Crime Doesn't Pay!!!

It was a low time for both me and my friend DripDry.  We were both out of work, and had absolutely no money.  I had been selling random shit around my parent’s house to pawn shops to afford beer.  Eventually, there was nothing left to sell so we found ourselves in a pickle.  Heaven forbid we have to stop drinking.  Down and out, we come up with a plan to save our social lives, and ruin our livers.

Over the next few nights, DripDry and I drive around Utica; scoping out all the newspaper machines in the city.  Our plan is to steal one of them.  My friend tells me that he had stolen a few back in his juvenile days, and that sometimes there was $80 in quarters in them.  This was drinking money for a few days, so I was all for it.  We would pull up to a machine, then shake it, trying to determine how many quarters it had.  Some machines were off limits, as they were chained to a telephone pole or other immovable object.  After hours of searching, over many days, we found one that we could steal.  It was in front of a gym in a shopping center.  DripDry said he had hit that one a few times before and it normally brought in a big payday.  This made sense, as we figured people would always get a newspaper to read while at the gym.  We had our machine, and we decided we were going to take it the next night.

The next night we use the last of our money to get cocked at a local watering hole.  It’s me, DripDry and one of our other buddies, Sugar-tits.  It’s 3 AM, and we pull into the empty shopping center parking lot.  We slowly cruise up to the front of the lot, being careful to look inconspicuous, or about as inconspicuous as 3 drunk guys pulling into a parking lot of a shopping center that closed 5 hours ago can look.  We park the car directly in front of the machine. All 3 of us get out of the car and crowd the dispenser.  Drip runs over and opens the trunk to his SUV.  As soon as he comes back, we do a quick check around, looking for cars driving by.  Seeing no sign of anyone, the three of us lift up the paper dispenser and carry it over to the back of DripDry’s car.  Grunting and shaking, we somehow manage to throw the dispenser into the back of the SUV.  We load back into the car and peel away. 

We get to our other friends house and unload the machine.  We put it into his garage, and start working on it.  We don’t have any tools to open it, so we all just start banging on the lock with whatever is handy.  After about half an hour, we decide to call it a night and work on opening it tomorrow.  The hard part is done.  We load the machine back into DripDry’s car and leave our friend at his house.  Not knowing where to bring the machine, we drive around for awhile.  Finally, we leave it in my parent’s garage.  Paranoid my ever-snooping mom will find it and start asking questions, we decide to kill both my parents…just kidding.  We do, however, put the machine all the way in the back of the garage, and put a whole bunch of shit in front of it, so no one will be able to find it.  The two of us agree that the next day we will find somewhere to work on this lock.  He wants to do it right in my parent’s garage, but I put the Kabosh on that, as that plan is bound for my parents finding out.  We agree to find somewhere to work on it the next day

The next day DripDry goes to Lowe’s and buys metal-cutting attachments for his power drill so he can drill through the lock.  They cost $10; which we can’t afford, but we split it- figuring the payoff from the machine will make up for these expenses.  That night, as soon as the sun sets,  Drip picks me up and we load the dispenser into his SUV again.  We drive around for over an hour, trying to find somewhere to work on the lock.  Finally, we decide to leave it at a park near my house.  It is closed in the winter, so no one should be snooping around there and accidentally find it.  We‘re not sure what the sentence is for stealing a newspaper machine, but with both of us having criminal records, we were quite sure it would mean jail time for us, regardless.  We pull the car up through the parking lot, onto the grass in back of the Park office building in order to hide it from passing cars.  We then unload the machine into the open hallway of a building, between the two bathrooms.  It is freezing outside, and the ground is covered in snow.   With drill in hand, DripDry walks around the office building and manages to find an outlet to plug his drill in.  Not wanting to waste anymore time, DripDry gets to work drilling immediately.  I act as a lookout, watching for cars driving down the road.  When I see one, I would signal DripDry and we would both run and hide behind trees until the car passed.  This happened a few times that first night.  Luck was not with us that first night, as DripDry broke not one, but two drill attachments.  He also managed to get sparks in his eye trying to cut through the metal.  Realizing there was nothing else we could do, we went home, leaving the machine where it was, hoping to get it tomorrow.  

The next day I make more money by pawning an old radio my parents had in our basement.  I sold some other shit too, like a set of pool balls and random appliances.  I think I got $50 for everything- which was enough to get us drunk.  I later found out that the radio I sold was a working antique radio, and a family heirloom.  My father was pissed, I told him I would get it back, something I have yet to do.

DripDry and I use our newfound wealth to buy more drill attachments at Lowe’s; we also get cocked once again.  After the bars close, we head back to the park.  DripDry brought some goggles from home, so he wouldn’t burn his eyes again.  This act of petty larceny was turning out to be very time consuming, and more expensive by the day.   I act as lookout again and DripDry does the drilling.  Two more attachments break, but at least the drill started to cut through the metal.  DripDry and I took turns drilling, hoping to finally bring this ill-thought out plan to an end.  Unfortunately, we were unable to finish the job this day- the 3^rd day since we stole the machine; the 2nd night since we started drilling.  Too many cars were driving by and we were getting sketched out.  We went home, depressed and angry, with a vow that we would definitely do it the next night. 

The root of all this evil.

The next two days we couldn’t get to the park to work on it, so we had to wait until 6 days after the theft to get back to work..  When this day finally came, both of us were all business, taking turns drilling and playing lookout.  We were like two veteran factory workers working on a Chevy engine that night.  Finally, after another 20 minutes, DripDry broke through the lock with the drill.  I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning when DripDry told me we were good.  This machine had to have a few hundred dollars in there, I thought.  We both crowded around the machine.  I took the lock off and placed it on the ground.  We looked each other in the eyes and thought to ourselves “this is it”. 

 I turned the handle and pulled out the tray which held the quarters.  We were over-flowing with emotion and pride.  It was like we had discovered the Hope Diamond.  I pulled the tray out and started counting quarters.  DripDry went to look out for cars.  After a minute or so of counting, something wasn’t right.  I was only at $5 and the supply of quarters was disappearing.  I got up to $8 and found myself out of coins to count.  I called DripDry over to see what I was missing.  He saw the pile of coins, then at me with a disgusted look on his face.  I reached my hand into the insides of the dispenser, feverishly checking for coins I must have missed.  I found $.50 more.  

After all the effort, the money spent on supplies, the grief and frustration we faced at the hands of this mighty lock, our take was a whopping $4.25 apiece.  A Cambodian working in a Nike sweatshop makes more in a day, and we had spent 6 days, and countless hours working on it.  We were both pissed beyond belief.  DripDry was so angry he did not even want the money, he let me keep his share.  What an enormous waste of time this was.  Just goes to show that crime doesn’t pay, or, rather, it does pay, but not well.  We spent more on supplies than was in the machine.  Luckily, both of us found jobs shortly thereafter and never had to resort to a life of crime again.

Unfortunately, DripDry and I were not in fact done with petty larceny after this debacle- to read the unfortunate conclusion of our life of crime, CLICK HERE.