Giving Up (6 page)

I
couldn't be trusted, that
I
was not what I seemed to be, and that if he handed over the money order I might try to take off with it and keep the full five hundred bucks for myself. He stood alongside me and held the money order in front of us so that I could inspect it up close, and even take hold of the opposite corner, while he could be sure that at any second he could snatch it from my view. ‘See,' he said, ‘it's pretty standard.' I, as I've already mentioned, had never seen a money order form before. They might as well have been from the same era as telegrams or trunk calls (whatever the hell they were), which is to say I considered them to be antiquated, obsolete, and so I certainly wasn't in a position to judge whether the form he held out in front of me was standard or not. ‘That's my friend,' he said, and pointed to a line near the top of the form where in faint blue ink someone had written the name ‘Gary Trites.' If he was trying to con me out of four hundred dollars then he was taking a big risk by letting me inspect the money order form. For all he knew, I might be the sort of person that regularly deals with money orders, and so knows what a legitimate form would look like. ‘There's no way he'd try to pass a bogus form off on someone like me,' I thought, and when I thought ‘someone like me' what I meant was a relatively well-dressed, normal-looking, intelligent-seeming man – my intelligence, I believed, would have been evident to the stranger within seconds of our encounter – but I might as well have thought ‘someone like him,' since I considered him to be well-dressed, good-looking, and obviously intelligent (or intelligent-seeming, at least) even though the desperate and wild eyes that were fixed on me throughout his whole story made me think of the senile patients at a nursing home. He had a nice voice and spoke clearly in full sentences and without the usual pauses, repetitions, and abrupt transitions and loopy syntax that characterize what passes for speech these days. He didn't saturate his story with obscenities or any of the other commonplace verbal tics. And if it weren't for his crazed and hollow stare I wouldn't have doubted that I was speaking with someone in possession of a keen intellect. But the way that he was looking at me as he kept pointing at the name on the form and repeating the blank assertion ‘That's my friend', suggested that he wasn't ‘all there', or that he was a bit ‘off.' ‘Either way,' I thought, ‘he'd have to be pretty stupid to think that someone like me wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a phony money order and a real one. Why would he risk showing me the money order unless it was the real thing?' I scanned the rest of the form and even though I had never seen one before I decided right away that it was legit. The FedEx logo was featured on the top left and the rest was divided into the boxed grid you would expect from the sort of form designed to record and transfer a sum of money. In addition to this, the form was a colour-coded sequence of three sheets with two carbon inserts, and it seemed altogether unlikely that this guy would have been able to forge this style of document, since the materials aren't available to general consumers and would've had to have been ordered from some sort of specialized merchant who dealt in carbon triplicate forms and that sort of thing. I focussed on the text and was immediately struck by the words ‘Money Order' on the top of the form. I was so intent on determining the authenticity of the form that it didn't occur to me that he could have stolen it, or that they might be freely available to anyone coming in off the street. ‘See,' he said, following my gaze and indicating a line just below the title where $500 had been scrawled in pale blue ink. ‘It's like a cheque.' Now that I was convinced that it was legitimate, I began to pay closer attention to what was written in the little boxes, but aside from ‘Gary Trites' and ‘$500' the form was blank except for another name – ‘Luke MacDonald' – and an illegible signature at the bottom. ‘Is that you?' I asked, pointing at the signature. ‘Yeah,' he said, pulling the form away and putting out his hand for me to shake it. ‘Sorry, didn't I give you my name?' It's Luke.' I shook his hand as impersonally as I could manage. ‘Okay, Luke,' I said, ‘let's go cash this money order.' This had the effect of taking him completely by surprise, so much that before I'd finished saying ‘let's go cash this money order,' he'd already started to respond defensively, as if to a question or an accusation. It was clear that he hadn't been listening to what I was saying, only that I was saying something, and he assumed (reasonably enough) that I was going to say something about how the form was blank except for his friend's name, the sum, his name, and his signature. Shouldn't there be something else? More information? At some point he registered what I'd said but it was as though he kept going because he was so shocked by my abrupt acceptance. It took a moment, but when he finally did stop talking he stood in front of me and stared. He'd been prepared for failure. The moment he approached me he probably said to himself, ‘There's no way this guy is going to listen to me, and even if I do manage to get him to stop and hear me out, there's no way he's going to believe a word I say.' The reason he seemed so desperate was because he knew how ridiculous it was to expect someone to hear him out, believe his story, and then go through the trouble of depositing the money order in their account so they could withdraw four hundred and hand it over. This was why he'd been willing to approach a complete stranger and humiliate himself with an outrageous request. ‘I've got nothing to lose,' he probably thought. It's not that he didn't hope to succeed, he wouldn't have bothered approaching me in the first place if that was the case, it was just that he never suspected it would really happen. To put it in more simple terms, he knew he wasn't going to succeed, but he wasn't going to stop approaching strangers until he did. So he couldn't believe his luck (and that's what it was, luck) when the impossible finally happened and I agreed to cash the money order at the bank machine a couple blocks away. After standing there silently and staring at me in utter disbelief he appeared to accept the fact that I had agreed to help him out and suddenly hurried to thank me, piling on the gratitude, going on about how he ‘could tell right away that I was a good guy' and that I was basically saving his life. He'd started walking in the direction of the bank machine and while he kept heaping on the compliments he suddenly became impatient. While he'd been telling me his story he stared at me the entire time, but now he was looking all around him as if he was expecting someone to show up right at that moment, someone that he'd forgotten about and only just remembered. I had expected him to be grateful, but his non-stop praise was so over the top (at one point he compared me to Jesus) and he was so overwhelmed and pathetic, that it struck me as suspicious. In fact, what bothered me about the way he was carrying on was that he was behaving as though I had agreed to
give
him four hundred dollars, instead of agreeing to cash his money order and take one hundred dollars of his money for my trouble. It was like he'd forgotten everything he'd just told me about the money order (if only for a second), like once I said ‘let's go cash this money order' he'd been so surprised, so completely caught off guard, that he forgot to remember that I was doing him a small favour, one that I was supposedly going to profit from, and that it was really just a minor inconvenience (if, that is, his story had been true, which, of course, it wasn't) and so he felt the same gratitude that anyone would feel if, out of desperation, they were obliged to ask a complete stranger for four hundred dollars and on account of some fucked-up luck the stranger said ‘Sure! I'll give you four hundred dollars.' He sensed that something was off. He didn't believe me, but since I didn't refuse him outright he couldn't plead his case any further, so he tried to steer the conversation towards innocuous bullshit about where I was from, since he assumed (correctly) that I wasn't from around here. I answered his questions as if I was taking an exam, which is to say that I answered immediately, without thinking about what I was saying, because all I was thinking about was how I was going to get away from this guy. ‘I'm not going to go through with this,' I thought, ‘Even though I said I would there is no way that I'm going to hand over four hundred bucks to this guy. There's still time for me to do something before we get to the bank machine. I can think of some excuse to get me out of this mess.' So even as I was telling this stranger about my childhood I was frantically searching for a reason for why I wouldn't be able to give him four hundred dollars without, at the same time, revealing that the reason I couldn't deposit the money order was because I didn't believe a word of what he'd said. ‘Because that's what you're doing,' I said to myself, ‘you are giving this guy four hundred dollars out of your own pocket, and making a fraudulent deposit, which no doubt won't go over very well with the bank. There is no way that money order is for real.' But I couldn't come up with anything, so I kept walking and talking and thinking and at no point did it occur to me that I could simply turn to this guy and say, ‘I don't believe a word coming out of your mouth, and even though you're obviously a handsome and intelligent man in your early thirties and no doubt could have your pick from all sorts of gainful employment, it's pretty clear that you are trying to con me out of my own hard-earned money.' And the reason I never thought to say this to him wasn't because I was afraid that if I confronted him he'd freak out and kick my ass – I'm a coward, but I'm also foolishly, resplendently proud – it was because I was embarrassed for him. Up until I had agreed to cash the money order, there had been a glimmer of truth, however faint, to his bullshit story, and even though I shouldn't have given it any credence, it was impossible to completely satisfy my doubt so long as he maintained the pretense that he was telling me the truth, and even if he'd come on a little strong, and the desperate tone of his voice suggested that this wasn't the first time he'd been this hard up, his act was somehow convincing. But the moment I agreed to his bogus proposal he was so stunned and full of joy over his dumb luck (i.e. me) that he definitively put to rest even the dimmest possibility that he was telling me the truth, and I could see with agonizing clarity just how fucking stupid I was being. And I was also struck by how pathetic he was. This was my first encounter with a real con man, and instead of the narcissistic calm I'd come to expect from all the crap I watch on TV, he turned out to be a rather ordinary alcoholic, and also an addict (of what, I'm sure I don't know, but something hard) and he was obviously in a chaotic state of total despair. He'd been reduced to cheating naive strangers out of what little money they have. It's shameful to go around conning people like me out of their wages, or inheritance, or stock options, or whatever, and while there may be a few people out there who are actually comfortable with this sort of thing and can hold their heads high and never give a thought to the degradation and corruption of their soul, I'm willing to bet that most people would rather work, even if the work wasn't all that great, maybe even if it was downright shitty, because there is something about ripping people off – even when they can afford it – that offends the sense of fairness that we're either born with or that gets planted in us at an early age. When I looked at his eyes now, eyes that I'd found so wild and mysterious, I saw what was there all along, the blank stare of someone high on hard drugs. To him, I was nothing. The story was nothing. There was only the four hundred dollars. It was possible he wasn't the sort of person who would normally go around cheating people. Maybe in his former life he'd been a minor success, the product of years of patient and unhurried work. He hadn't been ambitious and didn't expect that anything great was in store for him, just a quiet decent life. But a skiing accident, or maybe something even more banal, like a car crash, left him in constant agony and he ended up a slave to his pain meds, lost everything, turned to the harder stuff, and wound up so racked with need that he even tried the old money order con that nobody ever fell for anymore, certainly not with such a strung out and wasted addict like Luke MacDonald. As we made our way to the ATM he insisted on keeping eye contact with me the entire time, which meant that he had to do a mix of side-stepping and light-jogging, at one point even facing me straight on as he jogged backwards. But he wasn't very good at it. He kept bumping into me and tripping us both up, all because he insisted on looking me in the eye while he kept firing questions at me or interjecting with stories of his own childhood, keeping up a staccato pace that was clearly designed to distract me so I wouldn't have an opportunity to back out or to consider more closely everything that he'd said to me and discover some inconsistency or implausibility that I hadn't noticed before, because, as far as he understood, up until now, I wasn't suspicious of him or his story. ‘Why, if he had even a shadow of a doubt, would he agree to my proposal?' is what he would think. It's unlikely that I had been his first
mark
that day. It was late and I imagine he'd already been walking the streets for hours, meeting with continual rejection, most
marks
not even letting him get a word in before cutting him off and moving on, while those who listened, even those who listened to the whole story, may have let him down a bit gentler, but until he'd found me he'd been refused by what I'm sure were dozens of people. So he certainly wasn't expecting to be able to get me to listen to him, let alone agree to
cash his money order
, and even once I agreed he must've been skeptical at first, that I was trying to trick him and instead of going to the bank machine I was leading him into a trap. He was an addict after all, and the cruel irony of living in the street, so I've heard, is that they get mugged and ripped off all the time (often by other