Sucker

(2/2/02)

I suspect I just got conned out of a hundred dollars. My parents are in St. Louis this weekend, and I am keeping their car at the local public garage so I can go do fun things that I cannot do without the car. I was coming out of the garage to go to Target when a frantic, well-dressed, petite black woman stopped me. I powered down the window and she ran off this string of intensely worried phrases, something about a BMW 525i and locking her keys in the car and the trunk locking and her purse in the trunk and needing to make a flight by 7 pm and duplicates of the keys at her sister's house in Capitol Hill and that she was a lawyer at such and such firm on the waterfront in Georgetown and here was a number and I could look it up, verify it but she really needed cab fare to Capitol Hill right now.

I believed her. She said cab fare was $35 or $40. The cab fare to Dupont from Silver Spring is less than $20, so I should have been a little taken aback by the number. But, something in me reasoned, perhaps she'd never actually taken the cab down there before. She wanted round-trip cab fare, to the house and then back to wherever her car is parked, which must be somewhere around my apartment. I didn't have anywhere near the cash she needed, so I let her into the car and we drove down to the Chevy Chase at which I bank, to avoid paying ATM fees. Since she wanted the cab to wait for her, she revised her estimate upward in the car, to $100; she said she would pay me $200. She had been saying $80 and $150. She said "It's worth it to me" at least three times. She also invoked God while pointing at a Stephen King book that had lost its back cover, for whatever reason.

It was a perfect lie because it seemed true. It was perfectly possible for it to be true because it was such a good lie. Or maybe it is true, and in forty minutes or an hour or something like that, I will actually be $100 richer for trusting a stranger. We made tiny amounts of small talk; she said she had graduated from Georgetown Law, and I mentioned that I had a friend there. "Well, that was a long time ago, that I went there," she said. A response that could have easily come from a Georgetown Law graduate making light of her age or from a con artist trying to cover her ass. She mentioned something about her brother being an economist at some college — of course, I didn't catch the name — when I told her what I was majoring in. She, like everyone else I meet lately, thought I should be a law student, or at least that I had the demeanor of one. "We can tell who's, you know, in the profession." Why did the estimate of how much money she would need keep going up? Well, it's what I would do, keep revising upwards, be safe. Or was she just trying to get the most money she could out of me? Why the references to God, to watching over us and makingsure we all do right? For her sake or mine?

And she never did tell me her name.

I want to believe what people tell me, because when I tell people things I want them to believe me. When I say something, I try to make absolutely sure that I mean it, even when it's just something like "I'll call you" or "That was a good presentation." And I want to believe that other people are like me, that they weigh their words carefully, insert qualifiers if necessary, make promises only if they are sure they can keep them. Phrases like "I'll e-mail you" or "We should hang out sometime" — even though some (most?) people use these as ways of getting you to quit talking to them, they mean something to me, even as I take pains to remind myself that the speaker probably will not e-mail me or does not feel particularly strongly either way about hanging out sometime. I have ended friendships over the way people have used these phrases and not meant them. I don't do that anymore, but the struggle remains to get used to the fact that these phrases are just words spoken without intent most of the time.

And so I simply cannot imagine me coming up to someone and acting like this woman just did and not meaning it. And because I want the world to treat the responsibility of speech and meaning with the same gravity as I do, I have trouble imagining that anyone else would do it either. I know people do it, and I have realized that I may have made a financially grave error now, forty minutes after this all happened. But the rush of the events (and this is the key to it all for me, the way events rushed on each other) did not allow me to examine my initial emotion: not even so much the urge to help as the urge to believe.

Which makes me the perfect sucker.

I didn't end up going to Target, because I got nervous, and decided to wait for her to come back, if she is going to. I'd better get to work now, because I think I am going to need the money. Further updates as events warrant.

Two days later:

Of course I have not gotten any of my money back. I feel a bit better about having wasted my money in this way, albeit singularly reluctant to do it ever again. There are worse things in the world than to make errors based on trusting people excessively. I have led a somewhat mistrustful life over the past few years, for various reasons, and this may be an instance of a basic trusting nature trying to assert itself. With financially severe results, but the idea seems okay. I don't know what to think of it, really. I'll keep doing my best and trusting myself, although I will be a lot more vigilant about double-checking my (and other people's) logic. Thanks to everyone who wrote back with compassion, encouragement and helpful hints; I needed all of them.

It's hard to know, now, what to make of this. I do feel that I am more trusting and confident in others than I was in February 2002.I was leaning a bit much to the mistrustful side before, but you'd think that an experience such as this one would encourage me to be less trusting. I think this is one where the Spam-O-Matickers collectively came through and got me back on the path. For better or worse, right now I'm more like the person I'd like to be. As I noted in the original e-mail, however, the Spam-O-Matic is an entertainment organ and not Andrew Lindemann Malone's Confess-O-Rama. As in its original e-mailed incarnation, this essay is presented more to spark thought than to draw pity upon myself. At least, I hope that was my motivation.

One more note: the $100 has been replaced by a donor who undoubtedly wishes to remain anonymous. The note this donor sent closed with the words "Keep believing in people." I have saved the $100, and I'm still waiting for what seems like the right occasion to use it.

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