Crime and Cowardice

I very, very recommend the February 2011 issue of Wired Magazine, “The Underworld Exposed.” You’ll know it at your local Fry’s Electronics by its shadowy cover—a pair of eyes, painted in some angular, very graphic cartoon style—or by all the mixed-up, dime-novel typefaces (“How to Buy a Kidney, p. 112”). Some of the articles inside the covers will touch on WikiLeaks, cybercrime, and simpler Nigerian scams, so that the magazine still appeals to tech geeks; but other articles are quainter, with pickpocketing and smuggling and feats of confidence as their focus.

When I was a real young kid, before I became an early adopter of email, I was into letter-writing. I handwrote a letter to Tyco, manufacturers of Spy-Tech toys, imploring them to brand a live-action kid-whizzes-versus-adult-adversaries movie or television show (I am waiting for that check for ‘Spy Kids’ that isn’t coming). In short time I received a brown paper package in the mail. Inside: a letter, politely rejecting my idea (“we’ve thought of this already; no-go”) and a consolation copy of the Usborne Detective Guide to Fakes and Forgeries. I still think of whoever might have been behind that and how kind that was. Isn’t it neat? I still have my copy of that book.

Reading and rereading Fakes and Forgeries precipitated my ongoing, seldom-spoken fascination with crime. There are crimes of zoology (Piltdown Man), art crimes (washing a painting from an old canvas, for instance, then reproducing a famous work by hand), and of course, penmanship forgery. It smarts to be really robbed, or really scammed, but nobody minds being outwitted by magicians or good storytellers or other talented technicians. A good crime is illusive allusive elusive and whatevers.

There are good crimes and bad crimes, as author Ricky Jay notes (“I make a distinction between hard and soft crime”). The identity theft committed against my father, from which our family has never recovered, might have been something special and interesting—an amazing number of documents, including ID and checks, were carefully counterfeited—except that my father has Alzheimer’s.

“How did they ever get his social security number?” my mother wondered aloud.

“Here’s an idea,” I said, furious. “Call him at our house and ask him for it. See if he recites it to you, because he will.”

So this is the other thing about fraud, about the difference between elegant fraud and mean fraud: can you do it conscientiously? Is your victim in a position to defend himself? Is your crime, according to its own moral code, honorable?

Recently, when I discovered that a friendly acquaintance (and really all-American Good Guy) was shoplifting a bag of Twizzlers out of a late-night pharmacy—and now I felt over-polite, as if I didn’t have enough relationship collateral to really nail him to a cross, because after all we only castigate our very closest friends—I purchased a bag of Twizzlers right in front of him. And what was this supposed to solve? I should’ve bought three bags, or eight. In any case I wasn’t impressed by his crime. The aquaintance wore the Twizzlers in the waist of his denim jeans right out of the store. Earlier that afternoon, he had used an employee discount that wasn’t his to use, and he’d gotten all his beers comp’d in a bar. I think those cheats require more dexterity because they are wholly social manipulations, which is honorable in its way. Tucking licorice into the small of your back isn’t the same as palming a coin or misdirection and sweet-talk.

Later I was explaining to our mutual friend, who wasn’t entirely sure that I ever even realized shoplifting had happened and was telling me it had, even as I assured him that I was no dolt or blind, that I was really bothered, had really been horrified by the Twizzler thing. He didn’t seem to understand my ire, so I admitted that I have never ever stolen anything: in the moment, I left out some music, some television shows, but as I said it I actually believed it. I haven’t even snuck into a movie theater, not once. I did tell my friend about the one time I cheated on a test, in third-grade math class, and then never again cheated. Sure, I have been disingenuous plenty, socially and romantically, but always within the boundaries of law. Well. Maybe there is the other exception of talking my way out of some photographs I took inside of a Trump casino, or the photographs inside a Virgin Megastore, both of which are sort of like stealing, I guess, because I got away with the pictures by pretending naivete. This is a tourist’s way of spying, which is sort of exciting, to convince a man with a badge that you are stupid. (I have also been accused of stealing “time,” which made me impossibly wrathful.)

My friend, hearing that I had never shoplifted or snuck into a screening, encouraged me to start doing “more bad things.” I told him I had done too many bad things and had no want for more, and when he asked me to name just one bad thing, I became silent. But it wasn’t for lack of ideas; I just didn’t know what was safe or overly incriminating to tell. Finally I managed, “Popping pills,” which was embarrassing because it sounded not only base and timid but also pitiful. So I added, “And other things!” probably to sound more mysterious, but also truthful.

I have been reading this issue of Wired. And now I’m really excited because, unless I read on the toilet, I read magazines methodically, front-to-back, OK, and I just got to the article about Mohan Srivastava. This is the man who has discovered the pattern of winning lottery tickets. A lot of them play out on a grid, which should automatically indicate that this is already a solved game, like chess and Go, but also, Srivastava is a “geological statistician” who, we are told, is able to weigh and balance numbers until he can finally deduce the locations of gold veins. Realizing that geology and lotteries are not dissimilar, he figured out how to cheat. This is amazing but, he assures us, not too amazing.

When I was a teenager, I read the Jeff Noon novel ‘Nymphomation.’ I don’t remember much about it, except that I read it entirely in a cold hotel bathtub, waiting for a sunburn to peel away. I had wanted to read it because, as I understood it, this was a cyberpunk novel about solving the lottery. I really don’t remember it well. I do recall thinking, even as an illiterate teenager, that it wasn’t very good, but I wish I could find my copy because I’d like to read it again. Probably I gave it away.

I have always liked numbers, but not math (solve that!), and I have always admired game-players who can work numbers.

When we were still talking about Twizzlers, here is the story I told my friend about cheating and accountability:

I was in the third grade. One day, right in the middle of math class, I started reading a book, and my teacher, witnessing this act of insolence, sent me to the front of the class to put my name on the board. I walked to the board and took up a piece of chalk, but then I turned and winced at her. She told me to write my name on the board and put a checkmark beside it, and I made a new, dour face. So she told me to put two checkmarks next to my name, which demonstrated to my class and any class afterward that I was really in the shit.

So I put my name on the board, and I checkmarked it twice, and then, in a rush of real defiance, I pointed at the girl—who is now my friend but who was in those days a sort of academic opponent—who had been reading a paperback since math period’s start and had never stopped. And I said to my teacher, and to the class, “Shannon is reading a book!”

And the math teacher immediately countered, to me and to the class, “Well, Shannon’s smarter than you.”

I stole a book from the math teacher’s bookshelf later, in fact, and at the end of fifth grade I guiltily returned it to her. I put it in her hands and I recounted the experience, this vague thing that had occurred two years earlier, and she shook her head and smiled pleasantly and said, “I don’t remember that,” and I really believed her to tell the truth.

But one time, as I had been taking a math quiz in her classroom that wasn’t even graded, I was writing my answers and then surreptitiously checking them against the answer guide. I was still busy checking my work when I discovered her, standing over me, peering down at me. I went pale and put the answers away, and she didn’t say anything—she walked past my desk, in a way that I can tell you was birdlike—and I was absolutely humiliated because Shannon really was smarter than I am.

So I never cheated—on a test—again.