Jessy Delfino's Blog

CHALLENGE WINNER and A BIT OF BACK HISTORY REGARDING ONCE HAVING BEEN A KLEPTOMANIAC
by Jessica Delfino

OK, I am going to award Joe with my pretty new shiny free CD for his reply to the Delfino/Flavorpill Challenge.

His answer was as follows:

I would be Edgar Bubblewrapbutt. Then every time a woman would pinch my ass it would make that fun popping sound. As much as folks can't resist popping bubblewrap, imagine how many chicks would line up just to pinch my ass! What the hell, guys line up too. I'm confident in my heterosexual-bubblewrap-ity.

Congratulations, Joe. Please e-mail me and tell me where to send it.

I'd like to give a runner-up honorable mention to Echocat because I really like the idea of being able to sniff white out all day long at a boring day job. That's my kind of party.

All the rest of you - if this was an advertising agency, you'd all be fired. Me, too. I didn't win my tickets. I guess that means I suck. But I get the last laugh - I've already seen Edward Scissorhands. I just like to get things for free. Who doesn't?

I've gotten lots of great shit for free. But when I say free, I mean free of monetary payment. Everything, unfortunately, usually has a price of some kind. I have gotten several free computers from several different men with crushes on me. One guy gave me a computer then he indian gave it to me when he realized computer or not, we weren't fucking. I should have just refused to accept it, but it was really awesome to be given a computer, especially when you don't have one, which I didn't. Plus, he pretended it was a Christmas present. This was several years ago - I guess I was 22. So young and naive. And dumb.

Then, I got a computer from my friend Victor who is just an awesome friend. He had bought a new computer and he gave me his old one. It was a few years old and really not worth too much to him anymore but the sentiment was stellar. He didn't even have a crush on me or anything. Most of the gifts I get are usually in affiliation with someone wanting to have sex with me which really bugs me.

NOTE: If you want to give me something, don't expect me to have sex with you. I might have sex with you because I want to have sex with you, but not because you are giving me something. Also, by you, I mean the proverbial "you." And not you, or you, or you, guy in the back.

I got a laptop from a friend of mine who has a lot of faith in my writing ability. He was a rich old guy who owned a company that got sold and he just swiped a few laptops as gifts for friends and relatives. It was old but nice and yes, he wanted to fuck me. Even old guys - god dammit!

When I was younger, guys used to give me stuff for free all the time. Now that I am older, I am less inclined to accept such gifts because I know that free is a synonym, or perhaps I daresay a sin-o-nym.

I will, however, accept free meals on almost all occasions because I love to eat out at restaurants but don't have the money to do that so often. So, someone has to be either a huge slimeball or just have really bad timing for me to not take them up on a free hot lunch. And I don't mean the sexual innuendo hot lunch that Sylvester Stallone is said to engage in from time to time, and by time to time, I probably mean every day for all I or anyone else knows, for that matter.

I will also accept free advice or tips or compliments, always. And media. I love to find free magazines at the doctors office or the dentist's office. I guess technically, that's stealing, but hey, I didn't say how it becomes free or if that matters. Free is free, stolen or paid for.

I used to be a kleptomaniac when I lived in Maine. It's sad but true. In my small, no future for kids who stay there town of Damariscotta, there was nothing to do. We would walk down to the back town boat landing and throw rocks at horse shoe crabs, we would smoke in a barn in an abandoned construction lot, we would walk around like little sluts and talk to guys who were a lot older than us. We would disobey our parents and drink beer in various friend's cars and at people's houses where there wasn't any parental supervision. It was only a matter of time before I learned that I could get things for free if I simply put them in my pocket. I remember the first thing I ever stole. It was a bag of kitty treats for my kitty. I was 9 or 10. My mom and I had gone to the grocery store and I asked her if she would buy them for me to give to my kitty, Rags. She said no, so I just put them in my pocket. When we got home, I tried to feed them to my cat, but she didn't like them. She turned her little kitty nose at them and walked away. So, I picked them up and put them in my desk drawer. Later, my mom came in and looked in my desk for a pen. She found the kitty treats and beat hell into me. She was so pissed.

But did I stop there? No. A year or so later, my two friends and I were out cruising the streets on foot and we came upon the town hamburger shack (this was before McDonald's had bought it's way into town) and hid behind it to smoke A cigarette - one per the three of us. As we were back there rattling around, my one friend who was like an investigative little cat, jumped up on the ledge and looked in through the window and noticed the window was unlocked. She opened it and climbed in. While she was shimmying her little body through the window, I turned the door handle and opened it right up as her feet were smacking onto the ground on the other side. We went in and walked around the 10x10 space, scoping out what might be worth taking. There were some boxes of soda and chips and we carried them back to her house and munched out. Her boyfriend, who was like 16 and is now dead (he died in a drunk driving accident when he was maybe 19 or 20) was storing his Camaro in her garage. We sat in his Camaro and ate chips and drank soda and listened to the radio and smoked another cigarette or two. We really knew how to party. We decided to split up the soda and chips and take them home, telling our parents that one of us was going to have a party and bought all the stuff and then the party got cancelled so the treats were given away. I took mine home and told my mom the story, and it worked. We sat and ate chips and drank soda and laughed and had a great time on the front porch, watching the sun set. It was very easy to entertain ourselves back in the day, especially in a town with so little going on as Damariscotta. I prayed inside that my mom never find out the true story about the chips because I knew she would murder me if she did. As we were eating the chips, the phone rang and my mom went to get it. I could tell it wasn't good because, well, you know how you can listen in on the open end of a phone conversation and just know if it's good or not. A few minutes later my ass was red and I was crying, chips everywhere. What happened was the girl with the dead boyfriend and Camaro in her garage, she bragged to her step-mom about what we had done, and she called mine and the other girl's parents and ratted us out.

From there, things got more elaborate. My friend Rachel and I would steal make up from Waltz Rexall and then go home and dump it out on my bedroom floor, pouring over the items we had stolen and trading various colors and pieces. We would steal cigarettes from the Puffin Stop or Maritime Farms gas stations where they just kept them right out in front on the counter for any sticky fingered punk to help themselves to.

My friend Robin got a car and we began to take our thievery on the road. We would drive to Brunswick and steal jeans from Sears. We even stole our prom dresses that year. We would just put them on under whatever we were wearing and walk out of the store with them. There were no security tags or anything back then and it was like Sears was begging us to rob them with their blind trust of everyone.

I almost sort of got busted once though, when we went to Ames in Wiscasset. I painted my fingernails with some pink polish and put it back down in place. As I was walking out the door I got stopped by a snaggle-toothen froofy haired security bitch who really looked like she was just a white trash shopper. They had really nailed the part when they hired her. She took me up into a little glass room and searched me. She found nothing on me and so she let me call my boyfriend, who at the time was Steve the fisherman who drove a Ford pick-up truck, to come and get me as I was a minor, but I was living with Steve, which made Steve my legal guardian. (My father had already given up on me and kicked me out at this point - I think I was 16.) She then took me downstairs and we got what we thought was the bottle of nail polish I'd painted my fingers with, in addition to three other bottles just in case the one we'd picked wasn't it. Steve had to buy them all for me, they were 2.88 each. He was not happy. He didn't talk to me all the way home.

All my friends were little kleptos, too. Man, I could go on and on with this, I have so many childhood thief stories but I think I've told so many strangers enough personal depressing information about myself. I guess this is part of the reason I am the way I am today. I'd probably be a piece of trash if I weren't so smart and sophisticated. Thank God for that, then.