Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  I was John B______ until I was fourteen years old.

  That’s when I found the paper bag.

  * * *

  That paper bag is probably the single most important object in my life. There have been other things, sure, but nothing quite like this. If you want to know anything about me, you’ve got to start there. In a twisted sort of way, it was that bag that made me who I am. It taught me the first thing I ever knew about myself.

  But first, you should know where I grew up.

  Las Vegas is a big place, and in my lifetime it has gotten much bigger. By the time I was fourteen, in 1988, my childhood home wasn’t just a postage stamp in the desert anymore. It was part of a real neighborhood, with paved roads and sidewalks and frequent buses running back and forth. I was always mature for my age, but I was never quite sure what that meant. I never thought of myself as such. Most of the time I didn’t think anything about myself at all. It was like I was sleeping with my eyes open. There are whole years where I don’t have a single real memory. I never talked to anyone except when the teacher asked me a direct question or my parents asked how school was going. I could usually answer correctly, without deliberation, and then drift off again the very next moment. When I turned fourteen, my parents decided I was mature enough to go wherever I wanted to in the city. They gave me a little money, a dime for the pay phone and a bottle of sunscreen. They said I could go anywhere, as long as I was back in time for dinner. Then they put me out the door. I didn’t know where to go or who to talk to. I’d never been anywhere in my life.

  I just went.

  I did what any enterprising young man with no clue would’ve done, I guess. I went to the biggest place in town and started from there. I took the neighborhood bus all the way down the line to the transit center, then switched to another bus that would take me south along the Beltway. From the second-to-last seat, I waited and watched as the desert turned into houses and the houses turned into hotels and the hotels turned into casinos. I arrived half an hour later at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo, right in the middle of the Strip.

  I don’t remember much about that bus ride itself, but I think that’s when it started. Something changed inside me. It was like I was waking up. I’d ridden through the city a thousand times in the back of my father’s car and seen every inch of the Strip by the time I was that age, but for whatever reason it was different this time. When I was alone, I felt like I was really seeing Las Vegas. I could commune with the place in a way I couldn’t by walking along beside my father. The glass and the concrete and the lights and the bells weren’t just background noise anymore. They were the substance and the character of my own thoughts. When I got off that bus, it was like I was setting foot there for the very first time. I felt in that moment what a hundred million tourists have felt since the first lightbulb was hung from a wire, as a man with a mustache dealt the town’s first game of cards here in 1920. I felt the rush of blood to my head as I looked up at the casino towers and took my first breath of the devil’s wind blowing up the boulevard.

  My god.

  It was wonderful.

  You have to understand, back then the Strip was a whole different world from the one it is now. Bill’s Gamblin’ was still the Barbary Coast. The MGM Grand was the Marina. Even the Bellagio, that big white marble monstrosity with the fountains all up and down the road, was still a mob joint called the Dunes with one pathetic tower and a sign made of incandescent lights. Before New York and Paris and Egypt took over the skyline, the Strip had its own sort of feel. It was hard to describe. It was comfortable with what it actually was, I guess. It looked and felt like a place that real people had built. There was still the smell of Teamsters’ cigarettes, freshly opened playing cards and desert dust in the air. There was a desperation to it all, but a distinctly American one. Little things were off about it, but that’s what made it so perfect. The white pavement reflected the sun right up into your eyes like sand out in the desert. There were signs up on the sides of old hotels—rooms for a dollar an hour, no questions asked—that hadn’t been repainted in years. There were empty lots where the pavement had cracked and the sand had moved in. Tumbleweeds made of cigarette butts and newspaper were caught in the rubble. The whole city was dirty and ready and burning and halfway under construction. It was so different from anything I had ever known.

  When I was growing up, the Strip was always a place we drove through and tried to ignore. It was never part of my parents’ life. We had to go down it every once in a while, but we never stopped. It was like it didn’t exist. But here it was. I can’t explain it. When I was there, I wasn’t in my head anymore. I was in the realm of experience. My senses mattered in a way they never did in the desert or in the library. Smells mattered. Textures mattered. Colors mattered. Here and now mattered. While I was there, something inside me could cut through the fog of words in my head. In those moments of jaw-struck wonder, I was alive and present and rendered speechless by the tranquility of it all. For the first time, I could hear the whine of the metal bars in the concrete as the trucks rolled overhead on the freeway. The chimes of the slot machines. The growl of all the engines.

  For the first time, I could hear my own heartbeat.

  From that moment on, going downtown became a regular part of my life. I didn’t even do much once I got there. I just was. I did a fair amount of people-watching, I guess it’s called. I used to walk up and down the sidewalks and watch people pass by and observe them and see how they lived their lives. I listened and smelled and touched. I used to lean against the stucco wall in front of Caesars and let the waves of human bodies move along all around me like an ocean. I used to sit at the plastic counter outside the hot dog stand and study the faces of the men and women who came out of the casino doors across the street. That was my favorite place, especially in the evening. I could rest and watch the world. Some of the people who came through those doors were rested, like me. Some were confused, and others in tears. Some came out enraged, or aroused, or like they were in love. There was a kind of magic to it. I practiced imitating the faces of the people I saw. It was involuntary at first. I would see someone and become them, like reading a book on the human soul. I learned something I’ve kept with me my whole life. If you wait long enough, you will see every human emotion come through a casino door. I thought that maybe one day, if I waited long enough, I might even see someone who felt the same emptiness I did.

  It went on like that for months. I must have gone people-watching downtown probably thirty or forty times over the course of a year. My studies never hurt for it, so my parents let me go as often as I wanted. I was enamored with the city. It was my only real relationship.

  Some days were slower than others. The Strip was dead during the heat wave at the beginning of summer, then again in the fall, and for a few days right after New Year’s. Those days I would sit on the steps inside Caesars under the air conditioning and read one of my books. A translation of Ptolemy. A letter written by Augustus. A poem by Catullus. I’d wait there for the sun to go down and for the moon and the lights to come up, and then I’d watch the people in the restaurants and the nightclubs take off their suit jackets and high heels through the reflection in the glass. I’d sit and make up stories about their lives and live with them for a few seconds. Just being in such a place was a thrill for me. I could be a thousand people at once. I wanted to be everyone. I didn’t want to be a face in the crowd, I wanted to be Las Vegas.

  I thought I could keep at it, too, until that one day in September.

  That’s when everything changed.

  * * *

  If I remember anything about my childhood, I remember that Friday evening. It might be the first memory I have of anything, except for a few fragments of clinging to my mother’s side or playing in my imagination under the desert sky. It’s the first story I have, and I know it by heart.

  It was a good day by all reasonable standards. School had finished early because of some teacher-traini
ng exercise, so I had the whole afternoon to do as I pleased. I went to the hot dog stand outside the casino on the south of the Strip, just because I could. The bus driver who took me there had seen me dozens of times in ten months, but no matter what I did or said to him once the doors opened, I never saw a hint of recognition in his face. It was like I was a new passenger every time. I couldn’t blame him. They say low birth-weight babies end up either very thin or very obese, but that never happened to me. Nothing happened to me. By fourteen, I wasn’t tall or short. I wasn’t fat or thin. My hair was brown but not too brown, and so were my eyes. They say children are invisible. Invisible didn’t even begin to cut it. I didn’t even exist.

  I stopped paying the fare in August.

  I remember it was a slow day on the Strip, and it looked like it was going to become an even slower night. I’d brought a book, just in case. The Aeneid. September is never a good month here. The weather is better than normal and all the attractions are still there in full swing, but nobody comes to visit. Occupancy goes way down for a few days right in the middle, a back-to-school thing. The whole world runs around adults and their kids, so people don’t take vacations in September. By the second Monday all the schools in the country were in session, and the unsold hotel beds had been made and forgotten. I sat outside under a sun umbrella at the counter and waited to see who would come through the doors across the street. The sky was the color of cigarette ash. My finger was still holding the pages open. They were old and yellow. It was a paperback of C. Day-Lewis’s translation, and I was almost halfway through. I remember it all clearly. The whole world smelled of burned meat, stale beer and old paper.

  And then I saw the paper bag.

  Back in the eighties, ATMs were just getting started. They weren’t everywhere like they are now. Las Vegas was full of banks, and the banks were full of cash. You wouldn’t believe the amount of cash. Hundreds of millions, all of it in circulation. People would fly in with only a plane ticket and an overnight bag and take out whole paychecks to throw around on the casino floor. Once the casinos won, and they always did, they’d ship the money back to the bank. It was almost like a closed loop, except that huge sums of cash were moved around like this every day. Tourists would take money out of the banks, casinos would put it back. I’ve been to some parts of the country where a big cash withdrawal is two hundred dollars. In Vegas, the teller doesn’t blink until it’s two hundred thousand. They wrap it up and give it to you in an envelope.

  This wasn’t an envelope. It was a brown paper bag.

  Sitting a few seats down from me at the hot dog stand was a guy in a white button-down shirt with one of those shoulder-strap messenger bags by his feet. His hair was receded all the way back behind his ears, and he’d made a halfhearted attempt to comb the last few long strands of it over his bald spot. He looked to be in his early forties and was hunched over the counter staring into a mug of black coffee. He was thin and had brown eyes like mine. There was a silver name tag over his pocket. I squinted against the sunlight but couldn’t make it out. He had a look on his face like his day had stretched on for eternity. But that’s not what drew my eye and made me watch him like he was the only interesting person in the world. I didn’t care what his name was or what his day was like.

  I cared what was in that bag between his ankles.

  It was just a simple brown paper bag, like ones you get a submarine sandwich in from the corner store. It was a wrinkled little thing, hardly worth noticing. The mouth had been crumpled up several times, so it was half open. Peeking through, I could barely make out the contents. It was filled with paper, but all I could see were the edges. A book, I thought, at least for the first few seconds. I’m good at noticing things, though, and this was no book. The edges were off white, with the ever so slight hint of black and green ink stains. The paper was worn thin.

  A whole bag of money.

  I couldn’t see it all, much less count it, but knew it had to be a lot. It filled the whole bag, as thick as a Sunday paper. It sat there next to his messenger bag. I can’t really describe what happened in my head in that moment. I didn’t really have any thoughts. No rush of greed or anything like that. I didn’t fantasize about being wealthy, but I didn’t consider the consequences, either. I saw me, I saw him and I saw the money.

  I felt like I watched him forever, even though it was probably only about a minute. When I finally moved, it was like I was watching myself from the outside. I asked the man behind the counter for a paper bag to wrap up my leftovers. He brought me one and I left him a tip. I threw the rest of my hot dog away but kept the brown paper bag. I crumpled it, then slowly worked my copy of The Aeneid inside. It fit perfectly, so all you could see at first glance were the edges of the pages.

  At no point did I ever stop to think about what I was doing.

  I casually stood up from the hot dog stand and walked past the balding man in the white shirt like I didn’t have a care in the world, or like I was some simpleton tourist boggled by all the flashing lights. He didn’t seem aware of me, even when I was right behind him. I pretended to trip, just a little, on a crack in the pavement, then knelt down as if to tie my shoe. It took maybe a quarter of a second to replace his paper bag full of money with the one containing my book.

  I thought it would be as easy as that. Nobody had ever noticed me before.

  But I was wrong.

  As I stood up again, the man turned slightly in his chair. To this day, I have no idea what I did wrong. His gaze began to shift before landing right on me. I could see the thoughts forming in his head, like he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, the realization slowly showing in his eyes. The emotions on his face shifted. Wonder. Surprise. Anger. He had caught me and we both knew it, in that split second before anything happened. I saw the first syllable of what he was going to say move up in his throat like a bullet sliding into the firing chamber of a gun.

  It never got to his mouth.

  I grabbed the back of his head and slammed it into the counter as hard as I could. The force was hard enough to shatter his coffee cup against his forehead and send ceramic shards into his skin and break his nose. The hot coffee burned his face and splattered the counter under him. The scalding liquid seeped into his eyes and he couldn’t see. Maybe he went blind.

  He screamed. My god, can I remember his scream.

  I don’t know why I did it. I can barely describe to you the storm of thoughts in my head. It wasn’t handcuffs and police officers and jail cells and courtrooms and official letters sealed with wax stamps. It was the shame of having failed, and the sense of something inside me that wouldn’t let that happen. It was the fear of being noticed, of being caught red-handed and, worse than that, the pleasure of being the aggressor for once in my life. It was the sudden feeling of having everyone there looking at me, except for him. For the first five seconds after I did it, not a single person stood up to stop me. They just sat there and watched me as blood erupted from the man’s nostrils and ran into his eyes and filled his mouth. He fell off his stool and rolled on the ground, grabbing at his face. I wasn’t breathing. I tried to let it out, but I couldn’t.

  “Don’t you dare look at me!” I heard my voice say.

  Then came the rush. The adrenaline and the fear and the greed and the hate and the guilt of it all. It overcame me and I was back in that moment again. I could taste the air. I could hear my own heartbeat, and the scream of my victim as he clutched at his face in agony.

  I picked up the paper bag and walked away. The man crawled after me. Broad daylight, but nobody helped him or tried to stop me. By the time I got to the service street behind the casino, my heart rate was going down. I disappeared back into the crowd on the Strip and was nobody again. Police jogged right by me. I breathed and breathed again until I thought I couldn’t take it anymore.

  That was the first robbery I ever committed.

  I got on the next bus that showed up and took it down the line to another and then another. I never
went back to that hot dog stand. Sometimes I wonder if it’s still there, or if anyone even remembers it. I wonder if anyone who was there that day still remembers the man I left pawing after me on the sidewalk, his face still burning. I wonder if anybody except me and him remembers anything about it at all.

  On the bus, alone in the back, I opened the paper bag in my lap and looked inside. It was filled with fifty-dollar bills, a thick stack yellowed with age. Series 1979 through 1981. I counted them and fanned them out in my hands. Four hundred in total, divided into four straps of a hundred bills each. Twenty thousand dollars. I let my breath out slowly. It was more than I ever could have imagined.

  Afterward, I never wanted to stop.

  * * *

  I was fourteen years old.

  At that age, twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money. And this was 1988. Twenty thousand dollars could have paid my way through college. It could have bought a brand-new car, with all the options and a tape deck. Twenty grand was a year’s salary for a cop. The whole pile was two inches thick.

  When I felt that paper in my hand, I felt like I was somebody. For the first time in my life, I had accomplished something that nobody else could’ve done. I was better at something. Smarter. I wasn’t just another kid from the suburbs anymore. I wasn’t just hiding behind history and science-fiction books or working the night shift at the gas station for $3.35 an hour. No. I was alive. I was someone to be reckoned with.