start, which I do), I recognize the big pitfall, and no, I’m not talking about getting (A) arrested or (2) the crap kicked out of you. (Both I have, and neither’s a big deal.) I’m not even talking about what they call grift drift, where you have to make rootlessness your root and homelessness your home because it doesn’t pay to set a stationary target, not in this line of work. No, the real problem with life on the snuke is how it makes you cynical. Once you know how easy it is to pull wool—and it seems like I knew it neonatally—you start to expect the worst, or at least the least, of people. It’s not fair and it’s not fun. So I work hard to keep up my pointillist perspective—make every day indeed Sunday in the park with George if I can—and I always try to give my victims the metaphorical reacharound, so they can feel like crossing paths with me wasn’t the worst thing that could’ve happened to them in life.
According to me, I’m moral.
Plus, according to me, I’m normal, which is not at all abnormal when you think about it, because everybody’s default view is the view from inside their own skin. Though I appreciate that I strike some as strange. First, there’s my career, my chosen line of work, which few would choose. Next there’s my inexpressive expressiveness. I learn like a sponge, and like a sponge I hold everything without judgment and sort without order. I’m equal parts lunch bucket, pop culture, and string theory, and this can make me appear quite random at times, though I find that people find that part of my charm. Of course, what they call charm I call a tool, but that’s a subject for a different time.
Then there’s my name: Radar Hoverlander. Seriously, who’s got a name like that? People assume it’s a fabricat, * possibly something I cooked up between when I entered Harvard at the age of fifteen and when I got expelled for celebrating my eighteenth birthday in the apse of the Appleton Chapel with a bottle of absinthe and the underage-yet-in-my-defense-wildly-precocious daughter of a Radcliffe provost. That’s a reasonable supposition. Certainly if I’d been cursed with a Doe-value name, my first order of business would have been to tart it up to suit the grift. Zakaz Kourení, Vietato Fumare, something like that. But Radar Hoverlander I was born, and I have the birth certificate to prove it. Which assertion, of course, might not be all that assuasive, since when it comes to birth certificates I had six at last count. What can I tell you? Documents of identity are to my line of work what bromine and xylene neutralizers are to an EPA cleanup crew. You like to have choices. Anyway, for my given name I can thank my father’s whimsical bent toward palindromics. Which, when you think about it, thank God for Radar, for I could just as easily have been Otto. Or Grogorg. Milton Notlim. Lysander A. Rednasyl. All of this, by the way, according to my mother, for by the time I was old enough to ask such questions, the old man was long since coopgeflonnen. North to Alaska. South to Ixtapa. Or just into the vapor where grifters go when grift drift takes them too far too fast.
Hoverlander, they say, is a family name. German or Dutch, they say. Fabricat, say I. Pure Ellis Island improv. Probably the original was something with an unspeakable number of consonants, or an unsightly and un-American -ilych or -iliescu suffix, which would never do for this conniving bloodline of mine. From what I know of my family—on both sides, because like attracts like—we’ve followed the main chance for a thousand years, with moving on and blending in our ancestral stock-in-trade. Find a place, stay till you wear the welcome mat flat, then scat. That’s how we ended up in California. We just kept heading west till we ran out of west. The earliest memory I have of my mother is her standing on the end of the Santa Monica pier, saying, “Guam. I wonder what that’s like.”
Shortly thereafter, my mother discovered that while a deftly batted eyelash can cadge a drink or liplock a landlord, no amount of coquettish demur can deter the clammy hands of cancer. So with Dad in the wind and Mom in the ground, it was just me and my mentis non compos nana through all the years of