Retired schoolteachers make notes with Wildwood pens they don’t notice won’t write. They try to finish sentences; they tell him, “Stop!” He can’t stop. They shout him down. “We understand! We have the money! Here’s what you mean. Here’s what you should say.” Only a checkbook waved in his face gets him to shut up. A scammer makes you teach him how to scam you. He won’t take the check.

              “I don’t take money, not even a smallest completely guaranteed refundable deposit, but would you go to the top floor of the luxuriest hotel,” a remodeled five story motel, “worth every cent you spend, not one cent, for views alone of oceans of the sea. Even in a cloudy day you see far out into the future shiny like gold blinding you on the waters. In that room is model Paradise Condo, just to see. Hype free. I write, JL, Just Looking, on the ticket. Anybody hardsells you, come back here, I will have their job.”

              In the motel room are closers. They make ten per cent of what they take. He gets half the rest, or all of it. I don’t know, closers don’t know, whether he’s boss, front man, owner or flunky. Who cares? Who’d admit?

              The first week I earn ten dollars a day. No problem. He pays everybody twenty-five a day no matter how little they earn. He knows, who better? It takes time to get a scam started. There are five of us Boardwalk scuzz, nobodies able to look odd or normal enough to interest nobodies walking past. Freakshow for fellow freaks.

              I’m worried. I’ve never made so little on a scam before. I think it must be the closers’ take. “This hundred thousand dollar condominium reserved for you with the single refundable tax-deductible deposit of,” whatever they can get. Fifty, a hundred, a thousand dollars. Rumor is one closer got ten thousand. When the season’s over, scammers leave for Florida, California, the Gulf Coast, anywhere a new scam’s setting up. Marks call the cops. Cops, who’ve heard it all before, tell them chalk it up to experience, ma’am and sir, there’s no way to police intentions.

              I’ve never scammed anybody for more than five dollars, which is the middle-class equivalent of asking you for spare change. Small as it is, I do have a conscience about taking big money from Marks who’ve never done me any harm. But the Wheel of Fortune is a slow starter too. I’m making two hundred a week. What happens to my little curlyhead, whose $500 a month is all that stands between me and Jersey jail?

19

  

Copyright 2008 Disclaimer