I Totally Meant to Do That Read Online Free

fact, you are sitting in the same booth. “Is it true that R.F.K. sketched out his presidential campaign platform in this bar?” Yeah, and would you believe it was in this exact booth!
    You could have asked me anything. Did William Burroughs name
Naked Lunch
after Chumley’s BLT? Is that the barstool where e.e. cummings gave up capital letters? Is this where a blind John Milton dictated
Paradise Lost
to his amanuensis?
    You bet, and I don’t want to blow your mind, but it was in this very booth.
    Wait a second, the fictional you is thinking, Milton died before the West Village existed. Sure, but didn’t you know that the dumbwaiter in Chumley’s was once a time machine?
    the Pokémon-sheet cave, I cut down a block and moved swiftly on Walker Street toward the center of Chinatown, intuiting that my next assignment would be on the west end of Canal, where no one had seen me yet, and knowing that I’d need to reach it before the news of the last raid did. I called the office for the target and sure enough, it was still severalblocks away. When I arrived, the goods on display were all anonymous, legal. I feared it was too late, but I milled about regardless.
    A middle-aged woman standing nearby solicited advice about a wallet she considered.
    “I can’t believe it’s real leather for this cheap,” she giggled in a thick Long Island accent.
    “It’s not real,” I told her, maintaining my harmless Southern drawl, but unable to disguise the skepticism.
    “But it says so on the wallet,” she said incredulously.
    “That doesn’t mean anything.” I don’t know why I chose this battle. I guess, sometimes I was bothered less by the counterfeiters—even though they annually steal around one billion tax dollars from New York City, support a system of illegal-immigrant indentured servitude, and occasionally fund terrorism—than I was by the willful naïveté of the bargain hunters. How could she believe that piece of junk was real? Were we looking at the same wallet? It had a plastic sheen. The stitching wasn’t even in straight lines.
    At this point, she shouted across the store to the vendor, intent on settling the dispute: “Is it real?”
    “Of course,” he said, “it says so on the label.”
    She looked up at me and actually said, “I told you so.”
    Whatever
, I thought.
You are not my child
. Then I saw a man walk out of the back room with a thirty-gallon trash bag slung over his shoulder, and instantly stopped caring about the fool from Long Island.
    It wasn’t too late after all. They’d merely removed the contraband from the front room; only now were they excising it from the premises. I felt my heartbeat accelerate as I casually spun my back to him, a move that also allowed me to see which way he turned outside the door—I would have to follow. Then I flipped through the “real”wallets one more time, giving him a several-second head start, and pursued the tail.
    Following people was the only time I didn’t feel completely confident and comfortable on the job. When gathering intelligence, I could come and go as I pleased, depending on who was or wasn’t looking. But while tailing a mark, I couldn’t cut my own path. And I feared that would draw suspicion, betray me; no two people follow the exact same path.
    I maintained a generous distance between us as we headed east, and I called the office to alert the raid team of a change in plans. On the other side of Broadway, he crossed south on Canal and then did what I’d feared he would seconds earlier: took a right on Cortland Alley. No one walks through Cortland Alley. It’s a narrow passage that spans two blocks and has no storefronts. You might recognize it from appearing in movies whose scripts call for an alley that
no one walks through
. It is not the sort of grimy, dark, vermin-infested, less-traveled road down which a prim, tomato-pie-making, y’all-spewing gal from the sticks would, on a whim, mosey.
    True to its nature, this morning