How Not To Lie

If Someone Asks If You’re Ziggy Marley, Just Say No

We checked in to the Hyatt just off Canal Street, right there on the edge of the French Quarter. The Writer and I’d had grown up together, so he and I shared a room, while the Director of Development and the CEO split a suite. The CEO announced plans to find all-you-can-eat Chinese food. He told us that he’d scheduled a meeting for all of us to meet the president of the Korean animation company we’d just merged with. He was the reason we were looking to sell a TV show. The business breakfast was set for 6:30 in the morning. I suggested we split up and meet fresh the next day. Everyone agreed that was a good idea. It was possibly our first good idea in the last two thousand miles.

It had been a brutal drive across the Southwestern corner of the States. Like wine, sodium pentathol, or the promise of sex, you’ll sometimes find a desert will get a man talking. You might think the desolation would make a person quiet like their surroundings, but nope. Deserts bring out the defiant side of humanity. This may also be why both Burning Man and Las Vegas are desert attractions. It’s like we feel a need to push back against the limitlessness of the desert’s emptiness. Or maybe they’re just really great places to go crazy. The desert almost broke us.

We were four cocky twenty-something men, all of us professional, creative and independent-minded types who lived and worked together. As if we wanted to test our friendships, we’d locked ourselves together in that SUV and intentionally driven across the arid brutality of West Texas. It was a cannonball run — a straight shot with no stops. The CEO planned to drive the whole way himself. Texas changed his mind. But I’ll give him this he made it across the desert. He drove non-stop from Los Angeles until he finally collapsed somewhere outside of San Antonio. 1300 miles.

We rented a motel room in the middle of nowhere. If you put two quarters in a box on the nightstand, the beds would shake. I guess this was considered sexy before we had the Internet. After the CEO got four hours sleep, we hit the road. When we arrived in New Orleans, we were all tired, which probably explains why the first thing we did was run into a pedestrian with our loaded-down SUV. The pedestrian was fine — he sorta bounced off the bumper and cushioned himself against the hatchback of an old Honda.

Once we were checked in to our hotel rooms, the Writer and I quickly came up with what we considered to be the second good idea of the trip. We put a towel under the door and got high. We tried to shake the Texas out of our system. After we smoked, we took turns in the bathroom so we could wash the road off us. Soap and water possess a remarkable power to change a man’s disposition. If you’re in a shitty mood, go wash your face, rinse out your mouth and your mood will improve. Ours did, and then it did some more when we smoked again and got even higher.

We followed our noses to dinner. We both wanted to enjoy a good meal. It’s not every day that you’re in New Orleans. Plus, we wanted to lay down a foundation for a long night of drinking. The Writer had jambalaya and I enjoyed shrimp and Andouille sausage etouffe — both simple dishes, but damn were they delicious. Our night had begun.

It’s important I point out that, for many years, people thought I looked like Bob Marley. I guess the resemblance was strong enough to overcome logic. Like, sometimes folks would act like the ghost of the dead reggae singer was walking by. They would, for a moment, act like Bob Marley was there with them. Other times folks would be a little more reasonable and assume I was Ziggy, or possibly one of the lesser Marleys whose names they did not know.

It boiled down to one of three questions:

a) Has anyone ever told you look just like Bob, man?

b) Um, like, excuse me, but, um … are you Ziggy Marley?

c) Hey! Are you one of the Marleys?

No offense to Ziggy or the other Marleys, but I preferred it when they thought I was Bob. I mean, who wants to be the sequel, you know? Whatever. This is what I looked like:

The Writer and I started our night of drinking. He and I had been hoisting pints together since we were in high school. This night would be the culmination of years of practice. But we had to be smart about it because of our 6:30 a.m. breakfast meeting.

Which bar did we pick to start our crawl? The Blacksmyth Bar — reputed to be the oldest bar in America and once owned by the pirate Jean Lafitte. For two modern privateers like us, freebooters doing business with the scallywags of television, the Blacksmyth Bar was perfect. The only trouble was that the bar was built for smaller people. My friend, the Writer, was and remains a big fella. He stands 6’3 and weighs over two hundred pounds. You really notice his size when you’re with him in a packed car or an old tyme bar. The flagstone floor was uneven and dangerous to negotiate, especially, when one is properly pissed. There were field stones piled and old-ass bricks mortared together for walls and partitions. The look was something akin to time-travel. You feel like you’re drinking in 1722 when the bar was built. Also, there’s a piano. Tip the guy large and he may even play some Billy Joel for you. We did. He did. And we all sang along.

Usually, when you drink in Los Angeles, it means you have to limit your intake because eventually, you have to drive home. Or you have to use a car service or cab. But on foot in the French Quarter we had no reason not to get fall down drunk (other than our breakfast meeting at six-thirty the next morning). After getting our drunk good and warmed up at the Blacksmyth Bar, we’d had enough of pirate history and wanted to step into the heart of the madness. The Blacksmyth Bar is on the far side of the French Quarter, on a street barely trammeled by tourists, which is also why you can barely smell urine and puke in the streets. We again followed our noses, this time to the stinky center.

There are drinks in New Orleans called grenades. There are drinks named after local storm systems that every so often sweep into town and fuck the city up. And you, too, can get fucked up by hurricanes and grenades. You can also stop at a drive-thru daiquiri shack. Or just walk up, like we did. After about two hours of trying every thing that looked like radioactive fruit juice or arrived in an enormous and stupid-looking glasses made more festive with a neon crazy-straw, I was what any officer of the law would call drunk. So was the Writer. He had a distinct advantage over me height and weight-wise, which helped with the absorption of alcohol. That’s not to say we weren’t faring well. We grew up in a drinking culture. New Orleans didn’t intimidate us. It should have. But it didn’t.

We met him at the third bar. One of those real touristy monstrosities: on the corner so you can see it coming and going; two stories with booming bass bumping out from both floors, drunks stumbling and dancing their way in and out, and people wearing alcohol-distributing clothing like hats, camel-backs, and neon tubular arm bracelets, all filled with glowing alcohol. That kind of place. We went in. This was our undoing.

The place was packed. Everyone was sweaty, which actually helped you sorta slide through the crowd. At the rail, we got the attention of the bartender and ordered our flaming hurricane hats and matching neon green camel-back drink sacks for the walk to the hotel. The dude pushed between me and the guy next to me. He shoved past my shoulder and then turned to face me. He had a hard visage, scars here and there, his eyes glassy and blood-shot like he’d been at it awhile. He fixed his fuzzy stare on me and said slowly, “Are you who I think you are? Are you … Ziggy Marley?”

Damn. He picked Ziggy. What this drunk dude didn’t know and would likely never guess was that I’d been prepping for a movie about the late great reggae star and had been practicing my Jamaican accent for weeks and weeks. Like an overly-zealous pupil looking to show-off his Bob Marley impression for his teacher, I decided in my drunken moment to go with it. People were always bothering me in public. I thought to myself, okay, I’m gonna have some fun for a change.

I said, “Yes, I. Pleasure be mine, mon. But hey, don’ tell anyone. Ya know? Ya digga me say? Thank I, brudda.” It seemed so harmless. At the time.

How could I know he wouldn’t just find that little string of words charming? I thought maybe he’d have a fan moment and ask me to sign something; I would put up a little pretense of how this was not the best time, but, of course, would do it for a real fan like himself and then I’d sign his forehead or t-shirt or whatever odd request for a signature he might have. It was just a harmless series of pretty lies.

Not only did I miscalculate how convincing my look and accent were in combination, but it never occurred to me that this guy could be a fucking local legend. Which he was. He raised his hand and a bartender came right over. The bartender made whatever drinks we wanted. Handed them to us and said they were on the house. Our new host grinned, broadly, quite proud of his display of hospitality. He said with a sinister promise, “Now, I’m gonna show you my town. C’mon! Bring your drinks!” He urged us out of the tourist disaster zone and into the streets, by now swollen with drunken tourists and red-eyed television executives there for the same annual sales meeting and conference as us. The Writer and I grinned at each other like two pirates who’d conned the naïve locals into believing we were gods who’d come to visit their island nation and sample their tropical bounty.

Bar after bar, the local legend took us in and the host or hostess, bouncer or bartender, or some combination of the four would greet him, make space for him and get us drinks. Bar after bar. In each one, he’d introduce me to the staff. “This here’s Ziggy Marley and I’m showing him my town. Big Mike meet Ziggy. Ziggy, this here is Big Mike.” I’d nod and give a friendly, “Yes, I.” Then we’d be handed more drinks. The Writer stood at my side. Due to his size, everyone treated him like my bodyguard. As we got drunker and drunker, the only thing our far too generous host wanted to know was how Ziggy Marley liked his fair city.

Having no way of knowing the answer to that, I offered my opinion of what Ziggy Marley would think about N’awlens. I felt Ziggy would be very generous with his love for the terminal city situated down at the end of the Mississippi. He would be a fan of the architecture, and he would have a morbid curiosity about the above-ground cemeteries, he would find glimpses of heaven in the cuisine — having a sweet tooth he would be particularly fond of beignets. He wouldn’t be a huge fan of the coffee, especially the kind with chicory, but the breakfast and brunch places would be worth mentioning. I worried Ziggy was too focused on food, so I added his love for street musicians, the aging jazz legends, and, of course, the cars. The paint jobs on some of the N’awlens crawlers looked cool to Ziggy. The Local Legend thought Ziggy really got the vibe of N’awlens and he appreciated what Ziggy appreciated about his city — the food, the music, the eccentricity of the people.

At this point I was so drunk, I was surprised Ziggy was still speaking in coherent sentences. The Writer, who’d grown weary of playing my bodyguard and silent partner, and had been drinking twice as much as me due to having no one to talk to, was now fully drunk and ready to go back to the hotel room so he could maybe get three hours of sleep before our breakfast meeting with our new Korean boss. He leaned over and told me “Hey Z, we need to ditch your new buddy and get back to the room — I’m done, man. I left mine so, hey, give me your key and I’ll let you in when you get back.” I pulled out the hotel key. I was slowly and drunkenly processing how I’d get into the room if the Writer passed out. I didn’t know whose name our rooms were under; I had just been handed a key and that was that. Now, at three in the morning, I was fairly certain the concierge and desk staff wouldn’t just give a key to some drunk guy who walked in off the street and said, “Hello, hellooo … I’m in rrrrroom 13-oh-8.”

I turned to the Writer and said without any hint or trace of a Jamaican accent, “Okay, man, here’s the key — but dude, I’m gonna be like five minutes behind you — don’t fucking pass out — no, fuck it, just put the bar across the doorway so the door stays open. Cool?”

I held out the plastic room key. And then it was gone. Swipe! The Local Legend grabbed our key. Anger and hate and wrath and alcohol mixed in his bloodshot eyes and he said like I’d just shot the Easter Bunny in front of his kids, “You’re … not … Ziggy … Marley.”

Oops. All the tequila had finally shown me to be a liar. As they say: in vino veritas. I’d say: tequila removes bullshit. I sorta stuttered and stumbled over my words, “No, bro… I’m not, Ziggy. Sorry. And look, thanks for showing us around … but we need to go … sorry about that … can I have our key back?”

“No, bro. I’m not … going to give it back to you. Not until you make this right. Not until you fix what you done. You fucking wanna embarrass me in my town? Do you muthafucka?!” He said it with a rising anger. Behind the darkness gathering in his eyes you could almost see the light of an idea shaping as a plan in his mind. The Writer looked at me. There was no bed in his immediate future. His eyes pleaded with mine. Make this right. Everyone seemed to want me to fix what I’d done. But you can’t un-ring a bell.

“What can I possibly do to make this right, man?” I asked the Local Legend.

He thought a moment. “You need to go and apologize,” he answered, certain as sunshine. Imagine if a kindergarten teacher got shit-faced in the French Quarter and then decided they knew how to fix all the drunken mistakes you’d made that night. “Y’all need to go and say sorry to every one these muthafuckas you lied to and hurt. We clear?” Luckily, I was scared enough that I didn’t laugh.

“Yeah, okay. Let’s go do that. And you’ll give me our key back.” I asked.

“Maybe. We’ll see how sorry you are.” The Local Legend said with great moral superiority.

And so, the Writer, the Local Legend and I reversed course and went to all the same bars and I told every single host or hostess, bouncer or bartender that I’d met that I was not in fact Ziggy Marley, that I had lied to them. The looks those people gave me could’ve turned milk sour on sight. Bar after bar. It pretty much sucked worse than a diarrhea slurpee. I thought it was just a harmless lie but I’d warped their sense of reality and used their imaginations and dreams against them. I’d played celebrity to gain favor and free drinks. Bar after bar, I apologized while a tired bartender or overworked hostess looked at me like I was snake-shit. Finally, we were back at the first bar, the glowing neon version of Hell imagined by the mind of Harmony Korine. I apologized one last time, even though I hadn’t technically told that bartender that I was Ziggy Marley.

Satisfied with my act of contrition, the Local Legend held out my room key. He spat as he talked, “You a stupid muthafucka to go around lying to muthafuckas about someone they respect … tryin’ to play like you a great man when you a punk ass … tha’s about as low as it gets … you lucky I didn’ knock your ass out for lying to me … disrespectin’ me in my muthafuckin’ town? You sorry-ass excuse for a brutha … You TV people need to get your asses back to fuckin’ Hollywood where your lies do good for a muthafucka — but not here. We straight?”

I nodded and said, “Yeah, man. You know, you’re totally right. I didn’t really mean to-“

“Shut the fuck up, man! Don’t you know when you gettin’ off easy? You fucked up. And now you made it right. Don’t go makin’ it worse by tryin’ to make it better. There ain’t no better to be found here. You. Fucked. Up. That’s that.” He said it with all the clarity of a Zen philosopher or a life coach. For a moment, I imagined how if he went back to Los Angeles with us, he could make millions telling Hollywood folks what they needed to hear.

“Look, muthafucka! You fucked up! Now shut the fuck up and make it right!”

I think we could all use a life coach like that from time to time. I don’t know about you, but I still tend to fuck up a lot. And every time I do, the Local Legend’s timeless advice pops in my head. After all, you can’t un-ring a bell.

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If you wish to enjoy more of Zaron Burnett III’s work, here’s a link to his latest collection of humorous essays: How Do I Survive This Sh*t?

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