Grifters

A Story by Abishai100

Narrated 'portrait' of a real-life 'grifter' of North America, whose 'work' with diamonds-lore casts his dreams as American-stone!

A thief-lore inspired by The Grifters (John Cusack), which I think you'll like!

----

====

I've been a grifter all my life, perhaps after being inspired out-of-time by the books Racso and the Rats of NIMH (Jane Conly) and On the Road (Jack Kerouac). I consider myself a collector of American capitalism treasures, especially baseball-cards but also a salesman of these treasures in the metaphysical sense, marketing them in my cyber-forums as a 'Bartleby' (Melville) of the consumer-landscape, while doubling as a diamond-thief.

I went to Dartmouth where I studied cognitive-science and gained a keen appreciation of the subtleties of the subtleties of the human wit and sensitivity of the mind-at-work and what surfaces as delicate emotions and cast these understandings in children's comics-doodles in my cyber-mosaics coupled with various sports-cards albums meant to convey what captures the 'magic' of American dreams (or childish fantasies!).

My biggest love is the use of toy water-guns inserted with thin glass-tubes in the shooting-pistons filled with hot-acid, which is to say, I convert toys into acid-guns for my diamond-lifts. I've lifted and swapped gems from over 30 diamond bank safe-boxes across North America, all during this new-era 'blood-diamond' piracy-traffic gem-market sully craze stemming from Sierra Leone and bridging all the way between cities like Vancouver (British Columbia) and Belfast (Northern Ireland).

"A man must make himself a man, he must enable himself to stand up on two legs, unafraid because he has confidence in his own security and in his own power. There is no place for emotionally or politically cuckolded people in the society I speak of. Survival of the fittest“ (William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook).

What, you may ask, compels a man like me, a lover of American diadems/treasures/art, to become a 'grifter' in North America? A 'grifter is a person who engages in petty or small-scale swindling, as in "I saw him as a grifter who preys upon people" though I might add that my 'grifting' involves the sullying of the prestigious aura of some pretty nasty blood-diamond barons out there these days who're simply 'coloring' the already deeply-complex media-world of crime-underworld news...and photography. You can find most of this stuff on Facebook these days, folks!

AIRPORT TRAVELER: You want me to buy your Xenomorph robot action-figure toy with gems inside?
ME (Grifter): Not only that, good sir/traveler of Logan, but I'll give you this 'treasure-set' for 5 of your diamonds!

AIRPORT TRAVELER: You expect me to give you like 5 of my very valued gems for this alien-toy with some 'gems' inside?

ME (Grifter): Don't you want your friends to know, "I know someone who traded controversial gems for a sci-fi toy with gems"?

AIRPORT TRAVELER: Why's that?
ME (Grifter): Post the 'experience' on Facebook...and your peers will think you some kind of 'toy-world' affable good-guy.

AIRPORT TRAEVELER: Ha!

Of course, not all the 'work' I do is simply metaphysics gesture-symbolism work for Facebook-IQ. I mean, some of the stuff could be considered existentially heroic, like Robin Hood, for this modern blood-diamond sullied global gem-market environment, right? I have to look the part, too. I can't just look like a silly-man off the street, you know? I got all this creativity from my youth and my love of stories and child-adventure lore. I'm now a 'theatrical' grifter with a certain 'edge' for generating special street-smart/colored diamond ego.

BANK MANAGER: This 'priest' walked in insisting he's to swap Goldfinger's Sierra Leone gems with some glass-items in his case.

ME (Grifter): No one wondered what Goldfinger would say about items-swaps for insured items during a news-controversy.

I meet women sometimes, diner-waitresses mostly, and I promise them that if I succeed in my gifts, I'll post their images for Facebook-IQ, claiming they're my modern-world renditions of Florence Nightingale, but my mother told me before she passed that I'm never to pass-eyes on the possibility one of these 'angels' just might be more than just a Facebook-daydream!

BARON: You want to stalemate me in chess?

ME (Grifter): Why, sounds boring to you, baron?
BARON: You intend to spread some stalemate-rumor about me in the streets of New Orleans, right?
ME (Grifter): Nope; I just want a photo for Facebook so I can comment, "The Mardi-Gras diamond baron likes chess-drinks."

I got that 'chess-baron' so drunk he didn't notice when I swapped the diamonds he'd liked to showcase with fakes/replicas (really) in my jacket-pocket. He thought I was simply a New Orleans saree-merchant. When I'm not 'working' in North America, I'm reading Thief of Thieves comics, which is superior, in my view, to Diamonds are Forever (James Bond)!