Fakebook (8 page)

I felt completely cut off and needed to check in. So I gave Ted a call, but he didn't pick up.

A beat later I got a text. “Not safe 2 talk. Call you later.”

It's funny how Ted quickly became my closest confidant. Truth be told, I probably wouldn't have looped him into the hoax if he hadn't been part of the conversation that inspired it. He was one of my oldest friends, but our interests didn't entirely overlap. Based on fifteen years of going to Mets games but never to the Met, I'd wrongly assumed that creative endeavors like Fakebook were out of Ted's wheelhouse.

Besides, he was a notoriously dull Facebook poster. As I write this sentence, his actual status is:

Guh. What makes him think my wall is his to-do list? His was exactly the type of profile I was trying to parody, and yet he'd turned out to be a tremendous asset—mostly due to his status as the “mayor” of Red Bank.

I can't say that I understood why everyone seemed to know Ted Kaiser, or why everyone turned to him for information when a rumor got out, but we did. He was never a sports star or a class clown or anything that typically makes someone the center of their social circle…He was just a natural master of networking.

Actually, I take that back. It sounds too calculating. He was just a guy—someone who everyone seemed to like well enough to be one of his two thousand Facebook friends. And as a result, he was the hub of all Red Bank news. So whenever someone stumbled onto my profile, Ted's corroboration of the story was often more than enough to get them to buy in, and best of all, he was able to relay the reactions of my hometown crowd to me. He was tending to my roots.

A lot of the kids I grew up with drifted back to Red Bank after having the college experience, and I might have been one of them…but the thing is, I didn't have the typical college experience. In fact, I bounced around three colleges in just four years, joking that I was “academically promiscuous.”

I started at Syracuse and dropped out after a single semester. I don't regret leaving—I had my reasons—but I think part of me was looking to go back to the way things were. I was never the guy who couldn't wait to leave my no-name town in the dust—I like where I grew up and the people I grew up with. I don't carry a lot of scars from my teenage years. I had a good high school experience. I just needed to learn—the hard way—that the high school experience ends.

For a year and a half, in between my time at Syracuse and Rutgers, I went to Brookdale, the community college located…well, a few minutes from Red Bank. Turns out there's not a whole lot to do in a shore town in the dead of winter, especially when you're under twenty-one and all your friends are enrolled out of state.

And while a typical college experience is full of easy ways to make friends, meeting people at a community college is far more challenging. In fact, the experience hardly resembles anything that anyone's ever imagined college to be. There's very little in the way of elbow patches on tweed jackets. No pipe-smoking professors sitting at the top of the circle discussing Proust with their argyle-wearing students. There weren't even classic panty-raiding shenanigans going on under the nose of the fun-hating dean in the snobs-versus-slobs tradition.

At my college, it was all slobs, from top to bottom. Even the professors looked like they were just as likely to sweep up papers as they were to grade them. We were townies. We came to class, then we left. That was that. And when we came and left, it was either very slowly, back and forth from the Shadow Lake retirement community, or very quickly and very loudly, in a modified black, yellow, or purple Honda Civic. Gearheads and blue-hairs ruled the campus. The parking lot looked like the set for the next Vin Diesel movie, with a few Ford Crown Victorias thrown in for good measure.

The blue-hairs were just trying to have productive post-career lives, and I supported that. They'd earned it. But the gearheads were breaking my heart, working crappy full-time jobs while taking only two or three units every semester, putting all their money into spoilers and neon lights for their Civics. Five years passed, and these guys could have earned enough credits and money to join me at Rutgers, but instead they got bucket seats.

I'm not trying to damn the student body. It wasn't exclusively coasting gearheads and stir-crazy senior citizens. It was a cross section of everyone who couldn't or wouldn't go to a four-year school. It was people taking a second shot at education or saving money or staying close to home because of family obligations. In all fairness, it really was a place that provided opportunity.

None of that, however, reduced the drawbacks of such an eclectic student body. You had no way of knowing if the cute nineteen-year-old you were sitting next to in poly sci was actually a married mother of three about to celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday.

Inevitably, my social life suffered, and downtime began to center around jogs on the winter boardwalk and watching repeats of
Boy
Meets
World
(which I found oddly poignant). It was an isolated time.

But when summer finally arrived, it felt like a return to form. My friends were back. We were lifeguards and cashiers again, spending our nights hanging out and driving to parties before ending up at some diner. Just like always.

One night, as the summer died down, we found ourselves on an empty beach.

Every August seemed to have a night like this. We'd skip the diner and go to one of our beaches—the local spots that existed under the radar of the Staten Island and North Jersey BENNYs who migrate south. These beaches weren't particularly hidden or especially pristine. The weather-worn sand fences and odd stacks of litter surrounding the “Swim at Your Own Risk” signs gave the beach a certain lived-in quality. It was lived in by us.

I loved those nights. After a long summer of work and play, we Jersey Shore kids would get together and catch our breath one last time before the season ended and we had to return to real life. It always felt the same as every other year—except this time, it wasn't.

We weren't chatting about preparing for another year of high school or facing the great unknowns of college life. They weren't unknowns anymore. My friends were talking about returning to people I'd never met and places I'd never been. We were finally talking about experiences we hadn't experienced together.

We were the class of 2001, but this was 2002. People hadn't entirely moved on yet, but they'd begun to move apart. Most of us had already learned that the world was bigger than the semicircle we'd formed in the sand.

I didn't have enough perspective yet; otherwise I might have been able to find some significance in the setting—a connection to the sound of the changing tide, or maybe a sense of purpose in the Manhattan skyline just over the horizon. Maybe. I don't know.

What I do know is that a week later I was sitting on the same beach, alone.

Ted finally called back.

“Oh man, Cicirelli. You're a mad genius!” he said. “People were arguing about Fakebook all night. Steve was
loving
it—he buried you every chance he got.”

“So people are talking about it?”

“Absolutely. I mean, everyone's known about it for a while, but now they're finally bringing it up. People wouldn't stop bugging me about you.”

“But not a lot of people are posting.”

“No? I'm not sure…”

“Well, it can be awkward. Like when my dad started leaving comments, people backed off—they weren't sure if it was any of their business.”

“Your dad is great! The bit about law school? Classic.”

“Yeah, he's crushing it,” I said. “Hey, I threw out some crazy stuff. I need to know, what are people thinking?”

“Well, there's a lot of debate.”

Ted's natural inclination toward diplomacy had served us well so far. Whenever someone asked him about Fakebook, he'd feign uncertainty about the things he'd heard, never painting either of us into a corner. He let people get comfortable with their own reactions and delicately swayed them to accept the uncertainty rather than dig for answers.

“A couple of days ago, there was a ‘good for Dave' consensus,” Ted said. “Now people are asking, ‘What the hell's going on with Dave?' People are on all sides of it. You're a hero or you're going insane, depends on who you ask.”

“That's perfect.”

I wanted this thing to be hard to swallow, wacky enough so that people would begin to question the wisdom of my fake actions. I wanted debate, and I was thrilled that the conversation was about my motivations and not the iffy quality of my Photoshop work. “Does anyone suspect it's fake? I mean, I cited laws that don't even exist.”

“Not really…people have said things like ‘I almost don't believe this is happening,' and they'll doubt it for just a moment—I can tell—then just decide they're going to believe it anyway.”

“I can't get over how nerve-racking it is. This was supposed to be stupid fun, not so intense!”

“I know…I think you're the only one who could pull it off. Everyone keeps saying, ‘If there's anyone this would actually happen to, it's Dave.'”

“Wait? What? What do you mean? You realize I'm writing this guy as an idiot, right?”

“Dave, I'm not sure how to put it, but you've always done your own thing. I mean, the Amish story was based on actual events, you know.”

“Yeah, I know…but people think I'm crazy?”

“No, they don't. Well, they kind of do. But they like what you're doing. They say you're like the guy from
Into
the
Wild
.”

“That guy? The story ends with him dying alone in his van! Am I the only jerk who took that as the moral of the story?”

Ted laughed, but he could sense my discomfort. “Dave, it's not a bad thing. But yeah, people brought up a few stories. Matt Carew claimed he saw you in the audience of the Maury Povich show a few months ago, for example.”

“He saw that?”

“So you were actually on the show?”

“Yeah, me and Eckhoff went. We were betting on the baby daddy results. It was maybe the most fun I ever had.”

“This is what they're talking about!”

“It was so much fun! Why wouldn't I want to—”

“But it's not normal, Dave. He didn't see you at the Knicks game; he saw you on the Maury show. And you do that sort of stuff all the time—Elliott said he thought you were still living with those French women in Chinatown.”

“I guess it's been a while since I talked to him.”

“Dave, listen. Senior year, did you or did you not get thrown out of art class for the whole semester?”

“Ha! Yeah, that definitely happened. And I won the school's art award that night, too.” I perked up out of pride for the decade-old victory. I hated that teacher. “She was pissed.”

“You were the art guy, and you told the art teacher to fuck off. People don't remember the details. They just think—this is a guy who could do this shit. And Dave, you love those stories. They're the first ones you tell. You said you wanted people to think you'd gone crazy. It's working.”

“Well, yeah,” I said to Ted. “I was ready for people to think that I was going crazy. But I wasn't prepared to find out people thought I'd been crazy all along.”

“Hey,” Ted continued, “you think it's easy for the rest of us? People think Steve and I are complete asses because of what we've been posting about you.”

“I'm sorry, Ted. I didn't think it through…”

“It's all right. We wouldn't do it if it wasn't funny. Actually, Steve was reveling in the attention. The reality is, people didn't think you were crazy, they just didn't think much about you. It's why they aren't shocked that you're acting crazy, and why they aren't shocked that Steve and I are dicks.”

“Yeah, it's a
Black
Swan
thing.”

“The ballerina movie?”

“No, that's something different.
Black
Swan
is a book—one of the ideas it asserts is that a million things are happening all at once, and it's only after the fact that we pick and choose the details that are important. We find evidence for an event once it's already occurred and convince ourselves it was obvious all along.”

“Yeah, exactly. You tell people you're crazy, so they remember the crazy things about you. And so what? Since when do you care what people think?”

“Yeah, you're right. Screw it. I'll let them have the idiot they think I am.”

“Right.”

“They're doing exactly what I wanted them to, anyway—they're connecting the dots for me. They think I'm nuts,
great
. That just gives me freedom.”

“Go for it, Dave!”

“And I'm not nuts, I'm an artist! This thing I'm doing is too big for them. It's Warholian…or, no, I'm like Banksy, and this is twenty-first-century street art. Instead of brick and plaster, I'm vandalizing their Facebook walls…tagging them with lies to reveal a greater truth!”

“Oh jeez…”

“I'm trailblazing. No one ever said it was easy being stuck ahead of your time, waiting for the world to catch up. Someday they'll get here, but by then, I'll be somewhere else!”