Fake Louis and Glunk Glunk

There are counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags, and then there are counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags that make absolutely no effort to conceal the fact that they’re counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags. I wanted the latter.

It was Christmas and I’d decided to buy my wife a novelty present. Not just a fake designer handbag, but the most hideous, ostentatious, gold-encrusted monstrosity I could find. Something Louis Vuitton himself would have taken one look at and said, “That’s it. I’m going into plumbing.”

Naturally, I went to Canal Street. At the time, Canal Street in lower Manhattan was the unofficial international headquarters of counterfeit luxury goods. Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Chanel. You could buy a convincing imitation of practically anything, provided you didn’t examine the stitching too closely or ask where the merchandise came from. I had no interest in convincing. I wanted something brazenly unconvincing.

Fortunately, I had Marilyn. Marilyn was my partner at the advertising agency where we worked. She was Chinese, born in Hong Kong in the late seventies, and had come to America with her family. She was tall, attractive, serious-looking, and had a disposition that suggested she hadn’t been put on earth to suffer fools.

Account executive: Marilyn, the client wants you to make the logo bigger.

Marilyn: Fuck you.

We got along famously.

Marilyn was my principal source of information on all things Chinese, particularly food. She would occasionally show up at the office carrying gifts for yours truly from the exotic East. Once, she arrived with what appeared to be a transparent pillowcase filled with dried red Chinese peppers she’d picked up in Chinatown. Not a little bag. A pillowcase.

Other mornings she’d produce an assortment of spices: star anise, fennel seeds, Sichuan peppercorns, and once, a bag of undisclosed powders and twigs that promised to produce something called a 100-year-old egg. In return, I brought her Italian coffee cake filled with custard and whipped cream and a timpano.

When I explained my Christmas shopping objective, Marilyn immediately volunteered to accompany me. She knew Chinatown. She knew the language. She knew the people. Most importantly, she knew where to look. Or so we thought.

We arrived on Canal Street expecting an embarrassment of riches. Every counterfeit handbag ever made had supposedly made its way through this neighborhood at one time or another. Surely finding one exceptionally ugly Louis Vuitton wouldn’t present a problem.

We approached our first prospect. Marilyn spoke to the woman in Cantonese. The woman looked at Marilyn, then at me, said something brief, and disappeared.

We tried another. Same result.

A third vendor glanced at us with the sort of expression normally reserved for people carrying plague and abruptly shuffled past us. I’d seen people selling fake handbags here for years. They were part of the cityscape. Yet somehow, whenever Marilyn and I approached, the entire counterfeit luxury-goods industry vanished.

After several more unsuccessful encounters, Marilyn stopped walking. She looked at me. Then she looked at herself. Then back at me.

“I know what it is,” she said.

“What?”

“They think we’re detectives.”

I considered this. I was in my mid-forties, broad-shouldered, Italian-looking, and reasonably handsome, if I may say so myself. I grew up in Yonkers. I could easily have passed for a New York City detective, particularly one who’d spent the previous twenty years investigating organized crime and eating meatball wedges in an unmarked sedan.

Marilyn, meanwhile, looked every inch the formidable female investigator. Tall, attractive, inscrutable, with the unmistakable expression of a woman who’d heard every excuse in the book and wasn’t interested in hearing another.

Cue the Glunk Glunk—that unmistakable two-note musical punctuation that accompanies every scene change on Law & Order. Together, we were two suspicious-looking investigators moving silently down Canal Street in pursuit of an international counterfeiting ring.

We tried a few more places, but the damage was done. Our cover, whatever it was, had apparently been blown before we’d even established one. I was beginning to think I’d have to buy my wife something respectable.

Then Marilyn mentioned her cousin. She had a cousin who operated a shop in Chinatown. She’d been keeping this particular connection in reserve, although why she hadn’t mentioned it earlier was beyond me. We found the place and went inside.

Marilyn spoke to her cousin. I stood there trying not to look like a detective, which, as it turns out, is a surprisingly difficult thing to do when you’re already convinced everybody thinks you’re a detective.

The cousin listened, nodded, and motioned for us to follow. Then she walked over to a wall covered with merchandise. And pushed it. The wall moved. The entire display swung aside, revealing a concealed doorway. Behind it was a secret room.

I had spent a lifetime watching television detectives discover hidden compartments, false walls, concealed entrances, and secret passages. I had never expected to encounter one while Christmas shopping.

Inside were handbags. Hundreds. Gucci. Prada. Louis Vuitton. Every celebrated name in international fashion, represented in a room that none of its celebrated designers had presumably authorized. It was the King Solomon’s Mines of unauthorized luxury goods.

And somewhere inside this magnificent temple of trademark infringement was my wife’s Christmas present. I began inspecting the merchandise. Some of the bags were disappointingly tasteful. A few were actually convincing enough that I might have had trouble distinguishing them from the genuine article. Unacceptable.

I wanted vulgarity. I wanted excess. And then I found it. There was gold everywhere. Gold fittings, gold decorations, gold badges, gold doodads of uncertain purpose. It was perfect.

Marilyn approved.

We paid, thanked her cousin, and emerged through the secret doorway into the ordinary world of Chinatown commerce. I half expected to find Jerry Orbach waiting outside with a warrant. Glunk Glunk.

Christmas arrived. My wife opened the package and burst out laughing. Exactly the reaction I’d hoped for. She examined the bag, admired its appalling excesses, and appreciated the considerable effort that had gone into locating something quite so magnificently awful. I was delighted with myself.

Then, almost immediately, a large, ornate gold badge fell off. It landed on the floor. Apparently, even the counterfeiters had limits.

Two years later, Marilyn and I traveled to China to produce a television commercial promoting Chinese manufacturing to American businesses. The campaign was called Made in China, Made with the World.

Our assignment was to help persuade Americans that Chinese manufacturing deserved to be taken seriously. Christmas was around the corner. I couldn’t help thinking about the handbag. Here I was, a former customer of the clandestine Canal Street luxury-goods industry, now participating in an international advertising campaign intended to enhance the reputation of Chinese-made products. I’d come a long way from the secret room. So had Marilyn.

We traveled around China, visited the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square, and experienced the peculiar combination of exhilaration and disorientation that comes from being very far from home. One evening, while we were walking, a Chinese police officer instructed us to cross to the other side of the street. We complied. Well, I complied. Marilyn complied in the technical sense. She crossed the street, but did so with an air of profound personal dissatisfaction, repeatedly looking back at the officer as though daring him to say something else.

“Marilyn,” I said, “we’re going to get arrested.”

She continued looking back.

“Marilyn, this isn’t New York. They’re going to lock us up and throw away the key.”

One of our guides had already told us a story about someone receiving a life sentence for running a toll. Whether the account was accurate, I had no way of knowing. I wasn’t particularly interested in conducting my own investigation. Marilyn remained unimpressed. She hadn’t taken shit from anybody on Madison Avenue, and she apparently saw no reason to begin now.

I, on the other hand, was growing increasingly interested in remaining a free man. It occurred to me that a few years earlier, in Chinatown, people had been afraid of us because they thought we were detectives. Now, we were in China, and I was afraid of an actual police officer.

And Marilyn, who’d figured out our predicament the first time, was doing her level best to get us arrested the second.

Glunk Glunk. Gong