The Man Who Met Himself

So, here goes:

It all started...

I first came across...

Basically, what is happening to me is...

Shit. I don't know where to start.

Okay, here goes. In a nutshell, I have this problem, which is thus:

I keep meeting myself.

My name is Rob. In my life I've been a child actor, a singer in a boy pop band, a bass player in a rock band and the man famous for threatening to kill George Bush on live television.

I'm the one who bungie jumped from New York bridge attached to a cow, posed for a photo shoot with the exhumed decayed body of Kurt Cobain, spent six months in a state prison for not asking permission for the latter, and broke my collar bone whilst doing the former. I snow-boarded down a rice mountain for charity, founded the first ever political party based solely on the decriminalisation of marijuana and outed Albert Einstein on BBC Radio one, prime time.

I hosted Letterman, slept with Madonna, tap-danced with a CGI Dirk Bogarde, burned 10 million dollars in front of a stunned televised audience, became the highest paid actor in a film with the biggest loss in history and even had a sports event named after me.

I'm short, have big muscles, good hair and can charm for queen and country. I play saxophone, can drive a HGV, and boy, can I dance.

I also believe in time travel.

At the moment I am staying in an old dusty log cabin off a beaten track in Loch Etiv, Scotland, staring at a sunset so orange I can feel its colour on my tongue. I love it here. Amongst the chirruping and cricketing of forest life there is a silence here that I never found anywhere else in my life, and so for a while I can put the enormous mess of my life behind me and drink myself into a pleasant stupor with 25-year old malt whiskey whilst watching squirrels jump from branch to branch and wood pigeons sneak onto my porch table for scraps of food.

This is my quiet place. For two weeks in a year nobody knows where I am, my wife, my friends, my agent and definitely the press. Absolutely definitely the press. I meet nobody here. The keys are left underneath the mat when I arrive, and the only cleaning service available is done by yours truly. No-one visits. The people I do meet — normally stag hunters taking customers up to the Ben or the occasional hiker passing through on the way to the Glencoe pass — either fail to recognise me or choose not to. Either way is fine by me.

When I leave the key goes back under the mat.

Normally, holed up in my little cabin, I do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Year after year is spent sat on the porch throwing bread out into the field and watching nature’s little animals and birds devour a loaf in under a minute. I enjoy this lack of activity. This keeps me centered and prepared for the circus which kicks in the second I climb into my jeep, pull out my mobile (which is pointedly turned off for the entire two weeks) and plug it into the hands-free, then switch on for the return trip to the airport. The mobile will be ringing by the time I have pulled away from the dust track and the cabin is still visible in my rear view mirror.

Today is different. Today the birds will be fluttering around my cabin, even approaching the porchway, heads tilted in confusion, wondering where their free daily supply of food is. All I have on my desk is a pen, some notepaper and a bottle of Glenfinnig to nurse me through the hazy recollections of my past while I try to put pen to paper and make sense of what happened yesterday out on Dubh Chnoc.

I offer no guarantees based on my memories, only that I have been as truthful as they will allow.

My first ‘event’ — if such a word is suitable enough — began with my stint in a little pop combo called Never Live Forever. You may have heard of us; we hit the cover of Rolling Stones three times within a year. We had quickly garnished a ‘boy band with attitude’ reputation, which suited us just fine and this reputation was being thoroughly earned on our current tour of the UK.

We were staying at the Holiday Inn in Glasgow. Sammo, our singer, had taken some really mean looking pills beforehand and was consequently proving a handful for our minders who looked just delighted to be there, and as we entered the building he began to remove his tight-necked sweatshirt, much to the admiration of the entourage of hanger-ons and drifters that followed us around like hungry dogs sniffing for meat.

As I stumbled through the door in to the main lobby a strong feeling of déjà vu trickled over me, starting as a tingling sensation at the back of my neck and then rising up to the top of my head.

I remember looking at Sammo as he suddenly darted over to the huge open fire near the dining area, ripped sweatshirt now in his hand. We were laughing because we knew exactly what would happen next. This same feat had been repeated in the same Holiday Inn hotel in Edinburgh two nights ago, where they had an identical fire in an identical lobby with, it looked like, identical staff.

We guffawed delightedly, watching them rush around trying to both put out the fire and calm him down. This was Sammo's style and it still hasn't changed to this day, although I would have thought that the accident in his later life would have calmed him down some. But there you go. Some people are just born to party.

The feeling of déjà vu returned once the bouncers brought Sammo under control and the fire — smaller than the last one at Edinburgh, which had almost threatened to set alight the plush carpets — had been doused with nervous waiters armed with extinguishers. I raised a brief quizzical smile at the girl who had her arm looped around mine, but she seemed oblivious to the sensation in my head; just a happy drunk girl with a member of a major pop band hanging off her hip.

Like a many-footed animal the group homed in on a nearly empty but tidy and prepared bar, the only sign of life a barman quickly dispatching a shot before facing his customers. He herded us all into a corner of the bar and drinks were brought to us. Before I knew it the party roared into action.

The sensation, which had abated for a moment, came back in a series of long pulsing waves bouncing from the back of my head to the front. Now I was becoming worried, and to set it all off, paranoid, something you do not want when your drug/drink habit has peaked for the night.

Someone howled with laughter, facing me, their face bobbing and diving in a hypnotic dance and a moment passed before I realised they were talking to me.

I forced an answer, "Yeah, ” my mouth was dry, skin hot and itchy.

Paranoia is a wonderful emotion. At first I had been just worried, but now I was worried about being worried, which told me, in my heightened state of realisation that there really was a problem. I clumsily placed my emptied Budweiser on the shag carpet and aimed my gaze towards the bar, my breath short and just the wrong side of ragged. I scanned my immediate area. Nothing. Out of the ordinary that is. The barman, working hard to fill a tray already packed with multi-coloured drinks, a young couple getting frisky in a corner, and some guy sat by the bar, wearing a Kangol hat at a fashionable angle, hunched over a bot—

— hang on. I know that guy.

The weird, funky feeling in my head flowed through my body and thrummed like a raging hearbeat. In all my life I have never felt such a sensation before or since. Goose pimples crawled over my body, shivers flowed up and down my back. Some part of me knew this guy at an intrinsic, hightly intimate level and the realisation of this nagged incessantly, seeminly obvious but just out of touch. Or rather, and this is pushing simplification to the nth degree here, I knew exactly who it was, but I was going to have to go through several various stages of denial before accepting it.

Sitting there amongst that entire crowd I stared at this figure sat on a stool, sipping his beer detachedly, advertising the personification of relaxation. Something caught his attention and he turned around. The throng parted like Moses had just turned up until there was nothing but an ugly hearth rug between me and him and for the first time I looked at his face.

Into my face.

No doubt about it. I’d recognise it anywhere.

The one presiding memory that brings those same shivers running down my spine now (while I sit here in contemplation clutching my tumbler, staring at the crackling fire, still thinking of Sammo and that crazy look in his eyes) as it did then all those dusty years ago, was the same bright, continual thought arcing in my head, beating a mistimed stacatto with my pounding heart.

So that’s what I look like to other people. There I am. That’s me.

Later, when I came to in a hotel room (which hotel? I thought. Where am I? Manchester? Newcastle?) the girl whose arm had so cloyingly wrapped itself around mine stood up and began shouting and throwing random objects at me. I didn't quite get the gist of her problem, but she was somewhat thoroughly dissatisfied with my attitude towards her, which involved lying on the floor, face down, speaking in tongues and generally being totally inattentive to her wants and needs as a woman.

I remember trying to explain it to her that I had just met myself and it appeared to be quite an important moment in my life but that made things worse.

She made twenty grand selling her story to a newspaper article a month later, so somewhere along the line I guess she was satisfied after all.

There’s no point in giving a biography of my attempts to reason all this out. In a nutshell, I tried, and failed. A week later I had convinced myself that I had imagined it all, that someone had spiked my beer and I'd had a bad trip at whoever’s expense. No doubt I'd live the flashbacks in a few year's time. Within two weeks it drifted into a distant memory, a quirky little tale. By a month a vague sense of mystery remained, still amusing but now less believable. Soon after that I firmly convinced myself it never happened. Deep down, the piece of me that did all the real thinking without any praise knew otherwise, and made a point of letting me know this. There is nothing worse than your own subconscious doing the equivalent of turning the music down at a party and hiding the alcohol. The fact that one part of my conscience refused to believe the other proved occasionally tricky when chemically intoxicated, but by and large I coped.

Until, a few months later, I picked up a newspaper. I didn't and don't read them much, and frankly it was a bizarre twist of fate that the first time I picked up a newspaper in over two months, I just happened to be on the third page.

But not me. Exactly.

The story was about a fracas I had caused in a London night-club two nights before, a real dingy pit where I'd picked a fight with a local ruffian after offering a threesome with his girlfriend and his sister, a pretty poor state of affairs even by my (then) standards. The accompanying picture showed me grinning manically, a magnified shot of the blood and vomit splashed across a violated white silk shirt.

There were two problems with this. One; I don't remember the event. Two; I wasn't in London two nights ago. I was in Sydney, Australia and had been for at least a week.

Another thing. I looked older in the photo. It struck me as immediately obvious. I wondered why no-one else noticed. In the photo, my drunkenly grinning counterpart’s hair was shorter, crew cut style, while I — the one in Sydney — still favoured the floppy fringe look. The article went to go on that I had stopped becoming the loveable character out of Never Live Forever and had turned into the alcoholic drug-abusing monster the press all wanted me to become.

Even though my head went through several perfectly plausible explanations for this, I felt engulfed by certainty that this was my mystery man, my replica, my Doppelgänger, roaming around and living my life for me.

I was planning to call someone, possibly my agent, when the mobile rang.

It was my agent.

“Hey, aren't you supposed to be in Sydney right now?” She demanded.

“Good morning,” Joyce. She sounded annoyed because she regularly found herself in the situation of not knowing which part of the world I occupied.

I took to worrying at my hair with a free hand. She must had read the piece. Hard to avoid — and you have to work pretty damn hard to get page three on a newspaper with a daily circulation of 4 million.

"I am,” I replied in a tone more steadier than I felt. My eyes kept flicking to the article, trying to convey to myself some inner level of understanding. Not easy.

“What's this all about London? As much as I love to see one of my boys in the news, this is definitely not what I had in mind,” she paused, sensing my distraction. “It was you, right?”

“No.” I was sticking to single word answers. It seemed for the best.

“It is you in the picture though?”

“Looks like it.”

“So it's you then?” She sounded really pissed. More than usual. Agents go through several stages with their clients, from delight and happiness and determination and enthusiasm into the dark sullied stages when their protégé discovers the joy of alcohol, drugs and front page infadom.

Eventually I convinced her. She calmed down and eventually saw the funny side of it, assuming it to be an impersonator of some sorts. The publicity of this would an be interesting idea to follow through. I mumbled my way through the rest of the conversation. A few minutes of monosyllabic replies convinced her Rob wasn’t in his happy place and the conversation fizzled off. She hung off, mentioning about contacting some other kind of press agency about the impersonator.

The second she disconnected the call I felt and suppressed a sudden urge to call her back and explain to her in the most lucid of tones available that the chances are the impersonator is not an impersonater but an actual carbon copy of me who is floating around the globe incrementing notches of infamy on my belt, for some unknown reason.

No. I had enough reputation today already.

* * *

My life and career followed many interesting curves, but not all my own work. The other 'Rob' occasionally turned up either in the press or in the flesh, and I eventually found myself getting used to him. He looked older, just by five years or so, but sometimes it was interchangeable without any obvious pattern.

We waved, nodded, winked, acknowledge, smiled, feigned mock surprise, but we never, ever spoke. Or rather, I spoke, shouted and hollered, crashing across a room or over a dining table to catch up with him, but he never responded in kind, cutting off my words with a curt dash to his throat or a whimsical shake of the head before dissappearing like a bad episode of the X-Files.

This led me to believe these pre-destinations (or whatever hook you wanted to hang your hat on and call these decidedly unique events) were somehow engineered in his favour; either that or he had been blessed with advanced warning. The logical fact of the matter was that if he was older than me, then he must come from the future (there was more to this, but I wanted it simple; simple I could handle) and therefore must be aware of what happens to me in the future, hence his age and remarkable lack of shock when meeting me. Ergo he knows the future. My future.

Being followed by a future version of yourself. Jesus. They’d lock me away if I told anyone.

One prime example of this occurred when he turned up with his leg in plaster. This was at a film festival in the middle of nowhere — all the vogue at the time; hold a festival in some desolate back-road town and watch it get ripped apart by the celebs and tourists. I rode on a tram dressed up to look like the Incredible Hulk (don’t ask) and coming the other way was me. Me, wearing an all white and pale cream double-breasted suit, white strip leather tie — this was the 80’s after all — and a fetching thigh-high plastered right leg.

A couple had stopped him in the street. I watched, entranced as he foisted them off with the same charm and tact that I would have used in the same situation. Even with a broken leg. By the time I had ploughed through the packed tram and leaped out onto the road he had gone, lost in a sea of wannabe actors and cynical journalists breeding free love like it was in reverse. This whole thing confused me, until three months later, I broke my leg in a stupid bike accident. I got away lucky.

My worst memory is about five years ago when he appeared in a funeral suit. This was in Philadelphia where I had a small cameo in a popular sitcom as a stoned rabbi (this was in the 90’s). I climbed into my car, already in a blue mood as I was due to meet Sammo in hospital, where he was still recovering, and badly at that, when I saw him approach from across the road.

Black and blue bruises covered his face, but not the indelible sense of grief etched on his face as though it had been carved into granite. My memory of my broken leg surfaced and a sickly, dislocated fear came over me. He wasn’t a scene in a movie, or a crappy TV show. He was looking like that because something terrible had happened, something so horrific its mark had been left in the deep, haunted look in his eyes. Something very bad.

I watched on, struck motionless by a ringing noise in my ear so loud it drowned out traffic, and a feeling so powerful I felt at any moment as though I would burst out into tears.

He spoke the only words he has ever spoken to me.

“January the third,” he said quietly, drawing me close but not actually touching me, pulling away when I reached towards him. “Don’t be in L.A. “

I paused, rivulets of shock burrowing into me, “Wha — “

He shushed me with one hand. “Whatever you do, don’t be in L.A. Got me?”

Even as I nodded he was gone, leaving me stood there in the street, stupefied with confusion, and a sense of fear and loss so strong I started to cry, hunched over the bonnet of my car, wearing only my rabbi outfit, a hat and a fake gray beard.

I’m not stupid. If he didn’t want me in L.A. on January 3rd, then I made damn sure I wasn’t. I flew to Britain and spent the entire month locked in a flat in London watching Sky News for 18 straight hours a day, shouting in drunken hysteria every time a newsflash sprung up or my phone rang. I also rediscovered my coke habit. Sometimes, in most things, there is a balance involved.

I never found out why. Nothing of significance happened on that date — the longest in my life by a long stretch — that concerned family, friends or me. L.A. wasn’t sucked up by the big quake, the volcano lurking under Yellowstone didn’t erupt.

With that behind me, life went on as normal. Well, as normal as it could have been. That year I was arrested for digging up Kurt Cobain’s remains and posing with them. It made the cover of Time magazine, the title, ‘Has stardom gone too far?’ emblazoned on the front.

I could go on. I could tell you how he picked out my wife for me, how he helped cure my dog, when he drove my father to the hospital after my mother had her first stroke whilst I was asleep in another city with a friend’s wife. I could tell you about the credit card bills he ran up, the independent movie I never starred in but had top billing, the London marathon he put me in for.

I got used to him. Apart for that January the Third we never spoke, but whenever we’d see each other, I would share a wave and he would wave back and I felt good that this guardian angel, this twin, was around to look after me. He was my friend. True, my Dopplegänger-time-travelling friend, but you get what you’re given, a tramp in Seattle once said to me, and I’m not arguing.

But things change, and here I am.

If you cross Loch Etiv at low tide and head towards Glenetive Forest, you will eventually come across a mystic-sounding place called Dubh Chnoc. I own it. The day I came across it whilst on a hike with a friend I ended up making silly offers to the landowners before they caved in sold it to me. It’s the peace. All you can hear is nature, unimpeded, untouched and calmly going about the business of existing without all the screwing around, and I loved the thought of owning this pocket of anti-humanity.

Every time I visit Scotland I take a walk up there. It’s a bracing four-hour hike but the reward is the fantastic view. I reached the top about four. I sighed contentedly, stretching my back and spinning around, finally resting my gaze on my patch of land, a sea of green swirling grass surrounding an odd-looking black rocky outcrop that I hadn’t seen before.

Curiosity overtook me, and I reached inside my holdall for my binoculars. At first I couldn’t make it out, just a mass of black stone clumsily arranged to form... form what exactly? It looked a mess, but a man made mess like it had been teleported out of a cheesy low-budget vampire movie, like some kind of tiny gothic architecture teleported into the most unlikeliest of places. It shone. Like marble. Black, shiny marble, the kind you see at — Shit. A gravestone.

I’d known, you see. I knew the second I looked it through my binoculars. This wasn’t any old gravestone — this was my gravestone. This was my future, my plan manifested in physical form, and on that gravestone I would see the one thing I did not know yet in that frightening moment I first cast eyes on it.

When. The date of my death.

The gravestone was a huge gothic monster with all the stops pulled out, with liberal visceral amounts of pretentiousness, which later would appeal to my sensibilities but right now completely evaded my humour department. I eyed it nervously, hands on my knees, breathless with panic and exercise. Do I really want to know when I die? I wondered. Part of me wanted to turn away and get the hell out of here, but that was impossible, like turning your back on a once in a lifetime opportunity. No, I couldn’t do that.

I felt like huge lazy bubbles were crawling through my bloodstream but I couldn’t turn away, compelled to remain and see how long my future would last. I took a deep breath and read the first sentence and then my heart sank because it was a line I had decided many years ago, a single line designed during a drunken night out with friends to convey how cool and how flippant I treated death and dying, and that I would have carved on my gravestone to flip the bird to God and Jesus and whoever the fuck flicked the switches on mere mortals like us.

Let it R.I.P.

And underneath it, the date.

When I got back to the cabin I drank until I couldn’t remember the reason why I was drinking in the first place, which suited me fine and would still suit me now if I didn’t feel I had to get this all down on paper. Before I die. Which, according to my tombstone is in two months’ time.

Gravestones don’t lie and considering my all-knowing friendly Dopplegänger wasn’t around clutching his stomach, emitting belly guffaws, saying how much a sucker I was for falling for his gag, I can’t see this changing. Until then I am going to give my wife the best time of her life, tell my friends they were the best ever and give all the money I have to the nearest charity I come across. I’m going to hold the biggest parties and have the best kind of fun a condemned man can have.

Yet, the funny thing is I don’t believe I’m really going to die. Yes, in the physical sense, but I have the strongest feeling that when I go, I will be that familiar stranger that I first saw in the Holiday Inn a million years ago, that I will be the one with the broken leg struggling down that road at Le Tornu, and I am going to make sure that I never, ever find out what happens in L.A. on January 3rd.

I’m going to live my life over and over again, until I get it right according to some twisted rules set down by some all-knowing entity who has provided itself with some amusement that is my bizarre existence.

Today, I went back. I wasn’t suprised to see the gravestone no longer scored the empty field. I brought a bottle of Jack Daniels and poured it over the place where I’ll be buried in the very near future. Something to take with me.

I remember it vividly. I stood up, took a look around. The sunlight poured down like silk, the wind flowed like water, the birds chirruped like they didn’t have a care in the world, the crickets clucked in a manner suggesting harmony and happiness and I thought how alone this place was, how peaceful, how perfect. A sudden gust of wind caught me by surprise and I raised my hands to the world and drank a toast.

And I couldn’t think of anything better than this.

Return to the Contest index