Say what?

As a working class stiff and a card carrying member of "de collar bleu" I often come into contact with some fairly sketchy individuals whose pasts read like some bus stop, pulp novel rap sheet. Superficially these people would appear to be fine upstanding members of the community. Give them a shave, a haircut and teach them that "aint" is not a conjunction and you have before you Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Citizen just waiting to perform some sort of manual task. What you see is what you get. Scratch the surface, however, and you get a glimpse at dysfunctional with a lemon twist. Whether by tongues loosened by to much drink or simply time and trust, sooner or later an opportunity will present itself where you become privy to some extreme and often hilarious shit.
For instance, there was "Dan" a fellow construction worker who had one of the sharpest minds I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. There were few historical facts he did not know. I'm not talking "what's the worlds biggest lake" bullshit trivia, this cat could tell you the "who, what why, where when and how's" of most anything asked of him. We worked side by side for quite a while and I thought I had him all figured out. It wasn't until I had know him for about a year that he pulled me aside at a Christmas party and began an hour long monologue about how he had escaped from a Mexican prison after being arrested and sentenced to twenty years for smuggling heroin. It was, he said "just a thing." Shit, "just a thing" is getting pulled over and finding that you left your wallet at home. This was Hollywood shit. If anything, I would have pegged him as a embezzler. I heard recently that he was strung out on the same shit he used to run from the south.
My first real initiation into "human camouflage" came when I was 17 and working for a food supplier for a large restaurant chain. I was extremely naive and inexperienced and hadn't been working there for more than a month when all of my "nice" coworkers began rapidly unhinging themselves from reality and I always seemed to be at the epicenter of their collapses. A black dude named Ollie and I ate lunch together every day and over time I thought of him as the ideal family man; wife, kids, been with the company for a decade. Then one day he began to where combat fatigues and headbands to work. Our lunch hour discussions went from how well the Boston Celtics were doing to how fast he could disassemble and reassemble an M-16 assault rifle. He just didn't show up for work one Tuesday. In passing, another worker commented "Vietnam's a motherfucker." Indeed. And then there was the guy who filled Ollie's shoes at the lunch table. He wanted me to help him heist cars. "maybe we can go out and have a few drinks first." That was my last day pushing burgers into an eighteen wheeler.
I guess I should be somewhat desensitized to people pulling rabbits out of their asses, but I still find it hard to reconcile perception with reality. A little more icing on the cake came today when "Jeff", a guy I've know for over a year and always thought of as gruff but harmless threw a beauty out there that had me doubled over laughing my ass off; not so much at what he said but more the matter of fact "oh, by the way..." way in which he just put it out there. I'd been talking with another coworker and I asked him how his little girls were doing. He said they were just fine but that the youngest one had been starting to bite his oldest girl. Out of left field "Jeff" chimed in, "yeah, I know how that can be, that's why they put me in prison." I absolutely lost it. "Say What????" "Yeah", he said "the old lady owed me some money, when I tried to take it out of her purse she tried to pull the purse away....so I bit her shoulder!" Aaaaannnd?? "Well, she called 911 and I got booked on felony assault, the jail was full and they sent me to the state prison." Unbelievable.
So, I guess I will have to assume the position that nobody is really who they portray themselves to be. This is, of course, unless they entirely spill their guts. However, I think the game is best played making these erroneous assumptions and having your world bent a little bit sideways when someone pulls that rabbit out of their ass.