The California Roll - Softcover

Vorhaus, John

 
9780307463180: The California Roll
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307463184 ISBN 13: 9780307463180
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Meet Radar Hoverlander, a witty, gifted con artist with the mind of David Mamet, the voice of Tom Robbins, and the morals of a sailor on shore leave.

What do the Merlin Game, the Penny Skim, the Doolally Snadoodle, and the Afterparty Snuke have in common? They’re all the work of world-class con artist and master bafflegabber Radar Hoverlander. Radar’s been “on the snuke” since childhood, but he’s still looking for his California Roll, the one big scam that’ll set him up in sushi for life.

Trouble arrives in the stunning, sassy package of Allie Quinn—either the last true innocent or a con artist so slick she makes Radar look like a Quaker. Radar’s hapless sidekick, Vic Mirplo, a lovable loser who couldn’t con a kid out of a candy cane, thinks Radar’s being played. But if love is blind, it’s also deaf, dumb and stupid, and before Radar knows it, he’s sucked into a vortex of double-, triple-, quadruple-crosses that’ll either net him his precious California Roll or put him in a hole in the ground.

As timeless as a perpetual-motion machine, as timely as a Madoff arraignment, The California Roll brings you deep inside the world of con artistry, where every fact is fiction and the second liar never has a chance.


From the Hardcover edition.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Vorhaus is the author of The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even if You’re Not. An avid poker player, he has written several books on that subject, including the bestsellingKiller Poker series and the poker-world novel Under the Gun. A veteran creative consultant, he has taught writing in twenty-four countries on four continents, most recently running the writing staff of the Russian version ofMarried . . . with Children. When not out making the world safe for situation comedy, he lives in Southern California, where he very much appreciates the weather.

But wait, there’s more! At: www.radarenterprizes.com


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.

on the snuke

The first person I ever scammed was my grandmother, who had Alzheimer's disease and could never remember from one minute to the next whether she'd just given me ice cream or not. I'd polish off a bowl, drop it in the sink, walk out, walk back in, ask for another, and get it. Boom. They say you can get sick of ice cream if you eat too much. I found that was not the case.

They also say you can't cheat an honest man, but I say you can. The honest ones never see it coming.

In first grade, I cooked up the Golden Recess, which was a Ponzi scheme, though I didn't know to call it that then. I got my classmates to pool their allowances for me to invest in something. Action figures? Baseball card futures? I really don't remember. By the time the pyramid collapsed, I'd netted twenty bucks--huge money for first grade--and I didn't even do time because, though of course I got caught, no one believed a little kid could have such larceny in his soul.

Honest people. Like I said, they never see it coming.

And snukes--scams or the people who perform them--may have a bad name, but it's not always the case that someone gets burned. In fact, when you think about it, the best cons are the ones that leave people feeling like they got something for their money. And you know what? Sometimes they even do.

Consider the Doolally shorthair.

I'm like nine, ten, something like that, and I find this stray dog. He was a real mess, with matted, gunked-up fur and scarry evidence of many fights. I knew if I took him to the pound, they'd kack him for sure, and I couldn't stand to see a dog go down. So what I did, I shaved him and sold him to unsuspecting yuppies as an exotic purebred: the extremely rare and fairly expensive Doolally shorthair terrier. I charged a ton because, again, with honest people, they definitely think the more you pay, the more it's worth. Of course, it wouldn't do to have his hair grow out on them--who ever heard of a longhaired shorthair? - so before I sold him, I trained him to pigeon home. Which, at the first opportunity, he does. I shave him again and take him back again, and oh, the happy couple, they can't believe I found their precious pooch! I explain how the Doolally is so valuable and rare that they all get GPS microchipped at birth, and these yuppies are so grateful, they give me a reward, which I protest taking but take just the same.

So the dog bolts again, and I return him again, this time spinning a yarn about how the chip only has a limited number of resets, whatever the hell that means, and had to be replaced--at cost, of course. This they totally buy, and why not? I mean, just look at me, such a choirboy. Beatle bangs, cherry cheeks, scout's-honor smile. That's always been a strength of my game: I look so straight, you'd never believe I'd try to sell you your wallet out of your own back pocket.

Anyway, the dog jets again, and I trot him back again and get paid again. I'm definitely thinking, good times.

But it can't last forever, right? Even the dullest dull normal will eventually catch on, so after the Doolally's last scamper, I show up with another mutt, some additional stray I rescued. I suggest that the Doolally is a little more peripatetic - at that age I was all about the SAT words - wandery, yeah, than they can handle, but this other dog is a real homebody and won't go nomad like the Doolally. A schnufflehund, I called it. Very rare.

Sadly, the schnuffle costs a bit more, and would they mind making up the difference?

I kept that one dog, the original Doolally, and placed him in about five different homes before he had the bad luck to get run down by a rototiller (how does that happen?), and in the meantime, that's the lives of five other strays I saved, plus five other families who got the loyalty and love of a worthy woofer, even if they sort of overpaid for it. So you see, it was like the Haiphong phone book--a Nguyen-Nguyen situation.

Which is not to say that every day is Sunday in the park with George with me. Having been a grifter now for about twenty years (if you count the ice cream thing as the start, which I do), I recognize the big pitfall, and no, I'm not talking about getting A) arrested or 2) the crap kicked out of you. (Both I have, and neither's a big deal.) I'm not even talking about what they call grift drift, where you have to make rootlessness your root and homelessness your home because it doesn't pay to set a stationery target, not in this line of work. No, the real problem with life on the snuke is how it makes you cynical. Once you know how easy it is to pull wool--and it seems like I knew it neonatally--you start to expect the worst, or at least the least, of people. It's not fair and it's not fun. So I work hard to keep up my pointillist perspective - make every day indeed Sunday in the park with George if I can - and I always try to give my victims the metaphorical reacharound, so they can feel like crossing paths with me wasn't the worst thing that could've happened to them in life.

According to me, I'm moral.

Plus, according to me, I'm normal, which is not at all abnormal when you think about it, because everybody's default view is the view from inside their own skin. Though I appreciate that I strike some as strange. First, there's my career, my chosen line of work, which few would choose. Next there's my inexpressive expressiveness. I learn like a sponge, and like a sponge I hold everything without judgment and sort without order. I'm equal parts lunch bucket, pop culture, and string theory, and this can make me appear quite random at times, though I find that people find that part of my charm. Of course, what they call charm I call a tool, but that's a subject for a different time.

Then there's my name: Radar Hoverlander. Seriously, who's got a name like that? People assume it's a fabricat,* possibly something I cooked up between when I entered Harvard at the age of fifteen and when I got expelled for celebrating my eighteenth birthday in the apse of the Appleton Chapel with a bottle of absinthe and the underage-yet-in-my-defense-wildly-precocious daughter of a Radcliffe provost. That's a reasonable supposition. Certainly if I'd been cursed with a Doe-value name, my first order of business would have been to tart it up to suit the grift. Zakaz Koureni, Vietato Fumare, something like that. But Radar Hoverlander I was born, and I have the birth certificate to prove it. Which assertion, of course, might not be all that assuasive, since when it comes to birth certificates I had six at last count. What can I tell you? Documents of identity are to my line of work what bromine and xylene neutralizers are to an EPA cleanup crew. You like to have choices. Anyway, for my given name I can thank my father's whimsical bent toward palindromics. Which, when you think about it, thank God for Radar, for I could just as easily have been Otto. Or Grogorg. Milton Notlim. Lysander A. Rednasyl. All of this, by the way, according to my mother, for by the time I was old enough to ask such questions, the old man was long since coopgeflonnen. North to Alaska. South to Ixtapa. Or just into the vapor where grifters go when grift drift takes them too far too fast.

Hoverlander, they say, is a family name. German or Dutch, they say. Fabricat, say I. Pure Ellis Island improv. Probably the original was something with an unspeakable number of consonants, or an unsightly and un-American -ilych or -iliescu suffix, which would never do for this conniving bloodline of mine. From what I know of my family - on both sides, because like attracts like - we've followed the main chance for a thousand years, with moving on and blending in our ancestral stock-in-trade. Find a place, stay till you wear the welcome mat flat, then scat. That's how we ended up in California. We just kept heading west till...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307463184
ISBN 13 
9780307463180
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
276
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
MUSIC STORE professional GmbH
022188841282
Lars.Mueller@musicstore.de

Istanbulstr. 22-26
Köln
51103
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780307463173: The California Roll

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0307463176 ISBN 13:  9780307463173
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2010
Hardcover