The Narcoleptic Kleptomaniac Or, Carlisle the Thief

Carlisle awoke to find himself with his pants around his ankles in the lingerie department of Nordstrom’s.  He was clutching a monkey wrench hidden in a woman’s slip, and his head ached terribly.  He knew what had happened.  His perverse inclination to steal things always lead him into potentially dangerous situations, even though he was approaching the status of master thief.  He would sneak into the joint he was about to hit, and the mounting excitement of his incipient act of larceny would excite him so much he would have to jack off.  Pulling his pants down he abused himself in a spasmodic frenzy, depositing the viscous residue of his guilty pleasure into the lilac bush outside the house he was about to burgle, the garbage bin outside the office building from which he moved computers, the truck stop he lifted car radios from. 

After the deed was done, panting heavily, his skinny frame wracked with tingling adrenalin, his freckled face flushed, he would move in on his target.  On this particular occasion Carlisle, as he had so many times before, had fallen asleep after committing his theft.  Blood still circulating in his genitals, sweating a musky, oily sheen, he would swipe his prize, giggling to himself, and promptly pass out.  This made his escape routes problematic.  Having planned an in-depth heist, his efforts were continuously sabotaged by the fact that he was a narcoleptic, and his kleptomania always triggered these bouts of uncontrollable sleep.  He was also a randy motherfucker, and had strung the whole ritual along into one obscene, thieving, nap-time. 

Carlisle had slunk lithely around the side of the Nordstrom’s building, scaled the drainpipe and entered through the roof door.  He descended into the bowels of the stock room and waited for an employee to leave the door onto the floor room open.  His plan was simple: with his monkey wrench he would knock out the day clerk, a young Asian girl who stuttered-an easy mark.  He would ask her the way to Men’s Haberdashery, and then while waiting for her interminable reply-she could not pronounce “H’s” –he would brain her.  Once down, and here he would have to be careful, because the urge to masturbate over her prone form would be strong, he would empty the cash register, making sure to take all the credit card slips.  These could be perused for fraudulent purposes later.  He would then proceed into the Lingerie department and fill his pockets with the scanty, handkerchief-sized nothings he had been longing to give to Cherry Pie, an exotic dancer at a local strip club he frequented after he pulled a job, by way of celebration.  On the way out of the building he would change clothes, stopping by the Men’s floor after all, and don a cap he carried in his back pocket.  His disguise complete, nonchalantly strolling through the front revolving doors of Nordstrom’s, he would step out into the bright sunshine, pockets full of cash, and skip on over to the Pink Beaver to toast Cherry Pie’s amazing acrobatics on the pole with a can of Schlitz.

Why Nordstrom’s, one might ask.  When Carlisle was a little boy he had often wandered by the richly dressed windows of the department store at Christmas time, staring at the toy displays.  Part of Carlisle’s duties as a small child was to pick his father up from work-at his mother’s behest-to prevent him from drinking away his paycheck every Friday evening.  His arrival was always greeted by guffaws and sneers by his dad and the other members of the Sanitary Napkin factory.

“Well looky here, if it ain’t my son Carlisle, boys.  I can never be sure he’s really mine because he pisses like a girl and has that damn head of red hair.  Ain’t nobody in my family has red hair like that.  Go on, Carlisle, show the boys how you wipe yerself like a little girl!  Here, use one of these!” and his father would grab a sanitary napkin from a convenient nearby pile and shove it into his mouth. 

“Oh, that ain’t yer pussy, that’s yer dirty mouth!  I’m always forgetting you ain’t a little girl, you’re my good for nothing damn red-headed son!”

The factory workers laughed and laughed, and Carlisle would turn a red so alarming it competed with the color of his hair.  Ducking his head, he tugged at his father’s hand and they began their walk home, which lead them by the windows of Nordstrom’s.  On the evening in question Carlisle had not been sufficiently humiliated enough in his father’s opinion, who walked along muttering to himself and casting evil looks in his son’s direction.  Carlisle ventured to ask for the train set he had long been dreaming of, with the sadistic impulse of a child who had never been loved overmuch.  His father would never bequeath him the train set, but what followed was as close to Christmas as Carlisle ever got.

Eyes bulging, his father took Carlisle by the neck and shook him so hard his teeth rattled in his head and he tasted blood.  His father was bent over him uttering the incoherent roars of a man forced to put adhesive on the underside of sanitary napkins for a living.  Looking up through the shiny windows of Nordstrom’s, the train whizzing merrily along amid tinsel and little elves making toys for good girls and boys, Carlisle became so deprived of oxygen by the ministrations of his incensed father that he had an orgasm.  He creamed his three-day-old underwear.  He just couldn’t help it.  In fact, it is a natural physiological phenomenon, as any medical journal will tell you.  His father noticed the darkening stain on the front of his threadbare pants and gave a bloodcurdling yell so terrifying Carlisle passed out.  When he awoke, he was alone on the night lit street corner and Nordstrom’s had long been closed.  His ribs felt sore.  He wasn’t surprised his father had kicked him while he was down, and surmised he was off drinking with his Sanitary Napkin buddies.  Walking home, Carlilse knew he would catch a new brand of fury from his mother, and resigned himself to his fate.  He thought wistfully about stealing the train for himself, in order to avoid thinking of anything else in his abject existence.

Back in the moment, Carlisle had gotten as far as the Men’s department.  He was breathing heavily, the Asian girl lay behind her counter in a pool of blood and semen, and his wrench was covered with matted hair and bits of skin.  He had a silly grin on his face, and anyone approaching him in that instant would have thought he was bringing home a straight-A report card.  Once inside the changing room with a new suit on its hanger, Carlisle began the arduous process of peeling off his underpants, filled as they were with seminal fluid, while balancing the wrench and piles of cash in one hand.  The floor was curiously empty, and he guessed that his crime had been discovered and that security had emptied its departments to attend to the horrifying scenario he had just left.  This would give him time to make his grand escape out the front doors.  As he buttoned the houndstooth jacket and pulled his fishing cap low over his forehead, he realized with a sinking feeling he had forgotten to get the panties and negligees for Cherry Pie.  He could not enter the Pink Beaver empty handed, he thought frantically.  He would have to return to the women’s floor.  His composure was beginning to unravel.  He was torn between his spoils already purloined and the ravishing Cherry Pie who would never give him a second glance without compensation.  He chose the glance. 

Sneaking up the back stairwell he opened the door a crack onto the women’s floor and looked out.  The racks of pastel polyester shimmered in smug order, placed in two set panty and bra combinations that rustled beguilingly as he passed, running his hands along the hangers.  The Muzac blared politely from the speakers, and the high pile carpet was trod lightly by the nefarious feet of Carlisle the Thief.  He was in his element.  He would get that train set-uh, the lingerie for Cherry Pie, the stripper.  He fell flat and in a military crawl made his way for the first circular rack of nightgowns as the beams of flashlights passed over his head.  Safely tucked under the flounced lace of lime green hems waving over him like palm fronds he was overcome by a soporific weight which crushed him and dragged him down into a sea of guilt and forgetting.  The guilt sung to him like a siren’s song, lulling him ever deeper into a sleep in which he dreamt of train sets and strippers.  Carlisle waited out the police raid on the Nordstrom’s Women’s Lingerie department in a blissful satin bower of silken bedding.  He dreamt of harlots and their lovely costumes, a Salome danced nearer and nearer to him, discarding her veils to reveal a full Brazilian and tying her hot pink g-string around his head.  She knelt down to deposit one last kiss on his sweating, freckled forehead, before pushing her way through the cotton candy confectionary of the Nordstrom’s women’s department, spike heels sinking into the speckled carpet.  She exited noiselessly through the back employee stairwell over which the silent alarm flashed urgently in reds and blues.  She wasn’t Cherry Pie, but she was as close as Carlisle would ever get to her.