The tone-deaf saga of four-day Charlie

by David Benjamin

“In England, very early in the second world war, we were all provided with buff-colored cards which told us, as well as any interested authority, who we were. They were called identity cards, and while no one much cared for them, they were grudgingly accepted as one of the nastier, if necessary, inconveniences of being at war. Nigel Dennis has recalled them … to symbolize an extravagance of human follies.”
— From a review of Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis

MADISON, Wis.—One of the books I most enjoyed in high school was a satire by Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity. In his novel, to make fun of the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, Dennis assembled in a country house a fictional cast of shrinks, who presented case histories of patients who did not exist. They invented characters who synthesized their pet theories of psychology and their intellectual biases. Dennis’ band of assembled analysts were so skilled at warping identity that they were able to turn the servants in the house into other people, convincing each that they would be better off as someone else.

In a 1955 review of Cards of Identity, Time magazine (which, at the time, did not identify its writers) wrote, “Once upon a time (perhaps in grandfather’s day) … a man’s Self was his castle. There might be an occasional siege of sin, and the drawbridge to the outer world might get tangled in confusion, but the Self itself stood fast. It was kept in place (like Bishop Berkeley’s tree in the quad) by God, or at least by church custom or class. Today, the selves are multiplying like amoebae, and a man with only one is downright backward.”

Unaware of its psychological and social implications, I had already blundered into the sheer shiftiness of my own incipient identity. This happened when I was ten years old, at a summer camp sponsored by 4-H (an outfit in which my membership was tenuous). On a bus to the forest primeval, among kids of varying ages from farm towns far and wide, I rode unwittingly into a four-day vacation from my Self.

As myself, known as David to adults and “Benjamin” to my disdainful peers, I had been pegged as an egghead in class and a weenie on the playground. To the teachers and divines of my Catholic school, I was, at best, an enigma. Although they reluctantly conceded my formative intellect, they had no choice but to regard me as a dead-end kid, destined to delinquency by the sins of a mother who had divorced my dad and who worked outside the home, where she was available—if not receptive—to a veritable universe of lustful males. Fatefully and irrevocably, I was the offspring of a temptress.

When I arrived at camp, however, I was not myself. Not David. Not “Benjamin.” Not anybody. As I stepped off the bus, a teenage counselor handed me a blank, buff-colored placard attached to a lanyard. Providing me a marker, he told me to inscribe the placard—which would hang from my neck for the next four days—with my name.

But what name?

I gripped the pen and looked around. No one was familiar. No one—except my sister Peg, who would be billeted far away on the girls’ side of the camp—had ever met me. Looking back, I could say that I had a precocious epiphany, intuiting at that crucial moment, the evanescence of identity.

But, c’mon. I was ten.

It just hit me, in a flash of self-negating impulse, that I could fill that blank slate with any name that struck my fancy. So I wrote—indelibly—on my ID tag: “Charlie.”

Just like that—shazam—I was reborn. As David and/or “Benjamin,” I was a shy kid, circumspect and mildly paranoid. Charlie, to my surprise and my sister’s eventual mortification, was an outgoing goofball, bubbling over with charm. Most shockingly, Charlie turned out to be musical. As David and/or “Benjamin,” I was tone-deaf, off-key and two notes behind the choir. But Charlie was a kind of rock star, singing stupid kid songs so expressively, with a twinkle in his eye and a lilt in his voice, that campers started paying him for a rendition of “On Top of Spaghetti,” or “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?”

Charlie’s chart-topper, though, was a parody of “I Love You, Birdie,” which had trickled into pop culture from Bye Bye, Birdie, the Broadway musical. For a dime, Charlie would alter the lyrics by changing “love” to “hate” and insert a designated name in place of “Birdie.” For example, for a camper named Toony, with whom Charlie bonded, the song—paid for by a kid other than Toony—would go, “We hate you, Toony,/ Oh, yes, we do./ We hate you, Toony/ Your mother, too!/ When you come near us,/ We’re blue…” Etcetera.

This was all goodnatured ribbing that often turned into a sing-along, after which Toony got his arm chucked repeatedly and his hair tousled by the other kids, who would then fork over another dime for Charlie to sing “We hate, you, Gary,” or “We hate you, Ronald”. Etcetera.

One day, my sister encountered Charlie, warbling his heart out for a chuckling audience of a dozen or so kids. Between numbers, Peg grabbed her brother and said, “David, what are you doing?”

“I’m not David. I’m Charlie.”

“What?”

“Look. It says so right here. ‘Charlie’.”

“Oh my God. Stop it, David!”

“David who?”

Little did I know, in my four-day imposture as Charlie—which netted me about $2.90 in mad money—that I had stumbled into a the philosophical, psychological and—especially—literary labyrinth of identity.

As soon as I climbed onto the bus back to Tomah, I left behind my alter ego as Charlie. But I was haunted. I never quite shook a subliminal perception that I was not—and would never be—entirely myself. Later, in high school, reading Cards of Identity and styling myself as a “writer,” the specter of Charlie followed me like Dostoyevsky’s double or Charles Williams’ doppelganger. I anguished over what I deemed the aspiring author’s toughest challenge—creating characters who are credible, relatable and distinct from one another. It had yet to dawn on me that I had already breached that barrier by creating Charlie from among the cast of selves that I harbored in my mind and imagination. I was just beginning to figure out that each of us is many of us and that fighting to consolidate one’s innate multiplicity, as Nigel Dennis intimated, can make you crazy.

In my struggle for a literary identity, the self that began to evolve in high school, in a city far from Tomah (where I could never change), was neither David nor “Benjamin”. The eventual alternate self, called “Benjie,” that has adhered to me—occasionally confused with a movie dog or a Faulknerian idiot—is more Charlie than anyone else in my cast of personalities.

Fortunately, I think that for a writer—or, for that matter, an actor, a musician, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, even a politician—a case of multiple personality is not a disorder. It’s a wellspring.

Charlie was my first detour into the depths of identity that lurk—but often go unexplored—beneath every human skin. Sometimes, as I’m hammering together the planks and timbers of a new story, I think ruefully that my life’s vocation, ordained by a capricious Fate, is to share my ever-growing campful of off-key Charlies with anybody who’ll stop long enough to listen.

“On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese … ”