John Vorhaus - The California Roll

Books by John Vorhaus

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The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If Youre Not

Creativity Rules! A Writers Workbook

The Pro Poker Playbook: 223 Ways to Win More Money Playing Poker

Killer Poker: Strategy and Tactics for Winning Poker Play

Killer Poker Online: Crushing the Internet Game

The Killer Poker Holdem Handbook

Poker Night: Winning at Home, at the Casino and Beyond

The Strip Poker Kit

Killer Poker Online 2: Advanced Strategies for Crushing the Internet Game

Killer Poker No Limit

Killer Poker Shorthanded (with Tony Guerrera)

Under the Gun (novel)

To Dan, David, Sarah, Jen, and Tom

I trust Ive been a good bad example

The best offense is a good pretense .

on the snuke

T he first person I ever scammed was my grandmother, who had Alzheimers disease and could never remember from one minute to the next whether shed just given me ice cream or not. Id 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 cant 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 didnt 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 dont remember. By the time the pyramid collapsed, Id netted twenty buckshuge money for first gradeand I didnt 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 snukesscams or the people who perform themmay have a bad name, but its 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.

Im 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, theyd kack him for sure, and I couldnt 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 its worth. Of course, it wouldnt do to have his hair grow out on themwho 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 cant 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 replacedat cost, of course. This they totally buy, and why not? I mean, just look at me, such a choirboy. Beatle bangs, cherry cheeks, scouts-honor smile. Thats always been a strength of my game: I look so straight, youd never believe Id 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. Im definitely thinking, good times .

But it cant last forever, right? Even the dullest dull normal will eventually catch on, so after the Doolallys last scamper, I show up with another mutt, some additional stray I rescued. I suggest that the Doolally is a little more peripateticat that age I was all about the SAT wordswandery, yeah, than they can handle, but this other dog is a real homebody and wont 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, thats 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 booka 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, Im not talking about getting (A) arrested or (2) the crap kicked out of you. (Both I have, and neithers a big deal.) Im not even talking about what they call grift drift, where you have to make rootlessness your root and homelessness your home because it doesnt pay to set a stationary 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 wooland it seems like I knew it neonatallyyou start to expect the worst, or at least the least, of people. Its not fair and its not fun. So I work hard to keep up my pointillist perspectivemake every day indeed Sunday in the park with George if I canand I always try to give my victims the metaphorical reacharound, so they can feel like crossing paths with me wasnt the worst thing that couldve happened to them in life.

According to me, Im moral.

Plus, according to me, Im normal, which is not at all abnormal when you think about it, because everybodys default view is the view from inside their own skin. Though I appreciate that I strike some as strange. First, theres my career, my chosen line of work, which few would choose. Next theres my inexpressive expressiveness. I learn like a sponge, and like a sponge I hold everything without judgment and sort without order. Im 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 thats a subject for a different time.

Then theres my name: Radar Hoverlander. Seriously, whos got a name like that? People assume its 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. Thats a reasonable supposition. Certainly if Id been cursed with a Doe-value name, my first order of business would have been to tart it up to suit the grift. Zakaz Kouren, 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 fathers 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.