Breakin’ In Ain’t Hard To Do
The tenth installment in Tales from the Westside
“You mean burglary, Ma’am; not robbery,” the police officer corrected me as he dusted the door of the living room closet for prints. “A robbery involves a gun,” he continued. “Now, they might have had a gun. They might not have. But since there was no gun directly involved here, it’s just a burglary.”
What a relief. At least now I know the difference between the two! I thought. “I’ve learned something here today,” I said, acting as if I were grateful for the information which, honestly, I wasn’t. I couldn’t have cared less about semantics! I was a freaked-out puppy! And so was Wanda, my yellow lab. If you’d looked up “freaked-out puppy” in the dictionary, her picture definitely would have been there. Her tongue lolled out of one side of her mouth like she’d just come from a marathon day of squirrel chasing. (She never caught them, but man did she love to try!) Her pupils had shrunk to the size of peas, and the whites of her eyes were almost all I could see as she leaned against my leg and looked up at me with the most pitiful expression on earth.
“Poor baby!” I cooed, kneeling down beside her. “You were here all alone when those mean, masked men broke in!” I stroked her thick fur.
“You know, I wasn’t even gone an hour. I wonder if I interrupted them mid-burgle,” I said to the officer who’d finished dusting for prints. That’s gonna be a bitch to clean, I said silently as I studied the smudges of fine black powder coating the once-white door.
Looking at me as if he wanted to tell me that ‘mid-burgle’ was not police jargon, nor anyone else’s for that matter, he pursed his lips and shook his beefy head instead. “Now they might have been masked. They might not have. Either way, still a burglary,” he stated, closing the closet door. His partner, who’d barely said two words since they arrived, nodded in agreement; the Watson to his Sherlock.
In the eleven years I’d lived in my charming Victorian, nothing like this had ever happened. I’d bought it for a song, back when the Nations was less than charming, and seeing as how much of the neighborhood was populated by working girls, drug dealers, madmen and vagabonds, I should have experienced my share of trouble. But miraculously, nothing bad had ever happened to me and I guess I’d gotten complacent, believing my luck would always hold out. “You’ve been lucky up to this point ma’am,” the officer echoed my thoughts. “Real lucky in this neighborhood.”
But I didn’t feel lucky. Thieves had kicked in my back door, splintered the original door frame and ransacked the place. They’d pawed through everything I owned: the kitchen drawers and my medicine cabinet, the contents of my dresser and my closet. They’d even tossed my mattress for God’s sake, probably looking for cash, like it was 1938 or something. But the thing that really creeped me out was that this burglary (See what a fast learner I am?) had happened in broad daylight. And other than my dog, who obviously couldn’t tell us anything, there hadn’t been a single witness.
As I led the officers from room to room they dusted for prints on every one of the 11 doors in my house. But when we reached the second bedroom at the front of the house it was clear the burglars had never made it that far. Packed with valuables, my housemate’s room had been left intact. They’d missed out on a guitar, a laptop, and a TV, plenty of drawers to paw through and a second mattress to toss. It was odd. Had Wanda stationed herself there and kept them at bay by barking her head off? Or had I indeed interrupted them during their heist? (I wondered if that word was intended only for the theft of jewels and art but refrained from asking.)
After Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee finished blackening every door in the house, I saw them out and retrieved my laptop, which I kept hidden just in case someone broke in; maybe I hadn’t felt so bulletproof after all, I thought as I opened it. Logging in to Next Door I proceeded to report the news of my burglary, making sure to share the fun ‘robbery vs burglary’ facts I’d learned. And no sooner had I hit “post” than a flurry of replies followed from neighbors who’d experienced their own robberies. (They meant burglaries of course. But I felt certain that the cops who’d just left my house were en route to theirs and Sherlock would, of course, make them see the error of their word choices.) The MO had been the same; doors kicked in, mattresses tossed and nerves jangled. And although I felt terrible that some of my neighbors had also had their homes ransacked, it felt good to commiserate with them and know I wasn’t alone.
14 years have passed since that fateful day and I’m still living in my historic home, watching a brand-new version of the Nations grow up around me. The working girls, drug dealers, madmen and vagabonds are mostly gone now, having been replaced by young families with Golden Retrievers and baby strollers which makes life in the neighborhood a lot less colorful and a lot more civilized. Honestly, sometimes all this gentrification makes me nostalgic for the bad old days when the West Side was wild and the daily adrenaline rush that came with the territory was real. But on days like that, if I dose myself with larger amounts of caffeine than usual and close my eyes, I can travel back to the time before Ring cameras were ubiquitous, my house was burgled in broad daylight, and I lived to tell the tale.