The Clone Conspiracy

A patron was checking out recently when she surprised me by saying, "Hey, I saw you out the other day... Down at HISTORIC RESTAURANT, right?"

For a moment my brain was thrown into confusion mode as I tried to make sense of what she was saying. HISTORIC RESTAURANT is one of our fine and expensive downtown restaurants. Trouble is, I've never set foot in the place. Not that I don't want to, I just can't afford to.

Being as how nothing else at the library had made much sense that afternoon, it took me a few seconds to figure out that I wasn't the only one in the room who was confused. Then with an almost audible *PING* my brain realized whom it was she had actually seen at HISTORIC RESTAURANT.

"Oh, no. That wasn't me," I said. "That was one of my clones."

"Your clones?"

"Yeah. There's a guy that works at that restaurant who looks a lot like me, but it's not me."

"It wasn't you?" she said suspiciously.

"Nope. Clone."

"Wow. Well he sure did look like you."

"Yep."

I haven't officially met my current local clone, but I've seen more than one of them in the area.

Understand, I don't actually believe these people who resemble me are honest to God clones. That's just a nice short-hand I use to describe them. I could say doppelgangers or evil twins or faerie children with just as little seriousness as clones. Also know that I'm not actually saying there's any kind of sinister plot concerning them, nor is there anything remotely supernatural or conspiratorial about them. (Yet.) There just happen to be a goodly number of gents walking the earth who look a damn sight like me, who occasionally cross my path and infrequently cause complications to my life. I'd probably find it unsettling if this sort of thing hasn't been happening to me for the past thirteen years.

In short, I'm not making this shit up.

In March of 1991, I was a Freshman in college. During Spring Break that year, my buddy John and I took a trip to New York City as chaperones for a group of high school students my former high school drama teacher, Mrs. Mabry, was taking there on a tour. On the last day of our trip, our flight home wound up getting cancelled and the airline rescheduled us for a later flight. Having an extra six hours in the big city on our hands, our touring organization sent us on a scenic bus tour. So we drove around for a while, going through places like Greenwich Village and eventually past the NY headquarters of the Hell's Angels. A few blocks from there, we wound up getting stuck in a minor traffic jam for a couple of minutes. I was looking out of the right-side bus windows when from the left side of the bus Mrs. Mabry suddenly shouted, "Hey, look, there's JUICE!"

Everyone turned and looked out of the left side bus windows and sure enough, there I was on the sidewalk. It was boo-creepy! The kid looked exactly like me, though perhaps a couple of years younger. He had my face, he had my hair, he had my gargantu-head. He even had my ass.

Clone kid didn't notice us. He was too preoccupied helping a friend sort through a big cardboard box which seemed to contain lots of magic markers. I don't know what they really were, as magic markers don't make a lot of sense in that New York City sidewalk context. I've always imagined they were something more illegal in nature, but still have no idea what. Just white plastic magic markery-looking tubes.

Only later, after we'd driven on, did I realize that the greatest practical joke of my entire life had been within my grasp and I'd missed it. If I'd been on the ball, I should have stepped off the bus, walked over to the clone kid and said, "Mom lied!" then just got back on the bus. It would have shattered his world. Actually, the idea disturbed me a bit too and as soon as I got home I began grilling my dad as to whether or not he'd spent any time in the NYC area around 16 years previous. He denied having been there, but I think I caught a glint of fear in his eye for just a second.

This was only the first of my college clones. By the time I graduated, I'd seen a succession of them.



Within months of returning from NYC, I began hearing about appearances I'd made around campus which I knew I hadn't made. Friends and acquaintances would claim to have seen me at a distance, called my name to the point of shouting, and then would get pissed that I had ignored them or that I'd given them a dirty look for their trouble. It was a mystery for which I had no explanation for quite a while. Then I began having such sightings of myself myself and realized there was another clone at work.

Usually these sightings would occur while I was on my way to class and would spy a very familiar visage across the campus's drill field moving in the opposite direction. A few times, though, our paths crossed even closer and I was able to get a better look at him. He sure did look like me. It was hard not to stare.

My dad and I even saw one of my clones eating at McDonald's one night. Dad was completely blown away by the resemblance and kept trying to get me to go up and talk to the guy. Dad's a firm believer in the old adage: If someone looks just like you, go hunt them down and point it out to them. He'd actually done this to one of his own clones a few years earlier. (His clone agreed that they did indeed look very similar.) I almost did go speak to mine then, if only to keep Dad from doing it on his own and creating an embarrassing situation over which I would have no control. I could just see Dad marching over and saying, "Hey, you look like my kid," at which time he would point back across the restaurant at me cowering beneath our booth. Nope. That was not an experience I wanted to have.  And the idea of speaking to my clone just seemed like a very uncomfortable situation for everyone involved. It's like Ford Prefect says in Douglas Adams' book Life, the Universe and Everything: "People who talk to themselves on the phone never learn anything to their advantage." I suspect the same goes for in-person encounters as well.  So I forbade Dad to move from his seat until my clone had safely left the building.

Within another year, yet another clone appeared. This one was different from the one I'd seen in McDonald's in that he was slightly taller and slightly chunkier than me. However, we also shared several mutual acquaintances, which really began confusing things. Around this same time I grew my hair out to shoulder length and developed something of a goatee. Naturally, my clone decided that would be a good look for him as well. Thanks, bitch.

Questions concerning which of us was the Evil Twin soon began to arise in my mind. I was pretty sure it was him, but perhaps he'd disagree. (TMBG fans sing along.... *I know he looks like me and walks like me, hates work like me and talks like me, he's even got a twin like me!*) I eventually got the chance to ask him myself when some of our mutual acquaintances hosted a party and we both wound up going.

That was a very strange evening indeed for reasons beyond the presence of my clone. My friend Joe, who was also at the party, had just learned that his older brother had died that morning and was understandably still shaken. My crew of friends present were not really in a partying sort of mood as a result. I tried to console Joe by mixing up some Lemon/Lime flavored Mad Dog 20/20 with Shasta and then drinking it. This cheered him up immensely, if only for the expression on my face as I determinedly choked that reisty concoction down. (I maintain that mixing MD20/20 with Shasta is the only way to make it go down and stay down, but I still don't recommend it.)

My clone, meanwhile, wisely avoided drinking anything nearly so foul, perhaps proving himself the more intelligent of the two of us. We barely spoke at all, except to say, "No, we're not. But, uh, yeah, he does kind of look like me," when people kept asking if we were brothers. It was very awkward. Neither of us really wanted to acknowledge the resemblance and I think we were both irritated that no one else would just shut up about it and leave us alone. I did, however, learn that my clone's name was Dennis.

Some months later, one of my clones was attacked on my behalf. I'm not sure if it was Dennis or the first clone.  And while it was a minor, non life-threatening attack, it was an attack all the same. The attacker was a girl named Dawn who I worked with at the college radio station. We'd only just met a couple of weeks before, but were friendly enough, which is why the attack is all the more odd. According to Dawn herself, she had been walking on campus one day and thought she saw me moseying along the sidewalk some distance ahead of her. In this situation, Dawn did what anyone would have done upon discovering a fairly new acquaintance was walking ahead of her. That's right, she sprinted up behind me, leaped onto my back and knocked me to the ground. Then, to her horror, she discovered that it wasn't me at all and that she had just assaulted a complete stranger. She didn't discover it right away, mind you. She had a brief argument with him over whether nor not he was actually me, before realizing that he truly wasn't then had to explain to him that she hadn't intended to attack him, per se, but someone who looked just like him.

"Why the hell would you want to jump on me and knock me down in the first place?" I asked her. It's not like we were even good friends. We'd practically just met.

Dawn never gave me a satisfactory answer, but I'll bet she thought twice before attacking anyone else in the future.


So why is it a guy like me has so many look-a-likes (or like-a-looks, for you Cerebus fans)?
It's not like I'm the most commonplace-looking fellow in the world. I'm of average to stocky build, occasionally fat, have perpetually rosy red cheeks and a collossal cranium that's damn near impossible to fit a hat on. Yet, all my clones seem to match up pretty well for almost all of those traits.

Well, not ALL of them. I actually count my friend Glen Bryant among my clones. This is a pretty good trick too, what with him being over 6 feet tall and Korean while I'm a short white guy. We both have goatees, sure, but beyond that we'd hardly be mistaken for one another in a lineup. Yet I have been mistaken for him on more than one occasion, and he for me. I chalk it up to a shared aura of mischief, but have no explanation beyond that.

Then again, it might just come down to a matter of mathematics. As my friend Gordon Carskadon once told me, "If you're one in a million then there are 10,000 of you walking around in this country alone." And that's assuming I'm only one in a million, instead of one in 242,973, which I think is far more likely. Plus, that figure comes from before the last census, so there are probably even more of me now.

Since college, the clones have continued to turn up unexpectedly in my life.

One of my coworkers when I worked for Onstar was a clone. We were both damn good at our jobs, so at least we didn't cause each other any hassles when we were mistaken.

I've actually known about my current clone down at HISTORIC RESTAURANT for a couple of years now. He's a waiter. Some of my wife's fellow students once had dinner there and mistook him for me. They waved and smiled and waved some more, then began to get irritated that I was studiously not coming over to say hi to them nor acknowledging them in any way. (He wasn't their waiter.) Weeks later, they tracked me down and confronted me about it. That's when I realized I had a clone in the area. Since then that same scenario has played itself out several times, so now I have even more of a reputation for being a standoffish jerk.

It was a while before I actually saw that clone myself, though. I thought I saw him at Wal-Mart one day, but it turned out to be a different one entirely. He looked almost exactly like me only he was blond. (I've always wondered how I'd look as a blond and the answer is: really not all that different.) He was also wearing ski-gear, so I'm pretty sure he was just in the area as a pit-stop on the way to the slopes.

Eventually I did have a personal sighting of my waiter clone. (Or, at least I assume he was my waiter clone. If not then I have a third twin around here too, dammit.) He came in the library one day and did indeed look quite like me only a good bit scragglier. Mrs. A saw him too and she just stood and stared at him for the longest time before nervously looking over at me for an explanation.

"Clone," I told her.

Later she paid me the compliment that she thought I was the better looking of the two of us. That's good, cause that's what I thought too.

I've since begun to wonder if maybe the waiter clone had come in specifically to get a look at me, though. Surely if I've been hearing rumors about some guy that looks like me haunting a restaurant just down the hill from us, he's hearing the same thing about a slightly better-looking guy who works at the library just up the hill. I've not seen him in since then, so maybe he was just confirming the situation then backing off to a safe distance. Maybe he too realizes that people who talk to themselves never learn anything to their advantage.

My family's involvement with clones has not ended either. Dad reported to me just the other day about spying a clone of my sister in Birmingham, AL. He, of course, walked right up to her and said, "Hey, you look like my kid." The girl took the news well and was pleased to hear that her look-a-like lives in such a cool city as Austin, TX.

That's my dad for you.

I still think this is all somehow his fault.