keyword "precocious" title "the king of paupers" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

I’m not saying this is true or not, Frank couldn’t tell me either way himself, he could only repeat what he’d been told. The busking license his friend carried read “Cesar Zimmerman” a name he claimed he’d chosen for his forged papers as a nod toward the old fable of a Russian royal and a humble carpenter who’d ended up confused for one another.

“Cesar” claimed that in his late twenties, he’d already been rich beyond most human imagining, had precocious fame since when he still should’ve been in grade school. He had everything, and he had nothing, and he was bored as hell. Couldn’t go to a grocery store without being mobbed, couldn’t take time off without the pressure to support a growing circle of hangers-on weighing down his conscience. He tried feigning eccentricities, dressed odder and odder, brought a llama to work one time, for the love of God, just to see if anyone would call him out on it or suggest a breather for his sanity’s sake. Nothing happened, not even close family would risk upsetting the money train, so he just kept on getting richer, more famous and more and more exhausted.

Moving in rarified social orbits, however, and being slightly richer than God’s lawyers, he fell into a radical solution for his predicament. He found a scientist who, for a price in the hundreds of millions, could clone him and fill said clone with all of his talent and an approximation of his memory, so he could retire, disappear and be normal for once without abandoning responsibility or being hounded for a comeback when he just wanted to see the world. His simulacra could be “The King of Pop” and he could just be Cesar, a wealthy drifter who looked a little like the guy from the soda ads but couldn’t actually be him, Michael Jackson’s on tour in Dubai or whatever.

But trusting mad scientists is never the best idea and while “Cesar” traveled, his double suffered from slow genetic deterioration. The clone’s face deformed, its skin bleached out and it started to lose its mind, to believe itself the real thing. One day, the checks stopped being deposited into his Swiss account and when he returned to confront his warped doppelganger, he was ejected from the bizarre ranch his musical talent had built. What was this normal-looking middle-aged black guy doing claiming to be Michael Jackson? Michael Jackson hadn’t looked like that in years.

His money dried up, his identity lost, no work history to speak of, he was left with just one way to get by: dress up as his younger self and sell pictures with tourists on a street corner next to a bigfoot pretending to be a man in a bigfoot costume and that elderly Elvis impersonator whose busking license said “Anthony Clifton” but told friends to call him Andy. Or, anyway, this was what Frank Yetti said that Cesar told him. I mean, crazier things have happened, right?