FIRST PUBLISHED BY ETCHED ONYX
Con games, whether they be long or short, ain’t in my wheelhouse. I shoulda grabbed hold of that idea at seventeen when my first con shit the bed. But my botched up debut didn’t stop me from fifty years of just-one-more. You’d think after all the experience and all the time, I’d have become a, sort of, expert. But nearly every con I ever pulled exploded in my face, leaving its own brand of trash heap to shovel up. After more disastrophes than I care to count, the sad life of Curtis J. Poole burned to ash. Friends. Family. Job. Gone.
I suppose you might say, I’m a slow learner.
When a body finds itself sittin’ in a cell—again—a body tends to make decisions. What I’ve come to is this. I’m out. Done. Gonzo-ed. Time to kiss the baby good-bye. ‘Cause, honestly, there ain’t no fans left for shit to hit.
Like I said, I pulled my first con when I was seventeen. But my invitation to travel on the road to perdition arrived two years earlier. It was 1973. I was sittin’ in a theater with my buddy, Bobby Dasher, watching The Sting. Man, did that movie ring my ding. I figured myself a Robert-Redford-type. Yeah, I was that good lookin’.
Can’t remember how many times I went back to the Rives Theater with my hard-earned buck-seventy, just to see the beauty of a perfect con one more time. On its heels came Paper Moon. Ryan O’Neal ain’t too shabby in the looks department either.
I was hooked. Started going to video stores and swap meets looking for every con film I could get my hands on. But I wasn’t in it for the entertainment. I was takin’ notes; makin’ plans. You might call it my first peak under the skirts of glory. The Hustler. The Great Imposter. Can ya give me a hallelujah.
A-men.
I know what you’re thinkin’. Bad families raise bad seeds. But that ain’t where I come from. Pop was a good man. Worked at Pulaski’s Furniture Plant—Virginia’s finest. Came home every night. Gave Mom a kiss. Tousled little-boy-Curtis’ hair. Mom kept a perfect house. Not easy, considerin’ her shifts at the Coffee Cup Diner. Nah, they had nothin’ to do with how I turned out. If they were alive today, they’d shake their heads and say, ‘Our boy never could get the hang of honest work. Lord knows, we tried.’
After two years of collecting films, two years of planning, two years of reading, I learned plenty. The classics were my favorite. Pig in a Poke, Melon Drop, Clip Joint. Damn. Ya gotta be a cold fish if those names don’t give your feel a flutter.
Then, at seventeen, an idea dropped into my dumbass brain begging to be birthed. Wasn’t so much a con as a scam. But that was as good a place to start as any. And it was all because of an eight-track tape deck.
A car means everything when you live in the country. Got my first at sixteen. A 1966 piece o’ shit Dodge Dart. It had nine years of hard use under its dented hood. Burned oil like a son of a bitch. The seats were torn. Wheel wells, eaten away by cancer. Sometimes it started. Sometimes it didn’t. But it got me around.
Now, back in ‘75, a car wasn’t a car unless it had an eight-track tape deck. Man, the tunes you could play on that thing. Led Zeppelin. The Stones. Black Sabbath. Mmm, mmm, mmm. I wanted one more’n I can say. But gatherin’ up a hundred bucks when all I made from my weekend job at the Kum & Go, was twenty-three dollars and fifty-seven cents after tax…well…it wasn’t happenin’. Y’see, my pop made me buy my own gas and chip-in for insurance. Said it built character.
It built character, all right.
Which brings me back to my buddy, Bobby Dasher. Dash for short. We were tight. Couldn’t see one of us without the other by his side. And on account o’ my last name being Poole, we came to be known as Splash and Dash.
Bobby didn’t have a car at the time, so he was always hitchin’ a ride with me. Truth was, if I hadn’t driven him to school, he woulda had to pedal his bike like a goddam loser. I was happy to do it. That’s how much I loved the guy.
We had plans. Big plans. Me leading. Bobby following. And they may have worked if, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, Bobby hadn’t drunk himself into a head-on collision with an eighteen wheeler. Maybe his folks had the right idea, not givin’ him a car in high school. The crash didn’t kill him. But as far I could see, it left him a helluva sight worse. All crooked, drooling, not able to talk. You get the picture. It was a blessing the Dash-man died before his thirtieth birthday.
But I’m gettin’ off the beam. When we were seventeen, we had it all…except a goddam eight-track tape deck.
The idea came to me on the first Wednesday of the month—the day my insurance money was due. I’d handed Pop my $36.50 and it near killed me. The way I figured it, those thieves at the insurance company had been robbin’ me for close to a year. More’n three hundred bucks, flushed down the tolo. Hell. I coulda bought a tape deck months before.
I chewed on this injustice all night. The next day, me and Bobby were hangin’ out at my house after school, hittin’ the vodka. (We were smart about it. Always added water to the bottle so as not to get caught.) We poured ourselves a second drink, pretending we liked it, when I asked Bobby, “How much you figure it costs to replace a fender?”
“Damn. Couldn’t say. A hundred bucks? Maybe two?”
“I figure it’s gotta be at least two hundred.” And I gave the Dash-man my best grin.
“Whattaya thinkin’?” he said, with the left corner of his mouth twitchin’ the way it did when he got excited.
“Two hundred bucks would buy a mighty fine tape deck.”
And then, like one person with one mind we looked out the window at my pile o’ rusted metal and knew exactly what had to be done. We downed our drinks and headed to the shed. Bobby grabbed a crowbar. I preferred the weight of a sledgehammer. We moseyed out to the driveway and bellied up to that sad excuse of a car, thinkin’ where to start.
I held the sledgehammer with both hands and rested it on my right shoulder. Then I stepped up to the plate, aimed at the driver’s side fender and took a swing for the fences. I can still feel the impact as it vibrated up the shaft and through my arm. Bobby let out a loud whoop and, more like a reflex than anything else, smashed out the headlight with his crowbar.
Don’t have a good explanation for what happened next. Maybe it was bad judgement. Maybe it was booze. Maybe it was stupidity. Let’s face it. A seventeen-year-old is nothin’ more than a Ferrari with a monkey behind the wheel. But the adrenaline that shot through my brain waved a big, bad, beautiful NASCAR green flag in front of my eyes.
Gentlemen, start your engines.
My sledgehammer came down on the windshield with extreme prejudice. Ain’t no words to describe it. Hell. How do you describe your first bike, your first cig, your first fuck? This was different from the dented fender. This was the point of no return.
I lost control, swingin’ and smashin’, while my buddy Smirnoff screamed in my ear like a drill sergeant with a hard-on. After the windshield collapsed, I aimed for the door; worked my way to the trunk; jumped onto the roof swingin’ with a frenzy—legs spread, back arched, choppin’ my way down to hell. I saw Bobby out o’ the corner of my eye, working on the passenger side, jabbing and parrying like a goddamn swordsman. It was a thing of beauty.
I don’t know how long we were at it. Coulda been ten minutes. Coulda been an hour. Hard to say. But when we finally stopped, out of breath, with pebbles of glass in our hair, my ‘66 Dodge Dart was nothing more than a crumpled up junkyard joke.
You can guess what happened next. Pop came home, took one look at our handiwork and said, Hell no. Ain’t no way was he gonna be tagged for insurance fraud. So…no two hundred bucks. No eight-track tape deck. No car. No nothin’. I spent the next year-and-a-half ridin’ my bike to school.
You’d think getting bitch-slapped by a scam gone wrong woulda cured me. But nah. Like I said. Slow learner.
