june 2007

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The Man Who Would be Me

by Bob Knox
 
 

I was sitting in a coffee shop, head buried in a newspaper, when a man came up to me and said, “Rickie?”

I looked up.

“Rick Johnson,” he persisted, sounding a touch less certain.  I disabused him and he went away, somewhat crestfallen.  With a shake of the head, I returned to my solitude, pondering the possible causes of the stranger’s mistake and the reason for his inquiry.

 No.  That was not how it went. 

I was sitting in the coffee shop, head buried protectively in my newspaper, when I sensed his approach.  I didn’t look up until he said: “How’s that favorite Simon and Garfunkel song of yours go?  `Still Crazy After All These Years?’”

 Then, after a hesitation (since I hadn’t replied): “Rickie?”

A man about my age was holding out his hand.  As soon as the newcomer’s voice began its flip, familiar preamble, wrongly crediting the Paul Simon (post-Garfunkel) lyric, I knew these

words of greeting must be meant for me.  They were unwelcome.  I thought, You’ve got the song wrong and the guy wrong.  I am not the kind of person who looks up from his morning coffee with a ready smile and exclaims, “Why you old so-and-so!  Still crazy yourself?  Sit down and take a load of your flat, ugly feet.”

No, I am the kind of person who looks up with a civil but reserved manner, politely discouraging, and indicates: go away.  Nothing personal; just leave me alone.

Such was the face I turned to my misinformed intruder.  It generally produces the desired effect.

“Rick Johnson?” he persisted.  As if I had perhaps failed to remember who I was. 

As it was, I was left with the job of denying, point-blank, his misidentification.  Simple enough, perhaps, but I found it troubling to be given a name that was not my own.  Oh, Rick Johnson.  You mean the guy who raped the old lady on East Street?  Sorry, not me.  You a friend of his?  Oh, Rickie Jay?  The mass murderer?  The famous Swamp Coast Slasher?  Guess he’s still in the slammer, isn’t he?

“No,” I replied, trying for some reason to place the face of the mistaken stranger, as if the failure to recognize the connection between us was somehow mine: in the unknown life in which I was Rick Johnson (the Rick Johnson: still crazy), who would he be?  Robin Swift?  Billy Beans?  Eddie the Drill?  “No,” I repeated, shaking my head a little, “I don’t think I know him.”

Such a reply, of course, made no sense: he wasn’t asking if I knew him, he was asking if I was him.  Was it likely that I would know a man whom a stranger mistook for me?  What were the odds?  Ought there to be personal acquaintance when there is physical resemblance?  Or at least what my graying, ordinary-looking contemporary (drab as it sounds, that’s just what he looked like: ordinary, the kind of face you run into all the time) took to be resemblance? 

There was no logical reason for me to deny knowing the individual the stranger thought looked like me; yet I felt pressured to deny him, as if his existence somehow posed a threat to mine.  I didn’t like feeling pressured on this subject; I didn’t like the whole encounter.

The man I didn’t know stared at me, as if tempted to challenge my refusal. Are you shitting me, Rick?  C’mon, it’s not funny, guy.  “Then you look exactly like him,” he said at last.

He was in some embarrassment now, since I had contradicted him absolutely, despite my discomfort in having to do so.  People, particularly men of a certain age, do not like being told flatly they are wrong.  But why insist on how closely I resembled his friend except to cast doubt on my refusal to be that friend?  You’re wrong, dammit (I might have replied), I am not now nor have I ever been Rick Johnson, this so-called Rickie who’s probably a figment of you perverted imagination!  Who is this guy, anyway, your accomplice in some child molester ring?...

Look (I suppose I could have said, candidly, sympathetically), I’m sure you’re disappointed. You thought you had run into someone whose company you evidently enjoy.  You won’t enjoy mine.  Now please leave me to my coffee and my splendid isolation...  I didn’t say that either; in fact I felt a weak desire to find some purely fictional bond between us: oh, I think I know who you mean – Rick Johnson, yeah, saw him in here just the other day...             

But it was not a point on which there could be, ultimately, any compromise, any uncertainty, any common ground between our two views of the case.  Either I was Rick Johnson, as he had asserted.  Or I was not, as I maintained, despite the evidence of the senses – his, at least.

            If we, the mistaken stranger and I, were to write the communiqué patching over our differences and emphasizing the fundamental identity of interests between our two sovereign selfhoods, how would it go?  “After a cordial and candid exchange of views, the parties reassert their belief in the common destiny of a free and independent individuality and the mutual satisfactions to be gained by promoting a free and unhindered exchange of greetings, introductions, and data-specific inquiries such as the identification of mutually remembered song titles between sovereign individuals in the public venues of an appropriately governed civil society.  The question of the identity of a certain third party not present at this convening, the so-called Richard Johnson affair, will be referred to an international commission of representatives of nine independent nations (the Novena Group) for detailed exploration with the purpose of promoting a fuller exchange of views in a future forum.”

That forum not being Drunkin Donuts.

No, I did not take that approach either.  I was, I suppose, trying to let him down easy.  The interloper was embarrassed that I did not turn out to be the man he thought I was: not flustered, but concerned, in a manly way, with his dignity.  We men do not abide flat contradiction on matters on which we believe ourselves to be in the know, without some loss of -- face.

His, as I remarked earlier, was an ordinary face, a regular guy’s face.  I confess to giving it a good scan.  I half expected, half feared, to find it familiar.  What if it turned out I did know him?  It was still early morning for me; I was still on my first coffee; strange men had taken over my home for bothersome alterations; I am not the kind of man who looks up with a quick greeting and a welcoming smile... There was, in fact, no one that particularly dreary morning (certainly no one male) I would have wanted to run into at the coffee shop.  Yet if he knew me, or thought he knew me – then I, so my emotions reasoned (perhaps defensively; perhaps insecurely, even) was likely to know – or think I knew – him: You remind me of a chap I knew once in the Cameroon.  Or was it that awful whist party on Derby Day?

Or, perhaps more logically, if I recognized him, knew him in fact, then it would simply be a case of his remembering my name wrongly.  Not misidentification, but misnomer.  I would disabuse him and there we would be: ill met by doughnuts.

So, I did look carefully, stared even: close-cropped, graying hair around a regular, oval-shaped face with features that suggested a range of commonplace, though not undesirable qualities: self-respect, cordiality, a reasonable degree of complacent self-regard.  He knew who he was, such a face said, and was not too displeased by the knowledge.  The connection with the putative Rick Johnson would have been a pleasurable one for him.  His disappointment showed in the statement that I looked “exactly like him.”  There was an implication of feeling rather misused.  He didn’t exactly say that I was misusing him; but something was.  If you looked “exactly like” a certain person, then you ought to be that person.  That was how things worked.  Who was I to go around violating immutable laws?  Perhaps I should have tried to make up for this disappointment by inviting the stranger to sit down and share a few moments’ early morning sociability with me.  Who is this chap Richard Johnson, I might have asked, with whom I share an appearance?  And, as I might then have added (spicing in some ineffable way the mystery), a first name too.  If you have somebody’s first name right, aren’t you halfway to an identification?  What if the double sought by my interlocutor had possessed my last name as well?  What if he had said to me, “aren’t you Richard Thompson?” but had still meant someone else?  Surely there are many men with the name “Richard Thompson” – the Richard Thompson clubs could meet weekly in any major English speaking city – but do I not have the right, the fundamental, natural right, not to be confused for one of these namesakes?  Not to be put under the thumb, so to speak, of someone with the temerity to use my name.  Is not my unique individuality as sacred, as fundamentally mine, my possession, as anyone else’s?   Regardless of confusion with a look-alike?

For it is my uniqueness, my identity, that was in question here, and I liked it not.  You have erred, my man.  You have the wrong person.  Pardon, I cannot oblige you.  Find your own table and your own doughnuts (I might have added) and drink your own damn coffee, and if you have any bizarre suspicions about the truth of my identity I will thank you to keep them to yourself. 

And yet a troubled wave of speculation spurred by the shock of being mistaken for somebody else continued to build tsunami-like in my mind.  “Surely, my good fellow, that morning on the beach outside the casinos of Manray Demando, after such a night as I will never forget –”  Mandy Delmonico, you say?  Sorry, old darling, never met her.  “And that little joint in Tucaroon where the native dancer did that incredible thing with her –”  You are impertinent, sir!  Whatever incredible thing the little spitfire may have been capable of performing with her unusual anatomical talents, I for one never observed it.  “But surely that time you and I and Maurice were riding in the back of Lawrence’s produce truck and the piano began to slide--”  Surely not!  Never in my wide and richly colored experience of life have I ridden with pianos, whatever the accompaniment, in the back of trucks, plunging towards the depths (crashing decrescendos) and rising to the heights (tinkling glissandos) of unimagined hi jinks...     

The simple truth is that I am made uneasy by instances of being mistaken for somebody else (it has happened before, and for a while seemed to occur with disconcerting frequency) because they force to the surface of consciousness my lingering suspicion that I may indeed be the wrong person.  They cause me to fret that I should have been there, as the hypothetical stranger suggested I was, in the drab, impoverished village cantina (many-legged creatures skulking in the shadows) when the spitfire native dancer performed her imaginative act with her – whatever.  It remains unknown to me, as is all I might have done with the nameless stranger had I been the man he took me for.  What other life – what near-life, hidden life – might this never-to-be-named mysterious stranger have emerged from in order to encounter me, tempt me, in the doughnut shop, with the destiny-laden words “Aren’t you...?” 

And if I had said yes?  “Come with me then, seigneur.  Quickly.  We have no time to lose.” 

Of course it wasn’t like that.  The stranger was, or appeared to me, a regular guy, so unremarkable on the surface that I dismissed him at once as beneath my notice.  Wanted to chat, to

bat back and forth a few commonplace observations, spiced by the peculiar chemistry of friendship.  A regular Joe or Bob, or possibly a Richard himself, seeking the humble leavening of palship. 

And yet, what if he were – something more.  A messenger, a true avatar.

What if he had been sent to summon me to that life, the hidden, other life in which I walked besides the shining waters of the Nile, took a row on the Po, saw the dawn come up like thunder by a row of heathen idols, dared the jungles of Pico-Popo, hunted the wild gallapegos, ran Red Severy (the powdery form) along the borders of the Malantynes, drank cruppa in the dingy cafes of Belletele where the dancers may have done nothing out of the ordinary and yet were worth a gander on a lonely evening far from home (wherever that was) on a sad-eyed break from the endless Tashkan wars along the dusty plains of the fallow Ratino Rift – were you there, compadre, when we drank to the rebel Tayman, the true heir and panyan, or so we bloods believed, of the aging Khanna Haiye?  Rebels all, aye, but men of faith and sturdy arms for the shallecking shellbooter when the blood-curdling Quoit of Nine grew hot and humorous!

And all I had to do was recognize him.  Acknowledge him. And the fun would begin.

The truth, the drearier truth, is that before the stranger’s everyday face, with its pedestrian expressions of anticipation, disappointment, lingering pique – even before I had given it the

thorough searching middle age requires to banish completely the possibility of some coincidental acquaintanceship in decades past (Philip? Is it really you? I haven’t seen you since that

disastrous acid trip in sixty-six!) – before, as I say, that questioning face disappeared, perhaps forever, an unhappy speculation had already formed in my mind on the possible identity of the person he had taken me for.

I remembered this person, this inconvenient other, all too clearly.  He liked to walk around town, which in this staid village refers to a finite number of blocks and stopping points, just as I did, so our paths inevitably crossed.  I had noticed him first on the commuter bus.  He always carried books and a notebook in a backpack, like a student, though he was clearly past the ordinary student age.  He wasn’t quite my age, but he was no fresh-faced undergraduate.  His hairline was receding.  He reminded me of a lot people I had known long ago in other places who had ridden buses and walked around town carrying notebooks in pretentiously unpretentious Army-Navy knapsacks: the easy poverty of the young raised to fashion.  He looked like he had a story to tell.  He had clearly been through some other sort of life before dropping in, or dropping out (it could be either) to student life.  A woman picked him up on a bus one morning, and the two chatted with the happy egoism of lovers on subsequent rides.  The thing was, he wasn’t very intellectual, not particularly smart, not particularly good-looking either – the woman who fancied him didn’t strike me as particularly desirable or sharp-witted either – and I took this all in at a glance.  I had him pegged; pegged for mediocrity.  It was as if the ordinary barrier between souls was transparent in our case, and in view of how easily I could see into him, wasn’t it possible, or even likely, that metaphysical seam was two-way glass?  It was embarrassing to know so much about a stranger; where was ordinary privacy?  Where was my own? 

            But that alone did not account for my reluctance to acknowledge a case of mistaken identity.  It was the way this other looked at me, and avoided looking at me – that deeply uncomfortable scowl, as if he felt I must be staring meaningfully at him.  I wasn’t aware of anything untoward between us until I started noticing his automatic frown, his discomfort, at my regular appearances on the fringes of his own existence.  It was his marked antipathy to me that carved him into my memory.

So when the man in the doughnut shop took me for someone else, I immediately thought of this other, my despised double, who hung around coffee shops with open books, whether he had a right to or not.  It was cruel, I thought, a mockery.  It is bad enough to have one’s individuality, one’s uniqueness, violated by being mistaken for someone else; how much worse to be mistaken for someone like that?  There was nothing distinguished about him.  He was so ordinary; such a type; his number was legion.  The mistaken stranger had not come into my life to liberate me from the limitations of my narrow existence, the limitations imposed by any single human existence (for even the rich and celebrated are famously bored), he had come to offer me a lying mirror in which

to see myself as others saw me: a mediocrity, another guy in a coffee shop, trapped in a routine.  Or perhaps not a lying mirror at all, but a looking glass of unpleasant truths: I had more in common with my accidental soul-mate, my undistinguished Doppelganger, than I wanted to believe.  No wonder I squirmed: you think I’m him?  That nothing?...

            “Well,” he’d said, “you look exactly like him.”

            How could anyone – anyone – confuse him with me?  There is only one of me.  Besides, he is not nearly so good-looking.  What’s so special about him?

            God forbid I have wagered my all on the wrong horse. 

Bob  Knox is a free-lance journalist, fiction writer, and a correspondent for The Boston Globe newspaper. He was awarded an artist’s residency by the Hidden River Arts Association to work on his novel about the Plymouth, Mass., origins of the Sacco and Vanzetti case (working title “The Beautiful Idea”). A story about his father, entitled “Lost,” was recently published in The Rambler Magazine..

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