I Got Busted for Stealing a Car

A clip from The Memoir Tapes

One of the techniques I used to write Late Admissions was to set up “interviews” with myself. I would talk about my life with my editor, Mark Sussman, and we would record the conversations. The transcripts became the basis for the book, but we also have over 60 hours of recordings. We’re going to release some of them—curated, edited, and produced by my creative director, Nikita Petrov—and this is the first batch. In this clip, I talk about how I foolishly decided to steal a car in order to take my date to the school prom in style.

Taking that car was such an obviously stupid idea, and I felt like such a genius for doing it, that I can only laugh at myself in retrospect. At the time, of course, there was nothing funny about it. Having to call my father from the police station to tell him what happened felt awful. When he compared me to his wastrel half-brother Gerald, it stung. My father, Everett Loury, was a rigorously honest man with an inflexible moral code. He would rather have gone hungry than take a hand-out from anyone. It was a point of pride that he paid for everything he owned and earned every dollar in his pocket with hard work. He expected the same from his children, me and my sister Leanett.

So when I stole the car—despite the fact that, in my mind, I was only “borrowing” it—I had not only broken a law, I had stepped across a moral line that was, for him, inviolable. He could no more have stolen something than he could have grown wings and flown. I was a good kid and an excellent student, so I don’t think my behavior had caused my father much concern up to this point. But afterward, things changed. As I grew older and got myself into more serious jams—dropping out of college, fathering a child by a woman with whom I was having an affair, and my subsequent, more consequential run-ins with the law—our relationship grew more difficult. At the time of his death, and for reasons he never truly made clear to me, we weren’t even on speaking terms.

On the one hand, then, I do have to laugh at my own folly. But on the other hand, I also have to wonder if this was the first step on a road that led to one of the most painful aspects of my life, my alienation from the man who raised me. And if you want to know more about the relationship, well, you know where you can read about it.

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This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: I got arrested driving a stolen car when I was 17 years old. I was trying to date this girl. She was a year behind me in high school. She was about my age, but she was a junior. I was a senior. She and I agreed that I would take her to her prom. This is the big dance that the kids go to. And I said yes and I wanted to impress her and I wanted to have a place to “neck.” That was the word we use. It sounds archaic. To kiss and touch with her after the prom event, which was a thing. It was something you did. The kids that had money rented limousines and got driven around and they had the big backseat of the limousine to do whatever they were going to do.

I was longing to be able to drive. The hippest kids were older than me. You could drive at 16, you could get a license at 16. I wanted to be able to drive. Okay, not only because I could maybe get the girl to go out on a date and maybe find some use for the backseat of the vehicle, but also just because it was cool. It was a maturity thing. It was like, these other guys were driving cars. It was cool.

It happened that there was a car being repaired on the lot of a filling station very nearby my house, just down the alley. I discovered this because some kids ran up to me and they told me, “We can turn this car on,” because they'd been playing around in there, that the ignition was faulty and you could actually just rotate the lever and start the car.

So the harebrained idea got in my mind that I was going to drive this car. It was just a thing a 16-year-old kid might do. I was almost 17. It was the summer of 1966. So I drove the car off the lot. And then came a critical moment. Do I take it back to the lot? Or do I stash it somewhere where I can drive it again tomorrow?

MARK SUSSMAN: Okay, so wait. You stole it. And you have gotten away with it, pretty much. You take the girl to prom.

I kept it for a few days before I went to pick her up. I drove it around town. I had a car of my own for a week. Among the things I was going to do with it was impress her on prom night. But I had other people I was trying to impress, including my buddies. Believe me, it was a harebrained scheme. It was very stupid. But it was a lark. I wasn't really stealing the car. I had no intention to keep it forever or sell it or anything like that. I was just having fun with it.

How did the cops feel when you told them that?

Exactly. They took me to the interrogation room to try to find out who I was working with.

Wait, we're going a little bit too fast. How did you get busted?

Okay, so I'm on my way to her house in this vehicle. I'm really going to impress her as I pull up in my vehicle. There's a light of a flashing security officer behind me, and he pulls me over. He wants to see my driver's license. Of course, I don't have one. He wants other identifying information on the car. He asks me to get out of the car. He puts me under arrest. The car had been reported stolen. It had a South Carolina license plate. He asked me where I was from. I said Columbia. That was the one city that I knew in South Carolina.

And he put me under arrest. My father had to come and get me out of jail, and he was very disappointed. I also got into trouble with the girl's brothers, her older brothers, because I stood her up on her prom night. I'd never shown up. I was unable to call and make them aware of what had happened to me.

What did they do?

They were going to beat me up. They threatened me. I didn't go around there. I tried to go and apologize. She was angry, of course, and hurt. I got out without getting beaten up, but I don't know how I managed to escape that fate. I did not get beaten up about that. But I felt threatened by it and was afraid to go around.

When your father came and picked you up, what was his reaction?

So he had a half-brother named Gerald, and Gerald was a complete fuck-up. Gerald was a drunk. Gerald couldn't have a job. And my father was always taking food to Gerald's children. Literally. He said to me the thing that hurt the most, which was that I reminded him of his brother. The last time he had set foot in a police station was to get his brother out of jail. And now here I am.

So it was devastating. Now my mother's brother, Adlert the lawyer—even though by now he had been disbarred and was no longer a practicing attorney, he had been a high-flying lawyer in Chicago coming out of Northwestern University Law School. He got caught in scandal about some financial misdealings. He used his connections as a lawyer known in the court system, even though he was no longer legally able to practice and therefore unable to represent me officially. “This is a good kid. He's valedictorian of his high school class. He's on his way to the Illinois Institute of Technology. He's my nephew. He's not some ruffian. You don't want to send this kid to the county jail.”

I did not spend a single night under custody. So I was, in a way, released from jail in his recognizance, because it's Chicago. If you know somebody who knows somebody, you're good. So I got off relatively light because of the effective intervention of my uncle.

My father was terribly disappointed in me. The thing blew over. The charges were not dropped, exactly. It was like, if you don't get into any trouble in the next year, we're going to expunge the event from your record.

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