The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

[This happened in 2013, back when I was a shoplifter]

One day, I decided to steal cologne. My reasoning was that women like cologne and therefore if I stole cologne then women would like me too. If I wore cologne, then my attractiveness would slide up a notch, women would notice me, and maybe I'd pull a girl in Toronto. Never mind that I was a jobless immigrant living in a hostel and sharing a bunk bed with a Chilean man named Felipe. In my mind, cologne was all I needed to get a girlfriend, maybe even multiple girlfriends.

So I left the Canadiana Backpackers Inn and walked down the concrete steps onto the quiet side street outside. It was a chilly day in mid-Spring. The sky was overcast. The trees were still dormant and brown. But there was not a single trace of snow anywhere, no slush, no snowdrifts, no anything. In fact, I hadn't seen any snow since I'd arrived in Toronto a week earlier.

The shop I was walking to wasn't far; just a couple of blocks away. On the way, I passed a homeless man. He cradled a polysterene cup in his hands and smelled of alcohol. As I passed, he raised his cup, causing the coins inside to jingle, and said, "Any change?" The change is coming, I told him. Can't you see? Summer's on its way. I didn't really say that, of course. I just muttered, "Sorry" and walked on, as I do to all homeless people. (When I'm rich, I'll share my money around like a Jewish man doling out challah at Shabbat. But while I'm poor, I can't afford to give money to the homeless.)

I walked passed several bags of garbage that were just dumped there on the street, and then turned the corner and there it was: Shoppers Drug Mart. I knew this because the words SHOPPERS DRUG MART were in huge white letters above the doors. People were entering through the automatic doors, presumably to buy their "drugs" (not actual drugs but the Canadian word for medication).

Shoppers Drug Mart is a big Canadian pharmacy chain you can find in every town and city in Canada. They sell everything — makeup, nappies, dog food, the aforementioned "drugs" (read: medications), a wide selection of colognes, and much, much more. It's your one-stop pharmacy chain. And it was from there I planned to steal the cologne.

As I approached the Shoppers Drug Mart, the automatic doors slid open, welcoming me inside. If the doors had known I was a shoplifter, then maybe they wouldn't have been so welcoming; maybe they would have refused to open, or maybe they'd have opened at first to give me a false sense of security but then slammed shut when I was halfway through, cutting me in half or trapping me until the police arrived. But thankfully, these doors were non-sentient and I walked through them without losing a single limb.

Inside, the air was warm due to the store's central heating system. To the right were the checkouts, where an elderly woman behind the till was slowly scanning tins of baby formula for a mother with a pram. To the left, there were aisles and aisles of first-world, capitalist abundance: dozens of different packets of breakfast cereals, crisps, and chocolate; gift cards in various denominations; and every shade of lipstick imaginable.

An ill-advised rendition of Frank Sinatra's I Did It My Way, featuring a bongo drum solo and questionable hip-hop beats, drifted from the store's speaker system as I made my way into the store. Due to the store's layout, I was first forced to walk down the feminine hygiene aisle, a euphemism for tampons, douches and pads. Then, after passing a poster advertising leg waxing cream, I found the cologne in the skincare aisle.

There were dozens of brands of cologne available, something that made the task of choosing a cologne much harder task than it should have been. In the end, after much deliberation, I picked up a box labelled eau de homme by Giorgio Armani. At $89.99, plus tax, it was one of the most expensive colognes on the shelves.

I carefully turned the box around and over in my hands, inspecting the sides for security tags. And there, hidden away on the bottom of the box, I found one. It looked like a thick black sticker, but due to my considerable experience as an amateur shoplifter, I knew immediately that this sticker was in fact a security tag. Trying to leave the shop with that security tag on the box would trigger the store's alarm, causing SWAT teams to rappel down from the ceiling, guard dogs with sharp teeth and foaming mouths to leap out of concealed doggy doors, and police helicopters to circle around the building, which point I'd be dragged kicking and screaming to prison.

But what I wanted was not the box itself but the cologne inside. The box was unsealed, so I simply opened the flaps and pulled out the expensive glass bottle from inside. I turned the bottle around in my hands, examining it for security tags, and found none. It's ridiculous, really. They went to the trouble of tagging the cheap cardboard box but forgot about the expensive cologne inside.

The liquid inside the bottle had a very slight yellow tinge to it, almost like urine. I didn't have any experience with cologne and this bottle could have contained the piss of the great Mr Giorgio Armani himself for all I knew. But at $89.99 it probably wasn't urine but some sweet-smelling sex pheromone that would make me irresistible to girls, causing them to scream and chase me through the streets, like the hordes of young women screaming for The Beatles. I glanced left and right furtively to make sure no one was watching, and then I stuffed the bottle into my coat pocket. Finally, I closed the flaps of the now-empty box, which now felt a lot lighter without the bottle of cologne inside, and put the empty box back on the shelf.

At this point I should have left the store, thereby minimising the time in which I could get caught. That would have been the smart thing to do. But instead of doing the smart thing, I decided to walk around the aisles first. This way, I hoped the CCTV cameras would see me as just a normal shopper doing a bit of browsing instead of an amateur shoplifter scared out of my wits. Also, I needed time to build up enough courage to walk out of there with the stolen cologne in my pocket.

So I walked away from the skincare aisle and started browsing the wares of the baby aisle. A giant picture of a baby looked down at me, smiling a toothless grin. The shelves were full of nappies, baby food and those tins of baby formula I'd seen earlier. I pretended to be interested in a packet of dummies, two for $10, but the only thing I could think about was the stolen bottle of cologne in my coat pocket. I could feel its weight pulling my coat down on one side, yelling for attention like the beating of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart.

I hung around in that aisle for a while, trying to build up enough courage to walk out with the stolen bottle of cologne. I was examining a packet of adult diapers, wondering if I should steal some of those as well in case I shit myself from fear, when a middle-aged woman approached me. She looked angry. She had a name badge and wore the employee uniform of black trousers and a grey polo shirt. And in her hand was the empty box of cologne.

She walked up to me and held the box out as if to say, "I caught you, you thieving bastard." Perhaps, in this situation, other shoplifters would have made a run for it, vaulted over a closed checkout sign and flipped the security guard's cap off his head before dashing through the automatic doors just as they were closing, with just enough time to reach back in and grab a bag of Cheetos, like Indiana Jones reaching for his hat in The Temple of Doom. But I wasn't that type of shoplifter. I was more of a timid kind of shoplifter, more likely to apologise than to make daring escapes. So I sheepishly pulled the cologne out of my pocket and handed it over to her, like a guilty schoolboy relinquishing a catapult to the headmaster. Then I said the first lame excuse that came to my head: "I just wanted to try it". As an excuse, it didn't even make sense. If I just wanted to try the cologne, then why was I carrying it around in my pocket? My excuse had about as much evidential weight as Bart Simpson claiming "I didn't do it" with a can of spray paint in his red-painted hands.

The woman glared at me some more but that was all. She was like a teacher who just stares at you angrily when you do something wrong instead of giving you a detention or a bollocking. So I turned and walked to the store's exit, albeit shamefully, with my head down low and my feet dragging behind me.

For some reason, I grabbed a packet of nuts on the way out and got in line to pay for them. I guess I wanted to show the store that I was a real, paying customer. As I was queuing, I saw the woman from earlier go up to a security guard. She showed him the cologne and pointed me out to him. I froze like a deer in headlights. The guard looked at me with surprise.

I paid for the bag of nuts. When I left the store, with the packet of nuts and receipt in my hand, the security guard didn't stop me. He didn't even look angry. He just looked surprised.

So I never did get any cologne. I never did find out if the cologne would have made me as irresistible to women as the shirtless builder in that Diet Coke advert, the one where all the ogling office women bite their lips in lust. Somehow, sadly, I imagine it probably wouldn't have. But at least I didn't go to prison.