They have origin stories! They have alter-egos! But if I got an origin story for my alter-ego?
That just might make me a super super-hero…
“For the last time, lady,” I fiercely typed, “tell your country club friends that, no, I’m not that Lloyd Fletcher; no, I’m not your husband; and no, I do not want play tennis with them!”
I had tried to kindly address the situation before, but alas, I still received regular emails imploring ‘Bud’–apparently this other Lloyd Fletcher’s nickname–to join them for a friendly round of doubles tennis.
The situation had become so comically ridiculous that, given my druthers, I would have shown up at ‘The Club’, racket in hand, and upon seeing them (not that I would have known what Bud’s buddies looked like), curtsied and declared, “‘Tis I, the noble and beloved Lloyd Fletcher!”
The only problem was that ‘The Club’ appeared to be somewhere in Anchorage, Alaska, while I was off yonder in North Carolina. ‘Twas a real bummer, too, because that would have been pretty ----- funny.
Actually, though, my life had been intertwined with Bud’s long before I moved to North Carolina. According to my records, I first became aware of doppel-namer1That’s like a doppelganger, but with names. back in 2004 when I received an Alaskan Airlines/Horizon Air ticket confirmation for one Lloyd Fletcher. The fact that it was a round trip between Anchorage and Kotzebue (also in Alaska), was my first clue that email just may not have been intended for me.
Later on, I would be involved in a whole email thread about terraforming lagoons in Palembang…which I deduced from contextual clues in the email was located somewhere in Indonesia, and that Bud and his wife were going to be visiting soon (though he really wanted to be based in Singapore, if possible, on account of her desire for leisure and not malaria).
I ultimately figured out that the hilarious mix-up was the result of us both using variations of ‘Lloyd Fletcher’ in our email addresses: mine was lloydfletcher@hotmail.com,2I would to go ahead preemptively apologise if there actually is a Lloyd Fletcher somewhere out there using my fake real email address. You know…since I’m not even the real fake Lloyd Fletcher, and that is just an alias for our purposes here, in order to protect my fake identity. and his was lloyd_fletcher@hotmail.com. Did you catch that? Bud had an underscore between his first and last name in his email address–which I’m sure was a real pain in the ass whenever he had to give it out: “…now, it’s very important that you include the underscore–otherwise your emails will go to some yahoo in the Lower 48 with the same name…”
What I never had the heart to tell him was that–fun fact–we don’t actually have the same name…
“Have you heard about this new email service that’s totally free?!?” Phillip K. Ballz–my high school bestie–enthused. “We can be the first kids in town to have our very own Hotmail–what a cool name, right?!?–accounts. We’re going to be so cool!”
“Totes magotes, my dude, let’s do it! But what names should we pick? My name is way too common, and it looks like I would have to add ’69’ or something like that since almost every other variation is already somehow taken.”
Honestly, I didn’t expect ol’ PKB to be of any help in picking out a name. You should have seen how long it took us to settle on a name for our little garage grunge band that we had formed a year earlier in ’96 (that’s the year 1996, for you kids at home wondering what such a big number like that means). But, you know what, my favorite dipshit surprised me this time.
“How about you use your alter-ego? Now that would be cool!” he suggested.
“Oh, you mean ol’ ‘Lloyd P. Fletcher’? Hah! I had forgot about him!”
Back when I was a bored freshman–now that would have been in late ’95 or early ’96–I had got my hands on an ID holder, and decided that I needed to make myself a very crude fake ID. Of course, the best part of constructing a fake ID is getting to conjure up a fake name.
Taking inspiration from a well-known grunge band that I idolized, I borrowed the first name from one of their lesser-known songs, ‘Lloyd’. Of course that’s not my real fake first name–if I used my actual fake name, then everybody in the world would have my email address. And I take the privacy of somebody who I completely made up very seriously.
Anyways, another fun fact is that ‘Lloyd’ is actually reference to a secondary character from a very, very famous feel-good TV show from the 60’s. I’m not going to name any names–no real names anyways–but let’s just say it was so feel-good that the theme song may or may not include the most well-recognized whistling Americana has every produced.
Oh, and a not-so-fun-fact is that this song–the one that inspired me so much that I would name my alter-ego after it–was actually about some very, very dark subject matter. I believe it implied that this particular Lloyd belonged on a registry that may or may not be bridal in nature. (Spoiler alert: it’s not that kind of registry.) Further, this song implied that some of the most beloved characters from this show were complicit in such utterly ----- -up behavior.
So…yeah, that’s where my fake first name came from.
Now as for the mystique-laden ‘P.’, that intriguing middle initial. It actually does stand for something…unlike that prick Harry S. Truman–the S stands for nothing! Nothing at all! No, not my P. though–it’s a very funny-to-say-and-I-wonder-who-the-hell-would-ever-name-their-kid-that kind of name, which may or may not be found in a certain holy scripture. Fun fact, though, someone in our vicinity was ‘the hell’ that named their kid this, as a member of our rival small-town (which may or may not share the same name as a very well-known Russian city) football team had this name. And it made me snicker every time I heard it…
I think I may have digressed here a bit…where was I? Oh, yeah, I waxing poetic about the P.–which, again, I need to reiterate, is not my real fake middle initial. Anyways, the true fake identity of The P. was such a well-guarded secret that knowing it meant that you were in the inner-most innerds of my inner circle of trust. If I had told you the true meaning of The P., I was telling you a secret that I expected you to take to your grave. In fact, up until the point I was married, I believe that there were maybe 3 or 4 people who actually knew what The P. stood for…including my wife. Naturally, it was also my Hotmail password up until at least Y2K.
Lastly, I needed a fairly pretentious last name to go with ‘Lloyd P.’ The feel I was really going for–and why I insisted my fake self had a middle initial that lent itself to a certain nominal cadence–was inspired by the sheriff from The Dukes of Hazzard, Roscoe P. Coltrane.
Wait a second, that doesn’t sound quite pretentious enough…
*checks notes*
Ahh, right, I got my lawmen with prominent middle initials from 1970’s pop culture mixed up. Who I was actually thinking of all those decades ago when putting together my nom de plume was the sheriff from Smokey And The Bandit, Sheriff Buford T. Justice–that’s the guy. If I recall correctly, my dude was a huge pompous a**hole, always harruffing about, making sure that everyone included his middle initial when referring to him.
Say, if you’re in need of short break, why don’t you take a moment and enjoy this montage I found, the Best of Buford T. Justice:
Okay, so I was saying I needing a good fake last name to make me sound legit. For unknown reasons, I found what I was looking for in the Funnies Page of my beloved regional newspaper. I happened to remember a bit of trivia about the last name of well-known cartoon rascal of about 7 years in age, and thought ‘Fletcher’ would perfectly complete my alter-ego’s name. And again, Fletcher is not my real fake last name. It’s my fake name’s fake last name.
So there you have it: you were essentially in the room when Lloyd P. Fletcher was brought forth into this world. Of course, he wasn’t meant to live beyond the laminated walls of my Morton County Community College security badge.
But then I made the rookie mistake that every almost-17 -year-old makes: I thought it would be a fantastic idea to immortalize Lloyd by claiming the address lloydfletcher@hotmail.com.
And I can’t stop laughing every time I think about Bud, the real ‘Lloyd Fletcher’ (not his real name either–I have to protect the privacy of those who have the misfortune of sharing a name with ‘me’!). I bet when he went to sign up for his Hotmail account, he thought he was such a unique snowflake: “This will be easy, since I’m basically the only Lloyd Fletcher on this plan–whaaaah?!? How can this be? There’s another Lloyd Fletcher, and just my luck, he beat me to the Hotmail punch!”
“Fear not!” the real Lloyd Fletcher indubitably thought. “I’ll just throw an underscore in there–what could possibly go wrong???”
Well, I’ll tell you what could go wrong Lloyd: you have no idea how many tennis matches your wife Gaye shows up to but your clueless ass is nowhere to be seen! And you remember Palembang? Well, that trip almost didn’t happen because at one point I was pretty sure I was going to have to get on a plane and go build treatment lagoons in your stead. Why the hell do I know so much about lagoons in third-world countries anyways?!?
Now one might accuse me of proverbially acting like David in the Bible, and ‘Lloyd Fletcher’ my Bathsheba. Have I lustily and greedily taken yet another name for myself, leaving Uriah the Hittite (the real Lloyd Fletcher in this case) high and dry? No! You can’t complain that I came and ‘stole your name’–you weren’t even using it in the first place, Buddy Boy…
“Congratulations, Mr. & Mrs. Fletcher!”
Sure, it was nice to have a close associate celebrate me finding the love of my life and marrying her in short order. But you would think that ‘Oliver’–not his real name, but his real middle name–would at least know the difference between my true identity and my fake one. He’s seen my legal name on my mail, for fuck’s sake!
*sigh*
You know you’ve taken the Lloyd P. Fletcher joke too far when your own dang roommate thinks your real name is the made up one! I mean, I had been living with this guy for 4 months before I got married. Well, on the bright side, we can at least thank the Lordy Jesús I didn’t have him give the toast at our wedding. That would have been awkward…
“Dear Lloyd Fletcher,” the email read, “the results of your unemployment claims are ready for your viewing. Please log into the Ministry of Labour’s website for further instructions.”
“Oh, great!” I muttered to myself and the computer screen. “This is just what I needed–now I’m being mistaken for some British degenerate who apparently can’t keep a job.”
Yes, it’s true…thanks to yet another real ‘Lloyd Fletcher’ trying to claiming the lloydfletcher@hotmail.com email address, I have discovered my international doppel-namer…has bad credit (in addition to indubitably having bad teeth, #There AreNoRealDentistsInBritian). And I also constantly get notifications from his bank in the UK that his monthly statements are ready. I would be lying if I didn’t say that on at least one occasion, I may or may not have been tempted to try to reset the password so I could log in and a take a peek at this chump’s finances. I mean, I feel like I have a right to know if this guy is dragging my good fake name through the mud…
“Look, it was a mistake I made when I was 17, okay? I just can’t seem to get this guy out of my life!”
That is a phrase I’ve had to, with much embarrassment, share with a stranger way too many times, in hopes of convincing them that I’m not a CraigsList con artist trying to sell them some concert tickets that don’t actually exist.
At one point in my early 30s, I had resolved to change my email address to something that more accurately reflected my legal name. Turns out, that is almost impossible to do after only really having one email address your entire digital life. That ----- Lloyd P. Fletcher is just ingrained into my life…we’re so intertwined that it’s become difficult to tell us apart. The dude haunts me.
And the confusion is not limited to complete strangers–it has extended to people I need to have a personal or professional relationship with. For example, when I tried to get some important information from one of the guys in my neighborhood on the HOA board.
Here are actual excerpts from the email exchange we had:
“Hi Lloyd,
Thanks for sharing information with BJ3Yes, this is my real nickname, but not my real name, lol. about our management company transition. Here are my comments to BJ, FYI. My belief is the transition will be clear soon for all.
Kindest Regards,
Don”
This email was clearly a forward of an email that he had sent me through our neighborhood listserv, at which point it occurred to me: “Dear Lord, he thinks that we’re 2 separate people, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Bruce Wayne and Batman!”
Poor guy, I had to set him straight before things got to the point of awkwardness that I would have to some Seinfeldian shenanigans where I would have to fake my own fake death. Thus, my reply:
“Hi Donald,
I really appreciate you reaching out with this information.
To clear up the BJ/Lloyd issue: I am both BJ and Lloyd…well, not either really. My legal name is [REDACTED] but I’ve gone by ‘BJ’ my whole life. “Lloyd Fletcher” was an alter-ego I made up in high school for the fun of it, and then I ended up using that when I set up my very first email account. Because that’s what short-sighed 16-year-olds did back in 1997, apparently.
…and the confusion has propagated ever since. I even had a roommate in grad school who, after living with me for 4 months, was SHOCKED to find out that my last name was Henderton [note: not my real last name], and NOT Fletcher [also note: not my real fake last name]. Oh, man, that makes me chuckle every time it comes back up!
Thanks so much,
–BJ/Lloyd…”
The point of the story is that maybe you should think twice before creating an alter-ego out of thin air. Maintaining such a lie for the rest of your life can be exhausting–and if you’re not careful, it just might end up on your tombstone instead of your real name!
And what just may be the worst part about engaging in such identity fraud is when you want to tell your story to the world, but you realize that exposing your fake identity is essentially exposing your real identity–after all, these days are we not much more than the sum total of our preferred email address and our phone number?–and so you’re forced to triple-down on your lie and create a fake name for your fake name. Not only is this a confusing lie that’s hard to keep straight, but now in addition to the other 2 real ‘Lloyd Fletchers’ in this world whose digital lives your lies have ruined, you’ve drawn a completely innocent cohort of real-for-real Lloyd Fletcher’s into your global web of deceit…
Content created on: 6/8 December 2024 (Fri/Sun)
Footnotes & References:
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