Read an Excerpt
Don’t ask me where I come from. I myself should never have asked. The
question has gotten me into all sorts of trouble. I should have just kept
driving that excursion bus between casinos, playing video games in Paramus,
showing off for throw money on the Common, pulling purses and picking pockets
across the Beast. The problem is, the question asked me. Every morning as a
child I awoke with that eerie refrain. It looped in my head until the hour I
distracted myself with the butterflies of a sidewalk show, the heart race of
a snatch-and-chase. Each day the volume amplified until finally, even after
lunch and an afternoon full of distractions, the question would not ebb, but
instead, by the time my voice began cracking, found itself spoken out loud in
front of Shep. Shep, a sightless hustler from Southie, was my makeshift
Fagin, my only pal. He trained the youngest by pretending grift was a game,
supplying his own billfold. If Shep detected promise then off you went, an
independent contractor in his ranks of sticky-fingered freelancers.
As a toddler, I appeared barefoot and blinking at his rat’s nest and Shep
tapped me for a more conspicuous routine. “What can you do?” The rest of the
road rats, witnessing my mute reaction, laughed uproariously. Shep reached
out to see what was up. He could not believe his hands. I had screwed legs up
behind shoulders, crossed ankles at the back of my neck, and left fabulous
feet flapping above my head. “Holy cow!” said Shep, squeezing, “they’re
thick as tenderloins!” I can’t remember where I learned that early trick,
but my performance proves I already knew the props were show-worthy. My feet
were, in fact, huge, but as an infant I was unashamed. They seemed separate,
like shoes, although I knew they were not removable. They were two long dogs
that followed me everywhere I went.
A true scavenger, Shep kept a mental index of everything he had ever picked
out of the trash. He sent a veteran rat to go fetch an old pair of enormous
sports shoes from his dumpsterdive archive. My eyes lit up. They were so
oversized they might have belonged to a circus clown. Bright red fabric
uppers extended all the way to laced high-tops. Red ankles bore emblems
commemorating a long lost Century-20 legend whose legacy had likely been
buried beneath a host of successors’ in the annals of the Basketball Hall of
Fame. Here at the apex of retro footwear the name remained conspicuously
inscribed in stitched script: Chuck Taylor. It was a perfect fit. Shep showed
me how to tie them and I took them for a spin, divulging my nearsightedness
by bumping into the wall. Belying blindness, Shep had selected optometry for
a hobby. He memorized charts and dispensed from his sidewalk stand
of looted lenses by correlating chart readings with drawers organized by
prescription. Shep set me up with a pair of thick, vintage frames. The
glasses, together with the sneakers, made our Cinderella story complete.
From the start, we enjoyed a filial rapport, Shep with his tactile acuity and
me with my phenomenal flexibility. Flipping bottle caps back and forth at our
first rehearsal, we shared a natural rhythm, syncopated and contrapuntal.
Shep sightless and threadbare; I, nearsighted and, by my infancy, effectively
deaf and dumb: Together we had just the right chemistry for street theater.
Earlier that day, one of the rats had pilfered a case of ginseng juice. Shep
counted the empties he had amassed, decided to call me Eddie for eight, and
we began feeling our way through a rudimentary routine.
