Can I See Your I. D.?

by Chris Barton

  Thanks to your disguise, what you can see—and nobody else can—is the contrast between life lived black and life lived white. And though you’ve known more than your share of unfamiliar, unsettling situations, none has been more bewildering than this one.

  You have felt at least as alien in your own land as you did in France and the Pacific. Nothing you’ve seen these past few weeks, however, can compare to what your eyes are witnessing here in Montgomery.

  You arrived in town by bus just before Thanksgiving. The inhumane treatment you’ve endured from whites has taken its toll, and—perversely, perhaps—you’ve decided to rejoin them.

  Even before you got here, you quit taking the Oxsoralen pills. Now you keep indoors during the daytime, staying out of the sun so that its rays can’t interact with the residual medication that would maintain your shade of brown. As the Oxsoralen and its resulting pigment work their way out of your system, you scrub at the stain you applied to your skin’s outer layers, shedding the darkened cells at the surface to make way for the pinker ones below.

  You put on a white shirt, but it makes your skin look too dark by comparison. So you put on a brown one—there, that’s better—and venture into the white part of town.

  There you find that all the comforts of a white man’s everyday life—a policeman’s friendly greeting, an open table in a restaurant—are once again available to you, though impossible to take for granted or enjoy.

  Now you stroll into a black neighborhood, and what do you find? The people you pass on the street are looking at you—the white John Howard Griffin—with the same hate-stare that the black John Howard Griffin had come to expect from whites. You no longer sense from Negroes a shared, unspoken understanding—that automatic intimacy is gone, reflexive resentment in its place.

  You aren’t dressed any differently than you’ve been previously on this journey, aren’t using a different name, aren’t claiming any different biographical details other than the obvious one. This is all about the color of your skin. And you just know that, why, if you were to suddenly be black again right now . . .

  Now there’s an idea. The novelty, the recklessness of it are invigorating.

  You think of it as “zigzagging.” You’ve returned with a bag in which you’ve stashed skin dye, a sponge, cold cream, and tissues. A comic-book superhero and his alter ego may transform in a phone booth, but the white you and the black you need a little more seclusion for your quick changes.

  Into an alley, white to black, and then you’re meandering about as a second-class citizen, befriended by Negroes and disregarded by whites.

  Then, behind some bushes by the side of a road, black to white, and you begin retracing your steps as a person of privilege, embraced by other whites and instantly distanced from Montgomery’s black citizens.

  The white people you walk among have no idea that you have lived as a black man. It would never occur to them that any white person would make such a choice. Darkening up to get easy laughs from a crowd, now, that’s one thing. But to assume the identity of one of them . . .

  And when you pass those same white people while playing the role of Negro, well, let’s just say it doesn’t call for much in the way of acting skills. Their hostility toward you—or, at the very best, neglect—has nothing to do with how you act or who you are, and everything to do with how you look.

  The same goes for the treatment you get while white among blacks. Would a closer inspection of you reveal a darker skin tone than that of other white passersby? A lingering hint of stain that could be misread as evidence of a Negro grandmother or great-grandfather? Perhaps. But you’ve learned enough of the distance black folks keep for their own self-preservation whenever they can, enough to know that none of them will get that close. You look white, and so you are white. It is as simple as that.

  But what if? What if someone recognizes your shoes as those worn yesterday by a black man who was—say!—just about your height? Or what if someone catches you in mid-transformation? What would they make of you? Would they quake with anger and dismay? Would getting caught in the act of crossing over or crossing back be even more dangerous than being black all the time?

  In the Pacific, you knew what it was like to have your life in jeopardy, and you’re not eager to experience that again. But you had a mission then, and you have a mission now. You suffered the consequences then, and you’ll risk now what you have to risk. During the ten years you lived in darkness, you came to understand that skin color could not possibly be less relevant. Perhaps if you carry on your masquerade just a little bit longer, the story you’ll tell will be just a little bit more powerful and enable that many more people to see the truth.

  You know what you have to do.

  You’ll be black again soon enough, at least for another day, but you’ll never again be blind.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

  JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN ended his experimental journey through the South on December 14, 1959. He returned home to Texas, where he began writing his account of that journey, eventually published as the book Black Like Me. Griffin was modest about his accomplishment: “This may not be all of it,” his book began. Black Like Me became a classic—and occasionally banned—work in American literature; it also prompted death threats. Griffin died of various ailments in 1980.

  RISING TEENAGE STAR?

  RILEY WESTON

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1998

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  You just wanted to work.

  You would have wanted to work, to be an actor, no matter what you looked like. The fact that you still look like a teenager, or close enough, shouldn’t be important. But it’s not just important.

  It’s everything.

  Biologically, you became a teenager in 1979, on the day that Kimberlee Elizabeth Seaman turned thirteen. Nearly two decades later, you go by the name of Riley Weston, but you’re still playing the part of an adolescent—not only on this L.A. set, but in your real life.

  Your audience is the biggest it’s ever been. By this time tomorrow, it’s going to be even bigger. Much bigger. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

  Here’s how it started:

  You grew up in little-bitty, two-stoplight, Pleasant Valley, New York. From the time you were, like, four years old, you wanted to be an entertainer, visible, on stage. In high school, you did drama, chorus, student government, and cheerleading, a dynamo just shy of five feet tall.

  And what do girls with dreams like yours do when they graduate high school? They go to L.A. They change their names to something like “Kimberlee Kramer.” They babysit to pay the bills, and they audition, audition, and audition some more.

  All that work started to pay off for you. You did commercials. You got the lead in a musical for troubled teens and their therapists. You were “Nice Car Girl” in a movie about competitive waterskiing, and “Rita Sabatini” in a couple of episodes of ABC’s Growing Pains. In 1993 you were in Sister Act 2, starring Whoopi Goldberg, which was huge for you.

  The thing is, they had you playing a kid. They all had you playing kids. Here you were entering your late twenties, and the roles you kept getting were, like, “Girl Number Whatever.” But you still looked the part, and if it was those parts or none at all, what were you going to do? Of course you took the work.

  And if you shaved a few years off your age so you could get a foot in the door at the auditions, well, who didn’t? That’s the way show business works—new names, fudged ages, closeted actors, fake boobs. That’s just Hollywood, and you were determined.

  Along the way, Brad Sexton became your manager. You also married the guy. He wasn’t a big name, but then, neither were you—maybe you’d get to the top together. And by last year, you each had some ideas about how to make that happen.

  It was one thing to still be getting teenage roles in your thirties. It was another to be getting crappy teenage roles, these insulting, one-dimensional parts. You were a serious actor, and you needed better scripts
, and if nobody out there was going to offer them to you, you would just have to write them yourself. You’d never done that before, but you knew you could figure out how. So you added another hyphen and became an actor-singer-writer.

  Nobody cares, really, how old a screenwriter is. Being thirty-one as a writer would be no big deal. But you couldn’t be a thirty-one-year-old writer and be an actor young enough to land the teenage parts you’d be writing for yourself. You needed one identity for both of those facets of your career.

  Since someone might notice that “Kimberlee Kramer” had been playing teenagers for a decade already, Brad persuaded you that this single identity should be a new one. Actors change their names all the time—again, no big deal. Except for one thing: Your new legal name, Riley Weston, would come with a fake I.D. showing that you were a teenager. Having a phony I.D. was not so normal. That was a little unusual, actually.

  But you tried it, and you wrote and wrote and wrote some more. For a long time, you didn’t do much else, and you came up with a really good spec script for the pilot episode of a TV drama. You called it Holliman’s Way, and it’s about these three teenage sisters, and Brad sent it to this producer who really liked it and wanted to meet with you. He didn’t even know how old you were supposed to be—he just liked your writing.

  At this meeting, the producer didn’t want to talk just about Holliman’s Way—he wanted to talk about you, and your background, and how this tiny eighteen-year-old actress with no credits to her name came to be sitting in a Hollywood producer’s office discussing her script. Kimberlee Kramer’s story wouldn’t do, of course—Riley Weston needed one of her own. So you told him you’d been homeschooled, and that your mom had brought you out here, that you’d arrived a couple of years ago, when you were sixteen.

  Things started happening fast. That producer sent your script to a director, and he liked it too—he didn’t know your age either—but that turned out to be a dead end. Brad kept shopping Holliman’s Way around, though, and this huge talent agency signed you up. And this past spring, they got you a six-month, $60,000 contract as a writer for a new TV series that would debut in the fall.

  Felicity.

  You were perfect for it—the main character is this girl Felicity who’s just going off to college, so having an eighteen-year-old writer on the staff made total sense. The other writers were all older than that. Even the star was already in her twenties. The two guys who created the show were about the same age as you—the same age you really are. Everybody working on the scripts had a lot more writing experience than you, but while sometimes you felt like you were just along for the ride, they turned to you for help in getting the characters’ late-adolescent voices right.

  You had to keep in mind that as far as they knew, you actually were an eighteen-year-old—and a fairly naive one at that. You needed to act the part—bringing in stuffed animals for your office, hanging up a Titanic poster, talking about boys. Everyone on the show threw a big party for you right there on the set for your nineteenth birthday.

  Playing that role all day long month after month was exhausting. They all knew that what you most wanted to do was act, but they had no idea how much acting you were already doing.

  The show was really coming together, though, and this past summer, before the first episode even aired, Felicity was getting a lot of buzz. Part of that was because the network figured that having an actual teenager on the writing staff of a show about teenagers would make a good story, and they pitched it to the media. But what Entertainment Weekly did was a little surprising.

  The magazine has this feature they do each June called “The It List,” which is a rundown of the hottest, most creative actors and writers and singers in the business. And out of everyone involved in Felicity, it was you they wrote about. They singled you out. When they interviewed you, you told them, “In many ways, I am Felicity,” though you never said exactly what those ways were—or weren’t.

  A lot of people read Entertainment Weekly—people outside Hollywood, in airports and supermarkets and doctors’ offices, everywhere. Riley Weston suddenly became a lot better known than Kimberlee Kramer ever was, and no one besides insiders had even actually seen Felicity yet. By the time the show did go on the air at the end of last month, something even bigger had come your way: a $300,000 deal to create shows about teenagers for Disney/Touchstone. Holliman’s Way might actually happen after all.

  Meanwhile, your big break as an actress came along. An episode of Felicity you helped write has this character—a visiting high school junior named Story Zimmer who’s totally single-minded about getting what she wants, which in her case is to go clubbing—and she’s you, really. She’s you. It’s a subplot, but she’s got four big scenes, and they’re all comic relief breaking up this really heavy storyline about date rape, and people always remember the funny parts. You auditioned for the role, and you nailed it.

  So, things are going great, right? Entertainment Weekly. Touchstone. The Wall Street Journal is interviewing you, and Entertainment Tonight is following you around the set. You’ve got a big role—you shot the first half of the Story episode just yesterday.

  And then . . .

  And then . . .

  And then somebody turns on you. Somebody turns you in. Someone starts calling the show’s producers and your talent agency and reporters and everyone and telling who you really are, how old you really are, how long you’ve been around. They even have your Social Security number, and they’ve been giving that out so that reporters can see the proof down at the courthouse where you changed your name.

  You don’t know who is making those calls. Or why.

  Why would they do that?

  You’re here in your dressing room on the set of Felicity, on what ought to be the greatest day of your whole life. You’ve worked for thirteen, fourteen years to have scenes like these to shoot—scenes that you’re at the center of, scenes where millions of people are going to pay attention to you. You ought to be getting ready for the shoot.

  But instead, you’ve got this message from a reporter. She’s the one who wrote the “Touchstone TV inks teen scribe” article last week, but today she seems so hostile. You know that the producers know—you knew before you even showed up today that you were going to have to face them.

  But you can’t deal with that right now. You just can’t worry about it. You’re a professional actor, and you’ve got to keep it together at least long enough to complete your scenes. And then—well, who knows what then?

  You know, though—this whole thing would really make an excellent TV movie. If only they would let you play yourself.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

  RILEY WESTON INSPIRED a brief stretch of soul-searching in Hollywood about the bias toward younger talent and why some sorts of showbiz deceptions are more acceptable than others. Weston’s own career suffered, and her later acting and writing efforts attracted much less attention than her work on Felicity. In 2006, as she entered her forties, she published a novel, Before I Go, about a teenage ice skater with terminal cancer. She hoped it would become a movie, starring herself.

  26-YEAR-OLD WITH SUFFICIENT FUNDS?

  FRANK W. ABAGNALE JR.

  SPRING 1964

  NEW YORK CITY

  Boy, that was easy.

  You’re no master con artist. You’re no master anything, actually. You’re just a sixteen-year-old runaway with a lot of gall. But it looks like that just might be enough to get by on.

  That money in your hand couldn’t have been easier to come by—you wrote a check out to “CASH,” the teller handed over the bills, and the bank is just microscopically worse off than it would have been if you’d never walked in the door. So what if, technically, there’s not actually any money left in the account behind that check? And so what if, truth be told, you’re not really the twenty-six-year-old the teller thought you were?

  You needed something the bank had, the bank needed it less than you did, and nobody got hurt. Easy.
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  Easy, that is, once you overlook the hard situation that got you where you are in the first place. No, not just hard—devastating. Your parents had separated for a while, and then one day, without warning, they called you out of school and down to family court. Before you’d fully grasped what was going on—and without so much as looking at you—the judge asked you which parent you wanted to live with after the divorce.

  What kind of question is that? Well, in your case, it’s the kind of question that you answered by running away, leaving Westchester County that very day and heading twenty-five miles south to Manhattan. You didn’t take much with you, but you did bring the essentials:

  Your driver’s license.

  A book of personalized checks for that $200 bank account your dad opened for you a while back.

  Your own six-foot-tall, prematurely gray-haired self.

  That’s right—gray-haired already, just like your dad. It started when you were fifteen, and it’s the number one reason folks always think you’re older than you really are. Not having any acne helps too.

  Anyway, you knew midtown Manhattan well from making deliveries for your dad’s stationery store at Fortieth and Madison. And when you got to midtown, all you wanted was to get by. You were even prepared to do it honestly, though that scam you pulled back home with your dad’s Mobil gas card—charging set after set of tires, then selling them back to the dealers for 2,500 bucks in cash—showed a certain flair for other approaches.

  You rented a boarding room by the day and started looking for a job. But what you found was a fairly limited set of career opportunities for a sixteen-year-old dropout—imagine that. So the obvious solution was to not be a sixteen-year-old dropout. Maybe you could have forged a high school diploma and passed yourself off as a precocious adolescent with a go-get-’em attitude. But you chose a simpler route. Why fake a whole document when you can fudge just one teensy little number?