Creative Nonfiction: My Father, The Panty Thief

By Alden Nagel

 

I learned my father had broken into his neighbor’s apartment and stolen her underwear in the wake of his passing. I’d been told many things about him by those who had known him better than I had as I began to passively unravel the mystery of who this man was in his own time. He had a good sense of humor. He was unduly rude to my cousin when she was ten years old. He had a male lover while he was stationed in San Francisco. He had been permanently banned from the bar below his apartment for unknown reasons. The honest truth is, I’m indifferent to my father. I think of him as little more than a serial alcoholic, and the man who once slept with my mom that resulted in me, and beyond that, a man whose relation exists in short, unfulfilling bursts. And, a man who I learned the most about through his passing.  

He had done it because he was bored. This was what he had told my mother somewhat later after the incident. One must wonder if the opposite of a crime of desperation isn’t a crime of malice, but a crime of boredom. I’m reminded a bit of the horrific murder committed by Jung Yoo-jung, who had wanted to kill out of curiosity, a curiosity fueled by her fascination with true crime media. Instead of related media, perhaps it was alcohol which had fueled this heinous act by my father. From how it’s depicted, I imagine it as such:

He is drunk. He is considerably drunker than he usually is, which includes multiple failed attempts at rehab, at using medication to curb his desire for alcohol. He is drunk in a way that infantilizes a blood-alcohol test. This drunkenness causes him to exit his apartment, seeing her unit directly above and across from his, and take the stairs up to her floor and around the winding, maze-like corridors of his building. He finds her unit, out of spatial intuition and a familiarity with the building, having lived there for approximately twenty years at that point. I don’t imagine there’s much going on in his mind at that point other than the alcohol-fueled, libidinal forces that cause someone to get this far in their plan. 

I imagine him slamming his body into her door, all 6 foot three inches of him getting through surprisingly easy. The frame around the door snaps where it meets the lock, and the door flies inward along with his whole body. The occupant, a woman named Jules, is in her apartment doing her usual evening rituals. I imagine her yelling at him, telling him to get the fuck out, threatening to call the police on him. I imagine all of this gracing his ears with the profundity of a draft from an open window. I see him tearing open a chest that contains her garments and stealing a pair of her panties, like a ridiculous frat boy. He leaves without saying anything of note to her, and no one else in the building intervenes or comes out of their units to see. He wakes up with underwear in his unit, laying over the side of his armchair as some kind of hedonistic participation trophy to himself.

At least, this is how I imagine it goes from his perspective. His thoughts, his hangover, and his amusement at the whole ordeal the next day are ultimately his own business. However, I can’t help but regard that words themselves have almost no place in this absurd, horrific moment in his life. There was no preluding harassment from him to her verbally, no threatening texts, and certainly no jokes between the two where he would insinuate he would or could ever do such a thing. Even my own mother would tell me, of the incident, that she thought he was joking in the macabre, black way he often did. His very drunken behavior was nowhere near new for him, since to know him was to know the alcoholism that came with. 

In the vacuum of mystery that surrounds much of the details and nuances of this story, a story so personal and austere, I can’t help but be swelled by the unanswerable questions of that night so as too elucidate it all further, to the converging point of detailed explicability. Firstmost, what words, if any, played into this situation? Did he text anyone after with a picture of the underwear, or just texted words themselves, declaring his victory? Did he engage in any small talk with neighbors that night in any way, perhaps about the weather? Did he say anything to her rabbits, who were scampering around in her apartment, any words of comfort? Above and beyond all of this posturing, did he even have any real, recognizable thoughts during this time that were words at all? Did the voice in his head say anything to him, within him, or was the entire event just reliant on a drunken, lizard cognition? 

Somehow, it's this last possibility that rings the most likely to me. That language of any kind did not enter him, not just because of his being so drunk, but because of his unwillingness to talk with himself, to exit this zone of stupidity, of adrenalized rush he found himself in. Even if the walls and spaces were spinning, or his own balance was largely absent from his body during this time, was there anything worth saying? While I don’t think he was so drunk that he was rendered inoperative, or nonverbal in affect, I do feel that, ultimately, he was so cognitively absent that language didn’t return to him until the very next day. 

Jules would later be the first to tell me this. They would make up, as they’d see something shared in their situations - he was at least six months behind on rent, and she, as a paralegal. She was able to help him to keep his apartment, but this relationship wasn’t a one-way street: she was perhaps the only professional squatter I'd ever met, having lived there for years and not paying any rent since her original first, last and security deposits. She gave him a Frank Sinatra vinyl, and he gave her back her panties. All was well again, in some way that resembled reason.

I would mention this to my mother a few years later, that a neighbor of his had told me that he had broken into her apartment while she was there so as to steal her underwear, and my mother remembered that my father had in fact told her, and told her for the same reason he would tell Jules when he was explaining himself: that he was bored. This non-reason, or perhaps a perfect explanation in relation to the absolute absurdity of trying to validate or impose any kind of logic on what he had done, is, one the one hand, a stern insult to any kind of basic morality, and on the other, the grand punchline to all of this. That he had broken into his neighbor’s apartment and stolen her underwear because he was bored.

As we get older, we become, if not jaded, desensitized, thick-skinned, and harder to surprise. This is especially true, of course, with our friends. As we learn their insecurities, their bad habits, their negative proclivities, their pasts, we learn to suspend judgement, or better yet, to see it in a larger context for what it is. We have friends who have cheated on their partners, who have had serious issues with addictions, siblings who we remain friendly with yet retain intense unreal conspiracy theories, and the like. We remain close and friendly with them because we see their shortcomings in ourselves, we see their humanity become all too human upon closer experience, and their opening up to us reminds us of the theater of social niceties in the face of life’s ugliness. This happens to all of us, regardless of the course of our life’s events. In the case of our parents, we all see this and have to live with it, whether in stride or in shame.

In the case of my father, I see this incident twofold. First, as being unsurprising, though notable for its palpable horrificness and its absurdity, it still doesn’t stand out exactly like a sore thumb in relation to the rest of him. He was no salt of the earth, but he would make for a good supporting character in a Bukowski novel. In terms of his perennially alcoholic behavior, his narcissism, and his tendency to harass my mother out of nowhere just because he felt like it (a habit which could be said to stem from the same boredom through which he broke into his neighbor’s apartment and stole her panties), the incident doesn’t change much about my perspective of him. Though, it certainly hints at a reality I had known about him: that there were things that I didn’t know, that I still don’t know, and to a certain degree, may never know or may never want to know. Not simply because it would erode some silly facade of him being fatherly, but rather of, to say the least, of taking away from what positive attributes he did possess, and further what sides of him I saw in myself.

I remember the night he died. I was at work, a menial job in the wake of finishing my bachelor degree with no immediate plan in life, working security at a music venue in Seattle. It was a Thursday night. I got the call from his sister informing me. I did the motions - I left work early, met with my mother, and stayed the night there. I felt slightly sad, or rather I felt like I should feel sad and that prompted something resembling sadness. I certainly didn’t cry, or react hysterically like how I would come to know his closest friends and family members rightfully and understandably would. So, his breaking and entering his neighbor’s apartment, shows behavior indicative of his worst possible proclivities. 

Laundry theft is regarded as a “gateway crime” to sexual crimes similar to how young children gleefully enacting violence on small animals is seen as a gateway crime to sociopathic behavior later in life. While I have no outright knowledge of his committing sex crimes in his life, I do have direct experience with him being a womanizer. While far from one another, all of this did lead to me asking Jules, the neighbor, at one point during my time in his building cleaning out his unit about some of the other, darker edges to his life that she was aware of. She told me that there were things she witnessed and knew about that she’s sure I would never want to know about. The truth is, I absolutely do. Reality usually has a habit of being soberingly banal, even in the more horrible aspects of itself. I have this image in my mind of him drunkenly bringing back a woman (if not multiple times) and, while she was blacked-out drunk, sexually assaulting her on his mattress on the ground, by the window, with Jules watching it all in utter horror.

I believe that, in her not only being victim to his drunken antics that fateful night, but living so close to him and seeing into his apartment, there is a certain degree to which Jules understood my father more than me in many respects. When she tells me that she feels that there's things she’s seen my father do that I don’t want to know, I know this is coming from a deeply truthful place. Not because I respect my father simply because he happens to be my father, this is not the case at all. Perhaps there is a level to which, in learning about my father’s enacting of these horrible things which go unspoken, in her mind, it prevents me from being able at some level of becoming a person like that if I’m not aware that my own father had done them and, to various degrees, gotten away with them. Not only criminally, but in the mundane sense - of being allowed by society at large to continue on with his life, to be the kind of person he was, especially at his absolute worst, including that night. 

We never truly learn our parents’ life stories. We never learn about their one night stands, their stories of being unduly cruel, of them being turned down for a date. At best, we learn about these things from others, but if they do, then they do so out of a kind of respect seen as universal, a very pure and basic social nicety to uphold our parents over all else, including, to a very certain degree, their own humanity’s imperfection. To this, I have to give due credit and respect to Jules for not telling me more, of telling me the absolute worst. Perhaps she has some more ingrained beliefs behind this; perhaps she believes words are spells, that saying something manifests them into a kind of reality not merely memetic but truly real. Perhaps there’s a level of mistrust for me, because of my relation to my father. Ultimately, my curiosity persists, but I have to nonetheless be glad not to know. Ignorance being bliss can also be an active decision one makes, irrespective of the future but solely in consideration of the past’s follies.

 

 

 

 

 

Alden Nagel is a bald Master's candidate of Literary Arts at Central Washington University. Previously published by Manastash Literary Journal and Punch Projects, he is currently working on a book of non-fiction. Originally from Seattle, he is currently living in Ellensburg.