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August 25th, 2009
10:59 pm - [Headlight Green Light.]
This evening outside of the thrift store on 22nd I was loading up my car and sort of struggling to do so while not dropping my junk in the process. I see some guy that was walking around in the parking lot come up towards me and at first I think he’s going to offer to help me open the door. I finally just set the stuff in my right hand on top of the roof and he says something to me I don’t understand while he’s flipping through a book of some kind. At first I think it’s one of those ‘I’m deaf and please read this so you’ll understand that I am in dire need of gasoline to get home to my children’ kind of hustles. But then I realize it’s actually a cheap photo album full of pictures.
He stops on an open page to a photo of a headlight cover for a car. It’s taped off on the edges with blue tape as if the car was being painted or something and there was a date and time stamp but I never looked at it too hard.
So he points to the headlight in the photo and says that one just like it was stolen from the exact parking lot we were in. And then he pointed to my car and indicated it too looked just like the one in the photo. Now, I’m still confused about this whole thing even now but I asked him if he meant if had I seen anyone doing something like that. He said something else that I couldn’t make out and then I cut him off to say that I didn’t steal any goddam headlight if that’s what he was implying. It seemed like he was saying that he didn’t but then he asked me if I wanted him to clean the one on my car for me. [What for? As if to possibly protect me from the people that had their headlight stolen by proving in advance that mine was not theirs? What was this hustle all about?]
Okay, so I speak a fair amount of Spanish and I am conversational in it to a degree but understand a great deal more than I can speak. It’s not that he was speaking in Spanish or that he had some heavy accent that I couldn’t navigate. It’s just that he was this tremendous mumbler and I honestly didn’t understand him too well. But I did get the part about cleaning my headlight cover and, of course, this really confused the hell out of me.
I said, “Nah, man. I’m not too worried about it. It’s a company car and I don’t really care too much about it.” I turned away from him and and got in the car and watched to see if he was trying the same thing on other people. It looked like he had and was.
So what in the hell is that about? For me, on some weird level, I appreciate the idea of grifters and conmen and magicians and hustlers. Someone practicing and then perfecting some elaborate hustle is interesting to me in some way. I think most people probably think so too or there wouldn’t be so many freaking movies about that stuff. And I’ve seen or heard of a terrific number of scams and cons and I know enough about them to see them coming. But I’ve never heard of the old ‘clean your headlight routine’ and I don’t see what the bit could even be about.
So I guess he had a photo album with a lot of shots of various headlight covers. He had to see the car and then flip to the page that coincided with that make and model I’d guess. Because the one he pointed to was for sure a picture of a Lincoln Town Car from around the same year as mine. And I happen to know this because I’ve been driving this Lincoln Town Car lately and had just recently read up on it a couple of days ago. Three days ago, tops.
I was checking to see what the difference was with the Cartier Edition since that’s the kind that I drive and I think it’s totally funny to have a Cartier car. So I know for a fact that the headlights are this cat-eye, slanted kind that are super wide and run wide across the front and side of the thing. So he had the right kind of car in his book.
Man, I have no idea what this was all about. Do you?
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Comments:
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/96246544/15286518) | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cram |
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| Date: | August 26th, 2009 11:22 am (UTC) |
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sounds like mental illness/drugs, maybe both. weird. |
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