I’M A THIEF — OR AT LEAST I ONCE WAS.

Did you ever steal something? I mean really steal it — as in put it in your pocket and walk off with it — even though you knew full well it belonged to somebody else?

Well I did (don’t judge me), and here’s how it happened:

When I was 8 and in the third grade, I lived in San Jose. Among the daily throng of grade-schoolers running up and down the street was Eric (the slightly weird kid across from my house), Michael and Laura Ludkie (whose mom made incredible tuna fish sandwiches) and 9-year-old Kevin Gaines.

The most interesting of the group was Kevin.

He was the bad kid — trouble, to be avoided at all costs. Age and time have taught me these things. But before age and time became big enough to steer my thinking, I thought he was cool — real cool.

Probably because one of the things Kevin had going for him was this: He drove a car.

You read that right. Nine-year-old Kevin Gaines drove a car. And that, in my book, made him amazing. Now was it a real car? Like the size of an Oldsmobile? Well, no — it was tiny, more like the size of a little red wagon with a motor in it.

It wasn’t all that much bigger than those radio-controlled cars you get at Toys R Us. But still, amazing.

His car, among other accolades (like a beer-swilling, cigar-chewing dad who used real live cuss words right in front of us), made the kid fascinating.

Kevin was larger than life.

And the things I saw Kevin do became things I wanted to try. One of which was smoking. Kevin knew how to smoke and taught me, still a third grader, how to as well. Which went swimmingly until Dad caught me doing it and made me smoke — and inhale — a whole pack, one right after the other. Actually I think I only got through about one or two of them before the room started to spin, which is when … oh wait — what was I talking about again?

Right, stealing — I’ll get back to the smoking story some other time …

Kevin held so much sway over me, I wanted to emulate whatever he did. One of which was shoplifting.

Back then we didn’t even know it was called “shoplifting” — to us it was just “swiping stuff.” And the stuff Kevin swiped was candy bars from the TG&Y.

For those of you who don’t remember, TG&Y’s were five-and-dime stores where a kid could view just about every single thing he or she might ever hope to possess. Among those things were every candy bar known to man — all arranged down an aisle that, in our TG&Y, was a long way from the watchful eyes of the cashier.

That’s where Kevin Gaines taught me how to pick something up, put it in my pocket, and walk out without paying for it. And for a kid who, unless he got a dollar or two for his birthday, never had money in his pocket, it was an astounding trick.

But it was a trick I never used unless Kevin was there.

I lost track of Kevin Gaines when we moved from that neighborhood. Our family was growing and I think Mom wanted a bigger house, in a better neighborhood probably, so we moved to the little town of Morgan Hill.

Once there, Mom enrolled me in St. Catherine’s grade school. It was a smallish Catholic school that taught values as well as reading and writing. The priests there would have sorely disapproved of my secret trick of getting stuff free from the store had they known of it, but they didn’t know.

Now that Kevin Gaines wasn’t in my life, nobody knew.

It was my secret that, in the way a secret can, gave me a feeling of power. And because it was the sort of power you didn’t really use, it never dissipated. It was just there, in the background — something I knew I that knew how to, yet didn’t, do.

But one day after school, as I walked through a little shopping center on my way home, I came upon a store called Sprouse Reitz — a little five-and-dime like TG&Y. As I went in, I found that Sprouse Reitz also had just about all the things a kid like me could want. It had candy, and sporting goods, and toys — it even had model airplanes that you bought and took home and glued together.

And I loved model airplanes. I loved to assemble them, and paint them in military camouflage schemes, and then hang them from my ceiling. But it had been a while since I’d done that — I think the last one I’d built was at Christmas, and that was months ago.

Man would it be awesome, I thought to myself, if I could buy one of these planes. But I couldn’t — my pockets were as empty as they always were.

But what if I … ? Naw, John, don’t even think it … No, but what if … and nobody found out? And then you could build a model, and paint it, and hang it up?

I’m not sure I’d even finished my little internal argument before I slipped the model airplane box into my jacket and trapped it under my arm. It almost seemed to happen without a thought. “Dang it,” I said to myself. “You didn’t even look around to see if anyone was watching.” And it’s true, I hadn’t. Something just came over me — a want, a desire to have something that I didn’t have, that I couldn’t have.

But now I did have it. It was tucked under my arm. So I turned nervously toward the door and lurched forward. I remember sweating — I remember my heart racing — and I remember thinking, as I walked toward the door, “If I can only make it out of here I’m home free.”

That was a long walk. I hadn’t stolen anything in ages — and I was never the calm, cool, collected type anyhow. It felt like it took forever to get to the front door of Sprouse Reitz.

But I made it.

I was outside — it the fresh air and sunshine — with my brand new, super cool model airplane. I almost couldn’t wait to get it home so I could pull it out of the box and start putting it together.

I was thinking about what color scheme I should paint it and where on my ceiling I would hang it when a strong, heavy hand came down on my shoulder. As I spun around, the big man asked, “Do you have something that doesn’t belong to you?”

Which is when the water works started.

I began crying and blubbering so hard that I didn’t even make sense to myself — let alone to the store manager who had just caught me shoplifting.

The time it took me to get from the toy aisle to the front door didn’t begin to compare to the eternity I sat in the store manager’s office as we both waited for my Mom to arrive. As I had listened to him describe my crime over the phone, I could just picture Mom’s face contorting into a painful grimace — which, by the way, she was still wearing as she walked into the little office at the back of the store where I sat.

You know, I wasn’t a bad kid — just a dumb one sometimes. I made a big mistake before I had the sense to not make it. And there were those in my life who denigrated me for my mistake.

And there were those who didn’t. Positive types who told me don’t worry so much, kid — we all do stuff like that at some point or other. To those people I say this: Thank you.

And one more thing — I hope Kevin Gaines had those people in his life, too.

But I’ve got a feeling he didn’t.

John P. Gavin is the author of “Online Dating Sucks … But It’s How I Fell In Love,” which is available on Amazon and at Bookshop Benicia.