I Totally Meant to Do That (2 page)

I hit our target, near Baxter on Canal, in my tasteless denim ensemble, around 11:10 and immediately saw what I was after: counterfeit purses. They were on display, so I didn’t need to weasel my way through a back room, down a secret staircase, or into a crawl space in the ceiling. It’s the little perks that matter.

At that point I acted as if I felt my phone vibrating. When I flipped it open, pretending to answer, I punched the last-number-dialed button.

“Hello?” I said.

Ringing
.

“Hey Carol! What’s happ’nin’?”

Ringing
.

“Not much. I’m shopp—”

“Jane?” answered my manager at Holmes Hi-Tech.

“—ing. Yep.”

“Are you at the location?”

“Yes. Dinner tonight; y’all should definitely come!”

“So the bags are there?”

“You got it!”

“Great, I’ll send the raid team now.”

“No, you’re beautiful!” (That last part was just for me.)

I put my phone back in a pocket and moved through the store slowly, regarding every item, taking time so as not to run out of merchandise to inspect. I couldn’t leave until the guys arrived; the knockoffs were the evidence my boss took to court, so without them we had no case, and therefore no profession. If Pokémon got spooked for some reason and pulled the illegal bags from the floor, I had to know where he put them, whether in one of the aforementioned hiding spots, or in another location on another block, an outcome I feared, as it would require me to follow, and I was uncomfortable tailing criminals through the streets of Chinatown. I am not a subtle person.

But this vendor wasn’t worried about getting busted by a spy. Neither was he concerned about lying to customers. While I modeled scarves, another woman in the stall pointed to a pocketbook without a label and asked, “Is this Gucci?” Without pausing, the merchant answered, “Yes.” To trained eyes such as mine or those of a Madison Avenue doyenne, the item in question was clearly patterned after Louis Vuitton. I assumed the vendor was mistaken, until another woman, a few minutes later, grabbed the same purse and asked, “Is this Chanel?” to which he also responded, “Yes.” Whatever it takes to make a sale; tell them what they want to hear.

Where the hell was the raid team? It had been almost fifteen minutes. No one spends that much time in a store the size of a minivan unless considering a major purchase, in which case I probably would have approached the salesman by now. But I didn’t want to engage him for fear he’d later suspect my involvement, and then, suddenly, oh my God I was the only other person in the store, but, phew, he went outside, and …

Shu-ku-ku-ku-CLANG!

The pleather purses are manufactured for pennies, either in China or in sweatshops, and, obviously, not taxed. Markups can reach eight thousand percent. Salesmen, leases, aliases, and passports are all a dime a dozen; the crooks only cared about the bags—not for their actual worth, but rather their potential, imagined worth. In this never-ending battle, the contraband was our Jerusalem: All sides revolved around it, gained definition from it, and, therefore, assigned it a value far greater than its face.

That’s why I was locked inside. Vendors protected their holy crap. They were familiar with raids, so if they saw the team approach—it’s hard to miss six beefy mustachioed Irish dudes rolling out of a white van like a clown car of sports announcers—they’d immediately close shop, regardless of patrons inside. Occasionally I was trapped with other confused women, sometimes by myself, but never for long: Warrants trump locks.

When the gates inevitably rose on the other side of the Pokémon sheet—which was, by the way, counterfeit itself—I scurried out like a frightened tourist, careful to avoid eye contact with the guys. I could congratulate them later over beers but couldn’t blow my cover at the moment because a couple of days later, I’d be back in Chinatown canvassing the same stretch of junk. My income hinged on my ability to be multiple people. Problem was: I’m not much of an actor.

In the spring of my senior year in high school, I took a season off sports to broaden my artistic horizons. I played Miss Bessom in our theater department’s production of Shirley Jackson’s adaptation of
The Lottery
. All you need to know about the play is that everyone wears gray and people die, but then again you’re probably familiar with the story after seeing
your
high school drama club production. I don’t know why this brutally dark play is so popular with adolescents … oh wait, yeah I do.

Anyway, I was horrible. I had a handful of lines and delivered each like a kid who bowls by holding the ball between her legs, and then while squatting, thrusts it down the lane. I am also a bad bowler.

Our director said to smile and project. Apparently I understood that to mean grimace and shout. I’d have been hailed as a star had the stage directions for Miss Bessom read, “played as a man with hearing loss and hemorrhoids.” Actually, for my portrayal to have been believable, the description would have needed to read, “played as Jane with hearing loss and hemorrhoids,” for I was never actually in character. While the line “I declare, it’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve seen you!” came out of my mouth, running through my head was: “Who talks that way? Why not just say, ‘it’s been a month’? The Sundays are implied.”

The only point in each performance when I felt the slightest association with how Miss Bessom might think and feel was when the Mrs. Dunbar character said to Bessom/me, “They told me you were gettin’ real fleshy.”

Bottom line: I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag if it were made of me-sized holes. Whatever, no biggie—except that every other spotter at Holmes Hi-Tech was an actor. In fact, it was a thespian friend of mine who’d introduced me to the gig. Actors liked the work because, in addition to the flexible hours, it allowed them to practice their craft. I pursued the job because it sounded cool, the closest to clandestine this suburban girl could get.

I wish I were able to reveal to you a deeper, more complicated motivation—a consuming desire to serve justice, a fascination with Chinese culture, a lurid role-playing fetish. “It sounded cool” is a lame provocation, but there it is nonetheless. I’ve grown accustomed to the disappointment engendered by that response. People prefer a good story.

My actor coworkers wrote new narratives every morning. After exchanging flyer postcards for various low-budget blackbox-theater one-acts, they’d transform themselves. I remember this brunette who earned the moniker “chameleon.” She left the office once as a Canadian-accented tourist and returned that afternoon a Goth teenager, replete with pale makeup and ripped skull-and-crossbones tights.
I
didn’t even recognize her.

She was one of only a few who switched from one identity to another beyond the office. Our manager discouraged the practice because there was nowhere safe to do it. She also warned us not to take notes anywhere, not even in a bank or pizza shop, and not to leave information on voice mails within earshot of anyone. She’d lost two spotters that way, one who’d blown his cover in front of an employee at Pearl Paint, and another who’d done so next to an elderly man playing mah-jongg in Columbus Park. Our manager said everyone in Chinatown was involved, “Everyone is in on it.” Obviously, that’s egregious hyperbole, but I think what she meant to say was that there was no establishment at which we could be certain no one was involved. Indeed, I once happened across a multi-thousand-dollar phony-Rolex deal while hitting the loo at the Lafayette Street Holiday Inn.

The most convincing performers scored the respected roles. One time, during assignments, our manager told this guy Henry that she’d be helping with his disguise that morning. Authenticity was critical, as they needed him to case a location for four straight hours, to monitor who came and went. So Henry became a junkie. He passed the afternoon sitting or standing on the curb, intermittently nodding off. Back at the office, while demonstrating the smackhead lean, wherein the body reaches an angle nearly 45 degrees but somehow, Newton defyingly, does not fall, he explained that he’d delivered a depiction so convincing, it’d attracted the attention of both a
cop, who told him he was disorderly and threatened to arrest him, and a born-again Christian, who told him about Jesus and threatened to save his soul.

And then there was I, approaching the disguise closet each time with only this question: Which wig today, the brown one that resembles my actual hair? Or the brown one that’s exactly like my actual hair? After the great Miss Bessom debacle, I knew better than to try to act like someone else. Also, I’m a terrible vocal mimic. I can’t even ape midwestern, and that’s the O-negative blood type of accents: It can flow through anyone. It’s the Bill Cosby impression of accents. And I am also bad at those … unless what’s been requested is “Bill Cosby doing a Japanese man.” So only two characters lived on my résumé. One was me, and the other was a heightened version of me, the me I imagined I’d be if I’d stayed in North Carolina.

Alterna-Me had, for starters, a much thicker drawl, which I could pull off because rather than “doing an accent,” I merely tapped into the way I sound when I’ve had too much to drink. She was young, married, and applying to law schools near her home in Raleigh. She wore pearls and belonged to things like supper clubs and congregations. She grocery shopped at the Harris Teeter and ate lunch on Sundays at the Carolina Country Club. If ever questioned, I could have recited her biography easily. I knew everything about her, even though I am not the one who created her.

“Don’t you want to come home and go to law school?” my uncle Lucius used to ask nearly every time we spoke. “Raleigh’s nice, you know. It’s ranked on the list of most livable cities.”

“I’ll throw a luncheon for you!” Aunt Jane, for whom I am named, would add, having picked up another phone in the house. “And get you into all the clubs.”

“You can join the Episcopal Church.”

And then my aunt would shout, “I’ll give you all my jewelry!”

So, yeah, this girl was a big part of my life. And somehow, she worked. I canvassed Canal Street three, occasionally four times a week, always wearing a shade of the same person, and got away with it. I didn’t need to be a chameleon because the counterfeiters bought
me
. Eventually, I developed a theory regarding why.

Since they knew how we operated, merchants were suspicious of every potential customer, scrutinized each for tells that he or she might be a spy. I noticed them paying special attention to certain people while ignoring others, whomever they could quickly disregard as guileless. I never needed to become a different person, as long as the original was consistently overlooked. And as I’ve come to understand, people—from, apparently, either hemisphere—assume Southerners are innocent.

It was a wondrous thing to witness. Salesmen eyed me warily until the moment I purred, “Y’all got Gucci?” when they’d instantly drop their guards and either lift a sheet, pull a trash bag from a desk, or open a concealed door in a false wall. It’s not as if we were suddenly pals; there were no smiles or secret handshakes. What happened was a dismissal. They dismissed me, shifted mentally from looking at me to looking beyond me, over my shoulder for the next potential threat.

Astute readers would argue that any accent could have put them at ease. And for the most part that’s true. Counterfeiters trust tourists. But I’m telling you, there’s something foolproof about the drawl. Unlike some of the other spotters, I was almost never denied access. I can only posit that Barney Fife and Elly Mae Clampett exist in the collective unconscious, because I don’t think Mao fed his starving republic on a diet of TV Land classics.

Which is to say that maybe it was more than the accent; maybe it was also my accompanying wide eyes and gullible smile. Come to think of it, maybe it was I who worked like a Southern charm.

Once, I asked a peddler if he had “LV” in the store and he whispered, “Not now.”

“Why?” I responded vapidly.

He nodded toward another woman. “Come back later when she’s gone. She pretends to shop, but she’s a spy.”

Whoever she was, she didn’t work for us. Possibly she reported to Customs, but I doubt it. Either way, a moment later he threw her out of the store so that I, the spy, could shop. Not only did he fail to suspect me, he shared delicate information! My countenance and personality telegraphed a prodigious naïveté. It’s a circumstance discouraging and frustrating, and I didn’t mind at all using it against them.

Still, even with my airtight
Hee Haw
avatar, I couldn’t get cocky. A couple of times during my stint with the firm, coworkers returned from a day on the streets and heard, when the elevator opened, “You’ve been burned.” Our manager knew immediately because she had informants on the inside. That was a spotter’s worst day of work and also his or her last. It’s kind of like accidentally firing yourself.

Typically, though, the response was, “I figured.” An agent knows when the jig is up. If you approach a shop and it closes its gates, you’ve been burned. If you turn around and a shopkeeper you’ve been watching is following to see where
you’re
going, you’ve been burned. If passing one of the sentinel lookouts, who stand on stools at major intersections in Chinatown during the highly trafficked weekends, leads him to reach for his mobile phone and set off a chain reaction of cellular warnings that runs down Canal Street like those mountaintop bonfires in
The Return of the King
, you’ve been burned.

Game over.

In other words, I couldn’t work every day. But it was summer, and in your twenties, that means weddings, which require plane
tickets, gifts, and for me, that summer, two bridesmaids dresses. I was behooved by teal-green ruffles to seek supplementary employment. I picked up temp work here and there. And because I had experience waiting tables in college at a wing joint called Pantana Bob’s—for which I wore a T-shirt that read “Bob’s Got a Big Deck!”—I scored one shift a week at the legendary West Village brewpub Chumley’s.

It was cush. The owner promised a set amount each shift, so if my tips were short, he’d pay out the difference from his pocket; decent guy. He rarely had to, though. The place stayed packed. Both locals and tourists competed to sit in a booth that might have been occupied by John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Simone de Beauvoir, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Edna St. Vincent Millay, or any other of the dozens of literary luminaries who are said to have haunted the windowless speakeasy either during or after its Prohibition heyday. It didn’t matter that flies swarmed the back room, the jukebox featured only opera, or that sawdust inevitably found its way into your overpriced shepherd’s pie and frequently flat beer. With a pedigree such as that, derelictions are deemed charming. I agreed. I loved the joint.