The sweatshirt incident

"Take that sweatshirt off right now, before I call the police!"

The words cut like an alarm through the unfocused hubbub in front of the checkout stands in the big-box pharmacy. I turn to see who could be the target of such barely-contained rage..

A skinny little man, apparently a vagrant, is in the process of very slowly removing the sweatshirt with which he was about to walk out of the store, the manager who caught him looking on with stiff disapproval.

The man has a big grin on his face and moves with ostentatious slowness. Slowly, slowly, he pulls the shirt over his head, grinning all the while, like it's the biggest joke in the world. And still grinning, he slowly hands the shirt over to the manager, and slowly makes his way towards the door.

"And never enter my store again." The manager, successfully needled by the vagrant’s grin-and-creep tactics, shadows him to the door, radiating indignation from his jaws and shoulders. The eyes of all shoppers--mine included--follow their progress, unable to look away until The Thief is good and gone.

I never do get a good look at the sweatshirt. A flash of heathered gray is all I glimpse. Knowing the kind of clothing carried by such places, I imagine a cheap ill-fitting cotton/poly blend number, no doubt screened with a sports team logo, the label inside declaring it was made in some sweatshop in China. But even so, it would have been enough to keep off the unseasonably early chill.

And now that the manager has his precious piece of merchandise back in his posession, does he deign to re-hang it himself? Or does he toss the once fiercely-defended garment to some underling to deal with, his interest evaporated now that somebody isn't trying to take the shirt without paying? This I do not get to see either.

I am left to face my cashier -- a fresh-faced rosy-cheeked young woman. "One minute he was over there trying on every sweatshirt on the rack, and the next ... " she offers by way of explanation, eyes wide with wonder. Can it possibly be that this is the first theft she had ever witnessed in her entire life?

I think of responding with something like, "Oh yeah, homeless people are really inventive that way, especially when they're trying to avoid freezing their asses off when they’re spending the night on a sidewalk." Or "Oh well, it's not like people would actually want to pay the exhorbitant price your boss is charging for that piece of crap anyway." Or "But hey, aren't you glad he was taking a necessity of life and not a forty from the cooler? ... and by the way, remind me why a store for health care products is selling booze, again? Not to mention cheap-ass sweatshirts?"

But I look at her apple-cheeked innocence, and decide not to tee off on her when I'm too cowardly to take that same tone with her boss. "Well, you know, it's always something ..." I wind up muttering inanely. I pay for my diet soda and leave.

I look for the grinning vagrant in the parking lot. He is nowhere to be seen. I wonder at the sheer chutzpah required to have kept on grinning like that when a whole storeful of people is staring at your retreating back and thinking "thief."

I find myself hoping he's in the process of boosting a sweatshirt from the next big box store down the street. I wish him luck.