of practice to learn how to act natural. Think of the middle-class family man walking out of a triple-X theater, looking around like a startled rodent, checking his zipper, think of the kid airing out his bedroom and gargling away his bong breath before his parents get home. I’ve changed my name six times in three years, my name, Social Security number, parents, employment history, school transcripts, and fingerprints. I still have to remember how to act natural. I lapse into mirror mode, approximating the Evaluator’s posture—feet flat, hands exposed with a slight forward lean, confidence, honesty. The most important detail to remember here is frequency, frequency, frequency. Keep moving, shifting every five minutes. Guys get so locked into keeping their story straight, they forget to move, juggling so many details in their head that a rigor mortis stiffness seizes them, and it shows, throws a floodlight onto the flaws in their stories.
I’ve got to keep my hands moving. Need a line. I work a quarter from the cafeteria over my knuckles, tumbling from finger to finger across the back of my right hand. Keeps me nimble.
Three minutes pass, he reads my file, runs through five more lines on his pad. I pull two smokes from the pack, keep one in front of my eyes while I clip or palm the other. I practice a screen-and-cup drill, close-up maneuvers that make one cigarette appear to snap from one empty hand to another. This is clearly not the way to act natural, but I need a line right now, and this pulls my brain into a solid point where I can think for lack of a good hit.
“That’s pretty good. You a magician?” he asks. He needs to establish a rapport. He wants me comfortable enough to confess every infectious corner of my Id. He makes small talk to say Don’t be afraid of me, wants to appear casual but I know he’s listening.
Palms up, I show both cigarettes to the Evaluator. “Nah. Dabbled a lot when I was younger. It’s a nervous habit.” I smile. He’s got a basis for my Nervous Habit. I’ll use that later when I want him to think I’m on edge, pull his attention from the subjects that spook me. It’s called a misdirect.
“Are you nervous, now?”
“Well, yeah. A little.” I slide the smokes back into the pack, brush my hair out of my eyes with my right hand. “Yeah.”
The Evaluator writes, I can read the word magic annotated with HN. He opens my file again, shielding it from my view. No matter, I already know what’s inside.
Raymond O’Donnell had a Nevada driver’s license but has never driven. Raymond O’Donnell had never voted, been arrested, leased an apartment, or been otherwise visible. Raymond O’Donnell kept cash in a Clark County account because Nevada is tight with banking privacy. His name was on twenty-four mail drops throughout the Southwest—Chatsworth, Indio, Twenty-Nine Palms, Visalia, Needles, Bakersfield, Lordsburg, Holbrook. Mail drops didn’t care. They saw the driver’s license, matched my face, took my cash, and forgot me in minutes.
The DMV and Social Security offices always need an address, so I add my new name as an additional recipient on the mail drop for another name, one I don’t use in public. Sometimes I’ll pick another address, a house or apartment in a respectable neighborhood or an empty lot, give that to the DMV, then submit a mail forwarding request to the Post Office, and that mail goes straight to the designated mail drop. DMV never knows. It doesn’t even have to be a real address. When I change names again, I submit another forwarding request to a nonexistent address in Alaska. Somewhere up North is a mountain of mail miles high, waiting for a throng of people who were never born and never died.
I was getting good by this point, really good. Jimmy and the business were starting to pay me more, depend on me more, trying to convince me to quit legit work altogether. I was regretting I’d ever met them.
I was in Las Vegas, rotating mail drops and bank accounts in advance of another change, setting up ghost addresses and credit histories for some of Jimmy’s people. One ounce into a bourbon, the carnival slot machine noise had dimmed and I was scanning—eyes left, down, right, and back—out of habit, the casino floor and the lobby entrance in my line of sight. Five sorority girls bounced from a primer-smeared Jeep and waved down a bellhop. They checked in, passing me on their way to the elevators, one of them said pool. I found them twenty-eight minutes later, all in a bronze, buttery row, sunning on ribbed lounge chairs.
I spent the afternoon keeping my eyes on them, playing two hundred dollars among the low-stakes tables with a poolside view. I’d run a halves count on a six-deck Twenty One shoe, watching the ebb and flow of the cards and betting small to stay off the casino’s scope. Winning is bad for anonymity. Being photographed and thrown out is even worse.
The girls ordered cheap drinks and tipped cheaper, keeping their arm’s length giggle from the orbiting packs of men—fraternity hounds, lounge lizards and tanned and leathery minor royalty dripping strange accents, coconut oil and gold jewelry—simultaneously playing them and blowing them off. I tracked them to the bar that evening, sent them a round.
“I’m headed back to New York for a business function.” I’m doing, Nervous but Sincere. “And my ex is going to be there. If I can ask a strange favor of you, I’ve got a hundred bucks and cab fare to wherever you want. I won’t bother you after that.” I fanned five twenties onto the bar.
Inside a Las Vegas Boulevard souvenir shop, Cindi-with-an-i sat on my lap in a photo booth. I pinched her, told her to smile at the camera. Four bucks later, the booth spat out two strips of black-and-white stills of Cindi and me laughing and snuggling. The rest wanted pictures with each other.
“You each take shots with me, first.”
Cindi had black hair and soft, rounded bones in her face. Skinny, small breasts and a deep tan. But Cindi was still in Raymond O’Donnell’s Nevada safe deposit box when the ambulance took me to Queen of Angels. Jen was in my wallet. Jen was also skinny, but with a sharper face, spiky blonde hair, grey eyes, and a neon smile. The back of her picture said Danny, we’ll always have Mardi Gras.–Karen. Thrift store texbooks are rife with handwriting samples. I picked one that suited the photo—bloated letters with bold flourishes on the capitals—and mimicked it with a pink ballpoint. When they left, I had twenty-four new romantic memories, and they never saw my hand.
Too many changers are too clean to withstand scrutiny. They carry brand-new wallets, empty but for a new driver’s license with a spotless record, and a new Social Security card. That’s when they start to blow it. Nobody carries his Social Security card.
My wallet: a DF monogram—three dollars from a swap meet vendor—mink oiled and left on my windowsill for a month, then run through the rinse cycle. Driver’s license, video rental card (I rent documentaries I don’t watch to go with the magazine subscriptions I don’t read—I have to change hobbies a lot), credit card, ticket stub (The Divine Horsemen w/fIREHOSE at the Variety Arts Center), receipts (ATM, liquor store, strip club, gas station), work ID, Jen/Karen’s picture, an unused codeine prescription and business cards (mechanic, used record store, dry cleaner). The cops went through it, forgot it.
My file: Paramedic’s report, ER chart. They ran my driver’s license, I know, because they want to know a criminal history to corroborate a diagnosis. John Vincent has been a ward of the state. My juvenile offender record is sealed, though they can still verify its existence. But Daniel Fletcher is a churchgoing taxpayer, minus the intentional parking tickets so I wouldn’t be a complete stranger to the System (if you’re too clean, they start digging deeper). And Daniel Fletcher has no medical or psychiatric history.
You present a birth certificate at the DMV, they want to know why you’re getting your first driver’s license at age twenty-whatever. I’ve grown up Back East, never driven in my life. Anyone good at placing accents would peg me for
