It was always happening. That morning, a young lady slapped me in the face at the front of Mug, the coffee shop. About midday, two guys attacked and brutally kicked me in the parking lot of Money Tree building. That afternoon, an old lady was pleased to see at Ronny’s Cinema after a long time. She hugged me, and told me to pass greetings to a Johnny I didn’t know. And it was always happening: I was mistaken for someone else.
The first time I noticed was when two angry policemen, out of the blue, captured me to a psychiatric centre. Vivaciously and carelessly, they stuffed me into a straitjacket with a mask, and one of them, rather stout with a pouch stomach, and a rather ramshackle, ugly, famine-stricken moustache, kept calling me Terror.
“Are you hungry, Terror?” he whispered. After spending some hectic three days in the piggery institution with psychos much worse than aliens from planet fog, I was released. Later found out I was mistaken for an escaped patient—a Mexican man—who was crazy enough to kill and celebrate a roasted feast of his wife and two children.
Little did I know it would happen again. But I must admit, this time I kind of enjoyed it. In Las Vegas, I was hauled to a full-blown scene with executives, producers, and my agent, who at first glance I had no doubt he was high. He couldn’t even talk. One of his hands was preoccupied with a half-full glass of red wine, and I couldn’t tell whether it was the tenth or twentieth glass, while his other hand carelessly held a salad steak that seemed long prepared to collect a few soil particles from the floor anytime. I was mistaken for a movie actor until the agent got pressed and waddled off, kicking to the floor everything on his way to the toilet, only to find the movie actor there. The man, a nice thick shawl tied neatly around his neck, was motionless; just staring at the mirror, leaning onto the sink, just faint vapour rising from his clothes.
Drunk enough to miss that the body was lifeless, the agent said before he left, “Take the project, Ron.” Then seemingly annoyed by his wet trouser from pee, he muffled a curse, and added as he walked out, “It sounds a lot better. At least unlike your previous movie.”
In the early years of my life I had learned, from similar frustrations, to handle each incident quietly; never fight it, but allow it to follow its own course and let it die a natural death.
I didn’t have to wait much too long before another scandal happened. One evening on a walk in my neighbourhood, a young lady from the small neighbourhood supermarket mistook me for her boyfriend.
“You like doing this,” she said.
“What?” I asked. I had no idea what she meant.
“Do this,” she repeated.
“Do what?” I repeated.
“This!” she said.
All the while we walked we held hands and were getting warmer and warmer. She started for the stairs. “Are you coming?” she asked. “Come in, have dinner and then leave.”
I must confess she was awesome and tempting for that matter. We ate dinner, and it was time to leave. “Are you sure you want to leave?”
I hesitated while making up my mind.
“What about this?” she said, as she shrugged off her dress.
I couldn’t move. “I . . . I eh,” I stammered.
“You don’t have to if you don’t . . .”
I leaned over and covered her mouth with mine, cutting off her words. Her lips were even softer than I expected, especially when I sucked on the bottom one and then ran my tongue on its soft side. Her mouth was warm, moist, and inviting that it was hard to breathe without gasping. My hand wandered down her stomach and wriggled beneath the piece of fabric that hid her dark curls. I reached for the mound, not invading, not exploring, just letting the warmth pass between my fingers. She arched her back, thrusting her breast in the air, and I grudgingly removed my hand and moved it upwards, noting with satisfaction that she smiled when it made contact with her breast.
I could feel the heat burning within her, the tension moving her faster and faster against me until I knew she was ready. I held her steady and raised my hips, then lowered her until her eyes widened, and she stretched around me to make a perfect fit.
“Oh, Welcome!” she said in wonder. “Oh, Welcome!” she repeated as I guided her hips up and down my length, her body rising and falling of its own accord, beating some ancient rhythm that she punctuated with grunts and sighs that echoed around them. She punched me in the face.
“Oh, hell. What did you do that for?” I asked.
“Do what?” she asked.
“Hit me.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” she said. “You said that’s what you wanted.”
“I did?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You always do this. Always.”
“Christ Jesus,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “Christ Jesus. Christ Jesus. You always say that. You always say that.”
At 11:30 pm, I left while she was asleep. Just a few meters to my bungalow, two heavily armed policemen arrested me for robbing a house. The next two to three hours were wasted at the police station while I tried to reason with them that I couldn’t have robbed any house because I was in a house up the road in bed with a woman who had mistaken me for her boyfriend, and who’d punched me in the face, which was why I had a red swollen eye. “I’ve always considered it best, to be honest,” I said. They let me go.
Just when I stepped out of the station gate, I was mistaken for a detective and was driven by his partner to a murder scene. It was an awful stance. A man had short, bullet to the head, his wife, daughter and the housemaid. Overwhelmed with horror, I stepped out for fresh air. A neighbouring woman saw me.
“That’s him!” she shouted. “The husband! Police, help! This is him! The husband!”
They had to hold her back. She was about to attack me.
I was again hauled to the police station and interrogated. This went on until the husband was found cold in his car in the woods.
I decided to tell my story, and off I went to a storytelling booth.
A gipsy lady talked about matching with the bulls–a dream of a lifetime–and being jabbed on her leg and almost dying. A man related about a midnight lonely drive that led to meeting his partner, a street girl recovering from heroin addiction, who later demised of STIs. The chair-lady, on crutches, then related about her fate of her first fabulous multi-orgasm sex experience with her young boyfriend while recovering from a broken leg. She then randomly picked a name from the bowl and called out: Steven Macdonald.
“Steven Macdonald,” she said, as I walked to the front. “Your name sounds familiar. Aren’t you the ass boy that dated my friend and melted a morning-after pill in a drink and tried to have her to swallow it?”
Some fellows laughed on the floor.
“No, please,” I responded. “I’m always mistaken for another person. I don’t even recall the incident from anywhere.”
“Well, maybe, Steven. Maybe,” she said and went to the bathroom.
“I was mixed up at birth,” I began my story. “For the first seven months of my life, I grew up in a Red Indian family until the hospital learnt their mistake. The first day at school was a nightmare as my grade one teacher was sure I was a missing child from a county she’d lived in before, and that meant spending that day at a police station, my parents interrogated and much worse had to go through a paternity test. To reduce her frustrations, mom always tied a leaflet with my name on my arm when we were generally in town, or else I was often mistaken for another child by other parents.
“You heifer!” she said. “Do you remember me? Eh . . . remember me?”
The floor was quiet. The chair-lady was not back yet.
“Stupid dumbbell! Bitch!” the woman said.
“Jesus Christ, here it finds to him again,” a woman from the crowd said.
While I was trying to have a look at the woman who said that, she threw at me a heavy glass of whiskey, which grazed my scalp on its way to the floor. My hand slowly reached for the forehead, to be welcomed by redness mixed with whiskey.
“You son of a bitch!” she screamed. “You ugly worm! Remember me?”
I glowered at her. She was the lady who had been kind enough to invite me to her house the other night, mistaking me for her boyfriend.
“You must have mistaken me for someone else,” I tried to explain. “It’s always the case.”
“No, you’re lying,” she said. “I can see you. I know you.”
She drew a rifle and pointed it at my head. “You fooled me and walked out when I needed you again.”
“Oh my God!” I said. “Norah! Why would you bring a gun to such an event?”
“I just had the hunch I’ll need it,” she said.
But all the while I stood there arguing, more blood gushed out of the scalp. Suddenly, some lights went off, then more lights, and finally the undulating dark. I gained consciousness on a stretcher along a hospital corridor, IV lines twisting in various directions around me. I looked up as I was wheeled past a teenage boy.
“Daddy!” he called. “Daddy?”
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