I got hung up the last few weeks. Make that month.

I’m buying a house! I was training someone new at my day job! We were short-staffed at the bar! My dad broke a bone in his neck! The Bucks are in the playoffs! Novak is going for the Golden Slam! Leverage is back on TV!

But luckily, everything seems to work out well. The appraisal is done, all the new guys are doing well, my dad is out of his neck brace, Giannis has back-to-back 40-point games, Novak won his third slam and the Bucks won on the same day (for the 3rd time this year🤔), and I finished Leverage an hour ago.

Finally, some time to unwind and crank out some stories.

Part III: Florida Woman

Fakes are on the uptick again. How can I tell? Real IDs are becoming such a hot commodity that nobody is giving them up to brothers, sisters, friends, and cousins. That leaves a vacuum only one industry can fill — forgeries.

Because of COVID, my yearly average of 200 was thrown into jeopardy. I got No. 700 in February 2020 and No. 800 in April 2021. I wasn’t working for many months in between, but the vendors are stacking the decks with both cheap and expensive fakes. The market is flooding, and it seems like, as per usual, all the rich kids have boats.

I’ve heard people groan about how much they’ve spent on these IDs. It’s usually the amount they bribe to get it back. Or the amount doubled. Or in this very special case, the amount I was supposed to give back.

To the Florida Woman.

OK, she wasn’t really from Florida, but her ID said she was. She was actually from Arkansas and visiting Michigan by way of Missouri. Yes, it’s all very confusing.

Getting the ID wasn’t the story. It was fairly cut and dry. There’s one specific part of new Florida IDs that hers didn’t have. And that was enough to pop it in the old fanny pack.

But she thought I put it in my pocket.

What followed was one of the most irate meltdowns over an ID I’ve ever seen. First she yelled. Then she started crying. Then came the story.

“I need that to drive tomorrow! I have to go back home!”

It’s 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. She’s telling me she has to be back home to Eastern Florida by, wait for it, Sunday afternoon.

“There’s no way you can drive to Florida by then,” I said.

“I’ve done it before. I can be there in 12 hours!”

From where we are to where the address was on the card was quite the distance. Google Maps clocked it at just over 18 hours. For a 12-hour trip she would need to average 100 mph without stopping. That’s quite the automobile she has.

Now, I rarely google or Social Media check people after I’ve already determined it was a fake, but this one got me going. Her about page was an amuse-bouche of hopscotch locales from across the American south and Midwest. A little of Arkansas, back to Michigan, down to Missouri, a dash of Ohio, and one last touch of Michigan.

Is she in WitSec, an Army brat on the lam, or a Bonnie Parker in the making? Whatever the case, this wannabe Florida Woman was hell bent on getting her card back. Even if she had to dig for it.

Remember how I said I popped the ID in my fanny pack? She didn’t see that. After a few rants and raves about how she needed to drive 12 hours (which soon became a 3-hour flight that took off the next morning), she darted straight through a small crowd of smokers and snuck a hand in the cookie jar — aka my right shorts pocket.

You know, I’ve now had a few women lay their hands on me in that if done slightly slower would be seen as acts of affection instead of acts of aggression and violence. Yay to me.

After her fishing expedition ended, it was onto the next stage of grief — Bargaining. For those at home, we already went through:

• Denial (I have to drive tomorrow)

• Anger (the pocket lunge)

What was her bargain? Well, usually people offer me money to get their stuff back. Not Florida Woman. Nope. She demanded I pay her $150 to replace the cost of her ID.

Is that what a replacement license costs in Florida? At $25, not remotely.

But now I know how much her fake cost. And this was top tier, high end shit. A theme I’ve seen from the past few weeks. Sure, the dollar bin IDs are still prevalent, but this latest crop is wildly varying by state and producing good quality fakes.

After her bargain, which wasn’t really a bargain fail, she didn’t move on with her grief as she devolved to Anger once again. This time for the left pocket! That really stunned me. How was she so quick? Like a little red-haired jackrabbit.

Depression was next. Not hers, however. She was holding up the line, and the line was getting frustrated. We had the room, but there was a holdup. They couldn’t go in until this wily creature was fully removed. So they did what always warms my heart, and start acting on my behalf. More often than not, the crowd wants to see a member of the customer crowd prevail. The bouncers are at fault because they’re the ones making them wait in line (and not the fire marshal, the state liquor license board, simple mathematics, and the law of supply & demand).

When you win the crowd outside the bar, like Oliver Reed said in Gladiator, you win your freedom. You’re now free of whatever crazy your opponent is handing you. Gone is the tête-à-tête, the personal volley of insults and innuendo. Now it’s an ambush. A no-win scenario for the person on the wrong side of the gate.

The first blow was from a woman at the front of the line. As Florida Woman started her first retreat, she thought* she heard someone badmouth her. What she actually heard was a woman talk to her girlfriend about how they can finally get in. That set off a quick firestorm. Now Florida Woman was gonna beat her ass.

A bald man eight deep laid into her. “Go home,” he shouted. “It’s over!” That only enraged her more, but sensing the numbers weren’t in her favor, the second and final retreat began.

An hour later, one of her male friends approached me in the bar. He asked if he could get the ID back. No money, just earnestly asking the question. My flat denial surprised him a bit, but he relented.

Another of her male friends (this was a group of 11) stopped me at the sink in the men’s room.

“Yeah, man, she was totally talking about how good her fake was. That she got into all the bars in Ann Arbor with it.”

Ah. Acceptance.

Part IV: Put You In a Mansion,
Somewhere in Wiscansin

I am from Wisconsin, but I never had a Wisconsin ID. This does not stop me from correctly identifying one of them. After all, I have Wisconsin friends, family, and books. Plus, I know my shit. I know my directions and my distances, and my general state trivia. I can catch anything.

But this one, whoa boy, this one almost had me fooled.

Too often when I present a stack of fakes to a class, people will go agog pointing out all the ways it’s fake. Stop it. Not everything is obvious. Vendors put effort, time, technology, and money to get these fakes from online to your door. Forgeries are a multi-billion dollar industry, and IDs are definitely part of that money-making machine. Nobody is skimping on product quality on purpose.

So, when I say this card had me fooled, this shIt was GOOD.

And the kid knew trivia.

His name wasn’t easily Google-able. The only thing I found was an obit from someone similarly named that died 40 years ago. Dead end, literally.

OK, the internet won’t help me. Let’s try a question.

“I see you’re from Appleton, about how far away is that from Green Bay?”

“Like, 40 minutes.”

Shit. That’s too close to be wrong.

Blacklight. Of course. That will doom this card.

Dammit.

Perfect. The card had the right color, the right holos, the right texture, the window, the font, the style. Why did I hold it in the first place? The picture. The gold standard of make or break fakes. There was something off about the picture. But I couldn’t place it.

To be honest, I was two seconds from giving him the ID back. Three seconds from letting him inside the bar. Not to burst any other bouncer’s bubble, but this ID fools every bar in the city if I don’t get it here.

He spoke, unprompted, between seconds one and two. Sometimes your best friend isn’t the internet or general knowledge, it’s impatience.

“Listen, man, my whole family is from Wesconsin. Just give me the card back and let us inside.”

THE FUCK YOU JUST SAY?

WESCONSIN?

LIKE WEST-CONSIN?

NOT EAST-CONSIN, BUT WEST-CONSIN?

“Fuck you,” I told him like Will Ferrell in this blooper clip from Anchorman 2. “You almost had me. Wesconsin. Bastard.”

With renewed vengeful energy for this child wasting my time, I did a Facebook search of his first and middle name. Boom. A 19-year-old kid from 12 miles away.

I showed him the proof, and he kept denying it, albeit while walking backwards and away from the front line, behind his friends, the crowd, and the shadows into the night, never to be heard from again.