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Relational Con Artistry & Coming Home
Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
How do you sell the Eiffel Tower?
In May of 1925, Victor Lustig, the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Postal Services and Telecommunications in France sent an urgent message to all scrap metal companies in the area to meet him immediately. Only six showed up. There was an elaborate meal full of wine as Lustig explained that the government needed to knock down the Eiffel Tower and scrap it. However, it was a huge secret and a deal needed to be made that evening.
Lustig then began the bidding process for this valuable government contract. Within the group was the owner of a newer company and this was an opportunity to put his business on the map. He won the bid for $1 million dollars.
There was a slight problem. Lustig didn’t work for the government, there was no such thing as the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Postal Services and Telecommunications, and none of this was actually real.
Victor Lustig was a con artist and this was one of the largest scams to ever happen in history. Lustig actually sold the Eiffel Tower twice. As soon as he got the money, he left for the United States.
What makes this possible? How is someone capable of selling the Eiffel Tower, not logistically, but in willingness to subvert relationships with other human beings?
March in Pasadena, California is quite temperate. Going for a walk in the middle of the night is not out of the realm of possibility. As midnight approached, that’s where I found myself; brooding up and down the busy streets of Colorado Boulevard, famous for its role in the Rose Bowl parade. I, however, was not enraptured in jovial merriment. Moving to Pasadena was supposed to satisfy my identity crisis. I came here because I didn’t know who I was or where I was. Now I had to leave and, in so doing, I had to leave all of my futile hopes on that brightly lit parade route.
The places that comprise the narrative of my life have been many. My first space was a little town called Rossford — an offshoot of Toledo’s urban center that acted as a buffer to the burgeoning suburbs. I was raised in a blue-collar family as the second child. We were lucky to have intimate…
