(Or: How I Got Conned in Turkey)

I am fascinated by con-artistry, and by the cognitive dissonance that seems to help some con artists be their best and most persuasive selves. Some are very calculating and fucking smooth, it's true, but with some there seems to be a kind of grey area they can inhabit.

For years I prided myself on having never been conned, despite my travels and life abroad and my years living in New York City. That is a kind of self-con, as I discovered when I went to Turkey to do research for a novel. 40 years old and I got taken! It wasn't a bad episode, but what WAS humiliating was that I knew what was happening, all along, yet at the same time was engaged in cognitive dissonance. Because they got my number, as it were.

I was walking down a street in Istanbul, and had a scarf over my head for the sun because it was so strong (among my many paranoias is a concern with UV rays). A man stopped me, asking if I was wearing the scarf to look "Muslim." I said no, it was for the sun, and he, in his excellent English, began to chat casually with me. So we talked, and when he found out I was from southeast Michigan, he began naming towns. I mean, he knew all the towns in my area. So I told him the name of mine, and he knew where it was, etc. He said he did business in the area, that he was a wholesale goods importer.

So the man, Mohammed, said that among the many goods he imported were rugs. My warning bells went off: I laughed and said I was too poor to buy a rug. He nodded, said he was waiting for his American friend, Gene, who was working there in Istanbul and wanted to practice his Turkish. Gene and Mohammed were friends from the States, because Mohammed was in business with Gene's family. Then up walks this American guy, Gene. And we talk for a while, then Mohammed says, take her to the warehouse and show her the difference between good and bad rugs, in case she wants to buy one while she's here.

This was the con -- bringing this American guy in, very nice, funny, with an educated American accent. So we walk along through the streets, and I'm asking Gene what he's doing in Turkey, and he says he works for some company, it sounded kind of vague and weird. But I just let it pass, because I'd been traveling by myself for 6 weeks, researching and writing, and was always glad to meet new people.

So we get to the warehouse. It really isn't a store, though it is full of fabulous goods. Like a scene out of The Arabian Nights. And I am simply inundated. Rugs rugs rugs, they just keep bringing more out for me to look at, showing me the differences between cheap ones and good ones, etc.

Then Mohammed shows up, and he and Gene and I are talking, there are lots of weird inconsistencies, but the rugs are beautiful, and --REALLY?--

--I didn't want to be an ugly American. That was what the con hinged on. Mohammed figured out that in my travels, it was very important to me not to be an ugly American, as I envisualized this. And so, in order not to be an ugly American, Mohammed finessed it so that I ended up having to buy a rug.

It's a nice rug, it's sitting on my floor. But I paid $800 for it. It's worth, MAYBE, 200, if I'm being nice to myself and thinking that I don't want to be a conniving ugly jerk-off cut-throat American, out to rape the locals in a grasping, fuck-you sort of way, by driving them down to the lowest possible price they can afford to accept.

After I bought the rug and left, I had a total freak-out. And this, simply because I saw, very clearly, how expertly I had been manipulated. How, through the extended talk (which was facilitated by Gene, the friendly "trustworthy" fellow American), Mohammed figured out how I wanted to see myself. And went to work on it.

I did do enough talking of my own to figure out that Gene was just an American drifter living at a youth hostel, who helped Mohammed out in this way by telling his marks that Gene's hotel-designer family worked with Mohammed back in the US, because Mohammed was their supplier. And yet, Mohammed DID know a shitload about American geography, culture, and spoke with an excellent, refined American accent.

What's true? What's not? Who knows? But I know that they saw right through me. And so I had to buy the rug.