Ticket Scalping (and other sins)

I live in a college town, and that puts me in close proximity with recent graduates. There are a lot of people in this world I pity, but the 21- and 22-year-olds who have just lost the paradise of undergraduate life forever are near the top of the list. They’re about to face down an unfriendly adulthood, complete with a barren economic landscape, and they’re smart enough to know it. I was in their shoes seven years ago, and if you’re the kind of person who’s prone to worrying about the future, I would argue that the postgraduate funk is the worst slice of a certain kind of American life.

My progression through that phase is probably typical. Aimless and unsteady, I worked as a ‘production assistant’ on a small (and terrible) movie featuring Tom Arnold and Tim Daly. The job involved getting yelled at by my superiors until I quit after a week. A particularly shrill British woman sticks out in my mind, but the most memorable incident came when I accidentally put soy milk in the coffee of an assistant director. I handed him the cup, he sipped, and then spit out in a fine, dramatic spray. “What the fuck is this?!” he shouted, the little tyrant. When I realized the error, and tried to explain, he stared me down and kept repeating the words ‘walk away.’ “Walk away. Just walk away. Walk away.” At that moment, my predilection for anger and my issues with authority nearly prompted me to walk toward the man, rather than away. But a PA is someone who backs down, and so I backed down. Welcome to real life!

After that, I worked as a janitor at Skidmore University, where I cleaned up after students who left their dorms in a state of disgusting disrepair (as I had done a few weeks earlier). One apartment actually had a golf ball embedded in the bedroom door, which I could only take to mean that someone had hit it there. I worked with a group of young Bulgarians who were in the U.S. on work visas and spent their nights sweating in the back of fast-food restaurants. They were some of the nicest and hardest-working people I’ve ever met, and when things got so bad at my mom’s house that I was kicked out, I moved into their smoky apartment. They rolled their own cigarettes to save money, and after working 16-hour days, they had a techno dance party each night. For a week, I spent my days watching the Little League World Series from their tattered couch while they slaved away.

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From there, I was “hired” by an environmentalist group in Asheville, N.C., to make a documentary film about the cause. I put the word hired in quotes because I discovered the job through my university, and was accepted because I was willing to work for free room and board. I spent two months making the film with cheap, malfunctioning equipment, and found out during the editing process that the audio on most of my interviews was unusable. The final product was met with undisguised contempt by the woman in charge, who then reneged on her promise to refund my cell phone bills. When it was over, I had no choice but to go back home.

The great part about having divorced parents is that when life gets too tough with one, you can move in with the other. So I packed my bags and set out for my dad’s place. I spent my days in the public library trying to find a job and idly speaking with friends. Within a week, I managed to undergo a humiliating interview at a desolate Motel 6 on the highway to Canada, where the manager stared at my shirt and tie like they were the skin of a foreign species. I didn’t get that job, or any other, and it took me about a month to realize that living with one parent wasn’t any better than living with another. Which is when I decided to move to New York and become a writer.

If you couldn’t tell already, I wasn’t exactly rolling in money at this point. After I found a place in Brooklyn, my limited funds nearly ran out after about two glorious weeks of enforced ignorance (the highlight was when I spent way too much on a ticket to see Sufjan Stevens at the Allen Room in the Lincoln Center, and sipped wine at a dinner table a few feet from him and his orchestra). I had signed up with a temp agency, and they called me for the first time on a day in early January. I spent that morning at the offices of a fashion magazine in midtown Manhattan, transcribing an interview about a new makeup line launched that winter. The subject whose voice I had to interpret was a Japanese man who spoke something a little bit like English and a little bit like nothing. Every third word I transcribed was an educated guess. Worse, the only earphones they had in the office were comically short, and I had to hunch over the cassette player just to keep them from slipping off. This was how I spent my 23rd birthday.

Just as things got critical, I finally found a steady office job. It gave me a reliable income and health insurance while assuring that I would do almost no writing for the next four-and-a-half years and come to hate my life. While I sat at my desk staring at the computer screen, I knew I needed an outlet. And that outlet occurred to me by accident. I would become a scalper.

I attended exactly 33 shows during my first year in New York, starting with Sufjan Stevens and ending with Andrew Bird at the Bowery Ballroom. For 18 of them, or just over half, I went alone. I know all this because of an embarrassing but useful ‘concert stats’ spreadsheet I keep, which includes columns for date, venue, artist, city, state, companion and review. For M. Ward that year, I wrote “Amazing, possibly top 5 ever…unreal stage presence, unreal voice.” For Under Byen, a group I was supposed to cover for a music magazine, I wrote, “boring. Didn’t do interview.” The latter probably tells you more about me that stage of life.

To get tickets for these shows, I spent a good deal of time on Craigslist. I wish I could tell you exactly when the transition from purchaser to scalper began, but I can’t quite remember. An exhaustive search of the word ‘tickets’ in my gmail inbox gives one possibility, though. On June 4, 2006, I sent the following email to a girl named Daniela:

Hey, I’m a big Madonna fan and very interested in the tickets…would you be willing to sell just 2? If not, I’ll buy all three. Let me know if they’re still available, thanks!

I am not, suffice it to say, a big Madonna fan, and the motivation for the email could only have been to turn them for a profit. So maybe this was the moment. If not, it was close. Maybe, while searching legitimately, I saw the cheap Madonna tickets and thought, ‘hey, I could turn a profit from those.’ Maybe it was that innocent. Or maybe the plan had been brewing for some time. It’s impossible to say, but the game was very much afoot.

Shortly thereafter, I tried to hawk an extra Radiohead ticket for a show at the small theater in Madison Square Garden. I was one of the lucky ones who had come through the on-sale insanity with a pair, and one, of course, would remain mine. I didn’t know what to expect from the market, so you can imagine my surprise when I found a buyer willing to pay $400. That was more money than I’d seen in one place in quite some time. When the day of the concert came around, I felt oddly tired and decided that $400 more dollars sounded pretty good, so I sold my other ticket for the same price. No Radiohead for me. Greed had trumped art. My scalping career was off to a blazing start.

Later that month, I won two tickets to see Belle & Sebastian in Battery Park on July 4th. What happened next may be karma; the odd fatigue I’d felt on the day of the Radiohead show persisted. I could barely get out of bed on the 4th, missed the show entirely, and would eventually find out that I’d come down with mononucleosis.

But that didn’t hamper my scalping career. Later in July, I posted a pair of Sufjan Stevens tickets. “Get them early!” I wrote, and later turned down offers of $150 and $250 per pair before settling for much less when the market turned out to be less favorable than I’d imagined. After that, things escalated. For the first time ever, I followed up on my Madonna inquiry and bought tickets for a show I wasn’t interested in attending (Bloc Party) only to turn the tickets around at twice the value. I made $120 on that deal.

Life continued. In August, a Dutch musician declined to buy a ticket for a show featuring Jon Stewart, Dave Eggers, and Sufjan Stevens after we’d discussed it over email. I’d eventually meet him in person through a roommate, and become his friend without realizing, until writing this piece, that we’d communicated three years before.

In December, I started actually adopting the psychology of the scalper. “Lowest price you’ll find!” I wrote while hawking Damien Rice tickets for well above face value. After picking up two Arcade Fire tickets for their special show at Judson Memorial Church in the Village, I sold my extra ticket for $200 under the nose of cops and venue attendants who were specifically there to prevent scalping. I made about $80 on four Midlake tickets, and flipped two extras for the National at twice their value. And on, and on, and on.

By now, you’re probably wondering if I ever experienced the slightest moral twinge as I gouged prices and raked in the profit. The answer, for what it’s worth, is yes. It was easy, and even exciting, to play the scalping game online, to guess the market value for tickets and try to squeeze every last dollar by playing people against other buyers both imaginary and real. I’d tell one buyer that I had an offer for $100, and that if he’d just up it to $120, I’d end the whole charade and let him have them. Of course, there was no other buyer. The whole thing was an abstraction, a computer game, a way to pass the time while I languished in an office and put off a real life.

But the ticket exchange was a different story. That was when you had to meet real people, and come face to face with the souls you were screwing. Sometimes they were businessmen who couldn’t have cared less about the expense. That was the best case scenario. Other times, they were not.

It was one of these exchanges that brought my scalping career to an end. I don’t remember the concert, I don’t remember the date, and I don’t remember the money details, but the exchange is clear enough. I was waiting by the stone lions outside the Public Library in midtown when the buyer approached. He was unassuming, about my age, and he told me the tickets were a present for his girlfriend’s birthday. It’s hard to tell a person’s financial status by the way they look, but he didn’t seem like a guy with a lot to spare. When he handed over the money, he simply said, “It’s expensive, huh?” It wasn’t accusatory. He was just feeling that flash of pain that comes with spending money you’d be better off saving. And what could I say? I laughed sheepishly and shrugged. Then he was gone.

If he had yelled or condemned or laid the guilt on too thick, like others had tried before, it wouldn’t have affected me. Instead, by that simple, offhand observation, he cleared the wall in my mind between the profitable game I’d been playing and the actual consequences. Sure, scalping is a minor sin, and it’s not like anyone’s life was ruined by paying too much for tickets. But for someone like me to continue on that path, long after I’d ceased truly needing the money, still felt wrong. I could have been helping these people. The tickets I bought for the wrong reasons could have gone to a real fan. By my actions, somebody out there was deprived of a show. And then the memories came flooding back, of how I used to hate scalpers and the way their inflated prices left me outside the gates when I was younger. How had I become one of them?

As I walked back to the building on Third Avenue, the one I’d spend the next few years trying to escape, a year’s worth of guilt worked me over. The justifications vanished as I felt the ugliness of the afternoon. But the money, in the fingertips of a hundred forgotten hands, was already dealt. It’s a rotten feeling, causing that hurt, even if the wound is small. It’s why having your heart broken is always preferable to breaking someone else’s. Screw it, I thought. I’m done.