Cruel Shoes at the Lapin Angile.

a tale of a catfish

I might watch the Steve Martin documentary on Apple TV tonight. I’ve always been very interested in him.

In the mid-eighties, while I was still in college, I started communicating on computer bulletin boards quite a lot. This was the forerunner of what we now call the Internet. I used a program called "CB Simulator" that allowed me to message people in real-time. It evolved into an Internet Relay Chat system, but CB Simulator was the first.

We had a community of around five hundred people, all early adopters of technology, particularly computer technology. Nearly everyone was brilliant and far more intelligent than me, not just about computers. They were clever about everything.

In those days, some of us were very open about who we were in real life, and some were very cagey about it, preferring anonymity. I was very open about my real life, far more open about it than I was with people who knew me in real life. I told them I was a boy with very broad shoulders and a lot of confusion about what sort of life I wanted. I think it's easier to say what I mean by typing than by speaking it, so I told them more than I was telling the people I talked to every day without the computer.

Typing into the computer, I met a guy who would only tell me he was a writer, but not his name. He wrote plays, short stories, and screenplays, he said. He also made music. He said he'd written for television but wouldn't tell me what program. When I asked if it was something I might have seen, he said "possibly," but that I was a little young. I was nineteen at the time. He said he'd written for National Lampoon, but when I asked what issue, he wouldn't tell me.

Later in life, I would meet many people who were active writers, but he was the first. He was one of the first people I ever told that I wrote and hoped to be a real writer one day.

He had a sort of melancholic personality but claimed to make his living from comedy. Typing to him on the computer, I learned that he was wickedly funny, but you had to be alert to what he was saying to see it. Sometimes, he seemed very pessimistic about life.

He said that his first book was paperback, and they only printed a few hundred copies, which he mostly had to sell himself. He said later editions were hardcover, and the publisher did a better job of selling them.

I said that I hoped one day he'd trust me enough to tell me the name of his book so I could get a copy. He said it didn't matter because the book had been out of print for several years, so I probably couldn't get a copy. The title, he said, was "Cruel Shoes."

The next day, I went to the bookstore at Metrocenter Mall to pick up some things for my grandfather. I asked if they had a copy of Cruel Shoes. The clerk said he could try ordering it but couldn't make any promises.

"That's by the King Tut guy." The clerk said. "King Tut?" I asked.

"You know, the King Tut song." He said.

"I must have that title wrong. Steve Martin wrote the King Tut song." I said.

"That's what it says here." The clerk assured me.

Later that afternoon, at the computer workstation set up for me in the corner of my father’s mailroom, I typed to my friend that I must have written the book's title wrong because Steve Martin wrote "Cruel Shoes."

"Yeah," He said. "Try not to tell anybody."

On the internet, when somebody is pretending to be something they're not, it's called "catfishing." Apparently, the term came about because some restaurants claim to be serving a better cut of fish but are actually serving catfish. I always thought that was funny. Growing up in Mississippi, we often ate catfish without any trickery, and I rather liked it.

Surely, I hadn't actually been talking to Steve Martin. Another one of my computer chat friends asked if I believed it. I told her I figured it was fifty-fifty. The man I was typing to knew an awful lot about Steve Martin's work and life, things that later proved true, but he could still easily be just an obsessed fan taking advantage of the computer’s anonymity.

When Compuserve was sold to AOL and CB Simulator evolved into IRC, many of my friends moved to the new program, but not the man I'd been talking to. Eventually, Compuserve Email quit working, and I had no way of contacting him. We never typed to each other again.

A few years later, I made a trip to Los Angeles to spend some time with my science fiction friends. A friend from the old CB Simulator days suggested that we go as a small group to see a new play called "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" with Tom Hanks and Chris Sarandon from "The Princess Bride."

The play tells of an imaginary meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein at a restaurant called "The Fast Rabbit" to discuss their impact on the twentieth century. Most importantly, it was written by Steve Martin. Maybe this was an opportunity to resolve the mystery from the earlier days on CB Simulator.

My friends wondered if Martin would be at the play. They planned to corner him and find out if he'd been the man we talked to all that time on the computer. I thought that sounded like a good way to get arrested, so I was grateful when he didn't show up at the curtain call, even though my friend Petal shouted, “Author! Author!”.

As the theater emptied, my friends waited around to see if they could see anybody famous. One of them spotted Stephanie Zimbalist, and we waved. As the crowd thinned out, my friends walked disappointedly off to find the car we were riding in. They told me to wait by the theater's door since I wasn't familiar with walking around Beverly Hills, so, once again, I was alone in the night air in a strange place.

When my friends were out of sight, a tall blonde woman came out of the theater, followed by two men who looked like assistants and a third man with white hair in a Searsucker suit. She touched his arm.

"I really enjoyed the show," I said, struggling for something to say. It made me laugh and think, and it reminded me of the stories in Cruel Shoes."

"Thanks!" Said the man with white hair, who extended his hand. "Not a lot of people read Cruel Shoes," he said.

"A man on the computer recommended it," I said.

"Ah! Well, be careful of strange men on the computer suggesting strange books," he said. Tell him I said thanks, though."

"I will if I ever see him again. People on the computer disappear sometimes." I said.

"You never know about these things," he said. Hey! Thanks for coming!" he said as his car pulled up.

"It was my pleasure!" I said and waved as they drove away.

I'll never know if I was actually talking to Steve Martin all those months. Over the years, I have met a lot of interesting people on the internet, but not that interesting. In the back of my mind, I always held out hope that it might be true. Even if he wasn’t the real Steve Martin, I liked him. He helped me, and he taught me. That’s enough.

I knew I didn't want to put the man with white hair on the spot about whether he ever had a Compuserve membership. The man I talked to helped me develop the idea in my head that one day, I might be a writer, too. He gave me practical advice, not so much about how to be a writer but how to actually write and get your ideas out to your fingertips. Even if he had lied about being Steve Martin, he was still a good friend and teacher; if it hadn't been for him, I probably would never have gone to that play where I met the man with the white hair.

It seems unlikely that the man with white hair would take the time to talk to a boy from Mississippi about writing or anything else, but then again, you never know about these things.