Fakebook (19 page)

Great. Welcome to 2010. And Dhara was a Princeton girl; she'd definitely do her homework.

My entire profile was a red flag. My most recent post was an account of my bow tie tattoo being applied. The last several months would appear to be one act of poor judgment after another. Instead of seeing the real me, she'd see someone who antagonized the homeless and toilet-papered the pious.

A generation ago, Dhara would have been enticed to see me again for the same reason I wanted to see her—based on what little we knew about each other, we wanted to know more. That paradigm still holds true, but now, with the advent of search engines and Facebook, it's reckless for a young woman to meet a total stranger unless she looks up things about him. It's so easy to do, like flipping to the back of a baseball card for a player's stats.

We've always carried emotional baggage, but it's never been easier to shuffle through it. There's no “past” with Facebook, and there's no “distance.” Nothing happened “then,” and nothing ever happens “somewhere else.” It all pools together, fossilizes, and creates a permanent but evolving here and now.

“Getting to know someone” is still the cornerstone of starting a new relationship, but Facebook has forever changed the process. How many conversations won't take place because we don't have to ask what someone's favorite book is anymore? How suspicious would you be if someone had the same answer as you? Does that coincidence lose its meaning online? I had no doubt that the new romantic landscape could lead to happy endings, but for an overly analytical fool with a fake profile, the landscape was a minefield.

Through Fakebook and because of it, I was simultaneously learning what it was like to start and end a relationship in the Facebook era. The morning of my flight, I'd woken up in the new home of a growing family. That night I climbed into an empty bed, fairly certain that my real relationship status was going to remain “single” for a very long time.

It's almost funny. “As I climb into an empty bed…” is actually a line from “I Know It's Over,” the song I'd imagined Fake Dave consoling himself with. I fell asleep that night thinking of the girl on the train, while The Smiths sang, “I know it's over and it never really began. But in my heart it felt so real…”

Maybe I should have changed my status to “Married.” After all, I'd sacrificed everything for the committed relationship I was in with my own Facebook profile.

5
I reached out to the owner of Tatooine, Chris Bailey, on Facebook. He immediately got the point of Fakebook and accepted my friend request. He granted me permission to use his shop as a set piece and to use his photos as a base for Fake Dave and Amish Kate's life in Arizona.

“This is ballsy,” Joe said, standing over my proposal on Handler's main conference table. “Your boss sign off on this?”

“Yeah. You know her,” I said with a hint of pride in my voice. “She's gutsy.”

We were looking at a proposal for our next promotional mailer—twenty-inch, high-gloss, fully printed shippable packaging. The idea was to get media members excited when our newest superhero toy line arrived on their desk and to ensure they opened the package. This was the fifth one we'd produced, and the mailers had been one of our most successful tactics.

“I'm just thinking back to last year,” Joe said. “When the lawyers made us change our tagline a half dozen times.”

“Oh right,” I said. “We couldn't legally guarantee that our product ‘makes you feel like a superhero,' right?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, chuckling a bit. “It's ridiculous. But it's also why this makes me nervous. You want to create a completely original drawing of the main character. I don't think they'll let you get away with it.”

He was right. This was a huge risk. The brand sent assets—beautiful high-resolution images created by the best illustrators in the business. Usually we'd use these images in our design. It was what we'd always done. But I couldn't do the same thing over and over. I'd gotten the creative itch and wanted to try something new. So I proposed going outside the assets and creating original artwork.

“And even if they approve the proposal,” Joe said, “if you can't make the drawing look as good as the official images, we're screwed. And it's not just our client but all the licensing partners, too. This also would have to be approved by the publisher and the film studio.” Joe looked up from the comp on the table and at me straight on. “Three groups of brand managers. Three legal departments. If I pitch this,” he said sternly, “you have to pull it off.”

I wasn't sure I could pull it off. I've always been a good illustrator, but it was a skill I'd sidelined. Now I was committing to do my best work ever, after years of rust. It was foolish of me to even suggest it—putting at risk weeks of work and the company's reputation. Yet, how could I not try?

I mean, I was a comic-book kid growing up. Deep down, I still am. I'd never forgive myself for passing on this opportunity.

“I can do it,” I said.

“All right then,” Joe said. “Let's pitch it.”

I walked back to my desk, a little exhilarated and a little nervous. I knew I was making my life hard. A drawing like that—at the size it needed to be and the standard it had to meet—was going to take a couple hundred hours.

But man…I'd get to earn the next couple paychecks drawing a superhero. For once, it was more exciting than anything going on with my other life. Fake Dave was just sitting around feeling sorry for himself.

And people noticed.

I'd tried to be a little experimental with his downtime and had even tried to inject Fake Dave into a live event. From my couch in New York, I used Twitter to pull live photos from the night's Devils-Coyotes hockey game in Glendale, Arizona.

It was an interesting little experiment—a trial run for potentially sending Fake Dave to Vancouver for the upcoming Olympics. I liked infusing a live event with fiction—where Fake Dave's presence might make someone to tune in for the crowd instead of the competition. But having Fake Dave watch things was still not very engaging. Fortunately, it was just one night, and it did serve the need for some downtime.

This period of quiet also helped me serve another specific, if still hypothetical audience. I had a vested interest in not appearing insane if Dhara looked me up.

I looked at her card on my desk. It'd been a few days since our encounter. Now or never, I thought, as I gathered the courage to write her an email:

Recipient:
[email protected]

I thought it was cute. I even went as far to use a winky-face emoticon, unusual for any self-respecting guy. For better or worse, that was probably my A-game.

I was still hoping against hope she wouldn't dig too deeply into the strange back story of my public profile. Though I did tempt fate by committing the cardinal sin of blue-state New York dating—Republican-themed humor.

I could keep Fakebook in a holding pattern for a week or two—it made sense for the story. But ultimately I had to tell a story worthy of having a second life. Fakebook was my priority, and maybe that meant scaring away the girl from the train.

But to my surprise, all my concerns were for naught. An hour later, she wrote back.

“You find the place all right?” I asked with a smile. “There shouldn't have been any confusing transfers.”

We met for drinks that Saturday at Vol de Nuit, a Belgian beer hall in the West Village. It was a cool place with a good beer selection and a unique red-lit enclosed courtyard. It had a casual but intimate vibe that felt right for a first date.

“Haha,” Dhara said as she sat down. “I should tell you now, though. I have a friend's party that I have to go to later tonight.”

“Yeah, that's fine,” I said. “I have a late-night slice of pizza I have to eat in my apartment later.” I got the message fairly clearly. This date was an audition.

“So be honest,” I said, “you Facebook-stalked me, didn't you?”

“Well,” Dhara said, “did you really just get a bow tie tattoo?”

I laughed and began to tell her about Fakebook.

“I'm not sure I understand,” she said. “Why would you do this?”

“Well, don't you find the whole Facebook experience kind of strange?” I asked. “I mean, you suddenly gain access to the lives of people you barely remember.”

“Well, I don't know,” she said almost disinterestedly. “They are just people's profiles. I can't say it upsets me.”

I was a little struck by her nonchalance toward social media. In my months of explaining Fakebook, not everyone understood why I would specifically do what I did, but everyone understood the underlying suspicion of social media's implications.

“I wouldn't say it upsets me…” I said.

I took a real look across the table and studied her for a moment. She was younger than me, twenty-two to my twenty-six. And while four years isn't much, the age gap felt significant all of a sudden. I became self-conscious and saw myself as an old man complaining about “how low kids wear their pants these days.”

“It's just interesting…” I continued. “Something I think is worth playing around with.”

The waitress brought us our beers.

“Tell me,” I said. “What is it that you do? Are you a train conductor?”

She laughed a bit and then began to tell me about her job in finance. It sounded impressive and involved traveling to interesting places to do intriguing projects. She was clearly on a rarified track.

I'm not without exposure to this side of the world—I know Ivy League graduates. Hell, I even shared apartments with her European equivalents. But being with Ivy Leaguers still stirs up a weird insecurity in me. There's a perception that what I do is “fun.” Design can be viewed as a hobby or something subjective, rather than the communication discipline it is.

When I describe the projects I'm excited by, especially to someone with a job like Dhara's, I sometimes feel like a kid with a pack of crayons, my work more suitable for show-and-tell than career day.

“I'm drawing superhero toys,” I said.

“Really?” she said with a look of confusion. “Wait…are you, like, a toy collector?”

“What? No,” I said in an attempt to downplay my enthusiasm and distance myself from our core consumer. “I create promotional artwork for the toy industry.”

“But it is,” I continued, while looking down into my beer, “kind of fun.”

“Oh,” she said. “That's neat.”

There was a bit of a pause. Enough of one, anyway, to overhear a bit of the conversation from the table next to ours.

“So this girl,” the guy next to us said to his girlfriend, “gives Pauly D a shirt that says, ‘I'…and like, an Italian flag, ‘Jewish Girls!'” He was reciting a pivotal moment of
Jersey
Shore
's first season.

It's easy to forget how all-consuming
Jersey
Shore
was when it first came out. No one had ever encountered a Snooki before, and we all were trying to process the four-and-a-half-foot package of spray tan and gusto.

I was uneasy with the world sneering at the negative ethnic and regional stereotype of my own people, but a sideward glance toward Dhara suggested she was into it. I swallowed my pride, and we joined their conversation as put-upon, real-life Eye-talians from Joisy.

In return, our two-minute interaction with the MTV-watching table injected a little sense of fun and absurdity into our night, and loosened us up. And things began to click again—like they had when we were mutually making the most of our delayed flight, when I was too tired to overthink anything and happy to jump into something without a plan or expectation.

And before I knew it, one drink turned into another. Soon we were bar-hopping around lower Manhattan with the same manic energy we'd had while train-hopping around the airport.

Eventually we ended up in the bar of the Bowery Hotel—a new place with an old feel. We sat in front of a large fireplace, on a dark brown leather couch.

“This place reminds me a lot of Princeton,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It has a real eating-club vibe.”

“You know about eating clubs?” she said, somewhat alarmed.

Uh oh. I'd said too much. “Um, just a little,” I said. “From some friends of mine. Did you belong to one?”

She did. And she enthusiastically told me about all its formal events, full of pomp and rituals and traditions. We scrolled through photos on her BlackBerry, confirming every suspicion I ever had of college life sixteen miles down Route 9. Everyone in the photos looked like villains in an '80s movie—James Spader types complete with teal sweater necklaces and salmon pants.

I showed her some photos from my senior year at Rutgers. My album had a lot more passed-out friends with penises drawn on their faces. “You and I had very different college experiences,” I said.

She laughed, but before I could elaborate, her phone chimed with a new text from her friends. She looked down at it.

“I don't think I can delay any longer,” she said. “I wouldn't have double-booked if I was sure you weren't a creep.”

“So I passed the audition?” I asked. “I can see you again?”

“Well…” she said with a smile, “depends what you have in mind.”

“Oh,” I said, faux offended. “There's a right and wrong answer?”

“I'm just trying to get the most information—I'm an analyst, after all.”

“I can take you to a fancy Italian restaurant I know, and we'll order the second, no, the third cheapest bottle of wine they've got,” I said. “You're worth it.”