Word: conning
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...ever been north of North Carolina, and he was uncertain about where to go at that time of the night. He and Pilcher left their room in the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, went out onto the street and soon ran into a Negro named James ("Race Horse") Edwards, a con man with a 14-page police record, much of it for the Murphy game...
...some strange tricks. All of Selma, in fact the entire nation, has been flimflammed by the so-called civil rights movement for more than ten weeks. Then I went to Washington to televise the real truth of the Selma story and we got taken by a glib-tongued Negro con...
...Murphy game" is underworld argot for a slick maneuver in which a victim puts his cash in an envelope and gives it to the con man, who makes a fast sleight-of-hand switch and hands back an identical envelope stuffed with newspaper strips. It was named after an Irishman who was arrested many times for perpetrating such tricks...
...Rojack (like Mailer?) con- ducts his life as if it were some black experiment, he needs the battle even when life itself has almost been kicked out of him, needs the action, the booze, the orgasm--that inescapable moment--even with the fetid breath of murder and suicide and madness congealing in his nostrils. Even dizzy on the parapet, exhausted in the desert, he pushes on, tracking the devil, hunting out a more ultimate disaster; ready, even on the precipice of collapse, to go the very depths of possible experience...
...Dream of the Heiress polluted by Deborah's guileful malevolence; The Alger Dream of self-made empires gone rotten in her father's diabolic machinations; The Westerner Dream of the loner on the borderlines of society perverted now by the company he must keep; The Dreams of the Con Man, The Urban Gangster, The White Negro (a myth Mailer helped himself to make) all corrupted, immeasureably soiled by the evil of our national life until there are tenable dreams no longer but only the will, and the courage if not the strength to escape to Guatamala or Yucatan...