In The Dark
by Heater Case
I practically had my own booth and I rarely paid for a drink, but I’d buy the dancers drinks and or shell out for a bottle of champagne to celebrate somebody’s boob job. A tuck here, an implant there, I earned my keep. In addition, the dancers and bouncers were always on my guest list for where I worked up the street. It was a comfortable relationship in the predaceous back alley world of showbiz. I got to get drunk in a dark corner and casually shoot the breeze with half-dozen naked women. They got to go to places on their nights off where they enjoyed special treatment.
On one very indistinguishable evening, I popped through the back door and plopped into one of my usual shadowy recesses. A new waitress was making the rounds and I didn’t say anything when she charged me for my drink. I was a couple of rounds into my appreciation of my surroundings, the surreal Dante’s Inferno madness yet dullness of it all, when the waitress came back all too soon.
I almost didn’t recognize her. I saw her face as it really was, not the semi-expressive mask that she wore when dealing with a thousand idiots a day. She leaned into the booth with what seemed to be a cautious smile. Her eyes were alive and looking, for the first time, deeply into mine. As her lips parted to speak, she moved closer still to within an inch of my ear. I definitely had the feeling that she wasn’t going to ask me if I wanted another drink.
“Are you who I think you are?” she whispered.
Sure enough, I thought, somebody clued her in and she wanted to apologize for charging me. I didn’t want to be a prick, so I threw back a friendly, “Who do you think I am?”
She gave a quick look around the room and leaned in again, “I can’t think of your name, but you’re my son’s favorite wrestler! He’d kill me if he knew that I met you and didn’t get your autograph!”
Another man might’ve been angry. Another man might’ve been hurt. Another man definitely would have been confused but, to me, it was just another episode in the Clone Saga. I was actually long overdue.
The simplest explanation is as follows. It was the early ‘50’s and WWII, the Korean Conflict and the Cold War had accelerated technology by leaps and bounds. Rocketry, computers and medical research were rampant. Orwell, Huxley and Verne were all chuckling from either side of the grave. An army of test tube babies was probably on several drawing boards and, possibly in one instance, a fact. Bureaucratic mismanagement or termination of funds might have sent the commenced experiment into oblivion. Either that or my biological father screwed around a lot.
In both scenarios, the result is the same. Since the late ‘60’s, I have been regularly approached by hundreds of seemingly sane humans who absolutely insist that I’m someone of whom I’ve never heard. I’m not talking about strangers who’ve seen me on stage or liaisons from alcoholic blackouts.
I’m talking about people who run across Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, shouting, “Freddie! Freddie! It’s so good to see you!” I’m talking about guys in rush hour traffic who roll down their windows and yell, “Hey, Joey! Howda fuck are ya! Oh, Jeez, pal, I’m sorry! I could’ve sworn on my mother’s grave, may she rest in peace, that you were Joey Disangelopolonzapoloozio!”
I’m talking about people in the aisles of grocery stores in East Bumfuck who stop and stare at me as if they’ve just seen a ghost. Beautiful women have approached me in bars and have asked me if I still play the saxophone (I don’t) or if I still work at the transmission shop (never did). I’m sure they could’ve come up with better lines if they just wanted to break the ice.
A friend of mine showed me a postcard that he brought back from Paris. The photo was of a busy street market, a circus of fruit and vegetable carts engulfed by haggling buyers and vendors. In the foreground was a fellow selling bread. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought it was me.
As time went by, and as the Global Village shrank, I found myself in more parts of the world and more people found themselves wherever I happen to be. I was up to about ten cases of mistaken identity a year.
One of the most frequent mishmashes is that I’m a Viet Nam vet. I’ve had guys insist that I was in their old platoon. I’ve had drinks sent to me from guys yelling, “Hill 17!” or something to that effect. I’m not trying to undermine the integrity or sanity of these people. I really looked, acted and talked like somebody they knew.
The waitress was waiting for an answer.
There’s a time to stand up for one’s self and a time to know when to shut the fuck up. What prompted the lungfish to say, “Hey, you guys, y’all go back. I’m gonna hang out here for a while.”
Then, again, there was that morning that General Custer should have stayed in bed. But there’s also that gray area that makes up ninety percent of our lives. You make up these rules as you go along and even those rules were meant to be broken.
I looked at her, then around the room and then back into her eyes.
“If I am who you think I am, and I’m not saying I am, there’s a morality clause in my contract. Y’see, I’m one of the good guys and I’m not supposed to be in a place like this. But tell your son that, yes, you did meet me. You met me and I told you to tell him to stay in school and listen to his mother."
She seemed happy enough with that.
And the world still turned.
At least until my friend and I were mistaken for two of America’s ten most wanted and were held by the US Marshals for the better part of the day. That’s another story for another time.
