reverse plagiarism

Being the stimulus for the output of others seems to be my knack, and maybe I can learn to use it with intention if I live to be a hundred and twenty two. But it can sure be a bummer sometimes. I’m thinking hard about the first time it happened to me. I’m remembering a poem I wrote at fourteen that was absolute insurance for any lovelorn schoolmates. It did not once fail to win them the attention they sought. In fact, it may have been the seed for more than one marriage, not just the coveted date, but I’m pretty sure all of them asked to use it.

Then there was the time I was killed by my first love, walking around amputated as hell for a very long time, sitting in my car on the headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the night, scribbling, or hauling my insomnia to an all night coffee shop, scribbling so furiously that staff sometimes worried I was a mole from corporate headquarters. On one of these nights I met a guy at the coffee shop who was particularly interested in what I was writing... or: my body, which was almost a hundred percent of the attention I got back then. We had the most wonderful chat. It lasted for a few hours of much-needed relief from entirely too serious pain. Not that long after this extremely happy acquaintance a song came on the radio that would turn out to be a monster hit. There was a line in it identical to one of my amputation insomnia scribbles. I was both glad to hear it and vexed as hell that my line would turn out to be in a song that most flower children know by heart to this day. It would be a couple years before I went to a concert and saw the man singing it was the man with whom I’d shared that happy acquaintance in the all night coffee shop.

There were countless times lawyers in my office ripped off my work in their quests to be made partner, which would have been fine with me if they had not also tried to make me the author of their mistakes behind this same motive. I own my own and really take it badly when others treat me as if I do not; as if I might lie, or cheat, or steal, or play some kind of game to deceive, to wiggle out of responsibility, to delude myself I can elude karma. Even if they’re strangers and have no personal basis to understand this about me, I’m appalled by their courtship of such a dirty world. If a banker presumes to treat me as a potential felon, I want to smack that banker so hard that the Nazism spills out its ears.

There was the gad-about who was so juiced behind a particular dance move of mine that it inspired him to become a professional dancer and use that move to win competitions. He very giddily introduced me to everyone as his reason to dance, which was endearing and went a long way toward cementing his reputation as a dear fellow. I could not begrudge him because he had the vision and the energy to turn something natural to me into something that would pay off for him.

I suppose the same could be said of the superstar who took my line away from our counter encounter... or that I can take secret pleasure in being the author of a wisp of code in millions of minds.

There is a famous writer who is very close to my heart. He lives across the continent, and there would be two rooms of my letters at his place if he hadn’t started returning them because, he warned, some of the other famous people in his circle really had no scruples. Indeed, I had seen whole paragraphs of mine magically springing from the most amazing places and this would explain that, but I’d poured my heart out to him for many years, and getting the evidence back after he’d read it, after all that time, kept making me cry. His situation was such that he couldn’t really keep it safe, and he wanted me to be the one making the living off my work. What a concept! So I can’t fault his motives, but it did always hurt anyway. I haven’t laid eyes on him in twenty eight years, and still I love him like my lungs, cry sometimes that I cannot just hug him at will.

I recall making a list of all the famous people I’d caught plagiarizing me once when I was trying to divorce myself from the pain of sharing this planet with so much injustice. I took every scrap of proof I could find in my boxes and boxes of writings, and dumped it all in the incinerator in the back yard, while another friend danced around, tearing at his hair, whining like a crazed little girl about me burning my irreplaceable creation.

Pfeh!

Obviously it’s damn replaceable. Look how many did re-place it. (Quite a damn few.)

And he had no room to keen about my ceremonial cremation of injustice! He was forever jotting down my ejaculations for his use. Then bellowed that he was going to stop speaking to me unless I assisted in the homicide of my regard for him by finishing reading the manuscript of his first attempt at a book. (I guess it really is a form of creativity to plagiarize well.) So I finished reading it. My agonies on his behalf were not appreciated any more than my attempts to spare us both the trouble.

I was crazy for the scent of gardenias. So I would buy one to wear in my hair whenever I was going out on the town, having learned the hard way that gardenia perfume was entirely too much of a sensation -- so to speak. It wasn’t that long until there were quite a few women who frequented my friend’s nightclub wearing gardenias in their hair. I did not hold a gardenia-burning ritual. I started wearing paint-spattered overalls to my friend’s place of business.

The most enduring aspect of my relationship with style is that the popularity of it or appropriateness of it is a pretty sure indication I’m not going there. Where women are wearing gowns and heels, I’m in a pantsuit and sneakers. If they’re in bikinis, I’m in jeans and sweatshirt. I have been known to be so attached to a flannel negligee that I wear it in public. It’s not even about distinguishing myself. It’s about being innately unable to hang with the fads and social pressures that inhere dressing in the First World. It’s about losing the separation between the concepts of it and me, being and wanting to be myself for all sentient beings, purposefully declining to engage in things that ruin all our lives behind our own backs. Distinctions so out there you still do not notice. If someone who has no aptitude for the job can beat me out for it because they wore a blue suit to the interview and I wore what I always wear, then that was no place for me to be cutting out hunks of my soul to draw a paycheck.

Early on, I’d begun wearing my sweatshirts inside out to be more huggable thereby, and that became a craze as well.

Sheesh.

My sock fetish worsening, I combed telephone books for stores that sold dance-wear so I could add my legs into this celebration of soft. No sooner had I at long last tracked down the leg warmers for this, and my grandmother set hard at work knitting more for me, than leg warmers turned into an international craze so hard that you could buy them at the damn service station, right along with cigarettes, soda pops and magazines. So my leg warmers went into a trunk for a very long time, and even yet I only wear them in fits and blasts not to create a revival.

For the longest time I drooled over Ugg boots. (An extension of the sock thing, I’d say.) But I’d stopped moving and shaking and no longer had the money for such things. Still, I’d see men crossing a parking lot in them of a winter’s day, or women browsing in the produce section in them, and never lost my affinity for the things. In my part of the world they’d become almost as ubiquitous as sneakers and I just could never shake my materialism as it intersected with Ugg boots. So I finally traded a week’s worth of groceries for a pair. Inside a month, still trying to break them in properly, a drop of battery acid ate through the toe of one of them. I took them to a shoe repair shop and asked if anything could be done, if there was some arty way to patch this hole that could be extended to the other boot as well. We came up with some green suede stars to sew on asymmetrically. At the time, I was living a mile from my nearest neighbor and thirteen miles from the nearest small town. You probably know how that went. This time I just thanked whoever complimented me on my Ugg boots and resolved never to notice the feet of another person for the rest of time. Knock yerselves out.

It has crossed my mind that no one has ever copied me; that I am clairvoyant and am copying that, a collective now that hasn’t arrived yet, not really creating my own expression, written, said, drawn, arranged or worn, and living it in private and in public, deluding myself it’s my creation. This would explain both the feeling of weirdness I can’t shake, and the problem with my personal expression going so rapidly viral so many times. But it doesn’t explain why people are so mephitic about it, why it seems to them always most appropriate to sneak around behind my back, or smear me, or snub me, or ignore me, or treat me as though I deserve the abuse, when faced with it.

I do know the explanation for that, and wish I didn’t have to. But the truth seems to be the only thing I really do have to face, the thing each of us ultimately never succeeds in erasing, no matter how hard we try. I need to perfect my truth-telling/being/wearing/living and the art of staying so impervious to the uses to which people put it that it turns into a mirror so flawless it disappears.