Can I See Your I. D.? (10 page)

You think about this for a while. You think about nothing
but
this for a while. And it's surely on your mind, even if it's at the back, as you walk up Forty-second Street—just a couple of blocks from your dad's store—one afternoon amid the five o'clock hustle and traffic.

Right now, back home in Westchester County, guys your age are shooting hoops and spinning Beatles 45s. You, you're fifty-five minutes and another world away. You're strolling past the Commodore Hotel when a car pulls up in front. Out steps an Eastern Airlines pilot and his crew.

Heads turn. Doors open. Respect is shown.

Is anyone else at this scene thinking what you're thinking? That nobody's
ever
going to seriously question that man in uniform before cashing his check?

And is anyone else here wondering what you're wondering? Which is: Just how old do you have to be to pass for an airline pilot?

About twenty-six, is your guess.

Who do you think you are?

Really, you ask yourself, just who do you think you are? You've got some nerve thinking you can get inside the heads of the ten people you've written about in this book. And where do you get off thinking you can put the readers inside those people's heads as well?

But wait—it's not like you picked these ten people at random. There were other candidates, other impostors and pretenders that you considered, but their stories and circumstances didn't offer what you needed in order to tell their stories this way.

And what you needed was documentation—details of these masquerades captured in a personal way, or a public way, or both. These people's memoirs, interviews, and public statements were useful, to the extent that you could trust them; after all, we're talking about people who made their mark by misleading folks. Police reports, news accounts, and the tellings of others were helpful too, though these sources were often based either on statements grabbed amid the hubbub and swirl at the end of the deception, or on memories tapped months, years, or even decades after the incident.

So, let's face it, all of these profiles are imperfect. There are undoubtedly things you got wrong, or didn't get right enough. But through the telling of all ten of these stories, and through your attempts to understand all ten of these lives, you feel like you've gained something that a lifetime spent delving into every last detail of only one of these stories would not offer.

Now, you ought to state right up front that you're not inclined to go out and take on a fake identity or pretend to be someone else. But if you were, you think you have a pretty good idea now of how to go about it successfully. (“Successfully” is a relative term, of course. More than half of your subjects were caught in the act—if they hadn't been, we might never have known about them.)

Some key lessons:

1. Look the part.
Getting fooled by one of these masqueraders was often just a matter of looking only at the surface—seeing a Transit Authority uniform shirt and a bag of motorman's gear was to see a T.A. employee, not a teenager with a thing for trains; seeing a lightskinned person in a gentleman's clothes was to see a white man, not an African American woman. It's like Frank Abagnale told you: “All they saw standing in front of them was this uniform—not the person
in
the uniform, but the uniform.”

2. Let your would-be discoverers feel smart.
People who feel smarter when they're around you tend to have fond feelings for you and will be less inclined to question whether you really are who you say you are. Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., as “Dr. Joseph Cyr” and in his other guises, had a real knack for making experts in his fields of fakery feel this way. How did he do it? Get this: He asked their opinions and listened to what they had to say. He got information he needed, and they got an ego boost.

The mere presence of “Princess Caraboo” (aka Mary Baker) had a similar effect on people—especially on men, apparently. In her silence and in the mystery of her origins, her visitors saw an opportunity to spout whatever random facts or bits of hearsay they had accumulated about the Far East while passing it off as actual knowledge. The more intelligent they made themselves feel, the more material she had to pick and choose from in wordlessly crafting her backstory.

3. Keep your mouth shut.
The less you say, and especially the less made-up stuff you say, the less you have to keep track of, and the less likely it is that a listener will begin tugging at an inconsistency in your story in order to see what unravels. Solomon Perel got lucky that it was his Nazi girlfriend's mother, and not his girlfriend herself, with whom he was more talkative than careful.

But in addition to knowing a lot about how to get away with a false identity, you've also learned quite a bit about what to expect from the experience. And it's not something you're eager to try for yourself.

You think of the loneliness. Ellen Craft and Riley Weston were exceptions—they had partners in their deception. The rest were on their own, whether alone in a huge but impersonal crowd (like Frank Abagnale, crying himself to sleep in Manhattan) or in the uncomfortably close company of others (you're not the first to wonder how Sarah Rosetta Wakeman handled getting her period in the barracks). Putting on an act means putting up a wall around you, revealing next to nothing about your true self, and not having a completely honest conversation with anyone. Maybe that's some people's idea of a good time, but it's not yours.

You think of the stress. Solomon Perel must have had it the worst of them all. For
years
he had to maintain that false identity or die. What he said, what he didn't say, how he looked, how he acted, regardless of whether he was awake or asleep—all were potential giveaways, and the toll that must have taken on his nerves is hard to fathom. Mary Baker must have experienced some of the same, and while it would have been nowhere near as severe, who can blame her for running off? Ace Carter and Ferdinand Demara may have been heavy drinkers no matter what their circumstances were, but living lives of deception could not have helped.

You think of the fear. In the case of Craft and Perel and John Howard Griffin, the fear was mortal: Getting caught might well mean getting killed. Even when the stakes of the masquerade were lower—Riley Weston's quest for better TV and movie roles comes to mind—there was the risk of losing out on a life that had been desperately dreamed of and tirelessly worked for. And while it's easy to laugh now at Keron Thomas's predicament while the A train was stuck on the tracks—with the ride of a lifetime literally brought to a screeching halt because he exceeded a twenty-mph speed limit, and his technical skill undone by the lack of a flashlight—you think your own response to that situation would have been to panic. Just a little, of course.

You also think of what life held in store for these ten when their masquerades ended—though you've tried not to. None of them knew, in the moments you've worked to capture, what would happen to them in the minutes that followed or in years to come, and so you've deliberately tried to block out your own knowledge of their futures.

It seems only fair to recognize, however, that their lives amounted to more than their deceptions. But it's useful too. Because now that you think about it, you see that where these people ended up—all over the map—echoes the motivations behind their masquerades.

Better pay, better jobs, easy money, social justice, psychological need, plain old-fashioned kicks, sheer survival—each of those motives, plus others that you've no doubt missed, can be found in at least one of these stories. Take another ten masqueraders and you'd probably find as many more.

Which brings up one more question. These subjects all had
their
reasons for pretending to be someone else. Can you imagine what
yours
would be?

Writing the paragraphs below has reminded me of what a generous world this can be, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to say so.

Special thanks goes to those who made time for interviews for this project—not only Frank Abagnale and Keron Thomas, but also author and filmmaker Laura Browder, journalist Jenny Hontz, chess coach (and former T.A. motorman) Regoberto Sabio, and Ferdinand Waldo Demara's high school acquaintance Irene Wolfendon and his
Cayuga
shipmates Peter Chance, Bill Doyle, Ted Meyers, and Don Saxon.

Many others provided additional support for my research, and I am grateful to each one of them, including Benton Arnovitz and Aleisa Fishman at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Robert Bonazzi, Steve Campbell at
County Magazine
, Deirdre Castle at the Victoria
Times Colonist
, Sarah Davis at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, Nekeela DeHaarte, James Fleming, Carrie Ann Flora, Marie Ford at Central Catholic High School, Beatrice Hotchin, Rebecca Smith Hurd, John LaFave at Cengage Learning, Joan LeFosse at ABC News, Ryan Mackey at the Cherokee Nation Cultural Resource Center, George Moore at the Naval Officers Association of Canada, Maren Nelson at Brown University Alumni Relations, Douglas Newman, the community at NYC Transit Forums, Marco Ricci, Marc Tyler Nobleman, Jeff Robel at the National Climatic Data Center, Bernard Spaughton, Kelly Welbes at Abagnale & Associates, John White at the College of Charleston Library, and Jennifer Ziegler.

Thanks also to the indispensible staffs at the libraries of Austin, Texas; Columbia University; Kingston, Ontario; Lawrence, Massachusetts; New York City; the University of Texas; and Washington, D.C., and to those at Library and Archives Canada and the State of Alabama Department of Archives and History, and to all those who spent time on my various Freedom of Information Act and Interlibrary Loan requests.

Wow. That's a lot of people who helped just with my gathering of the raw materials for this book. My wife and sons may have realized before I did that this project was like researching and writing ten different picture book biographies (and then some) at the same time. Thank you, and you, and you for being so understanding and accommodating and supportive.

Editors Judy O'Malley and Nancy Mercado and my agent, Erin Murphy, showed the initial enthusiasm for this project that propelled it into the hands of Alisha Niehaus, its even-more-enthusiastic editor and allaround champion at Dial Books. Heather Alexander at Dial deserves the credit for coming up with the book's title, after it had gone through almost as many temporary names as Demara. Thank you all, and the rest of the crew at Dial for their parts in bringing this book about, and Jean Dayton at Dayton Bookings for her much-needed support during the home stretch.

That Paul Hoppe deserves my thanks and appreciation is self-evident. But Paul also bought me a cup of coffee at New York City's Books of Wonder, and that carries a lot of weight with me too.

Finally, my experience as the writer of these stories was infinitely less lonely than the experiences of my subjects, and much of the credit for that goes to my friends in the children's literature community who read parts of this book and encouraged me onward. Many of those friends and I spent two and a half critique-filled days in the Austin home of Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, discussing and debating—among many other things about many other manuscripts—whether the second-person point of view was a good idea to start with and, regardless, how to make it better. I hope I gave as good as I got. Thank you all for your help, and thank you for letting me be myself.

Cudahy, Brian J.
Under the Sidewalks of New York: The Story of the Greatest Subway System in the World
. Fordham University Press, Bronx, New York, 1995.

“Day tripper; Teen posing as motorman takes train for joyride in New York City,”
Houston Chronicle
, May 11, 1993.

Dougherty, Peter.
Tracks of the New York City Subway
, Third Edition. Self-published, 2003.

Fischler, Stan.
The Subway: A Trip Through Time on New York's Rapid Transit
. H&M Productions II Inc., New York, 1997.

Frankel, Bruce. “NYC teen takes city for a ride; A 3-hour spin on the subway,”
USA Today
, May 12, 1993.

Frattini, Dave.
The Underground Guide to New York Subways
. St. Martin's Press, New York, 2000.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Motorman Takes City For a Ride; B Movie Episode Rolls on A Train,”
The Washington Post
, May 12, 1993.

Gregory, Sophfronia Scott and Massimo Calabres. “The great A train robbery,”
Time
, May 24, 1993.

Henican, Ellis. “Subway Joyrider Arrested in N.Y.; Teenage rail buff drove train safely through 85 stations,”
The San Francisco Chronicle
(
Newsday
), May 12, 1993.

———. “Subway joyrider draws probation; New York teen still thrilled by power of trains,”
The Evening News Harrisburg
(
Newsday
), July 15, 1993.

“Impostor takes A train passengers in N.Y. City for a ride,”
Buffalo News
(Associated Press), May 11, 1993.