The Purse Snatcher Letters

The Purse Snatcher Letters

  Hugo Cambridge

  (with an introduction by Samuel Yost)

  Copyright © 2011 by Hugo Cambridge and samuel Yost

  Pocketful of Scoundrel/SmashWords Edition

  www.pocketofscoundrel.wordpress.com

  www.kuboapress.wordpress.com

  Introduction

  I was working in a chain hotel, middle shift, one of my jobs being to go knock on the doors of guests who were slated for check-out, but who had not come down to the desk.  One such guest was registered under the name Gordon Kirsz.  I remembered him, a by-the-week, cash paying guy who I had had several conversations with.  I knocked on the door and when no one answered I entered, finding every sign that he had not checked out: clothes were still around, some food in the fridge, a bit of loose cash on the kitchen counter and, most interesting to me, a portable electric typewriter with a stack of envelopes next to it.

  The next day, I got on shift to discover that Kirsz had not shown up to pay, his belongings therefore binned and set in the backroom.  They remained there for a number of days, and during a slow afternoon I poked through them, especially curious about the envelopes.  They were all addressed to someone named Bernard Cambridge and the name of the sender, rather than Gordon Kirsz, was Hugo Cambridge, the address he gave himself obviously a phony, though the recipients address seemed genuine enough.  I took the lot of them, drafted a note to Bernard that these had been left in the room of Hugo (Gordon) and that I thought it best to send them along. I put them all in a large envelope and set it in the outgoing mail.

  I was somewhat surprised when the mailman brought this package back to me, it had been marked as undeliverable.  So, though I had attempted before, I tried the telephone number Kirsz had provided, again getting a recording that no such number existed.  And then curiosity got the better of me: the Cambridge letters were unsealed, so I took one at random, opened it, removed three sheets of cheap, newsprint grade paper.

  I had never read anything like it.  Hugo, the name the letter writer identified himself with, was brothers with Bernard and these letters were highly descriptive narratives of the time Hugo spent subsisting off of stealing women’s purses, straight up, graceless purse snatchings, these narratives mixed with deeply personal assessments of self and almost poetically related asides to other events in the writer and his brother’s life.  I immediately made photo copies, but when it was a month and Kirsz had not returned, I became more interested in the originals, so took them. 

  The letters were my prized possessions: four of them, all with different dates typewritten under the signatures.  Peculiarly, in arranging them according to this chronology, I noted how clean they all were for letters, as though they had been drafted elsewhere and then written out as neatly as the electric typewriter would allow.  Had they been written, perhaps by hand, on the dates they indicated and then rewritten in the room, all to be sent out together?  Had he dated them according to memory, the dates perhaps indicative of something other than the letter’s contents (the letters, I should point out, each jump around in time, narrating past events, events present to the particular letter, memories, etc.)

  More interestingly, were they actual letters meant for recipients or were they made up, stories?  The tone of them was so in referenced and personal I could not think of them as concoctions, but the circumstances of their existence and my absolute inability to track down Kirsz or Bernard or Hugo put the entire matter into question.

  It wasn’t until the letters had been in my possession for four years that some light was shed.  I attended the AWP conference in Washington, D.C. February of this year (2011), was there in support of a friend who had recently received her MFA and was keen to mingle with others of the sort.  I was smoking a cigarette outside and when a fellow bummed one from me we got to talking.  I put on that I was a writer, after listening to him talk about trying to get work in to this or that journal, and when he asked me what it was I was working on I told him it had to do with a purse snatcher.  He laughed and pointed at himself, telling me he used to be “very interested in purse snatchers.”  I said something like “Who isn’t? Pickpockets, purse snatchers, so much charm, right?” and he got very big and animated, agreed with me, said it was like a sad art form that had died away. 

  When he finished his cigarette he invited me to join him at a panel, but as that wasn’t really my thing I just said we should get together for a drink, later.  I told him my name and he shook my hand, said “I’m Doug Brenner.”  I chuckled and said “Sure you’re not Hugo Cambridge?” and the strangest, slowest, most pointed smile I have ever seen crossed his face.  “Why would you ask me that?” he asked.

  I put him through a rigorous test to prove he was the author of the letters and he was able to pass it, no sweat.  I was bowled over, still unable to believe it when he signed the name Hugo Cambridge on a napkin and I recognized it, instantly.  I related the story of how I came across the letters, how long I had had them, how much they meant to me and he drank it up, laughed so unabashedly and kept calling me “a real champion” for every little nuance of how I had investigated the letters I told him about.

  Somewhere after a few drinks, I told him that I had for years thought to publish the letters, thought they really were something else.  He finished off his drink and just offhand said “So publish them.”  I laughed, but could tell right away he was serious.  “Publish them,” he repeated, “go ahead.  I won’t sue you or anything.”

  We agreed, wrote out on the back of the flyer for some reading an odd and likely non-binding contract that I had permission to publish the contents of the letters, however I saw fit.  It wasn’t until he finally left to return to his hotel, agreeing to meet me in the morning, that I thought to ask, “Are the letters real?  I mean, are they letters about stuff you actually did, or did you make it all up?”

  He just told me to publish them, scrunching his face and giving it an odd, indecipherable kind of shake.

  That is the story, that is how this came to be.  It is my hope that the letters be read as works of art.

  Samuel Yost

  Letter no. One