theme "creep" title "the treachery of images" in misc. flash fiction

Bruce Springsteen was born Bryce Sherrinford the Fourth, of the Kennebunkport Sherrinfords, graduated Yale, rumored to have been Skull and Bones president his senior year and only took on the working-class Jersey shore “Bruce Springsteen” persona after a disastrous run attempting to manage one of his grandfather’s Atlantic City hotels. None of this is true, of course, but it may as well all be. This is how much of any public figure’s projected reality is factual for anyone out in the really-real world. Believing that you can know a person without literally knowing them as people in-person is that sad, that delusional, that misguided. Even though they’re of course real people, you can never, will never have any idea who they really are as people. Just the façade.

You know Mark Twain wasn’t born “Mark Twain”, he was christened Samuel Clemens, but he wasn’t even the first writer known as “Mark Twain”. A journalist for the New Orleans Picayune had used it before and, upon his death, Sam took it for his own, Dread Pirate Roberts style. But the stories we made up sounded better so history made a fake-fake of his name. Bobby saw how Zimmerman was no name for a folk-rock tzar, so he stole a princely name from the poet Dylan. The shape-shifter David Bowie ironically would’ve been happy to perform under his birth name David Jones, but that moniker was already claimed by a Monkee, a fake-faked rock star himself.

Jack Benny’s philanthropy papered over by the fact that he played a miser by the same name or, anyway, the same stage name as he had been born Benjamin Kubelsky. American macho-rebel model James Dean was closeted for the sake of his career and his last meal was not whiskey and heroin, rather a glass of whole-fat milk and a diner slice of apple pie. Ellen DeGeneres is widely regarded as the meanest boss in Hollywood. Lucille Ball’s bright red hair came from a bottle.

You do not know these people. You know only their façades. There’s nothing wrong with loving the façades, enjoying them, that’s what they’re there for, to entertain you, long as you can accept their unreality. There’s a non-zero chance Mister Rogers was just particularly good at hiding that he was some sort of a sex creep. Jeffery Dahmer may have accidentally killed the next Hitler.

As children, we’re filled with great aspirations toward fame, a word that also means to choke on your own vomit. As adults, we prove our aspirations fulfilled through conspicuous consumption, a word that also means the slow painful death brought on by tuberculosis. Our language English knows us better than we know ourselves, let alone than we could never know our own “heroes”.

Don’t make heroes of those you can’t ever know. If you must, make them out of folks you can understand in full instead. Or, very least, if your heroes must be famous, let them be long dead. Less new surprises to worry about.

Last updated May 28, 2020