Fakebook (4 page)

“Yeah, sounds good. Love you, Son.”

“Love you too, Pops.”

I walked back into the Cake Shop and started packing up.

“If you're interested in checking it out,” I said as I walked past the girl, “you should friend me on Facebook.”

“Oh, I totally would,” she replied, looking back down at her coffee, “but I don't do Facebook. Good luck!”

How hip, I thought, and shrugged. So I'd made a mild fool of myself—good practice for Fakebook's inevitable self-destruction. I had no idea what was going to happen next. Fortunately, my dad had a few thoughts on the subject.

Recent Activity

Dave Cicirelli
and
Ralph Cicirelli
are now friends.

Even more important than my father's involvement was his blessing. On some level, I felt like I'd been given permission to keep Fakebook running, like I was off the hook for the moral ambiguity I'd been struggling with. If my parents thought it was harmless, maybe I wasn't such a horrible person after all.

Maybe.

I opened my phone and looked at my growing list of unread Facebook messages. I sighed, put the phone back into my pocket, and walked home.

Christine sat down across from me the next day at Handler. “Dave, I can't believe people are falling for your crazy thing.”

“You mean you don't believe I'm in front of that furniture store?”

“Of course not. The pictures are terrible.”

“I know, but no one seems to notice, as long as I make it blurry. It makes me question why I spend so much time on your projects.”

“Very funny. But I like what you're doing. It's sort of a social experiment. You're testing what people are willing to believe.”

I wished I had thought of putting it that way in the coffee shop.

“Yeah, I think it'll work as long as it stays on the rails. But I'm going to make this thing nuts.” I grabbed a weekly planner from my desk and showed her the next three months. “I got a head start on some of the Photoshop—I'm arriving in Philadelphia tomorrow, and I have most of it made.”

She thumbed through the calendar and shook her head. “Oh Dave…no one is going to believe this.”

“Well, that's kind of the point. I want to see how far I can push this. It's comedy, mostly.”

“Right, but Dave—you're in Mexico in time for the Day of the Dead festival? That's in like, two weeks! You're on a shipping boat to China in the middle of November after you accidentally kill a drug lord? You join the North Korean circus? This is too much. You're not going to prove anything.”

“Let me show you what's going up tomorrow night in Philadelphia.” I was getting defensive. I opened my phone and showed her what lay in the future.

POST 1

POST 2—two hours later:

POST 3—one hour later:

POST 4—half hour later:

POST 5—half hour later:

“Sorry, Dave, but this is terrible. I get that you want to push it, but wait until you're out in the middle of nowhere. People know Philadelphia. It's too soon for this sort of thing.”

“Too soon?”

Christine paused and collected her thoughts.

“It's like when we launch a campaign,” she said. “You can't just launch it; you need to prepare people for it. It's like a long lead. You start to build an audience slowly at first with smaller activations, smaller programs—build equity. That way people will already be looking when you do something big.

“You need people to find this, to get a foundation of followers. Take a month of just walking along—let people still be excited by the fact that you quit your job before you start pushing it. If you're going to Philly, do the Rocky steps, visit friends, things like that. Make it uneventful, because if you go through with this like it is now, you're going to blow it.”

“I'll have to think about it.”

I walked home, kicking Christine's advice around in my head. I wanted to push this thing as far as I could as quickly as possible, but she was right—the initial shock of walking out on my life was enough to sustain people's interest for more than just a few days.

I'd been thinking of Facebook as this big, dumb thing that served no purpose other than showing me pictures of the burrito someone I barely remembered from high school was about to eat. My aim was to take something strange and then make it stranger—to confound and, really, to entertain.

But there were those notes I was still avoiding—those messages that showed me that Facebook was something more than just absurd. What I was pretending to do out on the road mattered to people, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore that.

The loose approach I'd originally envisioned—the rapid-fire sensationalism, the increasingly unlikely events—wasn't the right approach anymore. I was going about it all wrong. Fakebook was only a week old and I needed to adjust.

I thought back again to my MTV misadventure and how much I'd had to scramble to take that as far as I could.

“Hey, is this Dave…Sicker…ell…ee?”

“Cicirelli,” I said into the phone in my kitchen. “It rhymes with ‘sister-smelly.' Who is this?”

“Hey! This is Kadisha, from MTV.” She sounded beautiful and cool, and her call filled me with dread.

“…Yeah?”

“We got your email. We love your look. We love your style. Any chance you could come in and audition for the show tomorrow?”

I was more than a little stunned. I'd had no inkling that my hoax would ever work, and now I was panicking. I'd been called out on a lie before, but never by a major media conglomerate.

“…Uh, sure.”