INTO THE GREAT WIDE OPEN

Our predecessors were fired for hiding a case of beer inside a dumpster at the local grocery store during closing time. As I mopped aisle six, another stock boy discreetly passed me, muttering, “Do you think it’ll work?”

“Hell yeah,” I answered, confident that if it didn’t, I was at least far enough removed from the situation so as not to be implicated. He was referring to my suggestion that they hide a case of beer under the dumpster instead of in it.

I’m not sure why the store manager decided to make dumpster diving part of his routine, but he had the lid flipped open and both arms rummaging through the cardboard. I had stuck my mop in the mop bucket and approached the backdoor where we unloaded the Spartan trucks. “Are you looking for something?” I asked.

The manager turned around and acted like nothing was out of the ordinary, a case of Old Milwaukee clearly visible behind his feet. That night, I and two other stock boys drank that beer. I remember their praise for my suggestion and my disdain for their obvious mistake—stealing cheap warm beer.

I’ve always known that the best method for getting away with something is to do it out in the open. These very same stock boys, after getting caught trying to sneak into the Armada Fair beer tent, doubted me again. “It’ll never work,” they said.

I found a large commemorative plastic beer cup in the parking lot and poured a can of beer into it. I deliberately walked by a state policeman checking i.d.’s at the entrance. “Hey,” he said, “you can’t be on the midway with that.” He nodded toward my beverage.

“Sorry,” I apologized and strolled through, my peers watching in amazement as I disappeared into the crowd, heading straight for the beer-ticket booth with a pocket full of money.

You’ve got to have confidence in yourself. You’ve got to not know any better. It’s called youth.

When Prisoner Gonzalez, a former school clerk, transferred to my current facility, he tried to continue his ruse. The school principal enrolled him in my class. “There must be some kind of mistake,” I told my new boss. “This guy had an office job when I was at the Ryan prison.”

“I don’t care,” he said.

I dug deeper. I’m not sure whether I wanted to impress my new boss or prove him wrong. I did neither. Here’s what happened:

Prisoner Gonzalez went from having a cushy job pulling student files to a GED student struggling with fraction computation. He did fess up, saying to me, “I’ve been right under your nose for years. No one thought to look at my school records.”

I shook my head, not in disbelief, but in admiration, afterall, he used a method from my very own playbook, a playbook I hadn't looked at in years.