I hear it all the time but I do nothing, and I feel bad, so I'll sit cross-legged on the floor to become at one with the universe." Bullshit. That lady knew better. She needed to do better.

Meditation is for the guilt.

Some people aren't even decent enough to feel guilt. They deserve to get brought down to size.

Premeditation is when somebody like me knows what you deserve and comes up with a plan to give it to you. Years later, I would learn how much that distinction matters. The pre part. But at this point, I was just a pissed off kid.

Bud Marsh needed to get got. He even looked like somebody who needed to get got. You know the type. Buzz cut. Angry face. Big gut, yet gutless. And did I mention, he's a cop? That made the get even better.

I'd stolen plenty of stuff before, but only out of opportunity. This was the first time I came up with a plan, though it doesn't take a criminal mastermind to figure out where a guy lives and when he won't be there.

It's a small fucking town. I knew he lived on that side. The side where people aren't friends with people from my side. Buttmunch and Trina weren't friends, though. Their relationship was strictly transactional.

It took me three Thursdays to find his place. I could have found it in two, but I ended up at the wrong house on my second try. The back door was unlocked and the lady who lived there made good pie, so the trip wasn't a total waste.

The First Thursday:

I waited two blocks away from Trina's house, on Davis Street, because I knew which way he went after their regularly scheduled hump and whump. But which way did he go at the intersection?

Which intersection?

It's. A. Small. Town.

He turned left and went around the bend. Aha! But then where? "See ya next week, A-HOLE!"

Second Thursday:

I waited a couple blocks down, after the corner where Davis becomes Ash Street. I used to wonder why the same street gets a new name just because it changes direction. These days, I know. I digress.

Buttmunch came around the bend, parked in front of an old yellow house, and took a bag of groceries inside. I thought, "Huh. Doesn't look like a cop's house." The next afternoon, I found out why. I'm pretty sure it was his aunt's place. Oops.

Third Thursday:

Buttmunch came around the bend, right on schedule. He passed the yellow house and went three more blocks before parking in front of a grumpy looking white house with a shitty shed in the back yard. "Oh, yeah, THAT'S a cop's house."

I returned the next day.

Everything was locked up tight. The windows. The doors. Even the garage.

I couldn't get in the house, but the shed had a cheap padlock that was easy enough to snap off with a stolen pair of bolt cutters, a little oomph, and a lot of complaining.

"Oh, son of a friggin' buttnugget!!! COME ON!!!"

SNAP!!!

"Finally!!!"

Once I got in the shed, I dragged everything out. His snow shovels and rakes. The dusty gym equipment he never used. The rusty fishing gear. His tools and trinkets. A cooler that smelled like something died in it. The fake Christmas tree. And the goddamn boxes. Half of his shed was stuffed with stack after stack of boxes filled with important-looking documents filed in manila folders.

I left everything in that shed spread across the back yard, and I put a new lock on the door, because it would be wrong to leave his priceless, non-functioning, non-draggable, busted-up lawnmower unsecured.

Actually, I used somebody else's old lock. I'd recently found a rusty Master lock in the trash, while looking for a reason to be going through somebody's trash in the first place. Hey, you never know what you'll find. I found a perfectly usable big-ass lock that just needed a new purpose. There can only be one purpose for a lock that no longer has a key, and this was it.

I didn't even steal anything from Buttmunch. I just wanted him to wonder what the hell happened when he came home and found his stuff sprawled everywhere.

I didn't know it at the time, but this sort of thing is referred to as being premeditated.

Postmeditated is something else entirely.

The Jacobson lady's post-yoga shouting match with her husband is postmeditated. After meditating on the porch, to become at one with the universe, she'd tear her husband to pieces for whatever the hell she decided was wrong with him that day. And make no mistake, she decided.

And me? I followed Buttmunch to his place. I emptied his shed, except for the fucking lawnmower that wouldn't move. Then, I locked him out of it.

It was a plan executed to perfection.

Premeditated.

Even if it's true that dandelions can predict the weather, the fact that it poured down rain on all of his stuff was not entirely my fault. Maybe he should have bought a better lock. Or maybe his boxes of important papers needed to become at one with the universe.