by Jane Borden
Astute readers would argue that any accent could have put them at ease. And for the most part that’s true. Counterfeiters trust tourists. But I’m telling you, there’s something foolproof about the drawl. Unlike some of the other spotters, I was almost never denied access. I can only posit that Barney Fife and Elly Mae Clampett exist in the collective unconscious, because I don’t think Mao fed his starving republic on a diet of TV Land classics.
Which is to say that maybe it was more than the accent; maybe it was also my accompanying wide eyes and gullible smile. Come to think of it, maybe it was I who worked like a Southern charm.
Once, I asked a peddler if he had “LV” in the store and he whispered, “Not now.”
“Why?” I responded vapidly.
He nodded toward another woman. “Come back later when she’s gone. She pretends to shop, but she’s a spy.”
Whoever she was, she didn’t work for us. Possibly she reported to Customs, but I doubt it. Either way, a moment later he threw her out of the store so that I, the spy, could shop. Not only did he fail to suspect me, he shared delicate information! My countenance and personality telegraphed a prodigious naïveté. It’s a circumstance discouraging and frustrating, and I didn’t mind at all using it against them.
Still, even with my airtight Hee Haw avatar, I couldn’t get cocky. A couple of times during my stint with the firm, coworkers returned from a day on the streets and heard, when the elevator opened, “You’ve been burned.” Our manager knew immediately because she had informants on the inside. That was a spotter’s worst day of work and also his or her last. It’s kind of like accidentally firing yourself.
Typically, though, the response was, “I figured.” An agent knows when the jig is up. If you approach a shop and it closes its gates, you’ve been burned. If you turn around and a shopkeeper you’ve been watching is following to see where you’re going, you’ve been burned. If passing one of the sentinel lookouts, who stand on stools at major intersections in Chinatown during the highly trafficked weekends, leads him to reach for his mobile phone and set off a chain reaction of cellular warnings that runs down Canal Street like those mountaintop bonfires in The Return of the King, you’ve been burned.
Game over.
In other words, I couldn’t work every day. But it was summer, and in your twenties, that means weddings, which require plane tickets, gifts, and for me, that summer, two bridesmaids dresses. I was behooved by teal-green ruffles to seek supplementary employment. I picked up temp work here and there. And because I had experience waiting tables in college at a wing joint called Pantana Bob’s—for which I wore a T-shirt that read “Bob’s Got a Big Deck!”—I scored one shift a week at the legendary West Village brewpub Chumley’s.
It was cush. The owner promised a set amount each shift, so if my tips were short, he’d pay out the difference from his pocket; decent guy. He rarely had to, though. The place stayed packed. Both locals and tourists competed to sit in a booth that might have been occupied by John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Simone de Beauvoir, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Edna St. Vincent Millay, or any other of the dozens of literary luminaries who are said to have haunted the windowless speakeasy either during or after its Prohibition heyday. It didn’t matter that flies swarmed the back room, the jukebox featured only opera, or that sawdust inevitably found its way into your overpriced shepherd’s pie and frequently flat beer. With a pedigree such as that, derelictions are deemed charming. I agreed. I loved the joint.
I discovered the venerable institution through Lou, the elder of my two older sisters, who lived in the West Village when I arrived in New York. She and her friends, many of whom went to college with her, took me under their collective wing as the kid sister they knew me to be—emphasis on kid. Lou and I are seven years apart, so those college pals hadn’t seen me since the perm.
Actually, Lou and I hadn’t seen much of each other either. She left for boarding school when I was eight. Of course, we visited over holidays and family vacations, but we didn’t have a relationship outside of the family unit. It was different with my middle sister, Tucker, but with Lou … I spent more of my cognitive childhood imagining her than experiencing her.
I remember trying to picture her New York apartment. In my mind, it had a tree-lined street and simple concrete stoop. I’d visualize ascending a dark and steep stairwell; I could see myself opening the door. I knew the layout of the fictional furniture and the color of the imaginary couch.
Of course, her real apartment was completely different, and hilariously smaller—particularly when, in addition to her and her roommate, I was there, which was all of the time. I’d come over to watch TV, or have a glass of wine, or just because I could. The first time we ordered takeout, I painstakingly separated out the duplicate menus in order to beef up my collection uptown, before Lou explained that New York restaurants don’t deliver beyond their immediate area: “Did you think they’d get on the subway with your pad thai?”
She teased me a lot, but mostly she mothered me, which I guess I needed at the time because why else would I think it was OK to sleep over in her tiny double bed, like, once or twice a week? I would have hated me. She gave me a key, and occasionally I’d let myself in at three in the morning, when they were both asleep, have a snack, open Lou’s door, and ask her to “scoot over.”
But most of the times that I stayed were on nights when we’d been out together carousing in her neighborhood joints. Everywhere in the West Village was legendary. We went to Corner Bistro for the best burgers in the city, and to the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. Lou and I stood in line for cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery and caught a scene of Sex and the City being shot on her block.
When my lease was up in August, I decided to move to the corner of Perry and Hudson streets. My friends thought I was crazy; the apartment on Eighty-Seventh was a block from Central Park, had a private garden with a tree and a hammock, and my portion was $300 less a month than I’d be paying on Perry. Why was I moving to the West Village?
“I don’t know,” I said and shrugged my shoulders. “Sounds cool.”
Unfortunately, Lou wasn’t there anymore. She’d moved back to North Carolina the month prior. She lived in New York for seven years, but we overlapped for only one. Oh well, at least she’d had a chance to show me the ropes, for example, how to get into Chumley’s.
The main entrance was hidden in the back of a courtyard on Barrow Street, and the back door was unmarked at 86 Bedford; during Prohibition, when a bribed cop called to warn the barkeep of an ensuing raid through the courtyard, the crowd was instructed to exit on Bedford, or to “eighty-six it,” which is the origin of that famous idiom. Patrons could also escape through a secret bookcase that led to an alley. Apparently, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre consummated their marriage in one of the booths. And it’s where James Joyce wrote Ulysses.
Oh geez, oops: I’m lying again. Sorry: you’re not diners. I guess, while working there, it became second nature. Those stories, and a dozen others phonier than a character in The Catcher in the Rye, were tossed to patrons thirsty for more than a pint. I heard some of them from other servers, a few from the walking-tour and bar-crawl guides who led their keeps inside, and most from curious patrons who’d picked up the apocryphal trivia elsewhere: travel books, blogs, drunkards at other neighborhood haunts. Everyone was in on it.
Here’s the truth. There is an entrance at 86 Bedford, but the phrase “eighty-six it” had been in use—and in print—long before Chumley’s opened. There was also a secret bookcase, but it went to the kitchen. And it’s pretty well documented that James Joyce wrote Ulysses in Zurich and Paris. As for the young Fitzgeralds … I can’t prove they didn’t … and they were married in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral … but still, sometimes you have to trust your gut, and mine thinks even Gatsby and Daisy wouldn’t have boinked in a pub. As one of the walking-tou
r guides put it, “Writers are known to get drunk and embellish.”
No one set out to spread distortions. It started innocently. In fact, I believed the tales myself until a fellow employee laughed at one of my questions and asked, “You do know that half of those stories are false?” But then, it became hard to stop—particularly when customers asked leading questions. One wanted to know if the ladies’ room had once been a dumbwaiter that carried people to a gambling den on the second floor. Another had heard that, actually, the dumbwaiter went to the basement and was how they carried the booze inside. Or, according to someone else, that’s what the trapdoor was for, since it connected to a tunnel that led to the rum-delivering boats. Still others pointed to that door in the floor and told their friends, “Runaway slaves used to climb through that hole because when this was a blacksmith’s shop, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad.”
And then they’d look up at me, all of them, with eager eyes, and ask, “Isn’t that right?”
Um, er, thwlllpb, “Sure is! Neat, huh?” Tell them what they want to hear.
The only time I didn’t play along, I instantly regretted it. While I distributed menus, a father told his children that this had been where Dylan Thomas died.
“Actually,” I piped in, “you’re thinking of the White Horse.” His face sank, and so did his children’s. What had I achieved? What mattered more: verifying a useless fact or giving them a memorable meal—one whose imagined worth exceeded the menu’s prices?
Besides, I can’t say for sure that Thomas didn’t stop by Chumley’s for one round before heading to the White Horse, just as it’s impossible to prove that the blacksmith shop wasn’t part of the Underground Railroad, or that the bookcase hadn’t, at one point, led to the street. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.”
And anyway, Dylan Thomas died in St. Vincent’s Hospital.
So from that point forward, I just said yes to all of the legends. “I heard Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby here.” He sure did, and in fact, you are sitting in the same booth. “Is it true that R.F.K. sketched out his presidential campaign platform in this bar?” Yeah, and would you believe it was in this exact booth!
You could have asked me anything. Did William Burroughs name Naked Lunch after Chumley’s BLT? Is that the barstool where e.e. cummings gave up capital letters? Is this where a blind John Milton dictated Paradise Lost to his amanuensis?
You bet, and I don’t want to blow your mind, but it was in this very booth.
Wait a second, the fictional you is thinking, Milton died before the West Village existed. Sure, but didn’t you know that the dumbwaiter in Chumley’s was once a time machine?
the Pokémon-sheet cave, I cut down a block and moved swiftly on Walker Street toward the center of Chinatown, intuiting that my next assignment would be on the west end of Canal, where no one had seen me yet, and knowing that I’d need to reach it before the news of the last raid did. I called the office for the target and sure enough, it was still several blocks away. When I arrived, the goods on display were all anonymous, legal. I feared it was too late, but I milled about regardless.
A middle-aged woman standing nearby solicited advice about a wallet she considered.
“I can’t believe it’s real leather for this cheap,” she giggled in a thick Long Island accent.
“It’s not real,” I told her, maintaining my harmless Southern drawl, but unable to disguise the skepticism.
“But it says so on the wallet,” she said incredulously.
“That doesn’t mean anything.” I don’t know why I chose this battle. I guess, sometimes I was bothered less by the counterfeiters—even though they annually steal around one billion tax dollars from New York City, support a system of illegal-immigrant indentured servitude, and occasionally fund terrorism—than I was by the willful naïveté of the bargain hunters. How could she believe that piece of junk was real? Were we looking at the same wallet? It had a plastic sheen. The stitching wasn’t even in straight lines.
At this point, she shouted across the store to the vendor, intent on settling the dispute: “Is it real?”
“Of course,” he said, “it says so on the label.”
She looked up at me and actually said, “I told you so.”
Whatever, I thought. You are not my child. Then I saw a man walk out of the back room with a thirty-gallon trash bag slung over his shoulder, and instantly stopped caring about the fool from Long Island.
It wasn’t too late after all. They’d merely removed the contraband from the front room; only now were they excising it from the premises. I felt my heartbeat accelerate as I casually spun my back to him, a move that also allowed me to see which way he turned outside the door—I would have to follow. Then I flipped through the “real” wallets one more time, giving him a several-second head start, and pursued the tail.
Following people was the only time I didn’t feel completely confident and comfortable on the job. When gathering intelligence, I could come and go as I pleased, depending on who was or wasn’t looking. But while tailing a mark, I couldn’t cut my own path. And I feared that would draw suspicion, betray me; no two people follow the exact same path.
I maintained a generous distance between us as we headed east, and I called the office to alert the raid team of a change in plans. On the other side of Broadway, he crossed south on Canal and then did what I’d feared he would seconds earlier: took a right on Cortland Alley. No one walks through Cortland Alley. It’s a narrow passage that spans two blocks and has no storefronts. You might recognize it from appearing in movies whose scripts call for an alley that no one walks through. It is not the sort of grimy, dark, vermin-infested, less-traveled road down which a prim, tomato-pie-making, y’all-spewing gal from the sticks would, on a whim, mosey.
True to its nature, this morning Cortland Alley was empty. I lingered on the corner of Canal before turning, aiming to diminish the amount of time we’d be alone on the block, but I had to enter: The distance to the next intersection is long enough that if I waited until he arrived at it, and he turned, he’d have had an opportunity to turn again before I arrived, and I would’ve lost him for good. So I joined.
He never looked back. I reminded myself that criminals are dumb. After a few more blocks, he led me not to another handbag store, which was typically the case as ringleaders control several locations, nor to a warehouse-like storage facility, which is how we made the occasional major bust, but to a small innocuous food market on a side street. Everyone is in on it.
He nodded to a guy, who nodded back and then led him through a door behind the counter. I grabbed a produce baggie. The room was redolent of fish alive, dead, dried, and dying. Every piece of text contained within was written or printed in Chinese. I was the only Caucasian inside and desperately tried to appear as if I had a reason to be, as if I’d come for something specific. That ended up being three stocky white root vegetables, the least unfamiliar items for sale. Burdock? Parsnip? I have no idea what I fried and ate that night.
Confident that the contraband would not move again, I left the market and called in its address to my manager. When I met the team that night at the Irish pub, I heard they’d rolled into the grocery with a warrant an hour after I left. The bags were exactly where I’d said they’d be. Somebody bought me a beer.
The next day I worked at Chumley’s, slinging burgers and returning beers when they became flies’ watery graves. But the day after that I was back in Chinatown. I should’ve waited longer, let things cool. I cased a few stalls: usual shtick, usual scores. And then, near the intersection of Canal and Centre, a man in a baseball cap caught my eye and held it for a millisecond longer than I expected him to.
I felt it immediately. I continued in the same direction at a casual pace for a block and a half, and then looked over my shoulder. Sure enough, he was behind me—talking on his cell phone. To confirm what I already knew, I popped into a
nother storefront or two, but, wouldn’t you know: No one was selling knockoffs anymore that day, not even when I batted my eyelashes, drew out my “i”s, and talked about Jesus.
Returning to the office, I expected a burn notice, but when the elevator doors opened all I heard was, “Hey Jane.” It’s possible I was wrong but … there’s no way I was wrong. An agent knows. I must’ve blown my cover in the grocery; Baseball Cap must have been in that market.
On Canal Street, I drew no suspicion, because I looked like a tourist, sure, but also because the salesmen had an incentive to believe I was who I said I was: They wanted to sell bags. Just like the fool from Long Island believed the wallets were real because she wanted to have found a deal on a luxury item.
It was the incentive that had made me a good spy—not my own work—and no one in the grocery store had it. They saw my syrupy Southern-tourist persona for what it was: a knockoff unraveling at its haphazardly stitched seams.
I was too ashamed to tell my boss, so instead I removed my name from the remainder of the schedule and left.
Not long after that, upon entering my apartment building on the corner of Hudson and Perry, I walked upstairs and stuck my key in the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. Duh, I thought, as I instantly realized my gaffe: wrong floor. I deduced the error quickly because I was familiar with the mistake; I made it about once a week that year. It was a strange and annoying affliction that has never struck me in any other of my many dwellings.
My place was on the third floor, first door at the top of the stairs. Sometimes I stuck my key in the right lock. Other times I tried to open the corresponding door on the second floor, and sometimes even the one on the fourth. My neighbors never said anything; I was mostly a nuisance to myself.