Fakebook

by Dave Cicirelli

  Thank you for all your support over these past six months. I’m happy to have traveled with you.

  Tara B. It’s been one hell of a ride (and we’re just readers). I mean it with all of my heart when I say: Good luck!

  about an hour ago · Like

  Pete Garra Amazing. Seriously kudos.

  about an hour ago via mobile · Like

  Elizabeth Lee Good luck david

  about an hour ago via mobile · Like

  Matt Campbell Wow

  32 minutes ago via mobile · Like

  Jay Patterson For what its worth man, you may have deterred some of us in the same “wanderlust vs rut” mentality of taking the same crooked travels. And even tho i barely know you its been good reading about your adventures, good luck with Fatherhood man!

  29 minutes ago via mobile · Like

  Peter Glass Hey Dave, haven’t really seen you since high school, but just wanted to wish you all the best, good luck man.

  5 minutes ago via mobile · Like

  Greg Cicchelli “Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move”

  less than a minute ago via mobile · Like

  With Fake Dave’s story over, and my confession still on the horizon, I could focus on my last two days at Handler PR.

  Or at least I tried to. My voice mail was full of messages from Freddy and LiveWired, trying to get me to come in early or do assignments at night. It wasn’t an option—I’d already agreed to start that upcoming Monday, skipping out on any sort of downtime between jobs. I wasn’t willing to now have these jobs overlap.

  The guy’s demeanor changed once I took the job. He was demanding, but I still kind of liked him. And I took him up on his offer of talking frankly by affirming I wasn’t available until the last week of March. I owed Handler my two weeks’ notice, and I was going to make sure they got it.

  There are plenty of stories about horrible bosses and horrible jobs and the types of skewed versions of lifelong dreams that a job offered. This was never one of them.

  On a professional and artistic level, I was completely at peace with my decision to leave. On a personal level, I was devastated. I was saying good-bye to a lot of friends—friends who, over the last six months, had been especially important to me.

  And as the last two days wrapped up—with me putting the contents of my desk into one of my completed superhero shippers—and as I stacked dozens of collaborative projects into this 20-inch cube, each press kit or invitation or stupid-awesome bobblehead was a memory. Feeling none of the day-to-day pressure of approaching deadlines and client demands, it was hard not to feel nostalgic.

  That feeling was only compounded by the happy hour my boss threw for me on my last day. It was a great time, and it kept going well past the original venue. Christine and Joe were there until the very end and even bought me the greatest slice of pizza a dollar has ever been spent on.

  Come Saturday morning, it was over—with Friday only lingering as vague memories and a sharp headache. It occurred to me, as I took some aspirin and tried to salvage what I could of my two-day stretch of unemployment, that it really was over in more than one way.

  Both PR and fictional profiles were behind me. I was officially out of the business of creating public faces.

  In my life before and after Fakebook, I’ve had a lot of bosses. And in my experience, there’s usually a line or a moment within the first few days that speaks volumes of the relationship that’s about to unfold. I once had a creative director who welcomed me into his office. He had the classic album In the City by The Jam playing out of his speakers and an autographed photo of legendary New Jersey Devils goaltender Martin Brodeur on his desk.

  “This,” I thought to myself, “is a good sign.”

  His replacement, however, canceled our initial meeting because she had to deal with her “au pair quitting via text message.”

  “This,” I thought to myself, “is a bad sign.”

  But as far as red flags go, little compares to “Where’s your computer?”

  “I’m not sure, Freddy…” I said somewhat confused, as I got up from the couch in reception of LiveWired to greet him. “Where did you set it up?”

  “You mean you didn’t bring yours?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, completely dumbfounded. “Were you expecting me to donate the use of my personal computer?”

  “Donate? I’m paying you! What happened to the one you brought on your interview?”

  “It’s at home…with the shirt I wore that day, too…”

  “Just bring it tomorrow. Come on, I’ll show you to your desk.”

  I follow him in a bit of a daze, trying to process what I’d just learned—attempting to figure out how this fit into the vision of building an art department that I was sold on.

  We walked past the large conference room I was interviewed in and past a dozen cubicles in the quiet, early morning office. We turned a corner and walked down a small hallway.

  “Welcome,” Freddy said, “to LiveWired.”

  “Is this storage?” I asked.

  “What? No.”

  I couldn’t believe what I saw—it was like I’d stepped into an office-themed episode of Hoarders.

  The room was cramped and overflowing with boxed and unboxed crap—every kind of cheap garbage merchandise you could imagine—from pocket knives to fake leather wallets to those computer mice that drew me to the gig. Mounds and mounds of inventory were piled onto shelves, in bins, in freestanding drawers, on desks, and on the floor. It was less an office than a Dumpster.

  “This is the office?” I asked again. “Then what did we just walk through?”

  “That’s another company. We rent this space from them.”

  It was four days until my Facebook confession, but I suddenly began to question if my real life should be public again.

  “I didn’t realize…”

  “It’s fine. Here’s your desk.” Freddy waved his arms toward a precariously stacked pile of LiveWired-brand iPad “armor” cases. I carefully walked toward it, afraid too hard a step would cause an avalanche of accessories. I took a deep breath and began to stack them in some semblance of order and structural integrity.

  After careful excavation, I found the tabletop and sat down at my chair—promptly banging my knees and causing an empty armor case to fall three and a half feet onto the floor, cracking on impact with the soft carpet.

  “Careful!” Freddy blurted out. “I can’t have you breaking all of our samples!”

  “Sorry! I banged my knees on something.” I looked under my desk to discover it wasn’t a desk at all. It was a bookshelf. And I banged my knees because bookshelves have shelves.

  Soon after I removed a bunch of LiveWired keyboards to give myself a small cavity in which to place my legs, one of my new coworkers arrived. He was setting up a laptop on the bookshelf next to mine.

  “Hi, I’m Dave,” I said, still clinging to my “first day at camp” enthusiasm. “The new designer.”

  “Hi, I’m James,” he responded somewhat meekly. We reached over a pile of computer mice stacked between our shelves and shook hands. “Head of product development.”

  “Oh great!” I said. “We’ll probably be doing a lot of work together.”

  “Let’s hope so,” he said. He hands me the power cord to his Dell. “Do you mind plugging this in?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Is that a PC? I was hoping we’d be on Macs. That’s what I’m used to.”

  “I’ll be on a Mac soon,” he said. “I’m saving up.”

  It was Thursday night, and my first week at LiveWired was almost over.

  I decided to walk home after our product review meeting—the full forty blocks and eight avenues. It didn’t feel sufficient to decompress from that crystallization of my new company.

  How to explain it…

 
You know how, near the checkout line at a T. J. Maxx, you’ll see the world’s crappiest pocket knife packaged with the world’s crappiest binoculars and, like, a carabiner? And they’d call it something like “Extreme Outdoor Adventure Kit,” and they’d sell it for $7.99, and your grandma would buy it for you, and it’d ruin your birthday?

  These were the people responsible for that product.

  It was a knock-off firm. They’d buy something that exists, send it to a factory in China, and make a lower-quality version of it. It was the opposite of creativity. It was theft.

  And the whole thing wasn’t just disheartening but degrading.

  During the meeting, Freddy began clapping his fingers into his palm. It was only after he increased in speed that I realized it was the “gimmie” motion of an infant. I got up, walked a few steps toward him, and nudged a flashlight a few inches toward his flapping fingers.

  You just felt…humiliated.

  Somewhere around Thompson Square Park, the weight of my personal laptop began to pinch my shoulder.

  “We’ll discuss it next week,” Freddy had said to me today when I told him I wouldn’t bring my computer in indefinitely. “But if we buy you the computer, you can provide your own software, right? I don’t care if you steal it.”

  Freddy and I had a lot to discuss—including a ten-thousand-dollar salary discrepancy.

  This whole thing was an epic disaster. It wasn’t like I could be happy just to have a job—I’d had a job. And I quit it because Freddy convinced me this was a better opportunity.

  And now I realized that the qualities I’d found so endearing when I was interviewing—that he was so quick to tell people that he “never tells a lie,” and why he could so proudly handle people calling him “a piece of shit”—had a simple explanation. Practice. He’d had lots and lots of practice.

  I tried to briefly forget about it. Tomorrow was Friday. And Friday was my birthday.

  And tonight…well, tonight was April Fools’ Day. And that meant I had something important to do.

  With a sore shoulder and a coffee shop across the street, I decide this was as good a spot as any to confess the Fakebook fraud. So I grabbed a coffee and sat down at a table. I pulled out my laptop. Lifting the screen woke it from sleep mode and presented me with the LiveWired files I’d been working on. An intense frustration swelled up in me. I closed my eyes tightly and inhaled.

  So this is it, I thought to myself. This is my penance.

  I’d fooled my friends and family into believing I was on the move—and at the end of it, I was fooled into moving. Like Fake Dave, I even ended up in a place without computers.

  I closed the window with LiveWired work and opened the Word doc I’ve been preparing for the past week.

  This was the moment I’d been dreading for half a year, but also one I’d been looking forward to. This was the moment when I could finally rejoin my community—when I could rejoin the world and reclaim my reputation. This was where I no longer had to pretend my life was this “leap-before-you-look” disaster.

  Except now it actually was.

  Served me right for believing something I read on the Internet.

  APRIL 1: It Was All a Dream…

  What a crazy dream I just had…

  …April Fools…?

  So all that crazy stuff that’s been going on in my life…none of it is true. It’s all been a six-month social experiment, a hoax.

  I never faced hate-crime charges in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, nor did I sway a young, beautiful Amish girl into joining me on my journey. I never wandered nude through the desert while suffering from extreme dehydration and rabies-induced hallucinations. I did not fall victim to the sly-tongued, brainwashing ways of a cult’s recruiters. And there is certainly no baby on the way.

  So why did I spend so much time destroying my reputation?

  I think most of us share a collective anxiety about how Facebook has changed the social paradigm. There is no such thing as falling out of touch anymore. Over time our relationships just devolve into newsfeeds that nurture both voyeurism and narcissism. We select a version of ourselves and present it to an audience with every new post. I find this fascinating, and wanted to exploit and subvert this phenomenon.

  But to try and say that what I did was completely out of intellectual curiosity or artistic impulse is not true. To be honest (for once), my motivation was mostly a love of mischief. There is nothing to stop someone from simply making stuff up.

  I hope people realize that I meant no ill will. People enjoyed reading it, right?

  Against a backdrop of boring nonsense in all of our news feeds, I think there’s a place for a page where anything can happen. I don’t think we even scratched the surface of Facebook’s potential as a new storytelling medium, but I think we are among the first to discover that it exists at all.

  Who could have guessed that a reaction to Farmville would blossom into the first attempt at real-time, social media storytelling? And it was social. We all played a part in making this thing something special. It wasn’t just the knowing collaborators who drove the plot forward in the message section, but also everyone who didn’t know this was a hoax. If you read the page, if you left comments, or if you did good old fashioned gossip about “what’s going on with Dave,” you were a part of it.

  It’s rare to be part of something that breaks ground, and flips an experience that hundreds of millions of people share. Now that it’s been done once, it can never again be done for the first time.

  So…April Fools. This profile is once again a real one. I’m done with tricks. You have my word, and you know what that’s worth.

  Also, tomorrow is my birthday. I love you.

  But I didn’t post it…not yet. I sat there, looking out the window toward Thompson Square Park at dusk, with my cursor hovering over the Submit button and my index finger over the Enter key.

  It was a feeling I was familiar with but still not quite used to. This confession was floating in limbo—it both had already happened and was still to come. But this time, the feelings of nervousness and embarrassment and fear of judgment from my audience—my friends, my Facebook friends, my family, my old colleagues—faded into something else.

  Six months ago, when my finger first lingered over the Enter key, and just before I gave the first words of Fakebook life and allowed them to broadcast to the news feeds of an unsuspecting audience, I’d had no notion of the consequences of what I was about to do. I didn’t think about the people I’d have to avoid or the feelings I’d hurt. I didn’t consider the places I couldn’t go and the events I couldn’t take part in. I didn’t consider the many hours a week I would be devoting to my second life, or how I’d have to be ever vigilant of exposure.

  I was also completely ignorant to how intertwined my real life and my online persona were—of how much of what was on that screen was actually a part of me. I underestimated how impactful our separation would be and didn’t consider what it meant to be estranged from my community—a community which would make me into an undeserving folk hero. I didn’t realize how it would complicate old relationships, and what an obstacle it would be in trying to form new ones.

  And I certainly never imagined it would change lives.

  But now I had experienced it. I had told Elliott that what makes Fakebook interesting is the total separation of real and fake life. I was wrong. That’s impossible to do. In truth, that was me up on people’s walls. It was the side of me that likes to push things—that challenges authority and assumptions. Fake Dave was a compilation of various sides of me, many of which I thought I had discarded for the sake of growing up.

  But in truth, those sides of me were just an Enter key away. Pressing down would end this and reconnect my selves on both sides of the screen. We’d both blindly leaped into a disaster, and not for the first time. But for all Fake Dave’s flaws, he’s always had
the guts to leap again. And that was a quality I needed again.

  So I pushed Enter.

  John Muscari How do we know that this note is not the real April Fools’ joke and you are using it to disguise how you are once again running away from reality by abandoning your unborn child?

  4 hours ago via mobile · Like

  Erin Brennan Hanson I’m with John. I call bull$hit.

  4 hours ago via mobile · Like

  David Thomas whichever version is true i’ve enjoyed it maybe as much as you have. As people we both cherish the opportunity to be connected and protected from others and ourselves. it is a true jewel to be able to create our own destiny. Got fired? Just call it artistic differences:) Got dumped? You’re looking for new opportunities:)

  4 hours ago via mobile · Like

  David Thomas Also…Rabbit Rabbit.

  4 hours ago via mobile · Like

  Greg Cicchelli Wow. You put an absurd amount of work into this joke. You got me, I still think you should submit the script as a sequel to Into The Wild.

  4 hours ago via mobile · Like

  Elizabeth Lee I think this was and is awesome. And thank you for giving me the Fakebook fairytale happy ending (as odd as it was, it satisfied the hopeful girl in me).

  4 hours ago via mobile · Like

  Joe Moscone Dave, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to continue writing disapproving, cantankerous comments on your wall? I’ve come to enjoy it. And to everyone that bought into your story/lies…well, let’s just say that I feel bad for stupid people.

  4 hours ago via mobile · Like

  Brian Eckhoff Fine, Dave, let’s put all our cards on the table. My family isn’t Amish, and I came to the conclusion that Ben Franklin was nothing but an Illuminati stooge a couple years back. But mutual deception has taken us this far…All the best to you, Kate and baby Zipper.

  3 hours ago via mobile · Like