Fake ID's: The Phantom Menace!

One man's quest to find redemption through false identification.

I stepped up to the counter. I was smooth, casual, nonchalant as I put my two half-racks of Blitz Weinhard's next to the register and stared openly into the eyes of the hopefully friendly woman behind the counter. She held my fate: I was underage and trying to buy beer.

"I.D?" she asked.

Not a problem. There will be beer for me, on this night I stand in front of the counter and eagerly await it, for I came here prepared. My California license may say I'm 18 and won't be of legal drinking age till the year 2000, but the Utah ID I hand over to the lady behind the counter says I'm 21. It also states that I'm a resident of Salt Lake City, live at 227 Evergreen Terrace (the street of course being the residence of the Simpsons), and go by the name of Mitch Mooligan.

The first thing you learn when you have a fake is to avoid letting the salesperson hold it. It is easier for a checker to spot a fake when the she has it in her hand and can inspect it up close. Knowing this, I had mine in a wallet with a flip lid which closed over two clear plastic ID pockets. With my California license and University ID safely hidden in a credit card pouch, I calmly let the saleslady examine my membership card for alcohol-induced bliss.

"Shit," I thought, as she said she wanted it out of the plastic. As I slid it out and let her hold it, my heart began to beat a little quicker in apprehension. She looked at it for two seconds, then spoke those fateful words: "So, Mitch, where did you get this one made, huh?"

With that one sentence, my blood froze and my face mimicked that of a man losing complete control of all bodily functions. And as I realized this meant no beer, I almost died. The saleswoman began to speak again, and I could barely understand her through my daze of heart-wrenching disappointment and shock.

"I can call the cops and have them check this out, or you can just leave here like a man."

"She's fucking serious. I'm going to lose my ID," I thought to myself.

My options looked grim: I could go for the grab and run, but she was holding my precious alcohol freedom at least a foot back from the counter and down by her waist. It would have meant diving over the counter, and at that point the sickening waves of regret and mourning at the passing of my good friend Mitch Mooligan held me paralyzed. The ID was gone. I hunched my shoulders, put my hands in my pockets, and shuffled out of there mumbling incoherently about setting the place on fire. I'll admit it, I was pathetic, I was a loser, I had just lost 3 years of my life; I was 18 again. I had been batting near perfect in Eugene with that fake ID. All the frat-dick bars accepted it. Even the barkeeps at the beer-soaked den near 13th and Patterson that I had come to love thought it was real. Drinking in Eugene had opened so many doors for me. Being a kid from a small town in the boondocks of California, this had been the first time in my life I could walk down to the corner pub and have a pint of Guinness and a smoke in absolute serenity. Those simple joys had now been stolen from me, as my license to indulge rested in the pocket of a hatchet-faced woman with no mercy in her soul. Why did she take my freedom? Was it my 10-year-old Mexican drinking buddies in the store with me, my nervous twitching, or the fact that the fake state seal on the ID read, "The great seal of the document?" I'll never know. All I did know, as I walked out of the store on that cold October night, was that Eugene would now have to supply me with a replacement ID. But where the fuck would I get one?

The first thought that struck me was to ask the police. They are in the business of collecting fake IDs, and as that was also my primary purpose for writing this muck, our goals convened. However, when I began to investigate the issue, the "massive" Halloween riots were rocking Eugene, and those in uniform disregarded my incessant calls. I next tried the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, but they never even answered the phone. I talked to one receptionist and she gave me the name of a person who gave me another name of a person who never called me back. The authorities were clamming up. I smelled conspiracy, and decided to get drunk on beer bought for me by another more fortunate soul who still had his fake ID.

While drunk, I endured the pity of buddies in my dorm, those bastards who still had their fake IDs and delighted in sending pangs of grief through my soul by saying now and again, "How about we hit the bars tonight? Oh, I forgot, your fake was taken." The shame was unbearable, and the cheap second-hand beer brought no relief. Yet on one of those depressingly belligerent nights in the dorm, a well-meaning friend passed along a secret hint about a supposed ID operation.

Tolerably drunk, I listened to his tip-off with glazed but curious eyes.

"Hey, you had your ID taken, right?" he asked.

"Yeah. What the hell do you care?" I snarled.

"Dude, I heard Peter is going to have a setup going pretty soon. I even heard he has all fifty on his computer."

"Fifty what?" I slurred, not yet grasping that the end to both my quest and the research for this article was close at hand.

"States, you fucking moron. I heard that he had all fifty states' ID backgrounds on his computer, and that all he has to do is print them up and put your photo on them."

Beer in hand, I swayed back and forth, still not understanding. "My ID got taken away from me, taken away, away, away," I replied morosely.

At that point my friend, justifiably disgusted, got up and left.

The next morning, being a bit more cognizant, I was able to remember some of what had happened. Vague outlines were dredged from the depths of my booze- addled mind, images of a dorm room filled with people, beer, and someone named Peter who was making fake IDs. I needed to find this Peter to regain my freedom.

Why shouldn't I have that freedom? It's been said many times, but it still bears repeating: I can vote, get drafted, and be imprisoned in this country, but I can't buy one measly beer. This country must be a nation of drunks, if they give 18-year-olds the right to vote at an age when they don't give a shit, and 21-year-olds the legal privilege to drink when they don't give a shit. I believe the two should be switched around. If a person can start drinking at 18, chances are he'll have gotten drunk so much that, by the time he's 21, he'll have gotten partying out of his system and will be able to make a rational choice at the voting box.

But I digress. My search was yielding no results; I was getting desperate. I needed to find this Peter individual, but whenever I went to his room he wasn't there. When I did catch him, the constantly moving kid would say, "I'm going to do it tomorrow." Those "tomorrows" were adding up, and my deadline was getting closer. His more stable roommates explained that he had to get some more equipment, and that he was just a busy guy, being employed and what not. This didn't help me, because whenever I couldn't get ahold of Peter, I ended up drinking with his roommates.

You may be asking how we got this beer without any fake IDs. The simple answer is that we got it from a guy who lived down the hall who did have a fake ID. A short little guy from Rhode Island who went by the name of Chip Newsome, he's had the same fake for two years. Back in Providence, Newsome had a buddy who looked liked him, so for three bucks he got the ID, and the friend went to the DMV and reported it lost. Since the thing is genuine, Newsome has had some fun with it in Eugene, and has even been able to pass it off to cops.

"I showed it to six cops in Providence and two OPS officers here in Eugene," he said, and every time he got off.

He told me about one of his choice encounters with OPS agents, as we were sipping tea brewed from some of the fine quality mushrooms he'd hooked up with through a friend in Humboldt.

"Once I was walking through campus with a back-pack full of beer, tripping on 'shrooms with this girl, and we wanted to climb a tree and drink our beer, but this OPS officer came by and found us," he told me as we sipped. I had to laugh when he told me what the officer said to him.

"When he came up to us, he said, 'This tree is a known place for drug use.'"

A tree as a known place for drug use-I've only known Eugene for a short while, but that comment typifies a wide range of the ideological spectrum here. When I heard that, the first waves of 'shroom-induced euphoria were hitting me, and the laughter was uncontrollable. But then Newsome also recounted when his ID was held by a suspicious clerk, and he had to get loud to get it back.

"I've had a couple of problems with people who didn't believe I was the person on the ID. I even had to snatch it out of a lady's hands. I said "Fuck you, bitch, I'll take my business elsewhere," and grabbed it right back." I could believe it, coming from this crazed-looking son of a bitch, whose eyes began to slowly drift from his head, damn these 'shrooms.

Things were looking grim. I had mostly been getting drunk and stoned, when I should have been looking for IDs. There were only a few days left before this story had to be done, and I had to have a fake ID.

One afternoon, however, my luck changed. I walked into the cafeteria, and after fighting my way through the nauseating sights and smells, I came out into the dining hall and began to look for a seat. Hung-over, cranky, and nervous about my deadline, I almost missed Peter. I stood and stared. This was the fucker I had been looking for for about a week now. This was my contact. After days of journalistic whining and alcoholic ruminating, I could now get some real work done. I walked over, and after some desultory conversation probed the heart of the matter.

"You gonna get your fake ID system running soon?" I asked, in the hopes that, even though I barely knew him, he'd open up.

"Yeah," Peter replied, "I'm going to start working on a couple today for some girls."

"Nice," I replied. "How are you going to do it?".

"I scan them through the computer, change the information on them, slap a photo on it, laminate, charge $25 and it's anybody's," he said.

Interested, and relieved that I finally had this guy cornered, I continued my long-awaited grilling.

"Where do you get the backgrounds?"

"I trade them over the Internet."

"Trade them?"

"Yeah, like I'll give you Florida for Georgia. I've got like thirty of them." "And changing the information, you have the right fonts and all?"

"Yeah, I've got 400 fonts, but I've had to make a few."

This was too good, but it was time to reveal my motives.

"Have you ever read the Oregon Commentator?" I asked.

"No," he said flatly.

"Well, it's this off-beat, almost underground in a way, student publication that actually considered me a writer," I explained to him. "I'm doing a story on the pain of fake IDs, and I was wondering if I could check out your system."

"Yeah, sure, why don't you come up in a few hours, and I'll show you some samples of what I have."

I almost laughed out loud. I had done it! I had finally found a source for fake IDs. It was amazing: for almost two weeks I had spun my wheels-drinking, smoking pot, and basically fucking off-and now this guy had them. And he lived only 50 feet from my door.

I went up to his room at the appointed hour. He opened the door, after checking through the eye hole, and let me in. His room looked like any other, aside from the fact that it was packed with computer gear. Being computer-retarded, I have no idea what everything did, and I can't describe it because when I walked in, my attention was focused on his computer screen-which was displaying a driver's license from the State of Montana. It was on one of those art applications used by procrastinating students everywhere to make little point-n-click masterpieces.

This was too much. I wanted to scream, kick the fucking computer out of the fucking window, grab Peter by the throat, do something to express the unbelievable frustration that was welling up inside of me. It was this fucking easy to get a goddamn fake ID; all you had to do was have a scanner and a computer. There I was, whining about my "lost freedom" and all that other crap, and all I had to do was borrow a scanner, buy a cheap laminator, take a passport photo and do it myself. Fuck this country and fuck myself; fuck this country because it's easy as hell to beat the drinking laws, and fuck me because I didn't know it.

All of you minors out there, desperate to get your hands on a fake ID to indulge in your ancient right to piss away a college education, do not lose hope. IDs are as easy to get as a hangover. You just need the right equipment. I only wish I'd fucking known that before writing this.

Brendan D. Gerhert, a freshman majoring in substance-abuse prevention, is undercover for the Oregon Commentator