The Purse Snatcher Letters Read online

Bernard,

  Three days ago I started what has turned out to be the worst run of luck, the worst run of unimaginable irritation I may ever have gone through – I’m through it, now, so thought I’d take a long night in and give you the rundown, give you some idea of how I punch the card, put it to the grind.

  Three days ago, I decided I’d start a little reaping - it was a good time for it, I still had a lump of cash so nothing too troublesome to distract me - get a little bump that’d swing me through some travel. I was in a big city, but it was the first time in this city in particular, I made a leisurely day of train riding, drawing my little maps, jotting my little notes, giving myself a personal understanding of the terrain.

  First irritation is the whole town: it seems like there’s one good little pocket and then whatever way I went outward it got crumby crumby immediately, shutters on storefronts –or shutters and gates or gates and bars or shutters and bars and gates – and the stores, they were all like little personally run, owner operated establishments. Not franchises, nothing like that - like none of the stores even had proper signs, just banners, all of them just had banners and all with the same lettering, like each row of shops pitched in and paid for one big banner with all of the names on it in the same font because it’d be cheaper that way.

  I’ve stopped to admire that last description – Christ isn’t that evocative? And for once it’s one hundred percent accurate, that is exactly what those areas were like. The only thing I want to add to complete the image is that the schools – elementary, middle, I didn’t see a high school anyplace - were always at the bottoms of steep hills and right by the onramps up the highway: now you know exactly what I mean.

  Alright, there were those areas or these almost bucolically poor areas – nothing depressed looking, but no stores, no shops. It wasn’t residential, it just had no commerce and an overabundance of slightly overgrown mini-park areas - people seemed to stroll around a lot, the way people would if they were walking dogs, but only there were no dogs.

  Have a picture of all of that? Great. So it was crumby, because the central area was affluent and distinctly policed and the communities were either gated or above shops, no easy access. But, I’d settled in on this being time to hoard, scuttle some goodies away, so I started staking places out. Alright, now understand what I’m saying next: I would do my thing, staking out some cash machines by buying a coffee and having some cigarettes in front of a book shop across the street or I’d mill in a bank working on an application or something, just something to give me a casual vantage of where people would get some money, and I’d be in decent attire, one of my better suits – I think I’m cutting a fine and adult figure these days, my hair has a length, but nice, respectable, like Michael Dudikoff if his hair was a little bit longer – but no matter what, if I stayed in one spot for the count of one hundred someone would come up to me. I am not even exaggerating this. It was like the world was a greased mechanism and I was peanut or something ugly got up in the works. At the bank, it’d be a floor worker or a manager - in front of a bookshop it’d be the clerk-on-duty or a parking attendant. Jesus, I even tried to adapt, started walking up and down the block and – I swear on mom I’m not making this up – by the third time I’d pass by - spread out over half hour - a woman came out of her shop and asked me did I need help finding someplace, she’d noticed me walk by a few times. Fine – you assume she was maybe flirting, that I’m being over paranoid? No, no. I do the same thing someplace else – even this was in one of the shuttered areas – and the same shtick, only this time it’s some tough looking kids, they want to know am I looking for somebody.

  It’s like one of those famous old books give everyone the creeps, something Russian or German or something.

  First purse I grab is a middle-age woman, she’s out of a taxi, she’s heading toward the entrance door to a building I found a side door into and I had pretty slick and easy escape route marked off – out the front door, back around to the side entrance, in and up two flights of stairs, across the corridor, down and out the other side door, down some back steps and there is a metro train platform and during the route I pick up my coat, which I’d left on the landing up the stairs, and I walk the corridor, dumping the purse once the money had been suckled out on the landing going down, then out the door, down the steps, I even had newspaper waiting, tucked up behind a trash can, to pick up and be leafing as I walked. Nice escape, it’s less complex than writing it sounds. Lady comes in, I’m pretending to get the mail, she starts down a corridor, I give her a hard shove, get the purse and everything goes off like beauty. Except the purse - it’s got no cash, nothing to even think of pawning – I almost want to go give it back – so I scuff into my coat and go get my paper and wait for the train and hop on.

  Second purse I try for is just opportunistic - pretty risky, I’ll admit, but I’m old hat and can swing improvisation every now and again: I’m riding the trains around, crowd gets thin enough, I stand up at the door to get off – same newspaper with me, I read whole newspapers, you might not know that about me, I read everything, even the parts I have no idea what they mean – and so a lady gets up, mills like she will leave after me, the only other two people on the train are seated facing opposite direction. Door starts to open, I fake a bad step, have a fall, the woman gets down to give me a hand - other folks just clicketing to the escalators - I start getting up, take a second stumble to give her a shove, grab the purse, back-peddle like I’m still off balance and get in the train again just as the door closes. For effect, I even stand up at the door, tap it like “Hey, what’s going on I need to get off” and I feel a surge of relief as it gets going. I take my seat, ride to the next stop, but by then I’ve already dug through the purse - which turns out it’s hardly a purse, has a day planner and a water bottle in it - so I get off at the next platform, go right up to the attendant booth, explain what had happened and could they make sure the lady has her belongings returned to her – I say all of this quick and thankfully, the attendant is a little confused by it all and I split.

  That one, it sound awful, it sounds awful and I deserved to get caught there – I probably would have, just a twist of circumstance this way or that, but I didn’t. I have to tell you, after you don’t get caught for awhile, getting caught becomes remote, it become less and less likely. I’m not trying to be controversial, go against the well meaning teachers of civics and statistics – because they are right inasmuch as the first something twenty, thirty times something, those first times the chances of getting caught become more and more likely - that’s fate, luck, evolutionary gamble, one either discovers they are a fish and therefore meant to swim, the water an escape from the jackals, or one escapes the jackals and drowns for their trouble. Your bother can be deep like that, fancy, I can be deep like that. After the first few dozen times, it’s just not so likely to happen, at least not until late stages of life kick in, but that happens anyway, everyone gets caught out at something eventually, right?

  Here’s what I think – I’ll get back to the exciting adventures of metro trains and nameless cities in a moment – I think that everyone, no matter what, they all wind up with that instinctive urge to confess. Everyone. It’s easy to lie, to deceive, but eventually it gets to be an obvious devastation to identity – not even semantics can help it, right? you can’t even say “Well, I’m a liar, that’s who I am, so to tell the truth goes against myself, so it isn’t in my nature to confess or desire confession” – it doesn’t go that far. No, everyone wants to confess, because eventually everyone wants to be known for exactly who and what they are. I mean they are that because they built themselves that – even if a bad hand was dealt, even if they’d secretly rather it’d gone down otherwise – it’s unthinkable to any normal person to efface themselves. Cognition, thinking-thought, rhetoric, consciousness would not be able to evolve, it’s an evolutionary trait of consciousness to confess - it is, I think. Look it up, scientist, look it up in some jour
nal.

  Two days ago, it’s mainly the same lot. Women in this town, they don’t have anything of any use or value in their purses - I start to get the creeps like I’ve wandered into a carnival, like it’s all a put on, I get to thinking that the insides of houses aren’t even interiors, like I’d see someone go in someplace, but then if I could peek inside they’d just be standing in an empty space, waiting for me to go away so they could leave – town could’ve been the same four dozen people switching around, the place a mountain of their own design, the proud owners of the wreckage of the world.

  Drunk? This letter sounds drunk you say? My goodness, what a perceptive one you are - mom always said she got the idea you knew you were a baby while in the womb, had it all figured out and learned to count even while your fingers were growing – I am drinking and having a glum celebration, the start of this letter was a bit of a misnomer. The story has a happy enough ending – I’m not in a dreadful way and so don’t let knowing that spoil the rest of this day-in-the-life immediacy - but yes yes I’m drinking and having a lonely, fabulous time of it.

  But, I had a date, earlier, with a very pretty older woman – older than me, so a good bump older than you – and it was perfectly wonderful and I thought it was going to be something, but it turns out no, she just is one of those sorts who actually can meet someone and have a long chat and say “I’m happy to have met you” and mean just that. I did call it a date, - fair enough, stickler – I did call it a date, but it wasn’t. I wanted to be drinking this bottle with her, off her, from her, but instead I’m writing a letter to you. Also, I’m not “drunk” exactly - I’m drinking and since I’m typing too it’s slow going.

  I get the creeps when I go in to pawn things – I’ve mentioned this a bunch of times, if it wasn’t kind of essential to being an ace purse snatcher I’d do away with the practice. I just don’t feel like I come off correctly, like I don’t seem quite like I need to be in a pawn shop for any regular reason and I can’t bring myself to go to shadier looking places on my own, I can’t seek them out. I know that part of the problem is I go in and I pretend I’m a customer for the first little while - like a browsing customer - and then I get flustered when either someone approaches me or else I finally have to go up and it’s revealed I’m there to pawn some earrings or whatever. No. I’ll be honest – writing that down, I hit on it exactly – it’s because nine out of ten times it’s distinctly female stuff I’m pawning, so I have to dress up to not seem a crumb, but then when I pull out a necklace and have to say it was something-I-got-my-girlfriend-but-now-we-broke-up I feel like a louse. I suppose I kind of hope they don’t believe me just so I can feel swell about myself – no, no this nice guy couldn’t actually be selling a necklace he gave a girl – but of course this would lead to them thinking “Well, why else would this guy be selling a necklace?” If I had a confederate - like a girl - then it would be so much better, but try to picture me getting the balls up to approach someone about that, right?

  I wound up with a decent camera – a gym bag grab, not a purse – and a decent portable CD player, so I had to go to the old Pawn and Loan. I tend to go for ones that look more like franchise establishments. I studied the camera awhile before going in, memorized what it was called and bolstered myself up that I could pass myself off as a photographer, which was good because they had a whole separate guy – the Camera Guy – who had a wall of cameras behind him and Christ if he didn’t want to chat. It was a goof, though, because I didn’t think to learn how much the camera would cost, retail, and I didn’t want to out and out lowball so I fidgeted that it had been a gift and I’d tried my hand at it but it just wasn;’ for me. The Camera Guy was so concerned because it was such a nice camera and he couldn’t help me out with all that much - maybe it was something I would get back in to, he gave me a pep talk about how much he liked photography, going out with his dog and taking pictures by some creek or something. So, he gave me a price, finally, and I was so nerved up by then I said “No, no you’re right. I’m gonna hold onto it awhile, I’m going to maybe try something else, maybe I’ll just play around with it - the trouble is that I signed up for a photography class” and so forth and so forth and he seemed glad about this and then I listened to him talk about his dog and the creek some more.

  I had to go to another pawn shop, thinking that now I had a price to work from I could be more on top of things. This joint was cleaner than the first, but the people running it were halfway foreigner – I think they were more Americanized than they let on, played up the accents and the “Well, I don’t know about this and that” sort of talk. I came out with the offer I’d just got and they just scoffed – two guys were tending to me, because there was nothing better for them to be doing, I guess – and chatted amongst themselves in their language – honestly, I halfway felt they were just talking gibberish, gobbledygook to stretch out the scene – and then they offered me one third of what I’d wanted and I couldn’t make any headway in a haggle.

  Third pawn shop – I have a blessed life, man, I live the dream of most – and I get an even lower offer, straight up, this time a woman just looks at the camera and says “Lots of those, these days, not gonna be able to tell you that’s anything but a thirty dollar camera, sorry” before I even get a word out. So, I get it - they’re calling all around about some louse trying to move a stolen camera and this just makes me glum and I argue her up to thirty-five - and what a complete waste of my time.

  See, it’s psychological, as much as anything is, it’s a slog - and like in that case, even when I know I’m on the underside of things, I sometimes just can’t will up the oomph to do better by myself. The first offer was two hundred and ten – I settle for thirty-five. And why? Because I know I don’t deserve the two, that’s why. Or that’s kind of why. What I don’t deserve is that the Camera Guy was so earnestly kind to me, it’d’ve made me like a heel if I’d gone back in and wanted the deal, he’d know I went all over trying to get a better price – even though I hand’t done that, exactly – and then it’d be out of the bag that I hadn’t got the camera as a present or taken a community college camera class and I couldn’t face it being that easy to find me out. And going a little bit further, why don’t I take a community college camera class, why don’t I want a camera? It all goes round and around in my head, I get confused like I halfway believe these are viable options - not that they aren’t, but I mean I think that right then and there I could do that, like I really am just a normal guy and maybe I’m not so distinguishably a criminal, maybe I am indistinguishable, sort of nothing, sort of nothing.

  How depressing – it’s tomorrow, by the way – what a depressing slouch that letter was becoming. Start again:

  When I stopped writing, it was because I’d gone out to a bowling alley. Whatever my mood had become – I didn’t just stop writing and go to the bowling alley, I laid in bed watching television for awhile, remembered about the bowling alley and decided to see how long did it stay open – I suddenly wanted to be around people. Bowling alleys are good, because if you’re bowling all by yourself you seem like you belong without needing to prove it. But anyway, it was great - I did join a group, because one of their girls had to leave because of her sister needing a lift someplace. I slipped right in, even able to yuck it up about how I was awful at bowling. They didn’t ask why I was bowling by myself - since I was so awful, they just didn’t care. We ate pizza and we drank, but it was funny and fast moving and I got the girls all prizes out of a skill crane and one of the other guys was just like me - has to go to the bathroom every two minutes after enough beer - so we were kind of buddies about going to the bathroom, it was joint ridicule from the others, but he and I were buddies and practically invented a secret handshake.

  I haven’t had that in a long while. I mean, I was way older than these guys, way way older than these girls – the girls were young even for these guys – but it was like finding a pal in kindergarten, like I probably had so
mething properly in common with my new buddy, only I’ll never know about it.

  It’s nighttime, again, had to go to work—what was this letter about?

  Do you find me worthwhile, other than you’re my brother? Or do you not find me worthwhile, even being my brother? I guess it’s easy for me to say I’d be all about you, all day long, even if you were an axe murderer, but you’d never be an axe murderer - it’s a phony rhetoric. Maybe I like you because I know what a genuine good guy you are, so I can’t assume that this is reciprocal. I like you more that you’re a nice good, a good guy than because that you’re my brother, to tell you the truth. It’s wonderful that you’re my brother, but it isn’t what I think about when I think about you.

  What is it about me? I know what I do isn’t just stealing, is it? It’s brutality, it’s ugliness. These women - even the ones who come off more like they’re just upset, like they have fight in them and are just annoyed I got the sucker of them - I know I frighten them, I know what I do to them is scary, it shakes them - some of them a lot, I’d imagine. But I never think of them like it’s some mom just popping out and what happened - what I did to her - is something she’ll not tell her little kids, just her husband and he’ll give her some time to compose herself and then comfort her if she needs it, but stupid comfort, comfort that won’t do one thing for her – I don’t think it might be someone who it’s happened to before, or someone whose been robbed before or hurt before and so I’m not just a shocking incidental, I’m a revisitation of horror, I’m a reminder of vulnerability and fear, of being singled out as worthless. You’re smart enough to know this, I know you’re smart enough to know this about me – I tell you a silly story about a pawn shop and I’m supposed to be your well-traveled brother - such a unique slant and look at the treasury of stories and all it’s given me. Why do I want to tell you what a rat I am and hope you smile about it? Because you will - but I still know I make myself something you don’t want to talk about, something that you’d rather hadn’t happen, but that has become an element of you, part of your definition no matter what you do, I force that on you.

  I’m just such a crook. I’m such an idiot. There isn’t any reason to think you’ve read this far and I don’t know I’ll ever send this letter but I pretend that writing in a hotel room is something you’re aware of - pretend I’ve written this, so now you know it, but I haven’t even sent it so I can’t even get the presence about me to really tell you all of these things - so I haven’t told you anything. I’m glad I haven’t.

  I don’t have anything to tell you.

  Oh. Knock knock?

  Who’s there?

  Oriel.

  (you know the rest)

  Alligator,

  (signed Hugo Cambridge)

  twelve, February 2007

  Letter no. Four