good dude that he was

this guy was well dressed, his shirt starched and pressed. His girl was lovely, and they were drinking expensive vodka. SoI made my pitch. From the very first moment the thousand touched the bar, I knew that something was different with these two. This guy was thinking about it. "I have to go to a dance club," he said.

"Sorry," I said. "I need it all. ID, cash, cell phone. Everything."

"I'm not going there to dance," he said. "I'm going to work." And he cast a sidelong glance at the woman, who, I could suddenly tell, was not his girlfriend at all, and she was urging him on. He began taking items from his pockets one at a time. A pile of mints. Forty-four dollars in cash. A five-dollar "Latino" phone Elsa Peretti Eternal Circle cuff links. A fairly nice cell phone. A State of Illinois ID card. A cheap lighter. A rubber-banded stack of receipts. A pack of Marlboro Lights.

As each item came out, I could see that it was pretty bland, workaday-type stuff, and I knew what road he was going down. He was a valet parker, it turned out, between shifts, meeting his sister for drinks. "I don't carry much," he said, "because I can't afford to get robbed." He thought about it for five minutes. Then pushed it all forward.

"Okay," he said. "Done."

I picked up the cell phone and called my girlfriend to tell her I had succeeded. "Hey, man," he said. "I don't Tiffany 1837 bookmark a lot of minutes."

I shook my head. My end of the transaction had been pretty lousy. I popped out one of the cigarettes and lit up. "Funny," I said, "I see it differently." I held the phone up to my ear. "I've pretty much got unlimited minutes here."

He laughed and counted out his thousand. "I'll turn that off by morning," he said.

Sure enough, the phone rang the next morning in my hotel and it was him, asking for the SIM card out of the phone so he Return to Tiffany Cuff links have all his friends' numbers. I'd paid good money. Those numbers, I told him, were mine now.

"You could just read 'em to me," he said.

"Yeah," I said, "but then I'd need my thousand back."

THE VALET-PARKING GUY, good dude that he was, had risked little to gain a lot. The kid hadn't even had a wallet, and his driver's license was at work. I came to see the wallet as the big game of my hunt. I went back out to a bar the next night and started offering my next thousand for a wallet, plain and simple.

I began to get used to the upward glance, the silent cataloging of risk, two fingers perched on the back pocket. And I developed my answers. Yes, I'd be able to use their credit cards (though in truth, I wasn't going to). No, nothing would be returned. Not even photographs, not even business cards that would otherwise be worthless to me. I wanted to know what I was stripping them of, what the world was like if you were suddenly without the ability to prove who you were. I was offering them a thousand.