grifts
Back in the early Obama administration a friend of mine, an event planner extraordinaire (which is to say, something of a grifter himself) put on a webcomics gallery show in Brooklyn, headlined by such luminaries as Dinosaur Comics, A Softer World, and Achewood. Being friends with the host, I was able to con my way into the preshow meal at some Brooklyn pizza joint, where I was seated opposite Joey Comeau and a woman with a very prominent chest tattoo whose name I would later learn is Kari Ferrell.
I got home from New York the next day, and opened up my laptop to Gawker and found her mugshot staring at me on the front page, accompanied by headlines about a "hipster grifter". She was wanted in Utah, she had been grifting her way through the hipster scene in Brooklyn, and I just had pizza with her.
(The story has the perfect movie script ending, as I recall it: she was too hot to stay in New York so she contacted a friend from out of town, hoping they weren't keeping up with NY gossip blogs, and asked if she could crash there. And they said yes, and then the cops were waiting for her when her train pulled in. And this is just memory of blog posts on Gawker that got destroyed when, y'know, Peter Thiel burned the website to the ground; but it's a perfect ending, isn't it?)1
I always had a soft spot for criminals and rogues and con artists, so this story became a favorite of mine for a while--it's a compelling narrative with a personal touch. Great stuff. And as I was kicking ideas around for telling this story here--it's been more than a decade, it's a good story, blah blah--I ran a little light google, and she's back. She's got a substack called Lexicon Artist, which she started in October and has most recently updated in the middle of last month.2 I think many people would be excited about this because they like the train wreck drama of it all, but I was never here because of that. I just think she's fascinating.
Her first entry seems to be part intro-to-my-newsletter, part origin story. In it she describes how growing up in deeply Mormon Utah colored her perception on truth, and particularly describes a moment that I feel like I have witnessed many children have firsthand:
...the ultimate life cheat code was revealed to me: you can just say shit."
Can you imagine it? The awesome power of being able to use your words to just lie, to shape reality with nothing more than your voice? Of course, most children are chastised for this behavior and eventually grow out of the "lying just because I can" phase, but what if they didn't? What if the people telling them "lying is wrong" were also the people from whom they had learned to lie? What if lying just got them what they wanted, forever?
She professes in this entry's conclusion a renewed commitment to the truth--not merely as a passive "I won't lie anymore" but in a more active sense. Obviously I have no idea how sincere this is. But I get it; living is the act of learning how to be who you are. And it's easy to imagine someone who learned how to lie and cheat and swindle her way through life and watching all of that crash down, and deciding, just maybe, to try to be another way.
It's a good story, anyway.
Editor's note from the distant future: she says in her recently published book, You'll Never Believe Me, that she was planning on turning herself in after accompanying her friend's band on their tour across the country, but was instead sold out when she got there.↩
Time traveling editor again here. This post was written in 2023. She has a book now; her substack has mostly not been updated since then.↩