How to Practice Becoming a Private Eye

LISP England 2018

1st Quarter-2018 Recommended Story 

How to Practice Becoming a Private Eye

by Paul Beckman - USA

Dress to look like “Everyman”. Carry a disguise kit: mustaches, sideburns, beards, makeup., clamp on false teeth, cane, hats, glasses (sun and regular). Carry a newspaper, book (How to Be a Gumshoe), magazine, (Saturday Evening Post), briefcase, or backpack. Pick out a stranger and practice following him/her for a day and change your look, your walk, e.g. stoop, limp, panhandle. Take pictures of your subject—both close-ups and with anyone he stops to talk to. Watch and follow from across the street keeping subject in sight using store windows, side mirrors on parked cars. Read Jack Reacher and Harry Bosch books. Fill out the paperwork for a private investigator permit and a gun permit (conceal carry). Do nothing with them. After two days of following your subject change your clothing to the opposite sex. Walk up to a complete stranger and head butt him without warning—forehead to nose—any Jack Reacher book comes with instructions. Take his picture with his cell phone. Take his wallet. Copy his address. Stop following the original person you’ve been following and stake out the person you head butted. Use his credit card and send an ostentatious “Get well” bouquet in the shape of a horseshoe—the kind and size the mob would send.  With his cell phone take pictures of a gravestone, church, and funeral parlor. Mail him his camera and wallet. Use the return address of the person you were originally following.
Decide that the private eye business isn’t for you and make a list of threats your mother made to you

when you were growing up. Start with: I’ll break every bone in your body. You’ll never amount to anything. If Jimmy’s mother lets him jump off a cliff . . . ? Stop when sufficiently depressed to need a drink.