Fakebook (9 page)

“Dave—”

I felt fantastic. Ted was right. I'd counted only two advantages in pulling this off: that the idea of Fakebook was brand new and that Facebook friendships were ambiguous by nature. But I finally understood there was a third advantage, one that I wasn't immediately comfortable with. The power of my own reputation. I had a résumé of oddities that stuck in people's heads, and now it was clear that the difference between the guy who would walk out on his life and the guy who would pretend to walk out on his life was too subtle for the casual observer.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, that the mockery I was making of myself proved to be more popular than the real me, but it was also liberating. If they simply believed me to be somehow heroically unhinged, then I thought I should own that conclusion…and challenge it with increasingly selfish behavior.

There truly were two of me. The real me was off the grid, living a life that was exclusively my own. The guy in the public's eye—the guy on Facebook—was someone else. Just in time for Halloween, I'd created a Frankenstein, stitched together from my own history and my audience's perceptions.

Nice to meet you, Fake Dave. Let's begin with a game of FarmVille.

As I quickly discovered, even fake FarmVille is boring.

If it had actually been true, my life as an Amish political prisoner would have been just one stop in a long history of absurd living situations.

When I was a last-minute transfer student at Rutgers, for example, I was randomly placed in what was left of third-year campus housing. In other words, I got stuck with people who couldn't fill their own dorm. You know, the cool kids.

So I was the fourth man in a suite full of LARPers. If you don't know what a LARPer is, you've probably done something right with your life. LARPers are live-action role players. Unlike traditional role players, who hide behind the walls of someone's basement, LARPers fly their (literal) flags in public. They make homemade foam weapons and medieval costumes, go to a park, and play “sword fight.” If one of the players gets hit in the leg by another player with a make-believe battle ax, he has to hop on one leg. It looks ridiculous if you're anywhere over the age of eleven, but exceptionally so if you are wearing a see-through beard and a homemade cape.

I learned something while sharing that dorm. I learned that dweebs are like zombies. In a one-on-one encounter you're faster than them, stronger than them, less awkward in social situations. But if they have numbers and you're in a confined space…shoot yourself before you're turned. I also learned that Hacky Sacks can be used to represent magic spells, but I digress.

The year after that, I lived with some friends in an off-campus house in New Brunswick. It wasn't the safest part of town, but if I had to get stabbed, I preferred the dignity of a real knife and not a fake sword.

I almost had my wish come true when my housemate threw a hobo party. To be clear, this wasn't a stick-and-bindle-themed party. This was a party where—without giving any heads-up to the housemates—one of the jazz dudes on the first floor invited the homeless of the community into our house to, like, listen to doo-wop or something.

And as altruistic a thought as that may have been, the reality of it was intense. Waking up to two dozen of New Brunswick's most mentally stable citizens, including a guy who mugged me, eating hamburgers and dancing to your housemate playing jazz flute…well, that's something you can't un-see.

And the year after that? The universe paid me back. Big time. It's best described by the first note I posted from the Amish farm.

I had hopes that the Amish chapter of Fakebook would look like these other chapters of my real life, where I'd bumble into an unexpected situation and perfectly unpredictable events would just present themselves to me. But, as I learned, the “waiting to see what happens” approach doesn't quite work when nothing's actually happening.

As it turned out, my masterstroke of turning Fakebook into a “real” version of FarmVille was a little too authentic. It was boring and pointless. Everyone hated it.

It felt so clever when I thought of it. In execution, it amounted to a lot of pictures of ducks. And people don't care about a duck winning a blue ribbon, even if they think it's a real duck.

Even readers who weren't my secret collaborators were vocally upset by it—a completely new development for Fakebook.

So after three weeks of pretending to actually do all the stuff FarmVille players only pretended to do, I realized I needed a new angle. But what?

The days of engaging my audience just by taking naps at furniture stores or camping out on playgrounds were clearly over—they needed something more. But the possibility of a new destination had been taken off the table: I was stuck at the farm.

Once again I was confronted with the challenge of real-time storytelling. To maintain that delicate balance between the outlandish and the plausible, there needed to be gaps between the marquee events. But to maintain audience interest, I had to keep up the momentum. So how does one spend time between hate crimes?

I did what any creative hack would do. I brought in a sexy dame.

Everyone loves gossip. Even the suggestion of a fight between my father and me gave Fakebook's audience a petty thrill. People like seeing things they aren't supposed to see, especially if what they see is something they could have an opinion on.