Fakebook

by Dave Cicirelli

  At my college, it was all slobs, from top to bottom. Even the professors looked like they were just as likely to sweep up papers as they were to grade them. We were townies. We came to class, then we left. That was that. And when we came and left, it was either very slowly, back and forth from the Shadow Lake retirement community, or very quickly and very loudly, in a modified black, yellow, or purple Honda Civic. Gearheads and blue-hairs ruled the campus. The parking lot looked like the set for the next Vin Diesel movie, with a few Ford Crown Victorias thrown in for good measure.

  The blue-hairs were just trying to have productive post-career lives, and I supported that. They’d earned it. But the gearheads were breaking my heart, working crappy full-time jobs while taking only two or three units every semester, putting all their money into spoilers and neon lights for their Civics. Five years passed, and these guys could have earned enough credits and money to join me at Rutgers, but instead they got bucket seats.

  I’m not trying to damn the student body. It wasn’t exclusively coasting gearheads and stir-crazy senior citizens. It was a cross section of everyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to a four-year school. It was people taking a second shot at education or saving money or staying close to home because of family obligations. In all fairness, it really was a place that provided opportunity.

  None of that, however, reduced the drawbacks of such an eclectic student body. You had no way of knowing if the cute nineteen-year-old you were sitting next to in poly sci was actually a married mother of three about to celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday.

  Inevitably, my social life suffered, and downtime began to center around jogs on the winter boardwalk and watching repeats of Boy Meets World (which I found oddly poignant). It was an isolated time.

  But when summer finally arrived, it felt like a return to form. My friends were back. We were lifeguards and cashiers again, spending our nights hanging out and driving to parties before ending up at some diner. Just like always.

  One night, as the summer died down, we found ourselves on an empty beach.

  Every August seemed to have a night like this. We’d skip the diner and go to one of our beaches—the local spots that existed under the radar of the Staten Island and North Jersey BENNYs who migrate south. These beaches weren’t particularly hidden or especially pristine. The weather-worn sand fences and odd stacks of litter surrounding the “Swim at Your Own Risk” signs gave the beach a certain lived-in quality. It was lived in by us.

  I loved those nights. After a long summer of work and play, we Jersey Shore kids would get together and catch our breath one last time before the season ended and we had to return to real life. It always felt the same as every other year—except this time, it wasn’t.

  We weren’t chatting about preparing for another year of high school or facing the great unknowns of college life. They weren’t unknowns anymore. My friends were talking about returning to people I’d never met and places I’d never been. We were finally talking about experiences we hadn’t experienced together.

  We were the class of 2001, but this was 2002. People hadn’t entirely moved on yet, but they’d begun to move apart. Most of us had already learned that the world was bigger than the semicircle we’d formed in the sand.

  I didn’t have enough perspective yet; otherwise I might have been able to find some significance in the setting—a connection to the sound of the changing tide, or maybe a sense of purpose in the Manhattan skyline just over the horizon. Maybe. I don’t know.

  What I do know is that a week later I was sitting on the same beach, alone.

  Ted finally called back.

  “Oh man, Cicirelli. You’re a mad genius!” he said. “People were arguing about Fakebook all night. Steve was loving it—he buried you every chance he got.”

  “So people are talking about it?”

  “Absolutely. I mean, everyone’s known about it for a while, but now they’re finally bringing it up. People wouldn’t stop bugging me about you.”

  “But not a lot of people are posting.”

  “No? I’m not sure…”

  “Well, it can be awkward. Like when my dad started leaving comments, people backed off—they weren’t sure if it was any of their business.”

  “Your dad is great! The bit about law school? Classic.”

  Ralph Cicirelli If you had gone to law school like I wanted, you could have ended up with the farm rather than just working on it.

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  Joe Lennon This is the best facebook page/blog in existence.

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  “Yeah, he’s crushing it,” I said. “Hey, I threw out some crazy stuff. I need to know, what are people thinking?”

  “Well, there’s a lot of debate.”

  Ted’s natural inclination toward diplomacy had served us well so far. Whenever someone asked him about Fakebook, he’d feign uncertainty about the things he’d heard, never painting either of us into a corner. He let people get comfortable with their own reactions and delicately swayed them to accept the uncertainty rather than dig for answers.

  “A couple of days ago, there was a ‘good for Dave’ consensus,” Ted said. “Now people are asking, ‘What the hell’s going on with Dave?’ People are on all sides of it. You’re a hero or you’re going insane, depends on who you ask.”

  “That’s perfect.”

  I wanted this thing to be hard to swallow, wacky enough so that people would begin to question the wisdom of my fake actions. I wanted debate, and I was thrilled that the conversation was about my motivations and not the iffy quality of my Photoshop work. “Does anyone suspect it’s fake? I mean, I cited laws that don’t even exist.”

  “Not really…people have said things like ‘I almost don’t believe this is happening,’ and they’ll doubt it for just a moment—I can tell—then just decide they’re going to believe it anyway.”

  “I can’t get over how nerve-racking it is. This was supposed to be stupid fun, not so intense!”

  “I know…I think you’re the only one who could pull it off. Everyone keeps saying, ‘If there’s anyone this would actually happen to, it’s Dave.’”

  “Wait? What? What do you mean? You realize I’m writing this guy as an idiot, right?”

  “Dave, I’m not sure how to put it, but you’ve always done your own thing. I mean, the Amish story was based on actual events, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know…but people think I’m crazy?”

  “No, they don’t. Well, they kind of do. But they like what you’re doing. They say you’re like the guy from Into the Wild.”

  “That guy? The story ends with him dying alone in his van! Am I the only jerk who took that as the moral of the story?”

  Ted laughed, but he could sense my discomfort. “Dave, it’s not a bad thing. But yeah, people brought up a few stories. Matt Carew claimed he saw you in the audience of the Maury Povich show a few months ago, for example.”

  “He saw that?”

  “So you were actually on the show?”

  “Yeah, me and Eckhoff went. We were betting on the baby daddy results. It was maybe the most fun I ever had.”

  “This is what they’re talking about!”

  “It was so much fun! Why wouldn’t I want to—”

  “But it’s not normal, Dave. He didn’t see you at the Knicks game; he saw you on the Maury show. And you do that sort of stuff all the time—Elliott said he thought you were still living with those French women in Chinatown.”

  “I guess it’s been a while since I talked to him.”

  “Dave, listen. Senior year, did you or did you not get thrown out of art class for the whole semester?”

  “Ha! Yeah, that definitely happened. And I won the s
chool’s art award that night, too.” I perked up out of pride for the decade-old victory. I hated that teacher. “She was pissed.”

  “You were the art guy, and you told the art teacher to fuck off. People don’t remember the details. They just think—this is a guy who could do this shit. And Dave, you love those stories. They’re the first ones you tell. You said you wanted people to think you’d gone crazy. It’s working.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said to Ted. “I was ready for people to think that I was going crazy. But I wasn’t prepared to find out people thought I’d been crazy all along.”

  “Hey,” Ted continued, “you think it’s easy for the rest of us? People think Steve and I are complete asses because of what we’ve been posting about you.”

  “I’m sorry, Ted. I didn’t think it through…”

  “It’s all right. We wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t funny. Actually, Steve was reveling in the attention. The reality is, people didn’t think you were crazy, they just didn’t think much about you. It’s why they aren’t shocked that you’re acting crazy, and why they aren’t shocked that Steve and I are dicks.”

  “Yeah, it’s a Black Swan thing.”

  “The ballerina movie?”

  “No, that’s something different. Black Swan is a book—one of the ideas it asserts is that a million things are happening all at once, and it’s only after the fact that we pick and choose the details that are important. We find evidence for an event once it’s already occurred and convince ourselves it was obvious all along.”

  “Yeah, exactly. You tell people you’re crazy, so they remember the crazy things about you. And so what? Since when do you care what people think?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Screw it. I’ll let them have the idiot they think I am.”

  “Right.”

  “They’re doing exactly what I wanted them to, anyway—they’re connecting the dots for me. They think I’m nuts, great. That just gives me freedom.”

  “Go for it, Dave!”

  “And I’m not nuts, I’m an artist! This thing I’m doing is too big for them. It’s Warholian…or, no, I’m like Banksy, and this is twenty-first-century street art. Instead of brick and plaster, I’m vandalizing their Facebook walls…tagging them with lies to reveal a greater truth!”

  “Oh jeez…”

  “I’m trailblazing. No one ever said it was easy being stuck ahead of your time, waiting for the world to catch up. Someday they’ll get here, but by then, I’ll be somewhere else!”

  “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.

  Dave Cicirelli

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  Dave Cicirelli

  I’ve been having a lot of fun lying to the Amish. They have a vague sense of what technology exists out there, but no real grasp of it (kind of like my mom). I told them that Twitter was an internet sex act, and that’s why it’s popular with celebrities. Easily the highlight of last night’s dinner.

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  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.

  October 25: Courting Possibilities

  When I first lived in NY, it was in a Chinatown loft full of European strangers. It was a great chapter in my life that I owe entirely to diving into uncharted waters.

  I’ll never forget that first Friday night. The apartment hadn’t filled up its eight (yes…eight) bedrooms yet, and it was just me and two of my new French roommates—looking for a place to eat on our first Friday night as New Yorkers.

  I volunteered—after all, I knew a few places from my bridge and tunnel excursions. So I led us all to Peep, a Thai restaurant with a cool gimmick. The doors to its bathrooms are one-way mirrors. You can look out the bathroom stall, right into the restaurant, but no one can see in. It’s strange, kind of interesting, and totally voyeuristic. Peep, to my New Jersey eyes, felt like a true Manhattan experience.

  What I didn’t realize was that “Peep,” to French ears, was slang for blowjob.*

  Just imagine moving to France, and this strange Frenchman who sleeps under the same roof you do, he takes you to a “great little place” he knows, Fellatio’s. Trying to explain that you’re not a pervert is an uphill battle in a restaurant where the bathrooms let you watch people eat while you poop.

  I had no idea what the next two years would hold. I didn’t know anything about the other 40 or so people who would pass through that crazy apartment, or the parties we’d throw or the friends I would make. H
ow could I?

  All I knew was the feeling I had. A feeling that meant “you have a completely different life than you had on Monday.”

  It’s a feeling I just felt again…while touching an udder. Here’s to possibilities.

  *Pipe is the proper spelling of the French slang, though it is pronounced peep.

  Ted Kaiser Just make sure that's an udder you're grabbing. There are bulls on that farm too.

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  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.

  Dave Cicirelli

  This duck won a blue ribbon. Respect.

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  Steve Cuchinello I’ve seen better.

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  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.

  Matt Campbell → Dave Cicirelli

  I feel a bit disappointed by the reporting since the whole Amish debacle. There have been so many questions I have that I feel just have not been answered to make this whole event make more sense.

  What are the terms of your servitude? Are you sleeping in the barn or in some Amish bed? How is the food? Besides fireplaces what kind of work are you doing? Do you grow your own tobacco and have a pipe with the men in the evening? Can they mix meat and cheese between bread? Do the Amish have pets; what kind?