A Note for the Guy I Impersonated in 2003
Photo Property of the Author (sort of)
I wasn’t sure if she meant me or the guy I was pretending to be when she said, “You have beautiful eyes.” She’d been staring at the ID for a while, scrutinizing it carefully and hadn’t looked up when she’d spoken.
It could have been either of us or both—maybe the way one of us looked had affected how she’d seen the other. We both had blue eyes, which had been one of the main arguments in favor of me choosing him to pretend to be.
It was a strange case where our identities—mine and the guy I was impersonating—converged.
“Thank you,” I’d finally said, having no real choice but to accept the compliment as my own. Clearly dubious, the woman had apparently decided I’d suffered enough and finally decided to ring up my order, leaving me to slink off to my other underage friends.
My fake ID. I remember my friend flipping through a small stack of IDs before settling on the one she had: Andre Y---.
Where had she gotten all of those IDs? I must have asked, but twenty years later, I don’t remember.
For a period, that became my nickname with my friends: Andre. I was Andre.
I wasn’t Andre for long. For some reason, an ID that said I was six inches taller than I was and of a different ethnicity never worked that well. I used it to get into some bars and concerts, and I think I bought beer with it a few times. It was always nerve-racking. People let it slide, but I don’t think anyone ever believed I was the guy on the license. Besides, I was almost 21 by the time I got it, so after a short span of appealing to the kindness of strangers to avoid arrest, I was able to retire it in favor of my real ID.
It never occurred to me to ask who the real Andre was, or if there even was a real Andre. I vaguely remember my friend John saying at the time that he knew the real Andre, but I didn’t believe him. I guess I’d assumed there wasn’t a real Andre.
It popped into my head the other day, and I decided to do a quick Google search. It turns out there was an actual Andre. For a few months in 2003, I was going around pretending to be him.
Reading about the actual Andre reminded me of the scenes in war novels where characters find a picture of an enemy soldier from their civilian life. The Naked and the Dead has a scene like that. Suddenly, Andre wasn’t “Andre”—he was a real guy with friends, family, a career—a whole personal history.
In hindsight, maybe John had known him. Andre and I could have easily crossed paths. He reminds me of a lot of people I knew during that time. He briefly went to the same local college many of my friends attended. He lived in a town I’d often visit for its record shop. Apparently, he dabbled in skateboarding, which was a big thing for me during that period.
There’s not a ton I can say about the actual Andre for certain, but I can be sure that at some point on May 23, 2001, the real Andre had gone to the DMV and had his picture taken. Overall, things seem to have gone well for him after that: he took up a trade after leaving college early, got married, and had two daughters.
At least, they went well until they didn’t. Most of what I know about him comes from obituaries. He died young in 2018. The obituaries don’t say how. Often that’s done when the person died for a particularly unfortunate reason. I hope that wasn’t the case for him.
Someone hosted an online fundraising drive after his death. The money was supposed to support his family and pay for his burial expenses. I took an inexplicable sense of pride in seeing that it had exceeded its $10,000 goal.
His expired license is a record of a man who no longer walks the Earth. Despite this, his memory kicks around in the head of another man he’d never met and now lives on a continent he likely never visited.
If he’d lived longer, I would have told him the lady who worked at Teri’s Package Store in Higganum, CT, in 2003 said he had nice eyes. I’d be willing to turn the compliment over to him. After all, she’d been looking at his picture when she’d said it.