The World's Unlikeliest Con Man

When he told me his line of business I thought it was a joke or some kind of stock line to break the ice. He was unshaven, and the dark circles under his eyes only served to highlight and frame the broken capillaries spider-webbing the whites of his eyes. From the disheveled look of his clothes I guessed he had slept in them, maybe for more than just one or two nights, and from the bouquet of stale tobacco and rotgut whiskey that wreathed his body I wouldn’t have been two surprised to learn it had been on a park bench.

By the end of that first weekend, when I had just about run through my meager bank account, paying our way to Vegas, then Tijuana, then back to Vegas, and spent more in 3 nights than I had in six-months of bachelor living, I no longer harbored any doubts that I was in the presence of the world’s greatest living con-man.

The thing that set him apart, that both separated him from and elevated him above your average matchstick man was his refusal to lie. He never claimed to be a deposed prince who needed some soon to be generously repaid help. He didn’t offer untold riches as a return for a modest investment. He didn’t even use a fake name. Instead he did something much, much more devious. He told the truth.

But when that man told the truth, he told it in ways that even the truth wouldn’t recognize in a mirror as itself. He twisted logic to a point that when he’d made his case as to why you should do whatever it was he wanted, you not only agreed but felt stupid for wasting his time making him explain it to you. I don’t know if it was some special form of hypnotism that shifted the listener’s world-view, or if his was an Einstein-level of genius that the average man can never really hope to keep up with. He made rational arguments bend a flex like a boneless yogi, but to this day as I look back on each and every decision I made, to the decisions I watched others make, I still stand by everyone as the right choice.

In another time and place in the world he would have called a prophet… maybe even the messiah. Here… now he just just ate, slept, and drank for free whenever and wherever and with whoever he wanted. And all things considered I think he was happier that way.