my boring life story

I had become an Avon lady before I became a Kroger deli clerk and was finally picking up some steam with it. Not huge money, but better than I’d been doing. Saturday was ordering day and I had a decent order to drop off.

Plus I had a paycheck from Kroger that I had to deposit.

So I had two very good reasons to leave the house.

Getting the nerve up was a nightmare. I got a phone call from Kroger as I was percolating around to making my move and they wanted to know if I could come in. Mike was standing right there, I don’t even remember why, and I said sure, I can do that. I felt terrible because I knew I wouldn’t be going in. He knew where I worked and if I’d tried keeping Sean at the weekend daycare while I worked those hours, he knew where that was too and all kinds of unpleasantness might have happened. So the same man who had angrily insisted I get a job, any fucking job at all, had now lost me one that had taken me months to find. Thanks?

Back in the front room, I looked around at all the stolen equipment and Mike looked at me and said to Scott, “Look at her. She’s excited about it.” I smiled, knowing that if I didn’t I was likely to put myself into immediate danger. Meanwhile I was thinking things like, Almost four fucking years of marriage and he still doesn’t know me.

As I was about to leave for the bank I asked Sean if he wanted to come along. Sean ran to the front door and started chanting, “Outside! Outside!” I got him dressed and we left.

I dropped off my Avon order and then kiddo and I went to the bank. Even on January 2, it was closed. Fine. I didn’t want to deposit my paycheck anyway. I took $200 out of the bank and we went to Fort Bragg. I called Reba from one of the pay phones. As soon as she answered I burst into tears.

I had been thinking up to this point that maybe there was some third way in between going to the cops and doing nothing that would get the stolen equipment returned but not send Mike to jail. No, Reba said, you have to go to the police. She tried to call Mike at home and the line was busy; could have been Mike calling his mother, could have been one of them on the internet. Reba called me back and we talked about how to do things. I did not have to go back home, she pointed out. She’s an old hand at hotel and motel admin because she worked for a lot of years as a night auditor. We’ll get you checked into a room under an assumed name, she said. That made me feel a lot better and I promised to keep her posted. We got off the phone and I headed for the military police (MP) station.

As I walked in, it was this hallway with a checkin window on the right side just past the front doors. There were a couple guys milling around in the office beyond the window. I said to them, “You know the rigger shop on Gruber Road? There’s been a burglary.”

“We just found out about that this morning,” one of them said. “How did you know about it?”

“I know who did it,” I replied.

His face went very solemn (though not angry) and he immediately hopped to and invited me to come in.

I gave them the particulars and they said well, with the stolen property being stored off-post, the MPs would not have jurisdiction to make an arrest — but Criminal Investigation Division (CID) did have jurisdiction, so they would have to call a guy in. It wouldn’t take long. They invited me and Sean to sit in a little side office and wait for him.

He came through the door in civvies and the first question out of his mouth was, “Why are you doing this?”

I told him I knew that if I didn’t, I’d be an accessory after the fact and that would make an already bad situation even worse. I thought afterwards that another good reason for me to report it was that if Mike and Scott had never been caught, someone at the rigger shop or at their parent company might have taken the fall for it — every Army unit has a unit fuckup. So either way, Mike had to go down.

We talked a good while and after he got the particulars of the crime, he started giving me all this information and material about victim assistance because, as the witness to two felony crimes (breaking-and-entering and grand larceny), I was entitled to it. While we were having this conversation Sean, who was still in diapers, not only went Number Two but leaked up his back. So we got done as quickly as we could because the CID guy needed to arrange the arrest before Mike got suspicious and tried to hide the stolen property anyway.

I went back to the post exchange and as I was walking into the department store itself (kind of like Walmart or Kmart or Target), this guy walking out felt the need to tell me my son had had an accident. Thanks, dude, I thought I was about to have a seizure or something. I don’t know why I had walked out of our house without Sean’s diaper bag. Panicked, I think. It would have been reasonable to take it with me but I hadn’t been reasonable anymore except for my basic drive to deal with the problem Mike had caused. Must have used up all my reasonable points. I was afraid he’d suspect something, I think. But I got Sean some diapers and wipes and clothes and I think I got myself some underwear and we were good to go.

After that, Reba helped me check into a local motel under an assumed name.

Everything’s kind of a blur. I know she and I talked about Mike being royally pissed off and calling her to scream at her, “Where is my wife???” and I must have hidden the car from view away from the main road, because apparently he’d driven around searching. I know I talked with the CID guy again and he told me they’d made the arrest and recovered everything, and also that the victim-assistance people were all stranded in a blizzard in Oklahoma. (Great.) I know I called Kroger at some point, told them what was going on, and apologized because I was going to have to resign as it was no longer safe for me to go to work.

But Sean and I were safe from his father so I was taking things a day at a time.

About 1:30 or 2am, Mike came barging back into the house, breathing heavily like either he was really excited or had just run a marathon.

I said, “I thought you were going to Savannah?”

He said, “We didn’t go to Savannah. Honey, we have to talk.”

The computer desk was in our front room, up against the back wall shared with the kitchen. The kitchen doorway was to my right and there was another wall to the right of that. Mike leaned against that wall and then crouched down to talk to me.

Apparently he and Scott had broken into the rigger shop on Gruber Road at Fort Bragg. The same one they’d both been stationed at before they went into Special Forces training. Somehow one of them climbed up the building and went in through the roof. The building has a garage door, so he opened it to let Scott’s truck in. He and Scott stole three or four computer systems including their 17-inch monitors, some laser printers, and a Xerox machine, most of it still out in our backyard workshop. He said the military police (MPs) circled the block two or three times on their normal patrol and never suspected a thing. He said he and Scott had been planning this for more than six months.

The whole time he was telling me this story he kept punctuating his speech with I-love-yous.

As he hit a pause, I asked him why he did it.

“Think of it as a disgruntled-employee kind of thing.”

Sure, that’s reasonable. Disgruntled about getting a promotion to corporal, which most Army E-4s weren’t anymore. Disgruntled about making the cut for Special Forces training. Disgruntled about never having gotten in trouble and in fact, having earned two or three Good Conduct medals over his career. And let’s not forget how they waived the high-school diploma requirement to enlist him in the first place. I get that the Gulf War was going on and maybe they were desperate, but still.

He noticed I was stunned and speechless. He repeated that he loved me and that he’d never do it again.

I went to bed at about 3:30am and woke up later kind of groggy. That cleared in a hurry when I remembered what had happened. It still didn’t seem real until I walked into the front room and saw stolen equipment everywhere. At least one system was taken apart and the CD-ROM was installed in our computer, along with one of the monitors. I went online for a little while and was grudgingly impressed, but I knew even then we couldn’t keep it all.

Mike was talking out loud, pondering what to do with his loot. At first he chattered about giving some of it to Dominic in Savannah to “get rid of,” and then decided that no, he would keep it all.

Scott set up one of the computers in his bedroom and he and Mike debated how to get rid of the military backgrounds, screen savers, and passwords.

I went to work in the afternoon in a daze. Once away from the situation at home I started feeling like I’d imagined it all and was sure that when I went home it would all be gone. I realized I would have to go to the police, but I wanted to contact Reba first and talk with her. When I went on break I spent my fifteen minutes writing her a letter in case I was too chicken to call her.

After I went home and Mike and Scott went to bed, I went online and told my internet friends everything that had happened. Everyone “yelled” at me to go to the cops. I told them I’d go the next day, but wasn’t going to wake my 2yo son. I went to bed for what I hoped was the last night next to my husband. It took me a while to fall asleep.

A recap.

Last week of December: Mike mentioned that a deal he’s been working out with his friend Dominic in Savannah, GA, to get hold of some warehoused surplus computer parts from the friend’s Iowa hometown or thereabouts, has finally gone through. Mike plans to go to Savannah, a five-hour drive one way, with his friend and our roommate Scott Seman to pick up the parts on New Year’s Eve. Total round trip is supposed to take between eight and nine hours. Fine, I say, just so long as he’s back and alert enough to watch Sean while I work at the Kroger deli on New Year’s Day. No problem, says Mike.

Now up to date.

I got home from work at about 10:30pm after crawling in my car through a New Year’s Eve police checkpoint. Mike and Scott left at about 11pm. Mike has gotten our scanner set up after weeks of swearing horribly and fighting with its SCSI configuration, and I have finally organized all my photo negatives into negative-sleeve album pages and labeled them, so I’m settled in at the computer with a bottle of wine and scanning old family photos to add to my homepage.

Not exactly a party, but not a bad way to spend New Year’s Eve.

Might as well set my first post as the day I was born. No reason why not.

Will add pics later. I have a couple.