Fakebook (15 page)

So for the first time all weekend I stayed up until midnight, and through a garlic-powdered haze, I scoured the online portfolios of movie makeup artists to find black eyes and bruises, and took perverse pleasure in photoshopping the consequences of Fake Dave's Thanksgiving tour of poverty.

There. I did it. I hurt Fake Dave. I gave my collaborators a legitimate defense for their criticism of me. I finally had a halfway decent Photoshop job. It felt pretty good.

But man, I sure could go for some more Luigi's.

That Sunday evening I got off the Delancey Street F train, still wearing my branded Unabomber hoodie and NJ Transit disguise, and approached my apartment.

What a strange weekend. I'd pegged it as an important weekend to reach out to people—and had succeeded. While I sat at home, voyeuristic gossip of my adventure spread as whispers over beers—far more freely than it could via proclamations on the Facebook permanent record.

Unbelievable. This guy thought I took requests.

Still, I'd gotten new fans and I'd given them a show—albeit at the cost of my real relationships with them. Besides, I'd take a house-arrest homecoming to a homeless Thanksgiving any day. That made me realize how deep into Fakebook I was. I was seeing this through, and it felt almost liberating.

When I arrived at my building, a FedEx box was leaning against the door of my apartment. This was unusual; I had everything shipped to my office. But remembering the strange call I'd gotten from Fed Ex a few days ago, I pushed back the hood on my Unabomber sweatshirt and cautiously picked up my suspicious, unsolicited package. It was maybe a six-inch by six-inch base and about a foot high, and it had some weight to it. Once inside my apartment, I grabbed an X-Acto knife and cut through the tape along the box's seams. I reached in and pulled out a small…pot of flowers.

From whom? I'd never gotten flowers before. I was confused and somewhat flattered. There was a small card:

“Dear Dave, Happy Thanksgiving. I'm thankful that I found you. Love, Katie Fisher.”

Katie Fisher? Who is Katie Fish…Wait.
That's my fake Amish girlfriend!

Someone knows.

3
I have to make this clear—despite being good eaters, my sisters-in-law are both very thin. If I give the wrong impression in a published book, I will be in trouble for years and years.

“Hey, Steve,” I said into my phone while glancing over at the mysterious pot of yellow tulips now sitting on the small round table I had bought in the restaurant supply district.

“Hey, Dave,” Steve answered. “What's up?”

“So…um. Did you buy me flowers?”

There was a pause. “No…” Steve answered, drawing out the sound of each letter. “Do you want me to?”

“Nah, I'm cool.” I quickly hung up.

I took a deep breath. I thought one of my collaborators might be having fun with me and had to check them each off the list. Steve was my first guess, and I hoped my call to my second, Joe Moscone, would be less awkward.

It wasn't.

Then Ted, my father, even sweet Elizabeth. But it was a series of humiliating dead ends.

I swiveled my chair toward my laptop and took a long look at my Facebook friends. I reread every post and every comment, looking for a change in attitude or some subtle clue to who the mystery sender could be. Everyone was a suspect.

I was impressed by this operation. This secret foil of mine had managed to subvert my subversion—turning Fakebook into a personal playground the way I aspired to do with Facebook.

I sat at my desk, staring at the card in my hands. “Dear Dave,” the card read. “Happy Thanksgiving. I'm thankful that I found you. Love, Katie Fisher.”

It was a generic type of message that didn't offer a clue as to who wrote it. I concluded it wasn't someone who knew me well—otherwise there'd be a trace of personality in it or a reference to an inside joke. There'd probably be less effort to conceal their identity.

This was simply a declaration: “I know your secret.”

But it had to be someone I knew at least a little. After all, how could they have gotten my address otherwise? I tried to put myself in this guy's shoes, tried to imagine what it would be like if I'd just discovered that the sensational Facebook page of an old, forgotten friend was totally fake. It would be tempting to immediately expose it and let everyone to know how clever I was for figuring it out. That was the easy, obvious thing to do.

But that's not what happened. Whoever this was took a step back and decided to go about this in a much more calculated way. This person wanted to protect the hoax because it gave them power. They wanted it to continue, just on their terms.

The comic-book lover in me was completely enthralled by the thought of having a real-life supervillain. I imagined a Machiavellian figure silhouetted by light from the large screens monitoring my Facebook page.

“Good…good…” the faceless voice said calmly as he petted some sort of jungle cat.

Part of me didn't want to know who my secret foil was. Then again, part of me did. I felt challenged by a worthy foe. He'd already shown patience, cunning, and a willingness to spend $19.99 on the “Yellow Sunrise Surprise Bouquet.”

I took another look at my flowers. I had to admit that they freshened up the place.

I picked up the phone and called the Send-Flowers.com customer service number on the back of the card.

“How can we help you today?” the operator replied.

I leaned back in my chair and put my bare feet up on my desk, facing my kitchenette. “A few days ago your company delivered flowers to my home on Delancey Street. Order number F dash seventeen, thirty four, B.”

“Was there a problem with the order?” the bubbly customer-service rep asked.

“Oh no, not at all. They are positively beautiful! It's just…it's that I don't know who they are from,” I said in my best Woody Allen voice, “and it's making me very nervous.”

“I see,” the operator said.

“It may be some kind of joke…but I've had trouble in the past with unwelcomed suitors, and I'm uncomfortable with this gesture. Very uncomfortable.

“I have to know,” I continued, “who sent them? Where did they come from?”

“Unfortunately, sir,” the operator replied, “the purchase contract legally forbids us from disclosing that information without a police warrant. Would you like instructions on how to pursue legal action to obtain one?”

I was stunned. Send-Flowers.com had a policy in place to assist with restraining orders? It made sense, I guess, but it still felt a little extreme.

“Oh, I don't know…it may be a big practical joke,” I said. “I don't want to take it that far, not yet anyway. Is there anything at all you can tell me?”

“I'm sorry, sir,” she said graciously. “Good luck!”

I hung up the phone. It was a dead end—all I'd discovered was my own unwillingness to delve into the dark side of Internet floristry. I'd simply have to patiently wait for clues to come to me instead.

After my awkward phone call with the Internet florist, I let the active mystery recede to the back of my mind. Yet, the residual excitement that remained had rekindled my lagging enthusiasm for the Fakebook enterprise.

For the next few weeks, I truly enjoyed Fakebook. One of the reasons I had started the project is that I like to jump into something completely unknown and experience the surprise and delight of seeing what happens. That attitude had gotten me into MTV headquarters and landed me in an eight-bedroom apartment in Chinatown where I was the only American. And now it had delivered me mystery flowers.

This new dimension—something out there that I couldn't explain—renewed my excitement. It was fun, frivolous, and wonderfully absurd. This spirit began to infuse the story, so I eagerly pushed it forward.

Using the night of Thanksgiving violence as justification, Fake Dave and Amish Kate were back on the road and heading west. But this time, looking to build a little momentum, I had them abandon their on-foot plans and try their hand at another hobo staple, the freight hop.

It was thrilling. I felt like I was on that trip with them.

Christine wanted a smoke, and I needed some air.

We stepped out onto the street and into the crowd of smokers in front of The Charleston—a small music venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Our coworker Pete was doing a set there, and a few of us came out to support his rock-and-roll persona.

I'd found that support at work for my alternate persona was a little less universal. No one objected to it outright; the Handler crowd just continued to have a mixed reaction to Fakebook. Consequently, small talk felt like a gauntlet of bafflement and skepticism.

“So why are you doing that thing on Facebook?” my colleague Michelle had asked as she took a sip of beer from her plastic cup.

“People actually believe this stuff?” Matt had asked when we were walking down the stairs.

“I don't get it,” Danielle had said point blank.

By the time Christine wanted to step outside, I was eager to join her.

“What'd you think of the show?” I asked Christine, as I buried my cold hands inside my pockets.

“It was really good!” Christine said as she lit a cigarette, “but the real show is on the street.” She nodded toward a midriff-baring guy riding a fixed-gear tall bike.

In an era of anti-bullying legislation, I'd like to cite Bedford Avenue as a cautionary tale for the world we're courting—a world where people's need for attention goes unchecked without any fear of judgment. How else could you explain a grown man in a child's T-shirt riding a ten-foot bicycle without brakes?

“Those guys are ridiculous,” a fellow smoker said to us. He was wearing bifocals.

“Yeah,” I said. “I've never actually seen anyone get on or off those things. It's one of those New York mysteries, like how you never see a baby pigeon.”

“Gross, I know,” Christine said. “It's like they hatch fully formed—wait, do they even have nests?”

“No one knows…” the bifocaled twentysomething said, doing mystery hands. He seemed harmless enough but also emblematic of my discomfort with the neighborhood. In the past twenty years, Williamsburg has transitioned from one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn to, well, one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Violent criminals were somehow being displaced by ninety-pound hipsters who brought with them a showy form of creative culture.
4
Bifocals were no exception.

How to describe a hipster: These are adults who don't look attractive and aren't interesting, so instead they've settled on looking interesting. Williamsburg is now overrun with men in ironically waxed mustaches and women wearing misplaced belts over vintage dresses.