Sarah, Shelby, Shock, Chagrin

a short story about a long con

A few years ago my friend Sarah gifted me her old credenza. “Gifted” is perhaps a liberal estimation, as it had been collecting dust in her parents’ garage for nearly a decade and when she told her mother I’d be taking it, her mother said yay in the way you say yay when you find out your least favorite cousin has had another baby. I was moving from my tiny studio apartment in Hollywood to another tiny studio apartment in Los Feliz, which I insisted on calling a “class move,” because I was in my early thirties and this is the kind of thing you say in your early thirties to signal that you’ve thrown off the follies of youth and are now bound by a more somber earthling calling. I’d also started folding my underwear, but that didn’t stick.

Sarah had kindly agreed to help me with my class move after I offered her a hundred dollars and a bottle of tequila. She stood in the doorway of my now empty Hollywood studio, cardboard packing boxes stacked in the corner like a three-tiered cake stand.

“You don’t really own anything,” she said, chewing on a finger that apparently owned a lot. I slid a roll of packing tape up my forearm like a giant bangle and spun to her on a single heel.

“But what do you call all of thiiis,” I asked, regarding the tower of cardboard like a model at a flatbed trade show.

“No, I mean, you don’t have any furniture.”

The truth is, I didn’t have any furniture. A week previous, I had owned quite a bit: a double size bed with wooden frame, an IKEA dining table I’d spray painted matte black for a “French look,” three Goodwill lamps, a wooden bench, a slate grey sectional couch, and a refurbished chaise.

I slid off the packing tape bangle and tossed it atop the tower of boxes.

“Well. This is all she left.”

Sarah smacked her forehead with a flat palm and grimaced. I’ve always wondered if we’re to take the smacking of the forehead as an act of self punishment for forgetting, as in “I can’t for the life of me remember where I parked my helicopter” SMACK. Or is it merely an attempt to restart the brain that has momentarily failed us, the way my father would smack the side of the microwave before realizing it wasn’t plugged in.

I shrugged at Sarah and sucked air through my teeth. She maintained a hand against her forehead to let me know how deeply horrified she was.

“Fuck that bitch.”

That bitch was a young woman named Shelby who had rented my apartment via a vacation rental site called VRBO. I was going to New York for two weeks of a voiceover gig and, desperate for cash, had listed my apartment to rent out while I was away. Shelby responded to my post immediately with a very sad story about her dying mother and needing to be closer to her (she lived two hours away) and yes, she understood she’d need to pay the full rent up front and yes, she was trustworthy and clean and nice. And so Shelby had met me one afternoon to collect the keys and see the apartment, upon which she gave me the full rent in cash and cheerily agreed to water my two plants.

A week into my New York trip, I got a call from my bank. I’d been budgeting the cash from Shelby’s rent for cabs and cigarettes and the power bars I’d shove daily into my mini backpack before heading off to a full day of recording at the studio. I’d lived in New York for a decade before moving to Los Angeles and returning always felt like falling back into the arms of an ex you loved to sleep with but who consistently misused the phrase “double edged sword”: a great time until you remembered why you left.

I was at the front end of this experience as I walked from the 2 train at Chambers Street to the recording studio in TriBeca. Coffee and twelve dollar power bar in hand, I’d stopped for a moment to admire a chalk drawing on the side of a bakery. “All Good Things Happen in Time,” it read, and I nodded solemnly because I too understood the way time worked. My phone buzzed in my pocket and I arranged my breakfast items into the crook of my arm to answer with a free hand. It was my bank. I shifted the coffee to my free hand and squeezed the phone between my cheek and shoulder, straining to hear. Yes, this is she. No, I have not written any checks recently. Yes, that is my correct address. Mother’s maiden name is Reinhardt. No, I didn’t withdraw the entirety of my checking account.

I turned from the chalk quote and faced the roar of traffic.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT OF COURSE I DIDN’T WITHDRAW MY ENTIRE CHECKING ACCOUNT WHAT THE HELL WHAT IS HAPPENING THAT’S THE ONLY ACCOUNT I HAVE THE BALANCE CANNOT BE ZERO I’M SORRY FOR CURSING AND NO I AM NOT ESCALATING.

Contrary to the chalk quote, nothing good was happening in time. Time sped up. Time was trying to trick me. Time was a jackhammer.

In the three minutes it took me to sprint to the studio while panting questions into the phone, I found out that someone had used my checkbook to write checks to cash until they had drained my account dry. The bank texted me an image of the checks. The handwriting was indeed a stranger’s, and in tiny cursive, barely legible, read the signature: Shelby Tullock. Nice Shelby was nice enough to use my last name, as if this merging of our identities somehow allowed me a sense of participating in the act. Nice Shelby had jimmied open the locked file cabinet I’d covered with folded clothes in the back of my closet, found a single book of new checks, and gone the fuck to town.

I should back up.

A week into my New York trip, I had called Shelby to see how things were going and to make sure my ninety year old neighbor Leo hadn’t followed her to the mailboxes asking for a “lil kiss,” which he was wont to do. Shelby sounded drowsy; impaired. Was she high? I asked again about the apartment, to which she muttered something about being accused of stealing a car and he was a fucking asshole and he’d never find her but anyway could she stay two weeks longer, she’d pay me double when I returned. Her mom was dying, remember. I balked, uneasy at the slurring, but was so hard up for cash I couldn’t refuse. I arranged to crash with a friend for the first of the extra two weeks and asked Shelby again if everything was alright. She assured me it was. I told her I’d only charge her for one of the weeks considering her circumstances, and she thanked me and told me her mother would appreciate it so, so much. Shelby was nice. All good things happened to Shelby in time. I blinked her away and continued with my trip. He’ll never find me. Stealing a car. Nope. Double the cash, moving right along.

A week later, as I stood panting outside the studio on Spring Street, I texted Shelby: What the actual hell, I’m calling the police. Return my money immediately. It doesn’t take a Poirot to know that if you demand a criminal return something, they will absolutely comply! Ask anyone! Shelby wrote back immediately: hahaha guess you shouldn’t have left your checkbook lying around

A note about Protestant guilt: unlike its better known Catholic counterpart, Protestant guilt operates less as a vehicle of You Better Not and more as a vehicle of You Already Did. For a moment, I wondered if Shelby was right. Was I to blame? Was I just another irresponsible millennial crying on a street corner holding a coffee I couldn’t afford, in a faded pair of Carharts meant to broadcast how little like my mother I was?

By the time I returned to LA and filed a police report, Shelby was long gone. She’d texted me a final time as I landed at LAX, a short but poetic refrain: hope you had the locks changed bitch! My girlfriend at the time, a lovely and generous person who seemed to come alive in conflict, insisted she accompany me when I returned to the apartment to survey the damage. I asked her why in the car ride from LAX and she said, eyes glued to the road, “Because I think it’s gonna be bad.” And it was. On the recommendation of my therapist, I offer you here the findings in the form a “concern letter”:

Dear Shelby,

I want you to know that I’m very angry. Shattering all of my dishes was a mean and nasty thing to do. Slicing up of all my underwear wasn’t very thoughtful either. Those weren’t even fabric scissors. They were intended for paper and paper stock ONLY. It makes me feel sad that you sprayed my couch with KY jelly and left a used condom on the kitchen table. I’m frustrated that you ripped out the pages of my journal and shattered my mirror with a hammer. I’d also like to express anger at the nailing of my wooden bed frame into the floor. I’m not sure what this was about, but it was a messy job and used up all my nails. The piece of pizza in the ice bin is disappointing, and I am concerned that you slashed all my pillows with a butcher knife. I wanted to let you know how I feel. I will not let my anger consume me. I am in a neutral place. My life is not my things.

Kind Regards, Jen

P.S. Rot in perpetuity, you feckless titcicle

And so it was that Shelby Tullock (née Titcicle) came to rob me blind one summer and slink ever silently into the void. The bank eventually returned some of the cash. The police shrugged off my case since Shelby had technically been a guest in my home. I hauled the ruined furniture to the curb for bulky item pick up. I was told it was too damaged to be donated, which was exactly how I felt as I stood on that shadeless Hollywood sidewalk littered with discarded Coors cans and a mountain range of dog shit. The New York gig had come and gone, the small profits of which were immediately absorbed by student loan debt. There would be no more power bars. If all good things happened in time, I wondered, maybe my count was off.

Sarah took a swig of the tequila and slid to the floor with a thud. In L.A., you can be a writer but act like an actor and no one bats an eye. It is a city of masks, and we but their humble inhabitants.

“I’m so sorry, Jen,” She shook her bangs out of her face and offered me the bottle. “Do you want my old credenza?”

The credenza now sits in my living room, long having left Los Feliz. It’s a beautiful piece; mid-century, unfinished oak with a single cigarette burn from Sarah’s years as a prep school rebel. She came over recently and we laughed as we reminisced about the Great Hollywood Furniture Rage of the Mid Aughts. At one point, Sarah stopped mid-laugh and grabbed my hand.

“I’m really sorry that happened to you.” Her bangs had since grown out and she was draped across the corner of my couch the way I remember Mitzi Gaynor draping herself across furniture in a film era I understood to be the height of feminine sophistication. She wore a silk blouse. I have always felt nervous in the company of pretty women, and for a moment I forgot I was an adult.

I don’t think I knew what a credenza was until Sarah gave me hers. There are a number of worldly amenities I didn’t come to encounter until leaving working class Kentucky: credenzas, avocados, masturbation. I watched Sarah’s face move through the loving sentiments of a shared memory, but I began thinking about Shelby. I wondered if she was sitting somewhere laughing about the Great Hollywood Furniture Rage of the Mid Aughts. I wondered if she too had a friend who was sorry that had happened to her. I wondered if she was still alive. The truth is, in leaving a childhood of struggle and violence for an adulthood of coastal culture and big city ambition, I had made a class move. I left a place I deemed bad for a place I deemed better. I dropped my Kentucky twang and became a pescatarian. I ordered cocktails I couldn’t afford and laughed away delinquent bills as if they were an accessory of the artist as opposed to the yolk of the poor. Most of my artist friends who were pounding the pavement in restaurants and bookstores and coffee shops were technically living below the poverty line. But we were doing so with the privilege of cultural costuming; we were stretching a penny to buy a macchiato, not to feed a child. I wondered if Shelby was feeding a child. Or an opiate addiction. Either way, I thought now as Sarah and her silk blouse gesticulated with an incredibly small martini, I’d spent more of my life as the latter than the former.

I hated Shelby because she fucked me over. She stole from me and ruined my things and she ruined them just as I’d finally worked my ass off enough to be able to even have furniture. But I also hated her because I knew, ultimately, that she was desperate. And that was the thing I hated most about myself.

I don’t think all financial struggle is experienced equal. Watching my mom’s debit card get declined at the grocery store was a childhood humiliation, but it was also a teacher; she was a master craftsman when it came to improvising a narrative to cover a mistake. She’d whip the card from the cashier’s hand and feign shock, then realization, as she remembered there was “something wrong” with that card. And then we’d leave. And we wouldn’t come back. In this way, my first financial savvy was to lie to people, which was exactly what Shelby did to me. If “the difference between being poor and being broke is an attitude,” as my old agent once told me, a whole dicking lot of us could use an attitude adjustment. I left a place I deemed bad for a place I deemed better, and so I’ll forever be my own merged identity: a Shelby-Sarah. Or maybe a Sarah- Shelby; who knows, I could be broke again tomorrow and Shelby could win the NY Lotto.