Forced Entry

People keep breaking into the office building where I rent a small room in which to write. Once, they broke through the front door and took the landlord’s bank bag, which didn't contain any money but did contain the keys to the rest of the building, including the door to my office. I immediately called my husband Dave to discuss the costs, advantages and idiocy of installing a deadbolt on my office door. Then I called my insurance agent because I don't have a therapist. I did have one, had a naturopath, too ─ as much as anyone can actually have a naturopath ─ and a family doctor who had a habit of giving me quick advice after complaining to me about her ex.

But the day of the latest break-in, I called my insurance agent to find out how much it would cost to insure my office equipment in case someone broke in and took everything.

"About $100 a year," he told me, "but first you'd have to put together an itemized list of all your stuff."

That list would include the bookshelf that's bolted to the wall and the desk Dave made me that weighs a ton. Even if the thieves were strong I don't think they could take that. So that left the cheap paper holder and wobbly desk lamp, the one I cut myself on while getting it out of the box.

I considered doing all of this but didn’t, in spite of the fact that three days after the break-in, I came to work to find graffiti splattered all over the building. John the landlord and I wondered what it meant. To me, the graffiti looked like a foreign language, intriguing and mysterious, like those marks hobos used to put on fence posts to tell fellow travelers if the woman of the house was generous or likely to chase them away with a broom. I wondered if the front of my office building had been marked "Easy Target. Come on in. Lots of Good Stuff Inside."

John is a rather timid man considering how big he is. He never evicts a tenant, no matter how obnoxious they are. More than once, he's had renters rip the place apart. Once, the sign over his wife's downstairs hair salon was plastered with paint. One Christmas Eve, vandals smashed the plate-glass window in the front of the salon, leaving nothing between the white-haired women sitting under the hair dryers and the all outdoors.

Another time, someone broke in by throwing a rock through the high bathroom window before climbing inside, breaking the sink and toilet and leaving a piece of finger on the jagged edge of the window glass.

And then there was the time someone broke through the back door and kicked down the wall into Joe's jewelry shop before setting off the alarm and high-tailing it out of there. And the time someone got inside and rummaged around in the basement. That time, they didn't break down the basement door but used the key hanging beside it instead, for which John was grateful.

One day, I was sitting in my office when John knocked on the door.

"If your eyes start to water," he said, "get out. It's mace. Joe's safe is the old kind that, if a burglar breaks into, they get sprayed with mace. It got them. They dropped all their tools and didn't get any jewelry."

They did break some lights, though, and a mirror in the salon before making off with a roll of pennies and the Kiwanis mints.

Later that same day, John showed me the office next door to mine. I was thinking of renting it to use as a classroom. Until recently, a middle-aged woman had worked there selling baby portraits over the phone. She'd moved out because the power substation across the street kept messing with her pacemaker. Anyway, there were still baby pictures stapled all over the walls, water stains on the ceiling, unpainted sills and an old, gray rug.

"We're going to have to wash down the walls," John told me. What with the break-in, it had been quite a day.

"Go home, have a beer," I told him.

"Can't," he said. "Gave up beer and cigarettes."

He gave up cigarettes, he told me, by chewing nicotine gum. After giving up drinking, his liver had gone down in size, and his enzymes had returned to normal.

"I don't miss the beer," he told me, "but I sure do miss those cigarettes. I dream about them. I dream I take a puff on the first half and then flick off the ash and then inhale the second half and put it out in an ashtray. But I don't have an ashtray beside my bed. The wife and I both quit. Two months later, she had surgery for lung cancer due to cigarette smoking. They removed the lower lobe of one lung. Boy, that's one way to make sure you don't start up again, to see someone lying there in the hospital with tubes running out of them. Everyday they would come in with a pair of pliers and run it down the tube. The wife said it felt like they were pulling her insides out. But she still says if they tell her she has six months to live, she's going to go out and buy a carton of cigarettes and smoke them up before she goes to bed. We miss cigarettes."

With that, John waved goodbye and then headed back down the stairs.