I'm Someone Else Copyright © 2017 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #60, Sep-Oct 2017

Here we are, near Halloween. Put on the masks.

When I was a kid, there weren't elaborate Halloween costumes. My parents would dress me up in old clothes, trousers rolled, burn a cork and smear it over my lower face so it looked like a beard, sort of, and tell me I was a hobo.

Back in the late Seventies, Mary and I were living in an apartment over a garage in San Francisco. We decided one dark blue night to order pizza. I called in the pick-up order, and when they asked for my name, I said, on a lark, Brian Eno. We had been listening to Low, Are We Not Men?, and Fear of Music. Eno was everywhere, but no one really knew what he looked like.

When we wandered into the small restaurant to pick up our pizza, long-haired and under some influences, the short-sleeved pizza guy behind the counter, using his big wooden paddle to slide our pizza out of the oven and into a square delivery box, looked me over. Shy. "Do you work in the music industry?"

I pretended I had no idea what he was talking about, paying him with gay money. (This was back when San Francisco was becoming the gay mecca of the United States. Gays would frequently rubber stamp their paper currency with a purple-inked 'Gay', to try to keep it within the gay community. But like all money, like all sexual desire for that matter, it went wherever it wanted, of course, so that you soon saw it all over the San Francisco peninsula. Mary and I both worked as bank tellers at the time, and it was not unusual for a customer to look at the money we had just counted out to them, pushing it back across the counter. "I don't want gay money!")

We laughed on the aromatic trip back to our apartment with our pizza. It's so much fun pretending to be someone else.

I wasn't happy in high school.

The first day of senior year, all the uniformed boys sitting on blue metal folding chairs at an assembly in the gymnasium, as if we were at an AA meeting, the principal announced long hair would no longer be tolerated. Pointed at me, sitting a few rows back. "So we need you to get a haircut, Mr. Moore."

Dropped out, got a job in New York City. Going out into the sidewalk crowds each evening once I got off work, the intense smell of car exhaust. The best experience a boy could have. My advice to any child. Disrupt your life.

One year later, I decided to try school again, enlisting at a college an hour's drive from home.

In the screams of the hallways I'd occasionally pass a short, overweight guy in old-fashioned clothes, carrying a black briefcase in his right hand like its hard black plastic handle was the long neck of an albatross. Feeling sorry for him, I set my lunch down at his table one day.

And he was boring. But lonely. I knew about loneliness, so I spent some time talking to him, mostly listening to him, because when you're in a conversation with someone boring, a lot of it is listening.

Fred was trying to fit in, but did not have a clue how to do that.

He had a habit of digging his hands into the glass ashtrays set out on the cafeteria tables, blackening his fingertips. At one point, he told me he was becoming an expert in hypnosis, but needed a volunteer to perfect his talent.

I had of course seen hypnosis sessions growing up, in movies and on TV. The idea did intrigue me. I always wanted to experience what it was like.

So Fred and I went to the campus library, which I figured would be quiet, and sat across from each other at a long wooden table near the back, stacks behind us. After clearing his throat several times, he bugged his eyes at me from behind his black-rimmed eyeglasses, attempting to put me under a hypnotic trance.

"You're falling asleep, deep, deep asleep." I don't have to do an entire paragraph of him trying to put me under, do I? You can imagine that yourself. The point is, although I was receptive to the idea, very much so, to see what it would be like to be hypnotized, it didn't work.

I felt sorry for him. Because I could tell he needed to believe he was an expert in hypnosis. In persuasion. That he had enough teenage confidence in him to convince a girl to go out on a date. Because being a teenager, having no one to date, talking to your mom every Friday night at the kitchen table? That's not the way it's supposed to be.

So I pretended to be hypnotized.

Head lolling to one side, lips barely vibrating.

"Tell me your deepest memory!"

Here's where I got a little creative. "My planet is dying. I must escape. I am one of the few who can. Heading outwards, towards this young planet, the one they call Earth."

Well.

Fred sat up in his library chair. Leaning forward. "Where are you from? Can you give me the coordinates of your home planet?"

I expected him to realize after a few exchanges I was obviously kidding, it was such a ridiculous idea. But he didn't. That's how much he needed to believe he had some talent, in anything.

We'd have hypnosis sessions twice a week. I'd go into a trance, slurred speech, reveal a little bit more about my home planet.

But I started to feel bad.

So one day, when we got together for yet another hypnosis session, and he asked, "What is the most important thing you can tell me about your planet?", I told him, "It doesn't exist. I'm not from another planet, Fred. I made it all up. It's a fiction. Sorry."

Back in 2000, I created a website, Jump Down the Hole, which presented different works of fiction as if they were real. For example, I made a home page for the fictional Arnie Maddox and his daughter Cindy. Mimicking most home pages at that time, it had animated GIFS, a section for the family's poetry, another for their family recipes, one for Arnie's weekly musings, a guest-book with fake entries, etc. I even dressed up as Arnie for a couple of photographs to put on the site, stuffing a pillow under my shirt to make me look heavier, and getting Mary to photoshop my head to make me look bald. People would write to Arnie, and I'd answer as Arnie. I loved it! I'm someone else. Isn't that what we do, as writers?

I'm a white man. I'm proud to be a white man. You should always be proud of who you are.

But because I am white, I have absolutely no idea, and will never have any idea, what it's like to be, for example, an African-American. Because I'm male, I will never have any idea what it's like to be female.

Just like an African-American will never have any idea what it's like to be white, or a woman will never have any idea what it's like to be a man.

As writers, we can pretend to be whoever we want to be. But as individuals, we will never know what it's like to be anyone other than ourselves. I don't know what it's like to be Brian Eno, or a man from another planet, or Arnie Maddox. But that's okay.

I'm dressed as a hobo. My small finger reaches up, presses the doorbell. Door opens, someone from inside made up like a werewolf. And they have candy! They know I'm not really a hobo; I know they're not really a werewolf.

We're just two people meeting on a door step. Beyond the burnt cork beard, beneath the furry mask, we're still just two unique faces, interacting.