Master of Disguise

I’ve had been the victim of mistaken identity a bunch of times. I’ve been approached by people recently that asked me if I was a professor of business at the University of St Thomas. That made me feel old. I wasn’t even wearing my tweed jacket with the patches on the elbows. I was smoking a pipe and holding an issue of the Economist while buying wine, but I didn’t think I looked that old. Damn it. Someone asked me if I was Ron Reagan Jr. I don’t recall my dad ever saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Are there similarities? Perhaps, but one thing that I will never understand is when I got mistaken for the police.
At the Infiniti dealership I worked at in North Carolina, as I mentioned before, I worked with some real fuckers. In a situation like that, I was forced to make the best of the situation.
There was a strip club near work called the Crazy Horse. Sometimes for lunch, we would go down there and throw back four or five beers and a bag of chips and go back to the dealership. Don’t have the t-bone by the way. This place was a complete dive, conveniently situated next to a hotel in a questionable side of Winston.

We went in there enough between work and after work that we started to know a bunch of the dancers and staff. These girls weren’t even pretending to be working there to put themselves through school.

So one night, my friend from the dealership, Dave, who wasn’t sure if he should bring in his gun to the club or not, and I went in there and got pretty smashed. After hearing Wild Side by Motley Crue for eight times, we left.
Two days later we went in for a few drinks during the day. The usually friendly bar staff and dancers were not only keeping their distance, but it was obvious that they were talking about us.

At first, I thought I was being paranoid. I turned to Dave and laughed when “bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do” started playing. It was then that I noticed that everyone in the place was looking at us. I asked one of the girls why the hell they were playing that, and she said, “because you guys are fucking cops.” I looked around and the looks that I thought we were getting were now actually glares. These home wreckers were pissed. We hastily finished our beers and left.

I mulled this over the rest of the day and decided that we should go back there that night and set things straight. So I left work, went home and changed and met Dave in the parking lot. In college, we had a bunch of theme parties in college and one of them was an ATF party where my roommates and I dressed as agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. I thought it would be in good taste to wear my shirt from that party to the club that night.

Literally when we walked in, three guys said “Oh SHITTTT!” and bolted for the door. Apparently no one really thought that this was funny except for me and Dave. After getting the attention of Brie, one of the girls that we were the most friendly with, we sat her down to find out why everyone thought we were cops.

The night that Dave and I had gone in there and gotten bombed and then left, there was a prostitution bust at the hotel next door, and we were there. We showed her our Modern Infiniti business cards and told her that there was no way that we could have been the police and gotten so drunk that night. We counted how many shots we did, and she finally agreed. After explaining where I got my shirt to everyone, the 70 year old woman who was at the bar was back to flashing her udders to me.

Maybe I shouldn't have said anything.

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