Pretending to Be Someone You’re Not
On September 10, 1972 I celebrated my 9th birthday aboard Her Majesty’s Ship the Canberra. It was the second largest passenger ship in the world at the time, next to the Queen Mary. My small town, Iowa family set sail the day before from San Francisco Bay, bound for Sydney, Australia. It was one of the most enchanting adventures I have experienced.
I remember our room steward from Indonesia, Mr. Marquis. My brothers and I wanted Mr. Marquis to think that we were fabulously rich, so we took a stack of Monopoly money and casually fanned it when he came into the room, as if its only purpose was to create a breeze to cool our faces. Whether he believed it or was just playing along, his eyes widened, and he asked with concern whether our father knew we had that money.
Moving to a new place means you can become someone you’re not, so we might as well be rich and sophisticated, enjoying a life of ease aboard the second largest cruise ship in the world. It was one of those early experiences of trying to re-write the boring story of who you are in favor of something more striking.
In those days, as long as you were white, immigration to Australia was wide open. The roots of most western immigration policies stem from racism, including our own. So, when we landed, we were placed in an immigration camp dominated by Croatians seeking asylum from communist Yugoslavia. For a 9-year-old boy, the adventure of being in a refugee camp which had been used thirty years earlier as a World War II POW camp, was nearly as magical as our Pacific passage on the HMS Canberra.
By the time we settled in a suburb of Brisbane in October of 1972, school had begun. It’s hard entering a new school in a foreign country as a shy kid, but because we were American there was something exotic about us. This is what I was hoping for – trading in my mundane persona for the mysterious. Me and my brothers were celebrities, so I was able to make a good friend really quickly. His name was Richard, and we hung out for the entirety of my elementary school days in Australia.
Richard’s family lived nearby and they were solidly in the working-class. His house was simple and unadorned, but the thing I remember most was its screenless, open windows. Mosquitoes have always loved my flesh, so whenever I was at Richard’s place, it was like a feeding frenzy for all those Yank-hating, Australian mosquitoes.
By age ten Richard and I were fast friends, and although he came from a poorer family than mine, Richard had one powerful advantage over my middle-class-wanna-be-rich persona. Richard was allowed to smoke. A wannabe sophisticated rich kid doesn’t hold water to the working-class ten-year-old who could light up like the Marlboro Man.
So, my interest in being a rich poser dissolved. To be truly cool, I now had to become a poor street urchin with a cigarette dangling from his lips.
But there was a problem. To become this kid, I would need to be allowed to smoke. Sadly, my prudish, middle-class parents wouldn’t let us kids smoke. Somehow, I needed to create the illusion of being this person without actually smoking a real cigarette.
Lucky for me, the desire to become an ill-bred, chain-smoking, ten-year-old imp occurred at a time when you could see your breath in the chilly morning air. Those were the mornings when Richard would come by to pick me up for school. So, I constructed a ruse. I would make a faux cigarette and stroll nonchalantly out onto our second floor balcony as Richard came calling.
“Ready for school, mate?” he would shout up to me.
“Just a sec, mate.” I’d say. “Gotta finish up this fag.” And I’d take a long, drag off my faux cigarette and blow an impressive plume of smoke from my mouth. I’d also be staring off into the distance: Just a poor, pack-a-day, ten-year-old, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. His poor, American family had done time in a converted World War II POW camp with struggling refugees.
I’d give Richard a nod, flick my cigarette to the balcony floor, and smoosh it out with my shoe.
The challenge was to create a believable cigarette. Rolling up a strip of white paper was easy, but the stuff inside needed to look like tobacco. Real, honest to God, cancer-spawning tobacco.
Ah, I thought. What looks more like tobacco than ground black pepper?
So, on the morning of my great bamboozlement, Richard indeed came calling. I sauntered out onto the balcony exactly as I imagined, leaned on the rail, and looked off into the distance. A cigarette resting between my fingers.
“Coming down?” Richard asked.
“Just a sec,” I replied, and lifted the faux cigarette to my lips. I squinted my eyes as I took a drag from my stogie, because that’s what smokers do. Only for me, it was a drag full of ground black pepper. My mouth turned to fire and I began hacking and spitting. The gig was up. I wasn’t the ten-year-old working-class-stiff I tried so desperately to become.
It was then that I discovered we tend to play the people we actually are, best. Rich, poor, black, white, middle-class American or working-class Australian. Our family of origin is fixed, as are so many other details about us. There are times I’d rather not be the middle-aged, mediocre white American man that I am. But I’ve discovered trying to be someone else just ends up looking foolish and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.