I had the good sense to say maybe we shouldn't be doing this in the split second before the alarm went off. It was in that moment that I realized Eli, who up to this point had been amazing, spectacular, an extravaganza; I realized now that he was three days shy of his 28th birthday and destined to die before thirty. Eli had drawn me into this sucker plan at the bar, the Gravel Box, where we all met for drinks after our schemes for the day had failed. I ran a con called the pizzaman scam and it involved sending a delivery driver to an empty warehouse's upstairs office and raiding the car while he was on his errand. I would then sell the pizzas downtown for a dirt cheap price. I earned about $20 a day. This was in the days that Motel 6 only charged six dollars a night and I considered myself a king because I got free housekeeping. The economics of the deal were beyond most people, they couldn't see the value in making your own way.

But I was telling you about Eli. He had appeared when he was just a kid, maybe 15, and he never burst on the scene so much as crawled through the backdoor when people were preoccupied. Eli had a wealthy aunt and there was some sort of repeated vow that a check was coming tomorrow, or maybe later in the week; the longer the delay, the larger the check's value. Eli's suffering was abstract and an open book. He would complain of sinster forces moving against him, odds always long. He once borrowed fifteen dollars from me to bet on a horse that he had a good tip about. He never paid me back and when I saw him a week later, I asked how the horse did. "They had to shoot it," he said bluntly.

We had started together as brothers. We would go to restaurants and sit at the bar. He would order coffee and I would get a full meal. We would switch checks and I'd pay for his coffee and leave. He would then raise a fuss and say he'd only bought coffee. They'd charge him for the coffee and he would leave. We'd do this again later at another restaurant. We ate this way almost every day. It got so the restaurants knew us by sight and would take great pains to separate us when seating. That bridge burned, we moved on to other cons. We ran short cons, stealing boxes of pens and then selling them for a quarter each, all while holding signs saying we were war veterans. Our age worked against us and we resorted to outlandish and implausible lies, such as being decorated for bravery in the Falklands campaign or the week's fighting in Panama. Our age was almost right and people took pity on us when not calling us liars. I never knew which was worse: that we fleeced a few people or that our lies were so obvious and we were getting pity money.

Eli cornered me in the bar one night and lifted his hands high above his head, his way of letting me know that he had finally won big. He told me his aunt had finally died from complications of diabetes and he was soon to be a wealthy man. That this was the sixth time his aunt had died, twice from diabetes and three strokes and one cable car accident, was irrelevant. His jubilation grew with each passing, effectively destroying whatever doubt you had about his honesty. He took me for fifty dollars and a promise that I would be paid back three fold when the will came through. I consented under the promise of riches, seriously, riches, more riches than I ever dreamed of making in one day. That fifty dollars was my life savings, the first payment on a junker car that I'd had my eye on. When Eli returned, grief stricken, from a meeting with the lawyers, he made no apologies about the money. I knew enough to not ask for any.

I had started out in New Orleans, a strange and langorous city where people navigate through the use of their car horns. I was just a kid myself and the low drinking age set me apart from the rest of the country, fueling a love/hate relationship with alcohol that extended into my prison sentence. I grew weary of the police in the French Quarter, always eager to move you along from just hanging out. Finding no other quarters in New Orleans, I ran away from my parents. My parents, both teachers at a community college, expected perfection from me at a young age and then less each following year. Even with these low standards I managed to disappoint on a consistent basis and when I left, I doubt they looked for me that hard. It was a sudden departure and most of my stuff, things I'd collected over years of collecting, was left in my room. I had a brother once but he died of influenza when I was still young. He had dreams of joining the military but his asthma would have prevented him, had he lived that long. The burden on my parents was not lifted at his death but bundled with constant disappointment from me. And always the question would rise in the house, "Would he have done better?" I'm sure he would have, even if he did die from the flu. I didn't think anyone died from that, not anymore. But there are statistics and all of these statistics have families, not unlike my own, troubled by the passing and possibly breaking under the strain of shoes that can never be filled. I left.

We had all met at the Gravel Box by the time I was 18 and I had already been jumped four times by angry men I'd had words with in the bar. I resolved to get a gun and pawned my watch to buy this protection. It turned out to be a joke, a sick joke that Evers played on me because I was unable to fight back. The sights were off, the barrel was bent, it could only hold five bullets because a casing had been fused inside one of the revovler's bullet chambers. I knew it would probably explode in my hand if I actually tried to use it, merely adding to my humiliation.

We didn't meet girls at the Gravel Box and I don't recall meeting them any other place. I can't remember people showing up with a girl on their arm except the one time, when Barkley arrived with a rumpled and moth-eaten creature who looked ready to be strung up by the wrists. We all took turns talking to her, reveling in our unexpected company. Insinuations about assignations were made and she rejected all of us, citing the fact that we were all unsavory conmen. She was right, of course, but it wounded us all. We harbored it for weeks. When it became clear that this girl was leaving with Barkley, we all settled into our normal conversational pattern. Everyone said mean things about whoever wasn't there and then they decided that I was a spy and the information would get back to these people and I was threatened with violence if I talked. But I wouldn't talk, in fact I was overjoyed just to have the attention. Eli was late getting there and was made fun of even after he'd arrived. Eli never said a word, never took a drink, and never looked anyone in the eye. He made some inquiries about cashing a check and the table laughed at him. When I asked Barkley where he met this girl, right before they left together, he pulled me in close and said, "She's my sister, dude. But don't tell no one. This is the first time anyone's ever been envious of me." I managed to keep the secret for another fifteen minutes after the two of them left, but when kind words were said about Barkley and his ways with women, I had to jump in and get the focus back on me. I missed the limelight of being confused for a spy and resented Barkley. Eli and I peeled off from the group and went into one of our routines for the bar's owner, a humorless automotan named Ruth. She didn't enjoy the routine, not even the part where Eli got down on his knees and looked me square in the crotch while praying. It was a popular routine we did but there was no joy this time. We abandoned the rest of the act and went outside for fresh air. Fresh air consisted of five cigarettes and a bottle of beer.

Eli pulled me down the road, insistent that there was something I had to see. I'd been down this road before, a little further each time, and I never found anything I liked on it. Eli was on a benzedrine kick and was talking non-stop about his great plans to do a disco version of The Ballad of the Green Berets. He said his ailing aunt, elusive philanthropist that she was, had contacts in the music industry through a previous marriage and this plan was within the realm of possibilities. So excited was he that I too began to feel excitement over this project and resolved to help him out. In the end I paid out thirty dollars for him to hop a bus to see his aunt and buy a suit and meet with lawyers. Eli never left and I never saw the money again, but he talked about this project continuously so I thought it was just a matter of time before he made his move. I guess in some way Eli's passion for this laughable project was contagious enough for us to feel like we had succeeded with him.

Eli and I were stranded outside of town after the car's engine exploded, literally exploded, a piston shooting through the hood and cracking the windshield. He had a great gold ring on that he'd won from a football player in a poker game he'd cheated in. A driver stopped and asked us for this ring in exchange for a ride and Eli wouldn't give it up. I pushed Eli to the ground, knocked him flat without throwing a punch, and ripped the ring off his finger. We left Eli there. Laying across the backseat was a man with a rifle. He said his name was Bryan and he referred to the driver as "my associate, Cornelius." I instantly suspected them of being the notorious "Highway 61 Gunman," an oddity that had been confounding law enforcement for over three years. The death toll was high and there had never been a single clue. I became quite wary of my driver and paranoid about the man behind me with a rifle. I kept checking the rear view mirror while Cornelius told me about ice-fishing in Wisconsin. They let me out at the entrance to town, explaining that they couldn't go further. We parted on good terms and I didn't call the police because they'd never shown me that level of kindness.

My first goal was to get drunk, as drunk as possible. Eli wandered into the Gravel Box late in the night, just as a song started on the jukebox, I think it was A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You by the Monkees. It was that kind of night for everyone except Eli. His face was sour with the doublecross and his hike. I explained to him that the ring had to go because the football player he'd won it from had friends and he was a dead man walking around with that thing on. I also explained that we needed a ride and someone stopped. I did not tell him about the gun or the ice-fishing. When he pestered me for money to replace the ring, I told him I'd be getting a check from my grandmother in the next week. He was speechless. It was probably the greatest night we ever had in that bar.

I had returned home to borrow money but I discovered my parents were not in. I found my mom on the playground of my elementary school, selling off the last of the stuff I'd left behind. I pleaded with her to spare my little collection, the baseball cards and the bong, the comic books I had read a million times that were worthless, but she refused to even acknowledge a blood relationship. She claimed I was a grifter intent on bilking her out of the twelve bucks that my stuff was selling for. I finally bought back the comic books and left. I never saw her again because word came through that the family had jumped ship to teach English in southeast Asia. My letters had all been returned to sender and I regretted wasting money on the stamps. I went back to my childhood home within days of their departure, unsettling really in that bizarre ESP kind of way, how had I known? I broke into the house and looked at the pictures of my parents since I left, since after my brother died. My mother had gained weight and her hair was shorter. My dad looked pretty good if you didn't look too hard.

I had fallen in with bad company because I got lost outside of town and was stopped by the police. I was suspected of vandalizing a house in the neighborhood but there was no evidence to tie me to the crime. I was almost run out of town before a plainclothes cop recognized me as the guy that painted his fence that one summer and vouched for me as more than a vagabond. I tipped a non-existent hat to him and he waved his hand dismissively. I always remembered that hand wave because on the surface it seemed supportive, but ultimately it was a rebuke. No one had to come and bail me out and I wasn't even processed. The cops stole all my money, $15, that I had in my wallet but we were like brothers near the end. I invited them all to the Gravel Box sometime with a promise that I'd buy them a drink. They patted me on the back and said to never come back again. The feeling was fucking mutual, but with regret.

The bad company I fell in with was these people in the cell waiting to be processed. All of them had been arrested so many times that nobody would bail them out anymore, or they'd robbed and ripped off everyone that would bail them out, so they were all waiting in jail for their upcoming court cases. They promised to show me how to crack a safe, embezzle from employers, and other assorted crimes. One con they told me about was pretty simple. You make a fake badge with a grocery store logo on it and go to the store. You make a till, a cash drawer, and walk up to one of the checkers. You say you're from the home office and you're doing an audit. You open their drawer and replace their till with yours. Then you just walk out with the drawer. They said no cashier's ever stopped them.

I had broken away from the Gravel Box crew, except for Eli, because I realized they were all wasters and short-timers with no real ambition. I decided you have to start living for the big score because a bunch of small scores isn't living, it's just killing time. Eli somehow stayed around me, he was in his own orbit of over-ambition. Tony, who was the first out of jail after his lawyer got a suspended sentence on the basis that the eyewitness to the burglary had glaucoma and was smoking medicinal marijuana for it, gave me a crash course in daily cons to do between the big scores. We canvassed neighborhoods with missing dog posters and commited fraud with Medicaid. We cheated people in front of laundromats and blackmailed businessmen we saw with prostitutes at local motels. The big score was always right over the horizon and Eli was becoming insistent that he wanted to be a part of it. Tony was waiting for the rest of the crew to get out of jail. They'd all been arrested at the same time for the same crime. Eventually the rest of the crew filed out of the prison system and schedules were complicated by parole jobs as short-order cooks, janitors, and auto mechanics. Even I felt these jobs were beneath them, them, a real crew with actual know-how and ability. I began my apprenticeship with the crew in between working at the diner and the halfway house they had been assigned to. I was still living like I always did, one fleabag motel after another. I found odd ways to fill my days and frequented the whorehouse near the private airport. This was a masterful stroke of locationing as most of their clients were business travelers just in town for a day or two. It was in that whorehouse that I first met a girl that would ruin everything.

Tony was connected to the mob through his cousin's wife and he was struggling to gain acceptance in that world because the power that would provide could make him the big man in town. No one would say it to his face, but he had no hope. Even if the mafia did come to his aid, they'd install their own crew and bleed the town dry. The town had no concept of how to deal with organized crime and we did our best to take advantage. After the crew got out, we started pulling heists. We drilled holes in the back wall of the jewelry store and pounded out the bricks with a padded sledgehammer. We robbed summer homes. We even broke into the Gravel Box after close, a crime that fueled an angry rivalry with that old crew. Any day now one of them would drop a dime on us and we'd be back in jail. But the giddy high of these times was addictive and I was always asking for more action.
"Action," I would say seriously. "I need action."
Tommy Guns, a Scottish man who'd gotten caught up with Tony and the crew in Las Vegas, would blow a smoke ring and say, "Aye, action. Fookin' hallelujah."
"How about this neighborhood?" I'd say and point to the little map. "Big houses there."
"Vicious guard dogs," Tony would reply. "Pain in the ass."
"Security systems," Terry would agree.
"But if you know that in advance..."I would start and then we'd begin planning.

They said that Tony had taken as much as half a million in one score in Vegas and everybody believed it. It probably wasn't true. If it was true, the rest of the crew would have robbed him right away.

The name of the whore I spoke of earlier, she's not really part of this story other than the fact that it was on account of her that we all got locked up. But her name, her name was Miss Ebony Whitfield. She actually had a husband and children but she was a prostitute. She was like a mermaid, able to traverse one scene to another though they have no logical connection. She was incapable of connection. She granted generous freebies to the townfolk in exchange for information. She would ask them about their assets and then gently suggest, "You need something to protect that." They would eventually tell her everything about their security system, she had them so conned into trusting her that they just told a prostitute about their entire security system. She passed this information on to me and Eli. Eli was mesmerized by Ebony because she could separate business from pleasure, something that he could never do because he only derived pleasure from business. Even when he made a habit of ripping off his best friends for the price of a beer, we forgave him because he loved to steal. He would steal or con anything that wasn't nailed down, any person that had an open heart. That's the secret of a con, you go after their pride. They want to be able to say, at the end of the day, that they're a nice person. And they'll fall for it every time. The other way to con people, the easier way, is to appeal to their greed. If they think they can get a small fortune by putting in a smaller one, they'll do it without thinking. Eli did it to me even. We're all suckers at one point or another.

Ebony would do anything there is to do except feet stuff. She would not let anyone see her feet, cum on her feet, suck on her toes, touch her feet, nothing. She wore socks in bed. Ebony got a cut of our earnings and she was grateful for it. The thing we didn't count on was Eli's obsession with her. She would take out the tarot deck and forecast doom now and then. Eli would refuse to go on the job and, being the point man occasionally, we'd have to scrap the job and wait until the cards said it was a good day to do it. Tony hated being controlled by a whore and threatened to leave her by the side of the road in a pile. Tony was just the kind of guy to do it. But I always protected Ebony, reminding him of how many tips we got from her. She could tell us the schedule for the outside lights to come on, whether or not there was a motion sensor in the room, the commands to make guard dogs heel.

Our most daring break in was a daylight raid we did posing as workers from the electric company. They watched us cut the line for the alarm system and then followed Tony out the back door where he explained where the hypothetical electrical lines ran under the lawn, discouraging them from installing a swimming pool. We waited until they left to pick up the kids from school and then we swarmed the place. But how Ebony got the best of us was she always phoned the police and informed them who had robbed a place recently. She was, naturally, on the short list of undesirables in the community and her only way of keeping afloat was to provide information on others throughout the course of the day. The entire criminal community is built on this kind of self-serving cooperation. From the nickel-bag junkie to the town madam, everyone talked about bigger deals that went down than what they got caught for. Ebony was calling in our actions but refusing to name names. She called us "that damn crew from out of town". Eli told me this in prison. But Ebony wasn't just involved with Eli and I. Oh no, Tony and Travis and Krieger, practically the whole crew, was taking advantage of her services. And one day Tony made a deal with her. She called the police about a robbery set to happen, one that Tony and the crew backed out of as we showed up at the house.

"We'll keep lookout," Tony told me. "You guys get inside. You know the layout?"
I nodded that I did.
"So make it quick. The alarm's disabled due to fire damage."
This fire damage business was new to me but Tony always had an inside line on things so I trusted him. I'm sure that when the house got robbed just three hours after the police left with us, Tony was still keeping lookout.

In the weeks leading up to the robbery, Eli had gotten crabs from a girl he’d been seeing, a girl in addition to Ebony, and he was constantly scratching himself and then explaining his affliction to whoever was around. He got a job working the desk at the town beauty salon and he quickly lost this job when he announced to all the women in the parlor that, “My nuts itch like athlete’s foot! Damn girls are spreading a plague around this city!” Not only did he lose his job, the owner of the shop threatened to call every business in town and tell them that he was an undesirable. Eli abandoned any further thoughts of honest work and turned to a life of crime full time. There was just nothing else for him now that nobody believed he ever had an aunt. Eli, who up to now had been a sarcastic cynic cheapening daylight hours with small cons, was now an unapologetic drug addict and crook. He was a worthless sack of shit, ten pounds in a five pound bag. He never grew bigger in reputation or size, he merely slinked from one bad habit to another until bad habits were all his life consisted of. I wanted to cut my losses and walk away but there was something lingering here. Eli would have that look on his face, a pleading sort of resignation to the horrors of life. I recognized in him something amazing, a truly emotional robot hemmed in by forces outside of his control. That he had made choices and done these horrible things that drove everyone away, that was just part of his tragic charm. I knew he would haunt me from beyond the grave.

I had taken to carrying a briefcase, filled with empty binders, the subject of which was to be a critical exploration of my life as though it were a piece of art. I had put blinders on my eyes then and did not recognize myself for what I was. There was always the promise of more exciting things, that surely I would get ahead someday and then the world would be mine. I envied Tony for having the constitution necessary to manage a crew; I resented him bitterly for being more of a man than me. The briefcase led to an unfortunate encounter in the public library, where I had set up shop in the bathroom, the bathroom that had a door that locks. I would pour over my notebooks, trying to decipher my life like a riddle, seeking some hidden truth that still eludes me. I would lock the door and spend hours in there, occasionally interrupted by eager library patrons, at which point I would make terrible farting noises by putting my hand over my mouth and blowing, complete with smacking of the surface of the toilet water with a toiletbrush. Other times I would sit in the town diner and fold Sweet ‘n Low packets into paper cranes. I kept these in a bag and soon it was overflowing. I sold them for a dime-a-piece outside of the toy store and usually made a good dollar or two, possibly the first honest dollar I had made in years.

But that day in the library, a man approached me while I scanned the rack of pulp paperback novels, convinced that my life was nearly as compelling. The man touched me on the shoulder and informed me that my zipper was open.
“Thanks,” I said, angry as hell.
“People were staring,” he replied.
I could have murdered him, I could have ripped his arm off and beaten him with it.
“You don’t do that in front of God and Jesus and women and children,” he told me and for a sickening second I thought he’d seen the pictures in my mind. I ran as fast as I could from the hidden accusation. I was still angry as hell, but also overcome with grief. This man had clearly delineated the fracture between mysel and polite society. My zipper may have been down, but it was my soul the man was talking about. I hated him for that.

I ran to Eli. Eli was panhandling in front of city hall, his audacity so great that even the cops were wary of approaching him. His ragged clothing was augmented by a noxious odor of junk food pouring from his skin. He was a beaten traveler. His eyes didn’t belong to him anymore, it was all just drugs. I hated everything at that moment, seeing my beautiful friend (a con man of little importance but a reliable companion) reduced to this lifeless husk ruled by the monkey on his back.

“Nearly got pinched at the library,” I shouted as I approached. I casually fell into the habit of exaggerating my little life, both from exposure to Eli’s plainspoken grandiosity and the literary notions in my mind.
“The cops?” he wanted to know.
“Fucking wrong bastard approached me,” I told him. “Right in front of everyone.”
“Could have been a narc,” he insisted, his drug paranoia jumping to the first natural conclusion his fixation would allow.
“Could have been,” I agree. “Or at least a fag.”
“This street’s dead,” he told me and we retreated to the Gravel Box, as though to relive old times. But those times were gone and we knew it better than anybody. Within weeks we would be in jail and everything would fall apart. It reminds me of those popsicle towers you would build as a kid, or a house of cards. All that time investing in creating something, no matter how feeble or pointless or crummy, and then it all collapses. Nobody else even cares. Nobody else even understands why you care about your crummy tower that you wasted time making.
If you asked us about home, I don’t know that we would have understood.