I Totally Meant to Do That - Softcover

Prologue: Waiting for the Raid Team

Shu-ku-ku-ku-CLANG! The last sliver of daylight disappeared as the metal gate shut me inside. I was trapped in one of those squalid knockoff handbag stores in Chinatown, alone, in the dark, and convinced I’d soon have this conversation: “So tell me, Jane, how were you sold into the sex- slave industry?” “Well, Svetlana, I tried to buy a fake Prada purse from a Canal Street stall with a Pokémon sheet for a door.”
 
That sheet was now on the other side of a very solid shutter. It click- locked to the ground and my knees went weak. Great: When they found my body, I’d have tee- teed all over my matching denim outfit. The store, if you can call it that, was no bigger than my minivan and it stunk of fishy noodle soup. I’d probably have to eat the vendor’s leftovers to stay alive. I knocked on the barrier and cried, “Hello? What’s happ’nin’?” No one answered.
 
I had come to town to see a Broadway show, eat at Tavern on the Green, and bring back a dozen knockoffs for my girlfriends in Raleigh. I had not come to pursue a career in a Chinese Mafia sweatshop. There was shouting outside. It had to be the cops. “Let me out of here!” I screamed. “I promise I wuh- int gonna buy nuthin!”
 
Lord Jesus, I didn’t want to go to jail. What would my book club think? What would I tell my husband, the contractor who was currently dove- hunting with the boys at Currituck? Or my twin sister, the one who had the cash for the bags, but couldn’t be there today because she’d taken the kids to the Hershey’s store in Times Square? Or my bible study leader, who’s a closeted homosexual, but . . . Wait, why am I lying to you? You’re not a counterfeiter. Sorry; old habits die hard.
 
Here’s the truth: I was trapped. And I was definitely wearing matching denim, but it was a disguise. I do not own a minivan or a wedding ring. I’ve never eaten at Tavern on the Green. And I wasn’t afraid; I’d been locked inside filthy Canal Street stalls before. It was part of my job description as a spy. My employer was Holmes Hi- Tech, a private- investigation firm that’s now defunct (otherwise I wouldn’t write this chapter; I may have been a spy, but I’m no rat). Our clients were Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Polo, and other luxury- goods purveyors protecting their trademarks from the sale of illegal knockoffs. New York City’s Chinatown is one of the biggest counterfeiting centers in the world.
 
So even though Customs, the police, and the FBI are responsible for busting the illicit trade, a multibillion- dollar industry flourishes regardless, leaving a niche plenty big for our small, spunky Midtown office. When I first interviewed for the secret- shopper position, and mentioned it to my mother, she forbade me to accept the job. She actually used the word “forbid,” a tactic previously unemployed, I suppose, because it had never been necessary. The closest thing to crime rings in Greensboro were the hippie drum circles on the UNC- G campus. And anyway, my parents typically let me make my own mistakes. Although I wish she’d forbidden my eighth- grade perm, going undercover in Chinatown was where she drew the line. Years later, when I confessed to disobeying her, she shot me a look that could have curled hair without chemicals. Honestly, though, I never felt unsafe in Chinatown; I had anonymity. My boss was the one who received death threats. He was also the one shouting with the vendor outside the Pokémon stall, which I of course knew; I’d been expecting his arrival. Here’s how it went down.
 
A week prior, another of my fellow “spotters” had cased the same location, looking for fake versions of our clients’ products. While she fingered purses and scarves, tried on sunglasses, and generally pretended to shop, she was actually memorizing all of the brands being sold, the kinds of items within each brand, in which part of the store each was displayed or behind which secret remote- controlled doors each could be found— multiplied by however many other locations she’d been assigned to visit before she could leave that section of Canal Street and safely purge her brain via pen and paper in a restaurant bathroom. The elderly should pursue this line of work as an exercise to stave off Alzheimer’s. With this intelligence my boss had obtained a warrant to confiscate Pokémon’s contraband. He’d surprise the vendor by rolling in with a raid team of off- duty cops and fire fighters. But first, they needed confirmation that the goods remained on- site. Enter me.
 
By 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday, almost every square foot of Canal Street, including parts of the road, is occupied by merchandise. Items spill out of stores onto the sidewalk: card tables whose legs splay under the weight of backpacks and wallets, buckets that brim with baby turtles crawling to the top of a mound of themselves. Food carts sell dumplings and noodles curbside. Women wheel jerry- rigged carts stacked with pirated DVDs. Adolescent boys hawk water and soda from coolers on wheelbarrows. Be careful not to trip over one of the dozen or so varieties of motorized toy that flip, flop, slither, and writhe through the squares of municipal concrete just beyond the cash registers that could make them your own. Invisible hand of the market? If Adam Smith could wander modern Chinatown, he’d have seen it plain as day. And people call the Chinese communists.
 
I hit our target, near Baxter on Canal, in my tasteless denim ensemble, around 11:10 and immediately saw what I was after: counterfeit purses. They were on display, so I didn’t need to weasel my way through a back room, down a secret staircase, or into a crawl space in the ceiling. It’s the little perks that matter. At that point I acted as if I felt my phone vibrating. When I flipped it open, pretending to answer, I punched the last- number dialed button.
 
“Hello?” I said.
 
Ringing.
 
“Hey Carol! What’s happ’nin’?”
 
Ringing.
 
“Not much. I’m shopp— ”
 
“Jane?” answered my manager at Holmes Hi- Tech.
 
“— ing. Yep.”
 
“Are you at the location?”
 
“Yes. Dinner tonight; y’all should definitely come!”
 
“So the bags are there?”
 
 “You got it!”
 
“Great, I’ll send the raid team now.”
 
“No, you’re beautiful!” (That last part was just for me.)
 
I put my phone back in a pocket and moved through the store slowly, regarding every item, taking time so as not to run out of merchandise to inspect. I couldn’t leave until the guys arrived; the knockoffs were the evidence my boss took to court, so without them we had no case, and therefore no profession. If Pokémon got spooked for some reason and pulled the illegal bags from the floor, I had to know where he put them, whether in one of the aforementioned hiding spots, or in another location on another block, an outcome I feared, as it would require me to follow, and I was uncomfortable tailing criminals through the streets of Chinatown. I am not a subtle person.

But this vendor wasn’t worried about getting busted by a spy. Neither was he concerned about lying to customers. While I modeled scarves, another woman in the stall pointed to a pocketbook without a label and asked, “Is this Gucci?” Without pausing, the merchant answered, “Yes.” To trained eyes such as mine or those of a Madison Avenue doyenne, the item in question was clearly patterned after Louis Vuitton. I assumed the vendor was mistaken, until another woman, a few minutes later, grabbed the same purse and asked, “Is this Chanel?” to which he also responded, “Yes.” Whatever it takes to make a sale; tell them what they want to hear. Where the hell was the raid team? It had been almost fifteen minutes. No one spends that much time in a store the size of a minivan unless considering a major purchase, in which case I probably would have approached the salesman by now. But I didn’t want to engage him for fear he’d later suspect my involvement, and then, suddenly, oh my God I was the only other person in the store, but, phew, he went outside, and . . .
 
Shu- ku- ku- ku- CLANG!
 
The pleather purses are manufactured for pennies, either in China or in sweatshops, and, obviously, not taxed. Markups can reach eight thousand percent. Salesmen, leases, aliases, and passports are all a dime a dozen; the crooks only cared about the bags— not for their actual worth, but rather their potential, imagined worth. In this never- ending battle, the contraband was our Jerusalem: All sides revolved around it, gained definition from it, and, therefore, assigned it a value far greater than its face.

That’s why I was locked inside. Vendors protected their holy crap. They were familiar with raids, so if they saw the team approach— it’s hard to miss six beefy mustachioed Irish dudes rolling out of a white van like a clown car of sports announcers— they’d immediately close shop, regardless of patrons inside. Occasionally I was trapped with other confused women, sometimes by myself, but never for long: Warrants trump locks. When the gates inevitably rose on the other side of the Pokémon sheet— which was, by the way, counterfeit itself— I scurried out like a frightened tourist, careful to avoid eye contact with the guys. I could congratulate them later over beers but couldn’t blow my cover at the moment because a couple of days later, I’d be back in Chinatown canvassing the same stretch of junk. My income hinged on my ability to be multiple people. Problem was: I’m not much of an actor.
 
In the spring of my senior year in high school, I took a season off sports to broaden my artistic horizons. I played Miss Bessom in our theater department’s production of Shirley Jackson’s adaptation of The Lottery. All you need to know about the play is that everyone wears gray and people die, but then again you’re probably familiar with the story after seeing your high school drama club production. I don’t know why this brutally dark play is so popular with adolescents . . . oh wait, yeah I do. Anyway, I was horrible. I had a handful of lines and delivered each like a kid who bowls by holding the ball between her legs, and then while squatting, thrusts it down the lane. I am also a bad
bowler. Our director said to smile and project. Apparently I understood that to mean grimace and shout. I’d have been hailed as a star had the stage directions for Miss Bessom read, “played as a man with hearing loss and hemorrhoids.” Actually, for my portrayal to have been believable, the description would have needed to read, “played as Jane with hearing loss and hemorrhoids,” for I was never actually in character. While the line “I declare, it’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve seen you!” came out of my mouth, running through my head was: “Who talks that way? Why not just say, ‘it’s been a month’? The Sundays are implied.”
 
The only point in each performance when I felt the slightest association with how Miss Bessom might think and feel was when the Mrs. Dunbar character said to Bessom/me, “They told me you were gettin’ real fleshy.” Bottom line: I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag if it were made of me- sized holes. Whatever, no biggie— except that every other spotter at Holmes Hi- Tech was an actor. In fact, it was a thespian friend of mine who’d introduced me to the gig. Actors liked the work because, in addition to the flexible hours, it allowed them to practice their craft. I pursued the job because it sounded cool, the closest to clandestine this suburban girl could get. I wish I were able to reveal to you a deeper, more complicated motivation— a consuming desire to serve justice, a fascination with Chinese culture, a lurid role- playing fetish. “It sounded cool” is a lame provocation, but there it is nonetheless. I’ve grown accustomed to the disappointment engendered by that response. People prefer a good story.
 
My actor coworkers wrote new narratives every morning. After exchanging flyer postcards for various low- budget blackbox- theater one- acts, they’d transform themselves. I remember this brunette who earned the moniker “chameleon.” She left the office once as a Canadian- accented tourist and returned that afternoon a Goth teenager, replete with pale makeup and ripped skull- and- crossbones tights. I didn’t even recognize her.
 
She was one of only a few who switched from one identity to another beyond the office. Our manager discouraged the practice because there was nowhere safe to do it. She also warned us not to take notes anywhere, not even in a bank or pizza shop, and not to leave information on voice mails within earshot of anyone. She’d lost two spotters that way, one who’d blown his cover in front of an employee at Pearl Paint, and another who’d done so next to an elderly man playing mah- jongg in Columbus Park. Our manager said everyone in Chinatown was involved, “Everyone is in on it.” Obviously, that’s egregious hyperbole, but I think what she meant to say was that there was no establishment at which we could be certain no one was involved. Indeed, I once happened across a multi- thousand- dollar phony- Rolex deal while hitting the loo at the Lafayette Street Holiday Inn.

The most convincing performers scored the respected roles. One time, during assignments, our manager told this guy Henry that she’d be helping with his disguise that morning. Authenticity was critical, as they needed him to case a location for four straight hours, to monitor who came and went. So Henry became a junkie. He passed the afternoon sitting or standing on the curb, intermittently nodding off. Back at the office, while demonstrating the smackhead lean, wherein the body reaches an angle nearly 45 degrees but somehow, Newton defyingly, does not fall, he explained that he’d delivered a depiction so convincing, it’d attracted the attention of both a cop, who told him he was disorderly and threatened to arrest him, and a born- again Christian, who told him about Jesus and threatened to save his soul.
 
And then there was I, approaching the disguise closet each time with only this question: Which wig today, the brown one that resembles my actual hair? Or the brown one that’s exactly like my actual hair? After the great Miss Bessom debacle, I knew better than to try to act like someone else. Also, I’m a terrible vocal mimic. I can’t even ape midwestern, and that’s the O- negative blood type of accents: It can flow through anyone. It’s the Bill Cosby impression of accents. And I am also bad at those . . . unless what’s been requested is “Bill Cosby doing a Japanese man.”

So only two characters lived on my résumé. One was me, and the other was a heightened version of me, the me I imagined I’d be if I’d stayed in North Carolina. Alterna- Me had, for starters, a much thicker drawl, which I could pull off because rather than “doing an accent,” I merely tapped into the way I sound when I’ve had too much to drink. She was young, married, and applying to law schools near her home in Raleigh. She wore pearls and belonged to things like supper clubs and congregations. She grocery shopped at the Harris Teeter and ate lunch on Sundays at the Carolina Country Cl...