Fakebook

by Dave Cicirelli

  “So I should say things like, ‘Be brave, stay safe, your family loves you’?”

  “You’d be that supportive?” I asked. “I’m glad to hear that, because I’ve actually been thinking about doing something like this for real.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Ralph responded sternly.

  “Yeah! Exactly! That kind of stuff, like how I should think about my future, act responsible…”

  “You should be thinking about your future! I’m serious. Maybe it’s time you at least look into getting your teacher degree—for the benefits. And then maybe consider getting yourself a nicer place to live.”

  I’d accidentally triggered an argument we’d been through a hundred times. I felt myself getting fired up, but then I remembered the coffee shop girl, who was probably still inside watching me. “All right.” I took a deep breath. “This is good stuff, but let’s save it for Facebook.”

  “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.

  Ralph Cicirelli Dave, Please answer your phone when I call. We need to talk. This idea is over the top. PS Your mother is worried sick. She will make some lasagna if you come home now.

  yesterday · Like

  Dave Cicirelli Calm down Ralph. I’m in a coffee shop now, relaxing before the second leg of my daily hike. A couple of things:

  First, stop leaving 13 minute long messages. They are draining my battery.

  Second, I’m not answering the phone because we’ll just talk in circles. Ralph…I’m an artist, and my life has gone stale.

  We artists feast on experiences. 401ks and dental plans and living in the box that society puts you in may be fine for some…no judgment here…but the life of a bohemian is what I want.

  I’ve already written three poems.

  yesterday via mobile · Like

  Ralph Cicirelli Dave, I won’t stop calling until you answer the damn phone! Your mother is beside herself. Neither of us buy into this bohemian BS.

  Being a vagabond doesn’t liberate you from the “box.” It just puts you in a different “box” that you may never be able to get out of. Don’t waste a promising future.

  22 hours ago via mobile · Like

  Dave Cicirelli I’m not going to spend my youth living for old age.

  I’m going to start calling you Mime from now on. You’re always trapping yourself and others in boxes that aren’t there, man! You can call me Houdini, because I’m an artist who just escaped. Escape artist. Get it? See, I’m already getting my creative juices back.

  21 hours ago via mobile · Like

  Ralph Cicirelli You may think you’re an escape artist but you’re really a BS artist.

  In 1972, when I was your age, I just got out of the Army, was married and was looking for a job to put some distance between me and poverty. If I was an “escape artist” you wouldn’t have had the opportunities you had. Time is fleeting and you’ll be where I am much sooner than you can imagine. Prepare for your future now. Don’t waste time kidding yourself that you’re liberated.

  PS. If you come home next week, we can go to “Coffee Sunday” at St. Leo’s.

  less than a minute ago via mobile · Like

  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?”

  Dave Cicirelli

  I can’t believe the furniture store let me sleep for four hours before they insisted I leave.

  Like · Comment · Share

  Justin Marshall Did you give anyone a dutch oven while you were there…?

  29 minutes ago via mobile · Like

  Dave Cicirelli The future owner of that couch will need a priest to undo the horror he’ll be bringing into his home.

  27 minutes ago via mobile · Like

  Matt Riggio Did you pack a small pillow or anything? jesus…

  18 minutes ago via mobile · Like

  Dave Cicirelli And yeah, I packed a pillow. I’m not an idiot.

  16 minutes ago via mobile · Like

  Matt Campbell Dave…I follow your daily posts like a junkie seeking a fix. Rest easy knowing that you’re helping my work days go much faster. I’m one of those stuck in the box…and the best I can do is support your journey by keeping abreast of it.

  just now via mobile · Like

  “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

  Dave Cicirelli

  I totally just ran into a Ben Franklin impersonator and am getting a beer with him.

  Like · Comment

  POST 2—two hours later:

  Dave Cicirelli

  Ok, we’ve had like 7 beers. He’s awsome. We’re pregramming at his place, and as you can tell he doesn’t fuck around.

  Like · Comment · Share

  POST 3—one hour later:

  Dave Cicirelli

  Benn insists on wearing th eoutfit. Says its gonnna get him laid!!?!

  Like · Comment

  POST 4—half hour later:

  Dave Cicirelli

  the MANN!!!

  Like · Comment · Share

  POST 5—half hour later:

  Dave Cicirelli

  I said we should fly a kite…The guy sobered up instantly. I’ve neverr seen anyone so focused.

  Like · Comment · Share

  “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.”

  “Great! See you then, 10:00 a.m.! Oh, one more thing,” Kadisha said. “We need you to record a tape of you at home. Be sure to use all those Limp Bizkit posters as a backdrop!”

  Uh oh…those posters didn’t exist. They were just images I’d grabbed off eBay and photoshopped in.

  “Hey, I just remembered. I have an exam tomorrow. Can we do it Thursday instead?”

  “No problem. See you then!”

  The next day I skipped class and crisscrossed the state, going from Spencer Gifts to Spencer Gifts, until I had bought up every Limp Bizkit poster in New Jersey. All the while I had my Discman playing through the car’s cassette deck, blasting a newly purchased Chocolate Starfish at top volume as I repeatedly yelled, “I LOVE LIMP BIZKIT. FRED DURST IS THE GREATEST POET OF OUR TIME.”

  I stayed up all night and crammed—making probably the world’s first Limp Bizkit flash cards. I hopped on every message board and every fan page I could find. I read through hundreds of pages of horrendous grammar until I started to absorb the conversation, until I began to believe those opinions were mine. Until I believed in Limp Bizkit.

  The email to MTV had started as a goof, just like my email to the Amish webmaster a couple years earlier. All of a sudden the goof became a challenge. And I almost made it happen. I got all the way to the final round of casting before I lost out to some dude with a very new-looking Fred Durst tattoo.

  Now Fakebook was a challenge just like those, and I didn’t want to come up short again. But it was different than the close call with MTV. It was much bigger, much more complex, and it had the potential to be…well, I wasn’t exactly sure what yet. I just knew that I was on to something. Something that might have been right and might have been wrong, but no matter what, it wasn’t something small.

  To do this right, I needed to understand it. I had to dive in and understand what exactly it was that I’d stumbled into. I looked at my personal messages, finally ready to confront them.

  Matt Campbell was a Facebook friend. In other words, he wasn’t really a friend at all.

  Sure, we were classmates once upon a time. But years later? He was just another piece of my news feed—part of that abstract mass of real-time minutiae.

  Facebook friends didn’t count. That’s what I kept telling myself. The people I cared about, I kept in touch with, right? So those I didn’t keep in touch with didn’t really mean anything. Which meant it didn’t matter what I pretended to do. To them I wasn’t even real anymore; I was just a particular arrangement of pixels on a screen. It was all entertainment, and I was providing it.

  At least that’s what I’d assumed when I started this—and it was an assumption that gave me permission to do Fakebook with a clear conscience. But now I was ready to have that assumption challenged. I logged on to Facebook and read Matt’s message to me.

  Matt Campbell → Dave Cicirelli

  Subject: Godspeed, Friend.

  I just suggested a bunch of friends that I know would love to follow your travels. Many of them are out around the country and may be valuable assets in your journey. I’m sure many of them will watch, and offer any help (tips or otherwise…lots of campers and outdoorsmen) or just support.

  I must say, I really admire what you’re doing. It is very “John Galt” and a huge life experience that some people never get to have. I am envious of your fortitude and newfound freedom…a word that many will never get to fully experience, so thank you.

  Also, if Ohio comes across your path, my wife knows TONS of really good, down to earth people much like yourself that would love, if nothing else, to just sit down for a couple beers one night and hear the tales of your trip so far.

  I will conclude with saying that it is a weird feeling to be almost emotionally attached to your venture. Like a “Truman Show” only with someone I knew while growing up (dating back to teasing Kelly in 7th grade). Your travels, in a small way, amount to my freedom as well.

  Godspeed friend.

  He was taking this so seriously. He seemed almost startled by how important my page was to him. To him, my Facebook page wasn’t a frivolous thing, but an inspiring and powerful experience that he felt like he was a part of.

  He was wrong. Facebook was stupid.

  I switched windows to Photoshop and looked at Party Ben Franklin. The photos were funny, and I wanted to make people laugh, dammit. The absurdity of all this was why I wanted to do Fakebook in the first place. That’s what had captured our imagination at the Dublin House over Labor Day weekend.

  Posting the Ben Franklin images would be taking a stand—staying true to my belief that Facebook was just a silly diversion, something that deserved to be seen for how superficial it really was. I wasn’t going to be pressured by Christine’s criticism or Matt Campbell’s support.

  I switched back to Facebook to upload the first picture.

  But in that split second I inadvertently reread the line about “teasing Kelly in the seventh grade.”

  I used to have a crush on Kelly, who used to live next door to Matt. I’d almost forgotten all about that.

  I sat back in a room illuminated only by backlit words of support from someone I
barely knew, but knew well enough to spark a fifteen-year-old memory that had all but faded away. He’d written a sentence that only had meaning between him and me.

  It suddenly occurred to me that Facebook isn’t just a website. It’s an experience, and a deeply strange, deeply personal one. It involves almost everyone you know and everyone you once knew.

  Updates posted by ex-girlfriends living on the other side of the world, your own mother commenting on photos of last night’s debauchery, a real-time review of a McDonald’s McGriddle from your tenth-grade lab partner—it’s laughable on the surface. But it’s also hard to ignore the feelings stirred by an ex-girlfriend’s update, how much this new transparency has changed your relationship with Mom, how that review keeps an old friend from fading out of memory. The relationships may not have evolved in years, but with Facebook, they haven’t disappeared either. It’s the cold storage unit of friendships, keeping them on hold, just one compelling post away from revival.

  I’d decided to fake my profile because I was looking at Facebook as a whole, but that was a mistake. Everything looks smooth from a distance. But I was tapping into something much less frivolous and much more personal than I’d thought. It was morally complex but also irresistibly compelling. I didn’t know what I was on to, exactly…but I knew I was on to something.

  Christine was right. Bar crawling with Ben Franklin was too much. It could destroy the project before I even had a chance to understand it. And I wasn’t quite willing to have Fakebook fall apart over something this silly, at least not yet.

  So instead, my Facebook profile had a pleasant, uneventful few days in Philadelphia, enjoying the virtual hospitality of a friend and keeping Fakebook in a holding pattern.

  Dave Cicirelli