Can I See Your I. D.?
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
SUBWAY MOTORMAN? - KERON THOMAS
NAVY SURGEON? - FERDINAND WALDO DEMARA JR.
MAN IN UNIFORM? - PRIVATE WAKEMAN
HITLER YOUTH? - SOLOMON PEREL
CHEROKEE AUTHOR? - FORREST CARTER
KIDNAPPED PRINCESS? - PRINCESS CARABOO
SLAVE OWNER? - ELLEN CRAFT
BLACK MAN? WHITE MAN? - JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN
RISING TEENAGE STAR? - RILEY WESTON
26-YEAR-OLD WITH SUFFICIENT FUNDS? - FRANK W. ABAGNALE JR.
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Text copyright © 2011 by Chris Barton
Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Paul Hoppe
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barton, Chris.
Can I see your I.D.? : true stories of false identities /
by Chris Barton ; illustrations by Paul Hoppe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47636-9
1. Impostors and imposture—Biography—Juvenile literature.
2. False personation—Case studies—Juvenile literature. 3. Identity (Psychology)—
Case studies—Juvenile literature. I. Hoppe, Paul, ill. II. Title.
CT9980.B34 2011
001.9’5—dc22
2010011878
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Mom, Dad,
and Joe T. Moore
—C.B.
SUBWAY MOTORMAN?
KERON THOMAS
SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1993
NEW YORK CITY
If there had been trains on the island of Trinidad, where you lived until you were twelve, you might have gotten your thing for them out of your system by now. But there weren’t, and you didn’t, and that’s why you’re here at the 207th Street subway station carrying a bag of motorman’s tools and signing someone else’s name.
If all goes well, they’ll never know that your name is Keron Thomas and that you’re sixteen. If all goes well, they’ll believe you when you tell them that you’re Regoberto Sabio, and they’ll have no idea that he’s supposed to be forty-four years old. You’re a six-footer, but you can’t pass for forty-four. Twenty-four, maybe. But not forty-four.
You met Sabio while you were hanging out on the Franklin Avenue Shuttle he operates weekday afternoons and evenings back in Brooklyn. You knew so much about the subway already that you didn’t come off as suspiciously eager to learn more. In fact, you told Sabio you were a motorman too, on another line. Obviously, you were a young, single motorman with time on his hands and a need for a mentor. Why else would you have ridden his four-stop route back and forth in the cab with him for several hours each week since last winter?
In addition to the tools, you’d gotten your hands on this Transit Authority uniform shirt. You kept it in your bag at school, and you’d throw it on before you got to the Franklin Avenue station. Between that T.A. shirt and your calm, mature demeanor, nobody would look at you and see a teenage train fanatic. That allowed you to observe Sabio up close and learn a lot more than you could have while watching a motorman through a closed cab door.
You paid close attention to everything Sabio did. As he ran his train down the line and back, you picked up on the lingo from his radio chats with the tower. You watched him brake when he came into a station, saw how he eased the train back out again. He’s a talkative guy, so there was a lot of conversation in there, a lot of advice. “Don’t stay out drinking the night before you’ve got a shift,” he’d tell you. “Don’t let management tell you how to wear your hair,” “Take notes on everything you do,” and so forth. It was all professional advice, not technical, because he thought you already knew the mechanics of operating a train, right?
Somewhere along the way, you got the idea that you probably did know enough to drive the train. But you didn’t want to just know—you wanted to do. And this week when Sabio mentioned that vacation he had coming up, you saw your chance.
You asked some questions not too surprising coming from a rookie motorman: Who’s going to take your shift while you’re out? Can I do it? How do I go about getting some overtime, anyway?
He said, “Call the crew office and see what they say.”
Which you did.
Late last night.
In Sabio’s name.
But you didn’t ask for his Franklin Shuttle route. You told them what train you really wanted. Come on in, they told you. 207th Street station, they said. And here you are—where, most likely, nobody knows that the real Regoberto Sabio is not only much older than you but four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter. They probably don’t know that he wears a beard or sports dreadlocks down past his waist.
“I’m the extra man,” you tell the dispatcher. “You have a train for me?”
You sign in with Sabio’s name—no pass code needed, no Transit Authority I.D. required. You catch a little grief about the way you’re dressed—you’ve got on your uniform shirt, but you’re wearing jeans instead of the regulation blue trousers.
“Hey, you’re not in your uniform pants,” he says.
“They’re at the cleaners,” you say.
“I’ll let you go today—it’s the weekend.”
He buys it. He believes you. You’re in.
He issues you a big, bulky radio, and now you’ve got a train to drive.
You’ve studied hard for this day. Not in any classroom—Automotive High never has taught you what you most wanted to know—but in the stations scattered beneath the streets of the city, and on the trains thundering through them.
All your life, you’ve wanted to know how things work—the mechanics of them. What’s inside a remote control that lets it run a toy car? The only way to find out is to open it up and see for yourself. And that’s pretty much what you’ve done with the subway.
Long before you began hanging out with Sabio, you were riding the subway for fun on weekends, situated at the front of the train so you could get a peek at the tracks, see how the signals are working. Lots of kids do that, of course. But how many teenagers have train posters in their bedrooms? How many sing out “Next stop, Franklin�
� while pretending a piece of wood and a stapler are the controls? Or count Rules and Regulations Governing Employees Engaged in the Operation of the New York City Transit System among their favorite books?
Becoming one of those employees after you graduate would be great—but you’re impatient. Why wait until then to drive a train when you see a way you can do it now?
When the dispatcher told you to report way up at 207th, it could mean only one thing: You got the train you asked for. The A. You’ve hit the jackpot. The A train is the longest line in the system. You’ve heard it’s also one of the hardest lines for a beginning operator to learn on, because it involves lots of switching on and off different tracks. That’s good. You want a little challenge.
You’re not stealing the train, any more than someone can steal an escalator—it’s going to come right back to where you got it, isn’t it? At least, that’s how you see it as you walk out onto the platform with your bag containing a motorman’s two main tools—a brake handle and a reverser key—along with a Day-Glo orange safety vest.
You do like you’ve seen Sabio do—charge up the air compressors that power the brakes, walk through the train, make sure everything’s in order. Then you step into the cab and wait for the conductor to give you two long buzzes. You give him two short ones in reply. It’s 3:58 p.m.—time to go.
Sabio’s shuttle is just two cars long, but the A has eight—that’s six hundred feet of train. The controls are also different from the ones you’ve watched Sabio operate, but that’s all right. You’ll figure them out. All you need to do is just—
Uh-oh.
The train starts to move backward. That’s never supposed to happen. You put on the brake, but not before you feel the train nudge the bumping block behind it. Hoping nobody noticed, you reverse direction and pull out of the station.
You accelerate.
You’re in control. You’re used to the rattle and the clatter and the whine of the trains, but this power, this exhilaration—this feeling is new, and you’ve never known anything better. You knew you could do it. You feel like a pro.
This train is taking you—no, you’re taking it—the entire length of Manhattan, clear across Brooklyn, and all the way out to Lefferts Boulevard on the edge of Queens. Running time: about an hour fifteen. You’ll haul hundreds of passengers, maybe thousands—none of them with any idea who’s behind this cab door. They’re a trusting bunch—not trusting in you, exactly, but in the T.A. You know what you’re doing, though, so they’re in good hands all the same.
When you get to Lefferts, you need to change onto a Brooklyn-bound train. But you can’t get your radio out of the cab—that requires a key that you don’t have. On the platform, you spot another motorman.
“Hey, can I borrow your radio key?” you ask. “I lost mine.”
“Yeah, no problem!” he says.
Radio removed and complication resolved, you slide into the cab of your next train for your return to 207th Street. Back you go, easing into and out of the stations at Euclid Avenue, Jay Street, Fulton, World Trade Center, Washington Square, Penn Station, Forty-second Street, and on up Eighth Avenue.
The switches aren’t a problem—no problem at all. You’ve got them down. In the past two and a half hours, you’ve made all eighty stops on time, with only five more to go on this round trip. Then you get to do it again.
North of the 168th Street station, there’s a downgrade and a speed limit of twenty mph. You’ve got your train under that, but you pick up speed on the decline, and by the time you see the red signal warning that you’re going too fast, it’s too late. The emergency brake system kicks in, and the train—your train, all 360 tons of it—groans to a halt.
Now what? Ordinarily, a motorman would get out of the cab, go down onto the tracks, reach under the train to manually reset the brake, and be on his way.
The problem is, you’re missing a key piece of equipment: a flashlight. And while there’s some light down in the tunnel, it’s not enough to suit you. Without some serious illumination, there’s just no way you’re going to get down there and feel around and risk getting yourself fried by those 625 volts coursing through the third rail. No. Way.
Instead, you radio in to the tower and tell them you can’t get the brake to reset. “I’m in BIE,” you say. “Send me out an RCI.” Brakes in emergency. Road car inspector. You read about them in a book.
After what seems like forever stuck there just south of 175th Street, an inspector comes through the tunnel, resets the brake, and you’re off again. Soon, you limp back into the 207th Street station, where a dispatcher and supervisor are waiting for you.
Standard procedure says that when a motorman breaks the speed limit, he gets taken downtown to get tested for drugs and booze. Gotta keep the subway safe, you know.
The T.A. supervisor gets back on the A with you for the forty-five-minute ride back to headquarters on Jay Street in Brooklyn. Along the way, you’ve got a lot to think about. The thing you think about the most is this: You really, really don’t want to go in there.
So you don’t. You emerge from the Jay Street station, up the stairs and onto the street. But instead of making the short walk to T.A. headquarters, you tell the supervisor, “You know what? I don’t think I want to take this test.”
“You could lose your job,” he says. “Just take the test. If you weren’t drinking, then it’s nothing to worry about.”
“It’s a little more than that,” you reply. And then you’re gone.
Not on foot. Not on a bus. Not in a taxi.
You go right back down into the Jay Street station, and you’re on a train in nothing flat. How else are you gonna get home?
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
KERON THOMAS was tracked down and arrested two days after his escapade on the A train, which made national headlines. “[W]hat Mr. Thomas did is monumental,” wrote one newspaper columnist. “Reprehensible, to be sure, but decidedly awesome, bodacious.” He was sentenced to three years’ probation and for a while continued hoping to become a (legitimate) train operator. But, he says, those hours at the helm of the A train got the subway bug out of his system. Today, he does make his living in the transportation business—but by driving a truck, not a train.
NAVY SURGEON?
FERDINAND WALDO DEMARA JR.
TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 1951
SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA
Less than a week ago, you were known by the Brothers of Christian Instruction as Brother John Payne, and they knew you to have been Cecil Boyce Hamann before you entered their order.
But that was before those ungrateful so-and-sos passed you over for a plum role at the new Catholic college that you practically founded for them. So on March 10 you left them and Alfred, Maine, behind. For that matter, so did their car, which you took for your trip down to Boston.
In those 100 miles, you became Dr. Joseph Cyr—that’s the name you checked in under at your hotel. And after turning right back around, driving past Alfred and the rest of Maine up north to Saint John, that’s also the name that you’ve just used to score a commission into the Royal Canadian Navy.
You’re now a surgeon lieutenant in the second year of the Korean War. You’re also Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., high school dropout from Lawrence, Massachusetts.
SPRING 1951
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA
Even traveled directly, it’s quite a ways from Lawrence to the Stadacona naval base in Halifax. But you, Demara—ever since you left home after your junior year at Central Catholic High School to try your hand at a monk’s life, you’ve never traveled directly. In the thirteen years since, you’ve never stuck to the accepted path or the proper channels.
And why would you? Your father did things the “right” way—he worked hard, built a buisness, got a nice house. And look what it got him: He lost the business during the Depression, moved your family from Prospect Hill to South Lawrence, and took a job as a movie theater projectionist.
Your big sist
er did things the right way too. Got married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to an Ivy Leaguer, a Brown University man. Became a nurse. She died of a head injury three years ago, when she was just twentynine. So much for the rewards of the right way.
So the road that has led you to Stadacona has been one of your own design and choosing, a road paved by an impatient desire to have others recognize the greatness you’ve seen in yourself all the while. Along the way, your vehicles of choice have been new names and identities. At first, the church created them for you—here, you were Frater Mary Jerome; there, Brother John Berchmans—but eventually you began to borrow others’. Most recently, of course, it was the identity of your good friend, young Dr. Cyr.
You weren’t hurting anybody. In fact, really, you’ve always been out to help, to share your impressive talents and energy and intellect with the world. But clashing with abbots, downing barrels of beer, going AWOL from the U.S. Army, and faking suicide to get out of the U.S. Navy made it a bit difficult to bestow those gifts as Fred Demara. So you took to borrowing birth certificates and academic credentials and writing letters of recommendation for yourself on official stationery you’d swiped.
Each new guise gave you a new opportunity to help people. They also allowed you to learn a lot about how big institutions work. You’ve seen the church, the military, hospitals, and universities from the inside. You’ve seen their big shots up close, and frankly, you’re not impressed. You’ve sat through their unpronounceable theology courses and read through their boring law textbooks, and one thing’s for sure: They’re no better than a C student from Central Catholic.
You know just how to play them:
1. There’s always plenty of power to be grabbed in one of those institutions, so long as you don’t step on the toes of someone who’s already got a little power of his own.