I never had one. I was a Good Kid and besides I grew up in a city with plenty of spots that didn’t card.
Like Sahara East (still in business!), where they’d usher us into the back room and pour us a bunch of vodka cranberries. No questions asked, no orders taken.
I was watching a movie a while back. Actually, my mom was watching a movie a while back and she told me about it and neither of us remembers the title.
It was about jazz and there were a bunch of interviews with these legends, these great crusty old guys. And one of the old guys said of another old guy:
“He got ID.”
My mom was struck by this phrase and when she told me about it so was I.
I’d never heard it before but I immediately knew what it meant: this particular guy’s sound was his own; it was his brand; to hear his music was to know him.
Thelonious Monk got ID:
When my mom called me I’d just seen Partly Fiction, the portrait of Harry Dean Stanton.
Harry Dean Stanton got ID.
I don’t know where these guys got their IDs. They’re definitely not fake.
In New York when you turn 21 you get your Real ID.
It doesn’t work that way in art.
Piet Mondrian only got his ID after decades of navigating impressionist and cubist styles:
Did Mondrian start out with a Fake ID? Or was his Real ID always in there?
Or was there never a Real ID? Did Mondrian just find a really good Fake ID that got him into the Cool Club of Great Artists?
I don’t know. The fact is this. Most of us will die without having artistic ID, Real or Fake. Few of us can even tell the difference.
There used to be a vintage clothing store in the East Village where you’d go in the back and ask for Pharaoh and pay him $20 and come back a week later and get your Fake ID.
I never did it. Like I said I was a Good Kid and besides I grew up in a city with plenty of spots that didn’t card.
But mostly I was afraid.
Because it takes a certain amount of courage to walk up to a Cool Club. One that cards.
To extend your Fake ID to the bouncer, to the Cool Club’s Gatekeeper, sweating bullets, hating yourself for lying, feeling painfully the whole charade.
Maybe you even know exactly who you’re impersonating and how little you look like him.
Far easier to forgo the Cool Club — it’s full of fakers anyway.
Walk on by. Let the sound of music and laughter fade into silence.
Take comfort in the authenticity of not having a Fake ID.
Have you heard about Sahara East?
It sucks —
But they don’t card there.
