Leagues of Urban Legends

When you realize the true story you're telling might be otherwise

A tragic figure: John Gilchrist as TV-ad character Mikey, an actor who: a) died from mixing Coca-Cola with Pop Rocks or b) became a director of MSG’s media sales.

One night, I was regaling a table of celebrities at a trendy Manhattan restaurant with a true story, a story about someone I knew, a story I’d entertained others with in the past, and a story I realized, right that moment, was almost certainly an urban myth.

A friend of my friend at UC Berkeley was crushing his philosophy courses developing an enthusiasm for LSD, and so dropped a few tabs of acid to take his midterm on epistemology and metaphysics. He breezed along in a state of Nietzschean exaltation, easily answering every essay question and indeed filling four exam blue books with his penetrating insights. When class resumed after the break and the professor asked to see him after class — no doubt to suggest that he submit to his work to a distinguished journal — the prof instead asked my friend’s friend if he’d “care to explain these” — and handed him back four blue books whose every single line was filled with tiny, squiggling horizontal lines. 

That’s the story. But in this rendition, right as I got to his first class after midterms, my vision blurred and my head swam as certain pieces fell into place. I soldiered on, half following the narrative, half clocking the various symptoms it exhibited: a louche subculture, a neat ironic twist, morality-tale overtones, two degrees of separation — as I teetered toward the kind of fugue state the detective enters at the end of the Usual Suspects, as the various details in his office reveal themselves as the raw material of a masterful fiction spun by a criminal that he's just set free.  

Anyway, I landed the story, got some laughs, requests for more details, and accounts of similar misadventures. I downed my overpriced whiskey and felt my pulse return to normal. But I don't think you ever forget that queasy feeling of realizing that the true story you're in the midst of telling is actually, probably, a hoax. That you're a patsy in an extremely low-stakes, decades-long con and that, within one second of this realization, you've just switched from reporter, monologist, or non-fiction writer to...what's a nicer word for "liar"? Fabulist? Raconteur? 

Truly, as Upton Sinclair said — or might have said, or might not have said, but is, I think, widely quoted as having said —
”it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But since I usually prefer to know if I'm full of shit before I start talking, I've gotten a bit hypervigilant about a certain kind of story, alert to the kind of tale, proffered as true, that ticks all those suspicious boxes.

 

These stories are sticky, due to either their shock value or some more quietly unsavory element: the wrong bottle, wrong receptacle, or wrong door; a minor transgression with dire consequences; a perverse intention revealed. The stories have some key twist, ironic turn, or reversal of expectations. They often involve a b- or c-list celebrity who's secretly a Navy Seal, the granddaughter of Marlon Brando, a former series regular on The Wonder Years, or died in a freak accident. The stories verge on the paranormal, point to extremes of human nature, and often bear the fingerprints of recognized folklore: evil twins or doppelgangers, Faustian bargains, offerings of poisoned food.

I’ve been thinking of these stories for the past few weeks, as reality increasingly seems to aspire to urban myth. In a city as big, dense, and cruel as New York, we get at least one of them a week. 

As in: You remember that guy, Mr. Pink from Reservoir Dogs? So one day he’s walking down a street in New York, where he’s lived for decades, where everybody loves him, where he was even a volunteer firefighter during 911. Just as he's passing Bellevue, a former insane asylum, this stranger comes up to him and punches him right in the face — hard enough to put him in the hospital. No one knows why. This urban legend happened in mid-May six blocks from my apartment.

Or: OK, so a guy dressed in a helmet, sunglasses, and a homemade superhero cape stabs three people, one of them fatally, in broad daylight. He was known locally as The Samurai. This urban myth happened June 23, 14 blocks from my apartment. 

Or: The cops found a dead body tightly wrapped in a sleeping bag among trash bins outside an apartment building. First, they did an autopsy "to determine whether foul play is suspected." Then they arrested an ex-con who turns out to have an identical twin, who's also an ex-con, and has the identical name. The first is distinguishable from the second by virtue of being in a wheelchair, which made him easy to identify in surveillance video since he was the one in a wheelchair. Dragging a corpse. At a briefing, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said: "When they take her body out of the sleeping bag a bullet falls out of the back of her head, so we know that she was shot in the head."  

This last urban legend happened five days ago,four blocks from my apartment.

A Fox viewer might assume that my bags are packed and I’m on the first U-Haul out of town. But the fact that I live here and have eyes and ears does provide some helpful context. And after a while, these stories jump from true crime into some more specific genre. This would be a redoubtable strain of New York City lore you might file under "Headless Body in a Topless Bar," title of an actual article published by this genre's premiere organ, The New York Post, whose grand-guignol reportage strikes an almost camp attitude toward human misery. 

It's a giddy, noirish aesthetic that literary figures have celebrated for decades, and, despite ruing its use as right-wing propaganda, I used to find it irresistible. But lately, these stories’ authors are off their game. It’s not that the stories are too horrible to be true. It’s that they’re somehow too perfect to be true. Too symmetrical, too on-the-nose. Either I've lived here for too long or today's grimmer realities are really badly scripted. 

It's bad enough in local news, where stats and algorithms can draw on a massive, open-air psychiatric facility to isolate those bite-sized clusters of carelessness, depravity, and cruel fate that read as modern folklore. It's a lot harder to cope with when this happens on a national, even global scale.

Like: a powerful leader, a good, decent, sane man, stands for service, competence, and community against a depraved, incompetent despot who ignores wise counsel in favor of his ego, often descends into gibberish, and uses manufactured rage against "elites" to fuel his revenge-driven quest for power. But just as this despot marshals his forces for a final, decisive confrontation, the good leader reveals that he’s actually the villain's doppelganger, sagging into a stupor like that ensorcelled king from Lord of the Rings,  as the curtain opens on our own real-life King Lear, already in its third act.

Or: Meanwhile, the despot, who has consistently goaded his followers toward violence for at least seven years, directed his leaders of law enforcement to shoot protestors, and led an actual mob to a violent assault the seat of government power, gets shot in the head by a registered member of his own party and survives. As his supporters accuse the current president of his attempted assassination. 

Seriously, who writes this stuff? 

When the world’s most powerful country is caught between the dueling Nixonian revenge fantasies of two geriatrics, conventional political coverage starts to seem a bit too prosaic to apply. That’s why I appreciated the backdrop that John Ganz, author of the new When the Clock Broke, used in a recent essay, which posited the same kind of Biden-Trump doppelganger phenomenon that Fintan O'Toole explored, only set into the ancient tidal rhythms of declining empire.

He likens the politicians who believe that Trump’s final defeat will restore the rule of law to those members of the Roman senate who thought killing Caesar would return the Rome that Caesar had destroyed. Guys who spent the last decade warning us that Trump's tyrannical behavior signified the rise of autocratic rule now support "a man manifestly unfit for office," writes Ganz, "driven by personal vanity and pride, encased in a camarilla of hackish cronies and depraved family members, who has cowed one of America’ great political parties into doing his personal bidding above their duty or even to preserve the party’s self-interest." 

Ganz derives this from that great screenwriter of modern history, Hegel, whose dialectics provided the same three-act structure that Marx and Engels used in their own blockbuster epics. And maybe for that reason, even Ganz’s take now strikes seems as just bit glib, like a too-tidy alignment of classical history onto our current postmodern chaos. Or is it insufficiently supernatural, obscuring the Jungian engines that link internal, psychological phenomena to external world events?

Jung believed that many occurrences labeled as “coincidences,” are not actually due to chance. Instead, he believed that these occurrences are directly related to the observer’s mind, and serve to provide powerful insight,direction and guidance.

There’s actually a term for real-life occurrences that resemble well-known myths or legends. The Hungarian folklorists Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi borrowed the linguistics term ostension to signify this phenomena wherein an urban legend becomes a news story. They cite the poisoned Halloween candy that appeared in news stories ten years after the urban myth was in circulation — and define ostension as “the more or less conscious or unconscious reproduction of narrative scenarios.” A definition that sure leaves itself a lot of wiggle room. 

In their analysis of copycat murders, Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi group the killers among other “folklore bearers” like news reporters and the media, which isn’t very nice of them. Another scholar posits three subcategories to distinguish an actual ostension from a prank, lie, or mistake.

These are: “1. pseudo-ostension, the deliberate re-enactment of a legend as a hoax or practical joke; 2. proto-ostension, “in which a narrator transforms a legend into a story of personal experience”; and 3. Quasi-ostension, “where preexisting legends lead to false readings of normal facts.”

So when I was holding those people spellbound with my sketchy tale, I was engaging in “proto-ostension.” Except I’m still not sure if the story’s false, so it might have been “quasi-ostension.” Then again, if that friend of a friend had heard about someone else taking acid for a high-stakes performance, this would have been “pseudo-ostension.” And actually, since my own reproduction of a narrative scenario was “more or less conscious or unconscious,” it might have been a bonafide ostension!

Maybe a more useful figure of speech for this moment comes from not from post-structuralist academia but from Mark Twain. I don’t mean the line “history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes.” It’s an urban myth that Twain said that. But he did write, 150 years ago: “History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Broken fragments of antique legends. Is that what churns through our media these days, recombining into various tableaus, over and over, a little crazier each time? 

I don’t have a conspiracy theory to explain this, at least nothing involving humans. I don’t play videogames enough to buy something like simulation theory. I’ve been involved in too many projects to believe in a psyop more complex than constant lying. Pace Joan Didion, I don’t think we tell ourselves stories to live. We tell them to others to drive them crazy. 

A 70-something friend of mine, who grew up in a violent section of Brooklyn in the 1960s, hitchhiked the country alone as a teenager and lived through one drug scene and violent cultural conflagration after another. This man is a wealth of true stories, but some of my favorites are the ones he heard from grown-ups in the old neighborhood.

Four out of five of them end with the exact same way. While their plots are multifarious, they all share the same five-word denouement that contains a whole era of American urban life in a phrase. It comes just as after the hair-raising climax, as the narrator draws the curtains closed, and leans forward to tell his young listener: “...and the guy’s a vegetable to this day.”