Chapter 1
“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger,
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
What follows is my experience ringing C.S. Lewis’ miserable bell.
To start, my lawyer wants me to point out this does not intend to be a confession of any kind. What follows is strictly for entertainment purposes only. I pay him a lot of money to tell me these kinds of things and I’ve learned to do as he suggests.
It began with me tuning into a podcast over the internet, one I’d listened to many times before. A program that ran quirky stories about quirky people, called ‘This F’d Up Life of Mine’. To give you an idea what the program was like, one of the stories they had done in a past episode was about a teenage girl who somehow became Noriega’s pen pal. She ended up going to visit him in Panama, but then the bastard kidnapped her, wouldn’t let her go home, using their ‘friendship’ for photo ops and propaganda purposes. U.S. Marines had to extract her. Another was a story about a grandma who was responsible for getting her nine year old grandson and a few of his nine year old friends addicted to heroin. Of course she claimed it was all an innocent mistake.
This particular day’s episode was about some guy known as the ‘Potluck Bandit’. Here was a guy who broke into people’s houses merely to eat. He would make himself a sandwich or microwave pizza pockets or make popcorn or barbecue steak, whatever happened to be in the fridge that day that struck his fancy. He never touched any valuables or stole anything. He even cleaned up after himself, scrubbing dishes and wiping down counters. Part of his M.O was sharing what he prepared with family pets if there were any.
This story got my attention not because of how weird it was, but because of the way the public had seemingly warmed up to this guy. Although the show never actually interviewed the Potluck Bandit himself, they interviewed a lot of his victims. These people talked as if they were special for having their refrigerators raided by this guy. It set them apart from their neighbors, made them feel exclusive. Here was a common thief being talked about like he was some magical elf from the North Pole or folk hero, some modern day Robin Hood. It was the law of novelty in full effect - oddball, but harmless.
The podcast interviewed the detective assigned to the case and it was clear, even though it was now ten years later, he hadn’t gotten over his frustration with the way the public and media had embraced someone he was trying to incarcerate. Then they played a recording of an interview the detective did at the time it was all happening. The detective’s voice was surly: “Sure he only made a salad today, but who’s stopping him from raping your daughter tomorrow.”
The podcast host stopped the ten year old interview, “Those are pretty strong words,” she said to the detective, “especially since in the end we know he didn’t rape or harm anyone, he only ate food and fed pets.”
“Ya, well what put me over the top,” answered the detective defending his frustration at the time, “was when people started leaving food on their back porches enticing him to come by, even though clearly the guy had mental issues.”
“I think after all this time a lot of people can understand your frustration,” said the interviewer. “You being the detective in charge of the case at the time, what did you do about it - these people leaving food out?”
The detective hesitated before answering, “Myself and my fellow officers,” he said sheepishly, “carried out a strategic plan to eat as much of the food as possible in an attempt to head off the bandit - so to speak.”
“Seems a bit unorthodox,” said the interviewer.
“Ya, well I personally gained ten pounds,” said the detective, “But I don’t believe in wasting food. We couldn’t just throw it all away.”
So I’m listening and the story went on. Turns out they caught the ‘Potluck Bandit’ and he was convicted and went to jail. The detective had since retired and apparently put himself on a diet. But that story stuck with me. It planted a seed in some dark orchard in my brain and it gestated there, soon to bare its bitter fruit.
While I was turning the Potluck Bandit’s story over in my brain my own story took a lousy turn. I was one of those people hopelessly stuck in the wrong vocation. Why the hell I chose to be an Industrial Mechanic god only knows. It had something to do with not having a rudder on my ship and having said ship, which is of course a metaphor for my life, crash head-on into Shit Island. In other words I never chose anything in life, I fell into things. I fell into this Industrial Mechanics course and then into an apprenticeship and on to being a Journeyman. I found out after I had invested a lot of time and money and bought a shit load of expensive tools that I was absolutely no good at being an Industrial Mechanic, or being any kind of mechanic for that matter. I couldn’t even fix my own bicycle when I was a kid. But, I was too far down that rabbit hole to consider doing anything else.
I’d worn out my welcome at most of the factories in town and now I was getting grief at my current job. I was taking it hard from the foreman and co-workers at the industrial plant I was working at about my performance. Finally one day the guy from the union came by and told me to take a walk with him. Seems I was costing the company money and they had enough shit on me to can my ass directly. It was just a matter of a little paperwork. But, he’d done me a favor and worked out a deal: if I got the hell out of the trade I could remain an employee if I’d take a position as late shift janitor. They’d even give me fair price for my tools. So that, as they say, was that. You can’t be too particular about the kind of rope someone throws you when you’re sinking in the shit.
The problem was the pay was naturally less. When I say less I mean a lot less. Every week the money screw turned and I felt its squeeze. As it says in the Bible somewhere: Out of want comes scams and schemes. Possibly I made that up, but it should say it in the Bible. Considering, it was my want for more money that brought all the thinking and scheming I’d done about the Potluck Bandit to the surface.
What stuck in my head about that story, I finally realized, was ‘The Potluck Bandit’ (whether he knew what he was doing or was simply a full on nut job) hit upon a few new twists to the age old craft of thievery: 1) the nature of his crime was novel, stealing only food. He didn’t take anything of real value, which went a long way in keeping the masses from wanting his head on one of his own skewers. 2) He managed to get the sympathy of his victims, as well as the public, by cleaning up after himself and feeding dogs and cats and Chinchillas and whatever the hell else people had as pets in those days.
So just for fun (that’s what I told myself anyway) I started thinking of other ways to reinvent thievery. The only part I didn’t like about old Potluck’s version was the not stealing anything valuable part. No point then, why go to jail for hotdogs and leftover spaghetti? Forget that.
I came up with a few half-baked and very ill advised ideas. To give you an understanding of my state of mind at the time, one of my plans was to break and enter and leave monopoly money in place of the things I’d steal. I would be known as the ‘Monopoly Bandit’ and people would admire the novelty of it and kind of hope I’d hit their house when they were at work or whatever and they could show all their friends the monopoly money I left. The colored paper would be a keepsake and they could tell their grandchildren about the ‘Monopoly Bandit’. Proudly showing their little colored money mementos, saying: ’this is what was left the time your grandfather’s Rolex was stolen. You know they never did catch the Monopoly Bandit. Oh to hell they didn’t Grandma, they caught him buying fifteen Monopoly games at Wall Mart!
Then I had a really twisted idea that made me worry about my sanity altogether. It involved kidnapping a child, preferably a girl around 8 to 11 years old, and strapping a pretend bomb on her, but she wouldn’t know it was pretend. I’d send her into a bank with a note: ’this is a robbery…. I have a bomb strapped to my body… a man has the remote…I’m terrified…please help me…put the money in the bag!” All the while I would be outside with the fake remote detonator. I know you think I’m evil even imagining this. It was the pressure I think. I’d gone nuts from the strain of losing an acceptable paycheck. I mean forget about the psychological damage it would do to the kid, I’d get it worse than her in the end. Kidnapping is felony- one, along with the bank robbing I’d go to prison for a hundred years! I realize now it was my subconscious nudging me in the direction of an ever evolving scheme, but at the time I believed I was ever so slowly losing my mind.
So for sanity sakes, I tried to forget everything about the Potluck bandit and anything to do with robbing or stealing. It was all just fantasizing anyway; at least that’s what I told myself. I’d put my mind towards trying to be a reasonable janitor and looking for a second job.
Then I woke up one morning and there it was - what my subconscious had been working on since I’d first heard about the Potluck bandit, a scintillatingly brilliant scheme just sitting there in my head, complete and beautiful like a fine jewel. For days I tried to ignore it, but it kept twinkling at me from the corner of my psyche. Guardedly I started poking at the idea, refining a detail here, tweaking a concept there. I say guardedly, but once I started thinking about it I couldn’t stop. It became an obsession. I made myself believe it was only fantasizing, nothing real, mere entertainment. I had (honestly at first) no intentions of carrying out such a thing; no matter how great it seemed or how sure I was I would be able to pull it off.
As bad fortune would have it my financial situation was headed more south than I initially thought. Every pay check I ended up $187.00 in the hole. That’s $374.00 every month if you are counting. And I was counting. I tried everything I could to cut costs. I stopped driving, parked the car, bought baloney instead of steak and cancelled the cable because I’d sold the TV anyway. In general I made life not worth living and still the money hole kept devouring my future and well being.
And then something snapped in my brain. It’s hard to say why it finally happened. It’s like I had been forever struggling to build a ladder to the moon and one morning I woke up and I had no idea why the hell I wanted to get to the moon in the first place. That’s how it felt anyway – fuck the moon. I couldn’t remember why anything was worth caring about. Maybe that’s all a fancy way of saying I’d given up.
A nice thing happens when you actually, authentically give up (even though for me it was only temporary and came at the worst possible time): you stop resisting, stop fighting things. A lot of what you thought was important shit, all the things you believed you were required to care about, instantly becomes meaningless. I didn’t care anymore about my money hole or my job or what happened to me in the future. It was as though I’d lost all fear. And I figured my life was shit anyway. I couldn’t really make it worse. What would be the harm in taking a chance, pushing a boundary here or there?
So I stopped pretending I didn’t have a diamond mine of a scheme sitting, like a golden elephant, in my head. What the hell, I figured, if I’m going to slip out of this tight squeeze I better do some wriggling. If it worked even once there’d be enough money to pull me out of the hole and set me up so I could keep my head above water and live half decently again. Pull it off twice, and shit, I’d be laughing. Fail and I’d go to jail, but like I said I didn’t seem to care what happened to me anymore (later I found out that is easy to say when you’re not actually in jail).
Now, with the intent of genuinely carrying out my plan, I started going over and over it in my mind again. I’m sure, at this point, you are wondering what this great criminal master plan is, or more correctly, was. And how great could it have been if I got caught?
The idea was that I didn’t need to kidnap a child, or anyone for that matter. I only needed to kidnap myself. I would be the kidnapper and the kidnapped. I would be the ‘victim’ with a bomb strapped to his body and the invisible perpetrator somewhere with the remote waiting to detonate if I didn’t bring back a bag of cash to myself. The genius part of the plan was that if I got caught I could maintain that I had been kidnapped and I believed the bomb to be real. I would cooperate fully with the law to help bring the kidnapping, bomb strapping, foreigners (of course I would make them foreigners ) to justice.
See what I mean the plan was pretty damn good, and simple which is the most important ingredient in the greatest plans. And to the best of my knowledge it was pretty damn original as well. I’d never heard of anything like it before or since. Although I’m sure now there will be copycats, people who will continue to push the envelope. But I was the first. I was the one who broke the 4 minute mile of bank robbing, the first in the underworld to bench press 500lbs so to speak. Now everyone will be doing it.
The plan was definitely simple, but daunting. I got to work dividing the operation into three Tactical phases: 1) Planning and preparation. 2) Execution. 3) Asset management and security (or more correctly avoid getting caught).
As much as I thought I was beyond worrying about consequences I became jumpy once I’d decided I was going to actually do it. I kept telling myself there was no shame in backing out. Somehow I knew I was going to go through with it. Every cell in my body confirmed it as well. You know how some things you just know. I could visualize myself doing it, everything in minute detail, like I’d already done it. The planning and preparation was easy compared to the execution and avoiding getting caught phases. The first thing was to go to the bank and take out another credit card (my two existing cards were both maxed out). Funny how easy it is to get a credit card in this country, all you need is any sorry job and anything better than ‘disaster’ for a credit score. Anyway, I needed it to buy supplies I would need. Now don’t think I was dumb enough to use the card directly. This is all pretty much ‘crime 101’ kind of stuff. I would take cash out on the card at local ATM machines. Not that I was buying anything outrageous like an Uzi, but I was worried about the things I’d need being traced back. You never know when you might make a simple mistake like dropping something, an article of clothing for example, a sweater say. The cops are smart these days; they can trace shit all the way back to where it was made (so inevitably right back to China). With cash there is no paper trail, no signatures. Cards present a risk. The cops might very well show up at the Gap or wherever and say ‘We would like to talk to the staff about this sweater which was purchased here at this location sometime last month,’ and the response would no doubt be ‘nobody from last month still works here, sir.’ The cops naturally question everyone, watch security video and check the records, they always check records. If you paid with debit or a credit card for the sweater bingo there’s a record. But, cash means no paper trails, no records.
The next thing in my preparations was to find a safe house. Somewhere I could go after the heist, lie low for a few days, or disappear fast if I felt the cops were hot on my trail. It was easy to find one. This city is crawling with slum lords with disgusting, vile places for rent for a couple hundred bucks a month, all on the sly. I also needed a stash for the anticipated loot I’d bring in. Crime 101 again: you never want to get caught with loads of cash on you. A suitable stash spot was harder to find. I found some reasonable places, but I couldn’t help but imagine some bum or kid getting lucky and making off with my hard earned cash. I finally settled for a broken pipe in the condemned building next door to the safe house I had rented.
Next, for part of the evasion aspect of the plan, I bought some rope and duct tape at the local hardware store. The kid behind the counter asked if I wanted to sign up for their credit card and get a discount. I told him I only use cash. ‘What’s wrong, don’t want to leave a paper trail?’ the kid said, smirking. I know he was joking but it unnerved me.
Back at the safe house I made the rope into a loop that I could slip on over my feet and cinch up tight. I did the same with a stretch of duct tape, making a loop with enough room to just get my hands through and back out. The tricky part was the back out. I practiced hog tying myself repeatedly until I could do it in less than forty seconds. First slapping a strip of duct tape across my mouth, next cinching the rope around my feet and lastly my hands duct taped behind my back. I‘d practiced screaming through the duct tape and the ‘thank god you found me officer’ speech until I couldn’t keep from laughing and adding stupid stuff like: ‘all this duct tape reminds me of the last time I saw your wife officer’. I could joke then, but I wouldn’t be joking if I had to do it for real. It would mean the police were coming for me. I’d have to carry out the ruse of being a victim in the whole thing, forced against my will to participate in a crime I could never commit on my own initiative. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. It was the weakest part of my plan. I was doubtful my victim story would seem plausible for very long, although I had worked it out extensively. Cops have a way of getting to the bottom of things; it’s their job, they can afford to be patient.
I didn’t let myself worry too much. I stayed focused and active, going over every detail, rehearsing where I could. I’d take the subway to point A, then a bus to point B, changing clothes and discarding old garb in trash (didn’t actually do this part in rehearsals –not rich yet), taking subway back to point A to throw off any followers, then a different bus to point C, then the subway to near safe house, then long zig zag walk home. I did the whole routine on my days off, twice in the morning - quick nap, lunch and one more time in the late afternoon. It pains me to wonder why I didn’t put this much effort into trying to be a good mechanic. Not much art of craft for me in being a mechanic I guess.
I’d prepared as much as I could, even got to the point of over preparing. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to fall into the trap of being over confident and cause myself to get complacent. I put a big red x on the following Wednesday on the calendar in my mind (real calendars with x’s on them are evidence). When Monday came I called in sick at work. I did it kind of huffy like, out of breath and talking like I was possibly under duress. I said I’d be off at least a couple of days. I don’t think the bitch of a receptionist gave a damn! All I got was a couple of ‘ya’s’ and the smacking of her chewing gum.
I slept at the safe house Monday night amidst the background of constant sirens. Tuesday morning I got my hair buzzed as close as I could get without technically being bald. Then I hung out all day back at the safe house, relaxing among the sirens and cockroaches. It was a shithole nestled in the shithole part of town but it fit the plan perfectly.
Tuesday night came and I slept adequately. I wasn’t nervous because I had done my homework: dotted every i and crossed every t. I made sure I triple checked everything twice. It was, as they say, go time.
I woke at 4:37 am, two hours before the alarm. It took a while to figure out where the hell I was and what day it was. I laid there for a moment in the dark with my eyes open. Then I remembered. Suddenly, I felt frantic energy surge through my nerves and form into a vortex in the pit of my stomach. It was the first time I felt uneasy about my plan in weeks. My nervousness grew into hysteria. Abort! - I thought – I must be fucking nuts! I closed my eyes and took deep breaths. Soon it came back to me: the meaninglessness my life held in its current form and the fact if I didn’t do something about it, it would only get worse. The plan was solid, even a little genius. It would be a gigantic waste not to give it a try.
“Fuck them all!” I yelled to the stained ceiling. I regained my nerve. Somewhere a siren wailed.
