to suffer the actual indignity of sloping downhill to the cafe. Or maybe just calling to remind me to bring the shoe. (Though how she’d have my phone number would be another mystery yet to be solved.) But a glance at caller ID revealed what I should have known: It was Vic Mirplo. The original Mirplo. Truly one of a kind.
Mirplo is the worst sort of mook: careless, rash, sloppy, lazy, ignorant, reckless, feckless, dense, and disrespectful of the mark. Classically opinionated and ill informed, he has no tangible gift for the grift, yet fancies himself a master—or as he’s put it on more than one occasion, “an ascended Stairmaster”—of the craft. He vaguely understands that cons call for misdirection, but his idea of this is on a par with pointing and shouting, “Look, Halley’s Comet!” while he snatches an apple from a fruit stand. Nor is sophistication his strong suit: I’ve actually seen him try to pass photocopied and hand-scissored $20 bills on the daft logic that “the Treasury’s regular printer is on strike.” Thanks to this moronic convergence of ill-chosen career vector and sad lack of skills, Vic has been in and out of jail more times than is healthy for a grifter, but his scams are always so laughably low-rent that he’s never done hard time, which was good, because hard time would’ve cracked his fragile being like an egg.
Vic was working a crude scalper scam outside Dodger Stadium when our paths first crossed. Lamely passing himself off as stadium security, he’d try to finesse tickets or cash or both—as “evidence”—out of unsuspecting sellers or buyers, and then basically just run like hell. Inept at selecting his victims (as he was inept at any decision more complex than paper or plastic), he had tried to put the touch on a pair of USC linebackers, who’d chased him down, roughed him up, and tossed him in a trash can. I saw the whole thing happen. I thought it was pretty funny.
“What are you laughing at?” he asked as he hauled himself out and wiped mustard stains from his already amply stained mulberry windbreaker.
“You,” I said. “What the hell was that?”
“A con,” he replied. “You wouldn’t understand.” I offered to buy him a beer and have him explain it. I just couldn’t resist learning about the grift from his nescient perspective.
But it turns out that buying a Mirplo a beer is like feeding a stray cat. Unfortunately, you’ve made a friend for life.
To befriend a Mirplo is to subject yourself to a never-ending cascade of need. He’d need money, food, booze, or dope. Or bail. Or a ride. A place to watch the big game. A place to crash. Or a present for his mother. And even when he’d try to return the favor, it would invariably go wrong. Once, he borrowed my car—“borrowed,” as in “took without asking”—so he could work the gas station con and get me a fill-up. In this snuke, you dress like a businessman and persuade the mark that you’ve been robbed and now must panhandle gas money or else—dire need—you’ll miss a vital sales call, lose the sale, have your wife’s dialysis cut off, whatnot. Only, Vic neglected to dress the part or convincingly play it, and one gas station attendant held him at bay with a baseball bat while the other called the cops. It cost me $256 to get my car out of impound.
So why did I adopt him? I don’t know. An uncharacteristic fit of charity, perhaps. Though in fairness, he did occasionally prove useful, in a blunt-instrument sort of way. If you need, for example, someone to deliver an utterly unconvincing lie to a mark, or a bag of money to the wrong address, Vic is your man. And he does have a certain cataleptic charm, a sunny membrane of optimism utterly impermeable to reality—and equally oblique to critique: There aren’t too many people who will smile while you call them stupid to their face. And if they adore you, as Mirplo adores me with all the dopey loyalty of an Irish setter, you bask in their devotion. Approval, as noted, is a heady drug.
So the phone rang, and it was Vic, and I answered, mentally girding myself for the inevitable onslaught of Mirplovian white noise. Nor was I disappointed.
“Radar!” he shouted, “Guess where I am!” As I could hear a recorded voice in the background announcing the departure of the Border Flyer for San Diego, I guessed Union