Fakebook (16 page)

And it's not that the neighborhood is a ridiculous place—I kind of like the weirdness of it—but that it's an insincere weird. I mean, I went to art school, so I've met a lot of genuinely offbeat people. I've also met a lot of people who think of themselves as offbeat, and they all moved to Williamsburg.

In some ways, living in Williamsburg is a purchased credential or a check mark in a column. There's a paint-by-numbers quality to many of its residents: their passion doesn't lie in the art so much as in being seen as an artistic person. It's creativity worn on your flannel sleeve.

“So what did you think of the show?” I asked Bifocals.

“It was pretty good, I guess. I mean, the whole shoe-gazing surf-rock thing is pretty tight if you are looking to play it safe. I like things a little more challenging.”

Guh. What is with this competitive drive of hipsters to be bored by something first? What's the endgame? To take pride in experiencing the least joy?

“You know,” he continued, “lo-fi noise pop, like Sega Book of Genesis.” He took a long drag on his American Spirit. “Their early stuff.”

The way he spoke—aggressively dropping in musical genres and subgenres—started to grate on me. He was like the kid who tries to impress the teacher with the longest words in the thesaurus. Except this wasn't homework. It was music. It was supposed to be fun. This guy embodied what bothers me about the whole scene. It isn't about creating. It's about collecting. The hipsters seem content to be remembered for remembering.

“I'll have to look them up,” Christine interjected.

“Please,” I said—deciding then to out-obscure him. “They are just doing what the Ninja Bin Ladens have been doing for years. They are practically a cover band.”

“Yeah…” he defensively responded. “That's sort of true, but they infused a rockabilly rhythm that set them apart.”

“What are you talking about? That's exactly how they were most influenced!”

“I'll relisten—but Sega Book of Genesis took it someplace unique. Anyway, I have to run to a basement show. I'm seeing The Recently Trained Lovers. They're like a cross between the Ninja Bin Ladens and Dr. Sparky and the Drunk-by-Noons. You should check them out.”

“Definitely will,” Christine replied.

And with that, Bifocals wandered off into the Williamsburg night, joining the ranks of the skinny-jean catwalk of Bedford Avenue.

“Bifocals…” I said. “That's a new one. How long until the ‘ironic toupee' becomes a thing?”

“Ha!” Christine burst out, before she took the final drag from her cigarette.

I looked over, smiling slyly. “Want to know a secret?”

“What?”

“Ninja Bin Ladens is just some band name I made up.”

“So you just lied to that guy?”

“Yeah, totally.”

She stared at me, clearly not sharing my sense of pride and amusement at my successful ruse.

“I mean, it's not really lying,” I added quickly. “I just don't take these one-off conversations too seriously. It's more fun when you mix it up a bit. He's an extra, you know?”

“An extra?”

“Yeah, the extra theory. That's a guy I'll never see again—he has a small walk-on role in my life. Everyone you walk by on the street, all non-speaking roles, just filling out the background.”

“That's kind of terrible.”

“Nah, it's not! Because to them, I'm an extra, too. We're all stars and we're all extras. It's just liberating to think that way…” I didn't finish the thought because Christine was looking at me completely unconvinced.

“I can't believe you are still doing that thing on Facebook,” she said.

“I thought you dug it,” I replied, feeling almost betrayed by one of my earliest supporters.

“Yeah, but that was, like, months ago. It's been going on too long. It feels like lying now.”

“I'm doing it for six months. Doing it for a little while isn't really interesting.”

“Six months? All the way until April?”

“Yeah, I'm wrapping this up on April Fools' Day.”

“Clever,” she said flatly.

“Well,” I said a little deflated, “a little, yeah.”

“It's gone on long enough.”

“I don't get this at all. You were the one that convinced me to draw this out! If it weren't for you, this would just be a big goof. You even got your mother involved!”

“I know,” she said defensively, “but I've changed my mind. It's lying to a lot of people, all the time! Don't you ever feel guilty?”

“Sometimes, sure,” I said.

“Because you know it's wrong. David, you need to go to confession.”

She'd just dropped my full name and told me to go to confession? She might as well have said that she thought she'd raised me better than this. I started to blush in shame.

I squatted down on the sidewalk, not quite sitting, with my back against the wall. “Listen…I do feel guilty about it. Really guilty when I stop and think about it, especially when people seem moved by the story.

“I really do try,” I continued, “to make Fake Dave not heroic. I always have him doing stupid and selfish things—the way he treats his girl, the way he yells at his audience, the way he flakes out on things. It's all to make the joke on me, you know? But the real joke is that people respect him way more than they've ever respected me.”

Christine's look softened as I yielded. “Of course they do, Dave,” she interjected. “It doesn't matter what you make him do or how dumb he acts. You know how many people fantasize about people leaving their jobs?”

“Yeah…” I said. “I do. More than most. In Red Bank, I've been told, my name has become synonymous with peacing out—you know, ‘I'm ready to pull a Cicirelli.'

“It doesn't matter,” I continued, “that I had him get jumped the night before or vandalize a religious community. They give me a pass because they are still so impressed with the balls it took to disrupt my life.”

“But you didn't.”

“That's not true at all!” I snapped back. “Why do you think I go to
every
work party now? It's the only social life I can have. My life's been pretty goddamn disrupted.”

“Don't take this out on me!” Christine responded loudly. She stopped as we both realized we were making a mild scene. “It obviously bothers you,” she continued in a calmer, almost compassionate voice, “because you know it's wrong. Just stop all the lying, and go to confes…”

“
Dave!
” we heard from across the street. A blond girl was running toward us, looking stunned and dumbfounded. “Is that you?”

Wait…I know her! It's Lauren…we were on the high school newspaper together. She was a grade under me…Oh no.
No!

“Are you back? Are you back from your journey?”

Stunned, I was overwhelmed by an unstoppable urge to run away. As I bolted, I turned my head and saw Christine doubled over from laughter.

At first, I should have been terrified as I ran away through a blur of the theme bars and theme people. I would have expected myself to be distraught after nearly being caught like that—with Lauren thinking she saw me. I wasn't sure what would happen next: if she was going to expose me, or if her uncertainty would keep her quiet. But suddenly, I felt an overpowering sense of exhilaration as one word dominated my thoughts.

“Journey.”

Being spotted by Lauren wasn't a failure; it was an accomplishment. I'd gotten a twenty-five-year-old woman to say the word “journey”—outside of a karaoke bar. What a strange and wonderful thing my lies had made real.

I ran ten blocks south before I finally stopped, resting on the guardrail of the bike lane entering the Williamsburg Bridge. I crouched down to catch my breath and felt the sweat on my brow start to cool in the cold winter air.

Emotionally wired from the encounter, I decided to decompress with a walk over the bridge to my Manhattan apartment just on the other side. After ten minutes of walking through the repeating geometry of the red-truss structure causeways and a half-mile of graffiti, I walked out onto the observatory platform.

It was a cold December night, and even colder up there. Unobstructed views of the city, I'd quickly learned, come at the cost of unobstructed East River wind. I chose to endure it and leaned out on an overlook, splitting my gaze between the Brooklyn and Manhattan late-night skylines, catching the Empire State Building just as it turned off its outside spotlights lit for Chanukah.

The cold kept most pedestrians off the bridge, and it was unusually quiet—save the ambient noise of the traffic below and the occasional rumble of the passing J train. At a busier hour, I probably wouldn't have noticed my phone vibrating with an incoming text.

I assumed it was from Christine, asking me where I'd gone off to. It wasn't. Instead it was a number I didn't recognize but an area code I'm very familiar with: 732—central Jersey.

“You never said thank you for the flowers.”

My eyes widened. I was completely struck by the surreal quality of the moment. I took off my glove and began to type. “Who is this?”

“Katie Fisher.”

“Impossible. She's from Pennsylvania Dutch country. This is a New Jersey area code.”

“Your ass is from Dutch country.”

Huh…maybe my stalker was a professional wrestler.

“Well, my ass does reflect the levels of craftsmanship the Amish strive for. I'll ask again. Who is this? I will find out.”

“John Fisher.”

I stood there, completely aware of…being there. It's hard to describe the feeling exactly, this mixture of amusement and exposure—of being completely at someone's mercy. It felt like I was being watched, and I was in a heightened state. This person had total leverage over me. I had nothing…I was impressed. I was terrified. If this was a girl, I might be in love.

“I smell a conspiracy,” I texted back and stared at my phone, waiting for the reply.

It came only seconds later. “You should know all about them. After all, your ingenuity is the reason I follow your game of misadventures in the realm of online social-networking pretend.”

“That's quite an articulate accusation.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, young man. That famous Cicirelli charm, no?”

Before my cold fingers could finish typing a retort, another popped up from the mystery texter. “My friend, have no concerns about exposing my ‘suspicions.' I am only interested in games. You do like games, don't you? I had the most fun discovering yours.”

As the bitter cold wind kicked up, I now pictured my foil as a beautiful woman in a black dress, sipping a glass of wine in front of a warm fire as she toasted my demise.

“Are you Carmen Sandiego?”

“Ha! Catch me if you can…but you may not need to search the world to find me. I may be closer than you think.”

A moment later I received one last text—a photo of a box. At my doorstep.

For the second time that night, I began to run. This time I wasn't fleeing, but in pursuit. I rushed down the bridge as fast I could on the pathway that slowly descends from overlooking the rooftops of the East Side projects to the street level and my apartment's front door.

I bolted off the bridge and across Delancey Street. I elbowed my way through the popped-collared crowd trying to get into the club next door and sped past the undercover cop car always parked at the mouth of the bridge.

Sure enough, there was a box, but no Carmen Sandiego. I grabbed it, burst through the door to my apartment, and tore it open like an animal, grabbing a corner of the tape with my teeth. I dumped the contents onto my coffee table, and from a puff of packing peanuts emerged a single book. What else could it be—a copy of
A
Million
Little
Pieces.

Sigh. If I'd wanted irony, I would have stayed in Williamsburg.

4
Seriously, criminal element, how did you let that happen? Step up your game.

I ended the year as a ghost in my own life. The diversion I'd thought up in the fall had completely taken over by late December, and it was going to be a long, cruel winter. The exhilarating highlights of being spotted in Brooklyn and the cat-and-mouse game of my secret foil began to feel like they'd happened a long time ago.

I was back in the routine of Fakebook, and the real-time demand for content and the surprisingly heartfelt nature of my following had worn me down quickly.

I was ready to relax, ready to see people, ready to have fun—after all, it was almost New Year's Eve—but that wasn't meant to be. New Year's Eve parties draw out the extended circles of friends that I desperately needed to avoid. Having no life was the ironic cost of having two lives. Being a hermit was the cost of being popular.

So it seemed an opportune moment to visit my brother, Jeff, and his wife, Elisha, in Evanston, Illinois, far from the people back home who, ironically, thought I was even farther away. Fake Dave's December had found him putting his illustration skills to good use as an assistant at Tatooine—a very real tattoo parlor in Glendale, Arizona, whose owner agreed to participate in Fakebook
5
—with his runaway Amish girlfriend at his side.

Elisha's brother and sister, along with their respective spouses and a six-month-old nephew, joined us for New Year's Eve. The night held the promise of watching TV with three married couples and a baby…and man, did it deliver.

It was a far cry from the previous year's festivities. Last December 31, I'd somehow found my way into the Times Square Alliance's private party, an elite event thrown by the organizers of the ball drop, complete with a cordoned-off, private section of the street for viewing the countdown. In other words, at 11:59, I was able to excuse myself from the crazy-fun open-bar dance party crawling with socialites and walk onto a pampered stretch of 42nd Street to be a part of the million-person crowd cheering and screaming their way to midnight.

Three hundred sixty-five days later, instead of watching the ball drop in Times Square with the mayor, I watched it from a couch in Illinois, the only single guy in the room not in a diaper. I literally spent the last moments of the year watching a live broadcast of the party I'd spent the first moments of the year attending.

But for Jeff and Elisha, New Year's Eve wasn't about meeting new people or kissing strangers. It was about spending time with friends and family.

In reality, I only knew two of the seven people in the room. Distance had created something of a veil around my sister-in-law's family, and my brother's adult persona had been hidden behind it. So while I was reasonably engaged in the conversation, part of me was a fly on the wall, observing my brother for the first time in an entirely new context.

They were all so comfortable with one another, using nicknames and sharing inside jokes. There was excitement, yes, but it centered around the baby. It was like going back to a time when my parents, aunts, and uncles were forming the relationships I'd grown up taking for granted. In some visceral way, I started to see a stable family life not as a jumping-off point, but as a destination. That particular New Year's Eve proved to be strangely satisfying, in a way that the outrageous ones can't.

Jeff and Elisha were new homeowners, and my visit was peppered with errands and car trouble, all sorts of “life” stuff. Jeff's problems were practical, not existential. He'd invested his time in real relationships, in the real world, and as a result, he was growing roots in a new place with new people. He had his act together in a way that was far from flashy but increasingly appealing to me. Jeff gave me a window into a completely different stage of life.

I, on the other hand, was twenty-six and only beginning to feel real adulthood creep up on me. I'd drifted through my first twenty-five years on potential but was learning that being capable isn't the same as being accomplished. In fact, I couldn't really think of anything I had to show for myself other than a few good stories. I'd spent my time, but I wasn't sure that I'd ever invested it.

My brother had a wife, a house, a growing family…I had an imaginary girlfriend. Turns out the only place I'd invested my time was in my fake life. And sadly, it showed.

I didn't know exactly how it had happened, but somewhere along the line, my alter ego had started faring better than the real me. Fake Dave had a steady girl and was making friends at the tattoo shop. He was enjoying eighty-degree weather and the admiration of everyone I'd ever befriended on Facebook. In contrast, I was single and obsessively isolating myself, bundling up for a freezing winter, and undermining the integrity of my relationships.

I was jealous of Fake Dave's stability. So I decided to take it from him.

Recent Activity

Dave
went from being
“It's Complicated”
to
“Single.”

I knew that word of Katie's infidelity would elicit a strong reaction, but it surprised me how many of the voices were new to the stage. The implosion of Fake Dave's fake romance had finally drawn out some of the voyeurs. Responses also varied. Some were compassionate, some judgmental, some angry. And some were unintentionally hilarious. Still, it seemed everyone had something to say.

So I capitalized on this new enthusiasm. The breakup played out as an on-again, off-again phase, full of mixed feelings and the open question—what exactly did Fake Dave owe Kate? I played up the ambiguity of the situation and the indecisiveness of its main players to keep the comment section robust and, for me, emotionally compelling.

Interestingly, as the relationship deteriorated, factions appeared, falling along gender lines.

There was Team Elizabeth, the girls who voiced their sympathies for Kate and clung to the love story as some sort of fairy tale, a relationship destined to work out. And there was Team Moscone: