out my dark past. The job wasn't much, but one day I noticed a customer, a fetching young woman who was in graduate school. We started dating and we really clicked. I didn't reveal my past for several months, and when I did, while we were sitting on a park bench, she at first found it difficult to accept. But she realized that I was just a naive kid when I committed the crimes, and that I was a changed man.
Her parents had a harder time warming to the notion of their daughter's ex-con suitor. She really worked on them, especially her father. She pleaded with him to go talk to my parole officer, for she knew he would tell him how I had changed. That pessimistic parole supervisor had assigned me to a highly supportive and unbiased parole officer who did all he could to elevate my spirits. He was a truly decent man, a born-again Christian with a generous humor who was always bringing up God in our discussions. We had a great relationship.
Finally, to appease her, my girlfriend's father did call my parole officer. He gave me a good build-up. He said, "I don't think Frank will ever go back to prison. He went down the wrong road, and he's smart enough to know the right road now." But then he had to insert a final thought: "I must tell you, though, I have five daughters, and I wouldn't let one of them get within six miles of Frank." That set me back months.
But finally they did accept me, and my girlfriend and I got married soon afterward.
After nine months in the supermarket, the district manager buttonholed me one day and said that they were opening a new store in the suburbs, which would be their first store to stay open twenty-four hours. He told me he wanted me to be the night manager. I was flattered. I liked that job, and I did it well. As always, I had made a point of being presentable and personable, and was dedicated to what I was doing. Then came the familiar story. A security check turned up my checkered past, and once again I was brusquely shown the door.
The truth is, I had felt extremely comfortable being a supermarket manager. I liked overseeing people and making the decisions that had to be made. There were enough complications to the work to intellectually challenge me and satisfy my ego. Had I not been fired, I honestly think that today I would still be running a supermarket, making decisions about canned peas and corn flakes.
The cycle continued for me. Nobody cared about my performance on the job, only my illicit past. Nobody was willing to believe that I was a different person. Once a con man, in their view, always a con man. It's a terrible feeling to want to reconstruct your life, and yet find yourself blocked at every turn. This made for a lot of tension.
A hopelessness sank in. This was not the routine hopelessness of a bad day or a bad week, but a deep despair and a recognition that nothing could go right again. Even though I knew the dire consequences, I seriously began to think of reverting to my past criminal behavior. There seemed to be no other way to get anywhere. I was angry at the establishment for refusing to give me that second chance that I knew I would make good on.
In my latest incarnation, I was working at night as a movie projectionist - that projectionist's license I acquired in prison had come in handy after all. In this case, I had told the manager about my past, and he didn't really care. I was upstairs locked in this booth for eight hours; what harm could I do? The job paid pretty well, but it was hardly thought-provoking work. I thought to myself that I was smarter than this, that I was wasting genuine talents that I possessed. What had made me so good as a con artist was my photographic memory that enabled me to acquire the knowledge and pose as someone else in an astonishingly short span of time. I could focus on things with an extraordinary intensity. And I was extremely observant, always noticing the small things that others didn't. These traits gave me an extra edge that I milked for all they were worth. But they didn't go very far in the cramped milieu of a projectionist's booth.
WHEN