at this very moment selling services they never intend to deliver? Home repair, driveway paves, window work—if someone offers you a deal on aluminum siding that sounds too good to be true, trust me, it is. They’ll take your deposit and be three states over before the check clears.
Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll loiter a while to strip-mine your bank account. After all, you’ve just given them a piece of paper with your name, address and phone, account number, and signature. A license to rob you at pen point, Merry Christmas.
But bunco at the highest levels requires a complex package of skills. I can read lips, pick pockets, pick locks, run a six-minute mile, hot-wire a car or disable its engine, field-strip an M16, throw a pot, and build a working computer from scratch. I know biology, geology, and half a dozen other ologies, including theology, which is more useful than you might imagine in this God-fearing world. I can preach a sermon, hit a baseball, bake a cake, splint a broken bone, jam on electric guitar. None of it’s wasted. None of it. You never know when you’re going to need to come off as an expert. Or jump off a roof and know how to land. When I was a kid, they called me a polymath and imagined that I didn’t know what that meant. That’s really the key to a grifter’s skill set: knowing what they don’t know you know. Like languages. I’m fluent in German, Russian, and Portuguese, and could get conversational in, say, ??????? ?? ??? ??????? (Greek in a week).
This one time I was working unlicensed salvage from a NATO base in Baden-Württemberg, selling, I don’t know, missile parts or something to some random Hans und Franz. They were spreching between themselves, and guess what? They’re undercover oink. If it weren’t for me knowing German and them not knowing I knew, I’d be stewing in a Stuttgart hoosegow now.
I can operate a forklift, make brandy, read a blueprint, and do fairly heavy math in my head. I shoot scratch golf, which is just bedrock useful, because golf hustles, like pool hustles, are insurance, something you fall back on in slim times. The one I like best is where I let the mook play best ball. Taking three drives, chips, and putts per hole, and playing the one he likes most, he thinks he’s getting a huge edge—so huge that he’ll often give odds—but what he doesn’t realize is that all those extra swings add up. He’s playing like fifty-four holes of golf while I’m playing only eighteen, so by the back nine, his ass is dragging, while I’m still as peppy as a preppy on Red Bull. Even playing best ball, he doesn’t stand a chance. Plus, people can’t putt for money. Not if they’re not used to it. Pressure is leverage. A good grifter eats pressure for lunch.
But pressure is a double-edged sword—for the truth is revealed under such, for snuke and mook alike. Truth about your essential nature. Truth about what you want out of life. Sometimes a truth you didn’t even know was out there. Like maybe the control you thought you had was just the illusion of control all along.
Which brings us by roundabout means to the start of our tale.
It was Halloween. I had crashed a party in the Hollywood Hills by putting on no costume whatsoever and walking in the first open door I saw. When they asked what I was supposed to be, I said, “Party crasher,” and this struck them as so charming and conceptual that they just pointed me to the bar and said have a good time.
I had nothing in mind so crass as a petty boost. Not that I couldn’t. Infiltrating a host’s bedroom is easy as getting lost on the way to the can, and the things people think are hiding places … really aren’t. But that’s not what I’m about, not on Halloween. * See, for most people, Halloween is their one night a year to sell an imaginative lie, while for me it’s just the opposite, my one day of the year for me to be me, should I so choose. After all, tell people on Halloween that you’re a con artist and what’s the chance they’ll believe you? You’re just all charming and conceptual, that’s all. So—literally—a busman’s holiday.
Even so, one thing I was doing—the thing you never ever stop doing on the grift—was prospecting for leads. At any