“…His nose scenting money in people’s pockets. The taste of tin foil on his fingers…”
What did it matter if I could pick the pants right out of somebody’s pocket and I got to be known as Something-Magnificent-Sounding Eddie? So what if instead I ended up trailing a string of luckless aliases in and out of juvie, jail, and the penitentiary for the rest of my life on account of a fumbled offense?
“…Geese honking over Canada. The sound of a thousand far-off roller skates…”
I felt a fever coming on, and, like the explorer who decides to forget about building a campfire in the frozen face of an Arctic gust because—yawn!—it would be so fine to just curl up and sleep, I was ready to be bundled off to a nice, cozy cell where I would have a good, long time to fend off the imminent hallucinations and cold sweats.
“How can I tell this corner’s already being worked?” Shep still had not let up. “It’s because you are the slipperyfingered sucker I smell coming a mile away even if I ain’t blind working it!”
“What?” He had my attention now.
“And besides,” he added as in afterthought, bending over and lowering dark glasses for an instant. Shep winked a bright blue orb right into the depths of my eye: “I ain’t blind.”
I was all pins and needles, overcome by awe and be-wilderment, a mystic initiate with scales dropping from my glasses. Of course! Shep wore shades and carried a cane but he could see just fine. He was happy to perpetuate any masquerade that might help increase the take. Why had I never noticed what I saw now with perfect perspicacity? Hadn’t Shep, especially in his gruff entreaties to action, always been so demure? He flashed a smile so disarming that, after an instant of ambivalence, I knew not to take it personally.
“Remember, Eddie,” Shep went on, the shades replaced, his disability drama intact, already in progress, “crime is an art, and the criminal is an artist of disillusion.” Holding his cane, facing the horizon, Shep gave the sidewalk a magic rap. I straightened right up. His terse pep talk had roused me and I forgot about my self-absorbed wallowing. I took a look around, found myself plopped right in front of the Federal Reserve bank, and right there, emerging like an augury from the revolving door, was my mark. He was running late, overweight, unkempt. Instead of scorn, derision, or pity, it was with gentle tenderness that I took in the slumped carriage, the stumbling gait, the henpecked perplexity, and the telltale, bulging pocket of a figure embossed by fate. My spirit soared. I had heretofore been crippled by anxiety over what I had believed would be duplicity. Indeed, if my motives had been insincere, then surely I should have succumbed to the attendant allergy known as self-incrimination, the symptoms of which had just gone into high-speed remission as my erroneous presumptions about thievery’s misanthropy were instantly extinguished. In a flood of understanding, my sensibilities were saturated by a recognition of the art’s essential altruism: The object was not to disdain those you steal from, but instead to take out of love. Tremendous tenderness is required to touch the mark, the pocket, the spirit. Without it, a rat will surely be trapped, and rightly so. Benevolent intentions are needed to buttress a taker’s claim on borrowing a bit of society’s scarce, scattered currency, that he might in turn tender a token of illumination. Hot coals of condescension were doused. The fire of fear fizzled out. Shame evaporated. I realized that pickpocketing was an extension of the very same ingenuousness I practiced as an illusionist. If it involved another hard-working Harry’s cancellation of credit cards and acquisition of a little more scrip, these minor nuisances were more than offset by the magic involved in recognizing, for a moment, the relativity of his grasp on security, on reality, on the fragile spark of life that somehow takes so long to founder inside our tender breasts.
Like a salamander in my cool new shoes, I crept up behind the mark. It was as if a righteous, diabolical deity had reached down, mopped my brow, and moved me in a cosmic chess match, not just changing my place, but, by her touch, also my nature and shape. I went from illusionist to disillusionist, from pawn to rook or possibly bishop. Eddie Bishop, I considered for an instant. I liked that. At the moment of the snatch, an unswerving hand belonging to that god who guides businessmen and other thieves plunged purposefully from the heavens, parting the clouds like the seam of a pocket, and picked me.
Billy the Kid lasted less than a week. He moved on to another pack, went ward of the state, ended up at the bottom of the bay—we never really found out. What mattered to me was that, from the night he had named me, Billy’s spontaneous exclamation had been a token of cheap if durable tin, a toy doubloon the other kids tossed around in callous afterthought which, over time, I would replace with real gold. Setting sleight of hand aside, I stuck with sticky fingers. It took months of persistent practice to change my nickname, bringing in the contents of ten, twenty, sometimes twenty-five pockets a day, never getting nabbed. Even Shep was impressed by my prowess. He said I spoke “el-o-quent-ly” about the elegance of the pick, and that I should lecture on the nuances of the art at school. Rats pestered me for my method and, insisting there was no secret, I instructed them in my simple provisions.
Lesson I: Lube
Some apply synthetic substances to the pads of the fingers, but when it comes to a pick, I believed in physiology’s own educated intervention: natural lubricants. Long talons and luxurious locks were no longer the tools of my trade, yet I still had my active glands. Depending on the exigencies of the instant, the adrenal and pituitary systems provide uncut speed or morphine; thus does judicious collaboration between perspiration and salivation supply the necessary cocktail to whet fingertips for the grab. It’s all about sweat and spit.
Lesson II: The Mark
There are the brutes who just goes for the suits, the psychologists who assemble impromptu personality profiles, and the superstitious pickers who select marks by cabalistic numerical sequences, but it really does not matter whom you pick. “Crime is an art,” I told my apprentices, “and the criminal is an artist of disillusion. If we have to deceive and deprive to reach our audience, it is only so that the muse may make understood her charitable caprice.” Talking points: not scorn, but sympathy; instead of misanthropy, altruism. By these means one determines who needs to be picked. Just as Robin Hood gave to the poor, so did he give to the rich. The gift: a sense of the vulnerability of all our amassed self-importance, abstract and material, and, subsequently, the nectar of ephemerality. The picker comes bearing a message of transience to be sent by special delivery.
Lesson III: Anonymity
Every road rat has to know to keep snout down. Ask any mark whether he got a good look at the suspect. If the pick was clean, what follows is a muddle of estimated height and shady hair color, yielding no nearer likeness for composite sketchers than that of your average kitchen broom. When the answer is yes, nine times out of ten the description begins with the eyes. Locking gazes with a mark is the first step to getting nabbed. Whether or not other features are detected makes no difference compared to a connection with piercing pupils. These are the umlauts that define the ineffable letter, the capsized colon that begets incriminating testimony.
Lesson IV: The Dance
Some are transfixed by the details of the getaway: elaborate escape plans, decoys and relays, sizzling sprints. These thieves, by their compulsive precautions, end up begging pursuit, something a good picker never induces but for which he is always prepared. The primary object is to protect against any imperative for chase. All too often, however, a rat makes a mistake, in which case preparation can prevent disastrous capture. The answer is rarely an all-out sprint. When flight seems prudent, the getaway is better characterized as a ballet of picker, architecture, pedestrians, and traffic—the accursed cars and trucks that keep rats always on their toes. The job of escape is to detect the ebb and flow and spontaneously choreograph a dance to the urban score; the payoff is the getaway.
I have to admit that, no matter how many learned of the suppleness of my hands, a few of the kids from the ear
ly days never gave up on the name Eddie Feet. It was sort of cosmic justice, really, because, in a squeeze, when the mark got aware or a bystander beheld the take, it really did come down to— hold onto those spectacles—salvation’s last resort: Run! The feet never failed, the shoes prevailed. Some rats attributed magical properties to my Nikes, the acquisition of which had marked a turning point in my career. As seasons passed and my lime sneakers turned the color of ripe avocado, they practically became a part of me. Sure, the shoes helped, but I knew I could do it without them, although the fact that I never stopped wearing the pair, whether in bed or bath, only stoked superstition. But it was just another habit, a pack precaution, like the way I kept my glasses on during sleep. In the rat world, the second you weren’t using something it became free for someone else’s scavengery.
After what seemed, over many months of expectancy, like an agonizing eternity to my juvenile eye, I observed a slow shift in nomenclature. At first, a few flattered me with Professor Eddie. Briefly, they teased with Eddie Fingers, then Eddie Frenetic, Easy Eddie, Wet Eddie—Eddie Anything, just so long as at the end of the day I brought in a batch of scratch. In the end, one name, my favorite, finally took. All over the city they spoke of the fleetness of Shep’s fastest rat: Fast Eddie. That was me.
Long after my ascendancy, I remained restless in my guacamole specials. Winters came, summers went, and I knew I needed to go somewhere to find the answer to a pesky question. Year after year I kept up with the compulsion to lift leather, but despite my once-and-for-all liberation from guilty conscience, the job gradually took on a troublesome subtext. Of all the pockets I picked day after day, there was the chance that one of them might belong to someone related to me. Every strange face seemed to cry out, Do I know you? What if I ever pickpocketed Dad or pursesnatched Mom? The recurring nightmare: Peering into a purloined wallet at the detritus of another’s life, I find a faded picture of an infant with moist forehead, familiar eyes, and huge blue booties. When any man in the world might be your father, any woman your mother, then no one can simply be your fellow. Everybody has shoes to fill, but there are none so large as the pair passed down by the unknown.
One summer day, a sooty sign at the Back Bay bus shelter caught my eye: a cartoon of a herdsman rubbing his stubbly chin, scrutinizing a lone lamb that had that wide-eyed, lost look. In place of a crook, the drover carried a neon question mark. Beneath the illustration, copy read: METZGER SHEPHERDING SERVICE. SPECIALISTS IN FILIAL IDENTIFICATION, CLAIMS, SETLEMENTS. I decided it was time to figure out whether my question had an answer.
Left over on ancient Causeway Street, barely distinguishable between the ruins of the old highway and the yawning chasm of the abandoned tunnel, crouching in a perpetual penumbra cast by the skeleton of that hulking, indistinct monolith dubbed the Fleet Center, Metzger Shepherding was a brick blot on the city’s history, one of the few offices remaining from the old North End. The building was probably already an anomaly, a relic of gaslights and two-lane streets, sometime halfway through century 20 when the viaducts had come and dwarfed it. Now, with the world’s widest cablestayed bridge eclipsing this part of the city like a monstrous wing and the tunnel’s plugged mouth swallowing the neighborhood’s light whole, the structure seemed doubly stunted. There in the dead heart of the city, beneath a peculiar pall of peace, I thought I heard a faint hum coming from the abandoned artery below.
I pushed the doorbell and stood under the scrutiny of the electric eye, sweating at the prospect of what I might discover, elated by the promise of release from beneath a long-amassed burden: a pocketful of money ostensibly my own. After pack dues and tributes to Shep, it had taken me too many seasons of squirreling away five-, ten-, and occasional twenty-dollar coins to save up the ten thousand weighing down my pants, half of it in change. I would be glad to give it away. After five minutes of unblinking surveillance and invisible deliberation, I was buzzed in.
An old man sat behind a great steel desk in the cheerless one-room office. His face was puckered like the butt of a lemon, his head as bald as the rind and his skin—from a long, lightless life in this hovel—just as jaundiced. He pointed to an empty chair. A few dusty calendars—all from different years, none of them current—drooped desolately from otherwise-unadorned walls. Long ago in this dingy little bunker, the man’s enormous desk had been assembled like a ship in a bottle. Components that had barely squeezed through the door and been coupled before a remote war were all now thoroughly fused, nuts and bolts having long since rusted to oneness. The desk was in this room for good. It was the reason this building was still here, holding up leaky roof and fragile man alike.
“So,” Señor Sourface said, noisily at work on one of those old hole-in-the-middle candies, “you think you can find yourself some honey, huh?” As if enveloping me in a cocoon of his confidence, the Metzger man—who by the looks of the cramped office served as owner, operator, and sole employee— leaned across a cluttered desktop plagued by a diaspora of last century’s business: rogue pencils, vagrant paper clips, errant erasers, and a nomadic wrapper labeled “Pep-o-mint.” Here in a brick box in the shadow of the now-silent overpass, that grimy, green steel landscape was something of a self-contained dimension, a barren expanse of office-supply apocalypse, the stray implements foraging for nourishment among scarce crumbs of efficiency. “Come on, cough it up. What’s your angle, kid?”
Beady eyes betrayed callous calculations. Metzger Shepherding specialized in intimidating the rich with hearsay or trumped-up testimonies in order to exact settlements more accurately described as blackmail. There were enough bigamous bigwigs to bully around in the Beast who, however powerful, had fragile, family-values personae to protect and preferred paying the occasional extortionist in order to avoid paternity suits. It was not a new experience for me, coming up against a patronizing professional who had no time to waste on a delinquent kid. I had patted a lot of these guys from behind, but a face-to-face encounter required a different kind of skill and patience than hand-to-wallet. He had access to something that could not simply be lifted: information.
“Look, I’m not out to frame anybody,” I said. “I genuinely want to know if you can tell me something about where I come from.”
The patrimony policeman lowered his voice and, breath reeking of candy cane, delivered in grave tones what must have amounted to his standard, supercilious pitch. “You know, most of the sugar daddies who eventually settle don’t even remember whether the claimant was an honest offspring, but they suck up the expense as a precaution, a symptom of their promiscuity, an annual inoculation for the health of their career.” This said, he pepped up. “So, your mother’s a whore, right? What’s the name of the horny old lecher who sired you?”
Smarting, I said, “Honestly, I don’t think either of them is alive.”
My inquisitor’s nose screwed up in revulsion. “You can’t bribe a dead man.”
“I just want to know what their names were, where they lived, whatever.” I stacked the coins on the desktop. “I have the fee: five thousand dollars.” Leaning over, he examined the pile, which seemed meager all of a sudden, and sniffed—not them, but me, perhaps to see if I, like leftover cheese, was off. I added a bit petulantly, “I’ve been saving an awfully long time.”
“Saving? Ha!” he snorted. “More like stealing. Squandering someone else’s hard-earned dough on your little vanity trip.” Skeletal yellow fingers darted up from behind the desk, scooping the booty into a drawer. “You want me to believe you might be someone special, so you’re holding out. Well, I’ve seen a million would-be Lindberghs.”
I doubted that he had. This was the lowest of the birth brokers, a real cradle chaser, but his was probably the only office of its kind in town desperate enough to let a road rat in the door, and the service was within my price range. I figured that giving him the cash up front would at least compel Mr. Metzger (I presume; he never offered his name, nor a receipt for my chunk of change) to make cursory checks in hospital records and ch
ild-search networks.
He took my picture with an old-fashioned film camera, my blood blot with a none-to-sterile-looking pin, and asked me whether I knew my birth date. “No. I’m not even certain of my age. Somewhere between twelve and fifteen, I believe.”
“I’ll run a search in the DNA databases to see if you were ever registered, but it’s a shot in the dark,” he said. “You sure you wouldn’t rather keep the money and shoot up drugs or something?”
“How much time will you need?”
“I’ll have your answer tomorrow afternoon, but if you ask me, you’re wasting the dough. The chances of a rat like you finding an actual match are about as good as the Sox winning the pennant…”
I made my way to the door.
“…the Pats taking the championship…”
I was back on the street and he was standing in the doorway, still going.
“…the Celts coming back from the dead … the Bs taking the Stanley Cup…”
The next day, I delivered lunch to Shep’s prescription booth and decided to tell him the news. I went into it feeling righteous. Going through the formal process was my idea of poignant passage: If there was a chance of finding relatives or the parents’ final resting place, knowing as much before handing Shep the payoff might dilute my resolution to leave. Akin to the compulsion that had kept me aloft among power lines even after I had pretty much given up on getting the magic shoes, I held onto the superstition that an obstinate resolve might reward me with an aperture, however narrow, of hope.
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