Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Wax Museum

Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

It was hour two of sitting in a Ford Taurus with no keys in my high school parking lot, in twenty-degree weather. My body heat had warmed up the car so much that moisture collected on the interior windows, only to quickly turn to ice; a sheet of frost so thick I could not see out of the vehicle. I was in an igloo (which happened to have leather seats), freezing, and I started to think: “We may have planned this attempt to skip school too hastily.”

We were seniors in high school and had arrived earlier that morning and, while meeting in the commons, decided on an impromptu plan to skip the second half of school and go to a nearby horse track. Me and my buddies did this often in high school: skipped half days to go betting; skipped whole days to go on road trips. The previous year (our junior year) we executed our grandest plan—we painted our masterpiece—by skipping school and leaving the country. We drove to Canada and back to Akron, Ohio, unnoticed. And the problem with painting a masterpiece that young is you start to believe that everything you doodle is an act of flawless genius. You get cocky, and the next thing you know you are spending a full day in a frozen car, stuck in the parking lot of the school you were trying to escape.

The plan we had devised that morning was simple, but it was impromptu and had definite risk vectors. My buddy Tyson and I, both frustrated with school, decided we would forge notes from our parents, each claiming that we were visiting a nearby college that day—you were allowed six days off to visit a college—and we would be leaving after our first few classes. To avoid suspicion, our exact departures and colleges would be different.

“I’ll write the notes,” I told Tyson.

Every time we skipped school I would forge a note from our respective parents. We did it so regularly that we started intercepting legitimate notes from them— donations to the school; offers to help with bingo—and I would forge a facsimile of the legitimate note so the school would never see what their real handwriting looked like.

“No, I got this one,” Tyson replied.

“I think we should stick with the traditional plan,” I insisted.

“No, this is a simple one. I got it,” he said and left for home room.

I turned my note into the principal’s office first, as my note had me departing first.

“I’m going to visit the Cleveland Institute of Art today,” I told the secretary, “it’s my dream college. Leaving after second period with my folks. Here’s the note.”

“Hmm, OK, all right. Leave it here,” the secretary replied.

And I left.

A few minutes later a buddy of mine—who was delivering mail for the office—found me and said, “Hey man, I overheard them saying they think that note is suspicious and they’re going to call your parents!”

Working quickly, I called up Kinney Shoes (the store where I worked), got a hold of my twenty-year-old manager and asked if she would call the school’s office, claiming to be my mom, and tell them I have her go-ahead to visit The Cleveland Art Institute.

“Is this illegal?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered, “but, if you do this for me, I’ll promise to dye all the shoes for the next two wedding parties!” (Color-matched bridal footwear was a big thing at the time, and everyone at the store hated dealing with it.)

“Will they believe I’m your mom? I have kind of a high-pitched voice.”

“I go to an all-guys, Catholic high school. Most of us don’t know two women in life we aren’t related to. There’s no way they will suspect you’re not my mom.”

She made the call. I would learn later from my mail buddy that this assuaged the staff ’s fears, but at that moment I was busy looking for Tyson to warn him to expect similar pushback. I found him as he was entering his next period and barely had time to explain the situation:

“Tys! They were super suspicious of my note! They were going to call my parents. I had my manager call as my mom…Hopefully that works...I wonder if we should stage a fake call as your dad?”

“Oh, don’t worry, they are not going to question my note,” Tyson answered and confidently walked into his class.

Tyson was two hours late. My note said I would be leaving at 10:30 a.m. It was now 12:30 p.m. and I had been inside a frozen Mercury Topaz for two hours, watching the ice stretch across the vehicle. At that point I made a vow: I would not go back into the school to admit the plan failed. I’d rather them discover my frozen body inside my buddy’s car, like a dead Everest hiker, than return to Chemistry 301.

Twenty minutes later, as I was relaxed, prepared to die solemnly, Tyson busted through the door. He had no coat on and was holding a giant piece of wood with “HALL PASS” etched into it.

“That’s not good,” I thought. That doesn’t look like a man who’s ready to leave campus.

“Well, they got me, dude,” he began.

“What do you mean?”

“They found out my note was fake. In fact, it was pretty bad.”

“What happened?”

“Well, you know, if we are being honest, I’m a better student than you, Sean.”

“That’ s very true.”

“So the colleges I’m looking at, they are far away and—no disrespect—but I thought it wouldn’t sound realistic that I was visiting colleges around here, like you are.”

“No disrespect taken.”

“So, I went in a different direction.”

“Ok, what did your note say?”

“I said one of my close friends was murdered earlier this week and I needed to attend his funeral.”

“What?”

“I thought, they’d feel so guilty, they wouldn’t ask any follow up questions.”

“Do you know how infrequently teenagers get murdered in Copley Ohio? It would have been a huge story that everyone would know about!”

“Well, it gets worse.”

“How does it get worse than that?”

“The principal called me into his office and said the note looked suspicious, and I didn’t know this at the time but they had already called my parents on it.”

“Oh boy,” I interrupted.

“Yeah, and they told my parents to stay on the line. So, my parents were silently listening on speaker phone when the principal called me in and, again, he said it looked a little suspicious and they were wondering who was murdered so I panicked and said, ‘Ya know what: the kid never meant that much to me. Why don’t I just skip the funeral?’ And I stood up to go back to class and the principal—he knew he had me trapped in a lie—so he questioned back, ‘The kid did not mean anything to you?’ And I said, ‘People wear a lot of masks in life.’ And, with that, I heard my dad scream, ‘Christ, TYSON!’ from the office phone.”

We both exhaled, knowing he was in a lot of trouble.

“Well, I have to get back to Greek History in two minutes,” Tyson concluded, pointing to the hall pass as he exited the car but, before shutting the door he dipped his head back into the automotive iceberg and said, “Oh, and they know about Canada.”

“How do they know about Canada?” I asked.

“They were able to piece it together after my debacle. Like I said: it was bad.”

“You didn’t tell them that we had a Canadian friend that died?” I quipped, and he shut the door, laughing.

The next day the principal called us into the office and said, “I don’t have the leeway to discipline you for that Canada stunt last year,” which we found hilarious because this was a Catholic school. He could have forced us to drive the school’s tractor to Manitoba as punishment—they were allowed to do pretty much whatever they want—but, separately, it was made clear that any time we missed classes in the future our parents would get a confirmation call and that ended our sport of skipping school.
 

I often tell this story—about being stuck in a car in freezing weather while my buddy lied about a funeral—and when the part about the Canada trip comes up people always say, “Wait…you flicked school and left the country? And you’ve never told me that story?”

And I would always respond, a bit ashamed: “It’s not that great of a story.”

It’s a good memory, to be sure. One of the greatest days of my life. I laughed so hard that day I lost my voice, but it’s not a good story. And it’s not a good story because it was the most well-planned event in any of our lives. We plotted that day for months and executed it with practiced precision. Competency, even on very impressive missions, doesn’t make for a good “story.”

Look at NASA: The Apollo 11 mission proved we could reach the moon; Apollo 12 proved we could explore more of the moon; but ask any American to name an Apollo mission and they will say “13.” The one where mishaps nearly killed everyone.

Our best-planned missions in high school often resulted in our least interesting stories. They had a kind of understated craftsmanship to them—quietly successful, like a baseball player that only hits singles—but they did not have the exciting twists and turns of a great story. The only exception might have been our friendship-long attempt to make, purchase, or swindle fake IDs for buying beer. That effort was both meticulously planned and disastrous.

 

Our first attempts to get beer underage were indelicate: we would wait outside the most white trash gas stations in town and ask any guy who drove a car with a bird, wolf, or flaming-arrow painted on the hood if they would buy us beer:

“Hey man, you getting beer?” we’d inquire.

“Hell yeah!” would come the inevitable reply; inevitable from anyone with some type of stylized carnivore emblazoned on their vehicle.

“We forgot our IDs. Yep, all five of us. If we gave you this twenty dollar bill, could you buy us a case of beer?”

There are two ages when kids are indisputably hilarious: when they are toddlers—they stumble into walls constantly; never wear pants; claim they are going to marry the family dog—and when they are in their late teens, talking to adults, and believing they don’t sound like total shitheads.

Back then a case of cheap beer was about three dollars, which made our proposal sound even more ludicrous: we were paying for Busch Light like it had a street value above cocaine, and we were all wearing ties outside a gas station in an effort to make ourselves look older.

The main reason teenagers in this phase are so hilarious is because adults do nothing to correct their behavior. No one tells them: “Kid, people don’t fly to Copley, Ohio ‘for business’” or that “Five grown men don’t split a case of beer.” When five grown men enter a liquor store together—and I contend that the correct plural noun for five men in a liquor store is an “escalation”— they buy enough booze to submerge a basement because, each time they hesitate about needing one more bottle someone in the escalation says, “Just buy it; we can always finish it tomorrow if we don’t get to it tonight.” But that never works, for the same reason you can’t go on vacation and just leave a week’s supply of food out for the dog; it all disappears in the first eight hours, and your house gets destroyed in the process.

No, these adults never provided practical feedback. Instead, each stranger listened to our pitch, visibly held back laughter—almost convulsing, like a heron fighting back a fish trying to swim up its neck—and answered, “Oh, sorry honey, no, I can’t tonight.”

Then they would presumably drive to their friend’s party with their beer and enter the party laughing hysterically: “Wait till you hear what happened to me at the gas station! Ha. Five teenagers—in ties, mind you— tell me they’ve left their wallets back at “corporate!’’ At corporate! They didn’t provide any more information on the company or their line of work! Then these five, corporate professionals asked me to buy one case of Busch Light— for five grown men to share—at three times its normal price! Hahaha! I asked if they were under twenty-one, just as a joke to see how stupid it could get.”

“What did they do?”

“They did this fake, dad laugh—‘OOOH HOO HOO!’—then said, ‘You flatter us, ma’am.’ Ma’am! ‘I’m twenty-two years old!’”

Even on the rare occasion that the plan worked, we received no instructive feedback, so our gambit was destined to never improve. We would approach customers for about an hour, explaining our situation as business people without wallets, but each declined to help. Until, eventually, a guy (it was always a guy) usually covered in white paint would say, “Yeah, I got ya.”

And we would hand him a twenty and he would emerge with an impossible amount of beer, go directly to his car, load it in—“Is he stealing it from us?” we’d wonder—but then he would roll over to us, hand us just one of the cases through his window, saying:

“Thanks! Don’t do anything too stupid with that!” He would then peel out, keeping both the extra beer and the change. This last part was always unspoken and uncontested.

We rapidly learned this plan was not sustainable. A few of us got arrested, plus we couldn’t afford to keep paying for beers at a price that wouldn’t be fair inside Yankee Stadium, so we vowed to develop a more sophisticated scheme: “Let’s eliminate the middleman and buy our own fake ID!”

We heard a tee shirt shop at The Arcade, an old art deco mall in Cleveland that was semi-abandoned at the time, would print fake IDs. We went there and, like all failing malls at the time, there were seven tee-shirt shops, but we eventually found the one that did print fake IDs. The place and the conversation were amazing, in its dubious flirtations with what is and what is not legal:

“We are looking to buy fake IDs,” I told the guy behind the counter, in as clandestine a tone as I could manage.

“No one can sell fake IDs, kids. I’d get arrested tomorrow if I sold you a fake ID,” came the prompt reply.

There was then a slight pause, just enough for him to see if our look of disappointment is genuine enough or not. “But, what we do sell here,” he continued, “is novelty tourism photos and those can be very specific.”

“What do you mean by that?” we asked.

“Well, ya know how when you go to the Grand Canyon and, for a memory, maybe you stand behind one of those wooden cowboy cutouts, where you stick your head out onto the body of a cowboy and someone takes a photo for ten dollars? Well, we do something similar but, instead of sticking your head out of a cowboy cutout, the state of Montana’s official ID background, with random personal information, is behind you!...Ya know, for the memories!”

We contemplated this for a second, then asked: “Do you have any, um, ‘memories’ that you have done for other customers that we can see, just to see how much we would, ah, ‘remember’ this event?”

The owner showed us a few examples and, to our untrained eyes, they looked exactly like out-of-state licenses. In fact, they looked perfect.

“Great. Let’s get Ohio ones.”

“I don’t do Ohio,” the owner said. “Makes it harder to argue it’s a tourism venture.”

“Makes perfect sense,” we said in reply to something that actually made no sense.

“OK, then, I guess…Pennsylvania?” I proposed.

“Yeah and maybe, Indiana?” another friend suggests.

“And Michigan?” came a third.

“Gentleman,” the store owner interjected, “may I suggest that all five of you get Wyoming.”

“Wyoming?”

“See, Wyoming is the last state in the union to not use holograms. You likely did not notice when viewing the ‘memories’ I made for other people, but I am not capable of printing holograms. So, while I could print memories from Pennsylvania or Indiana and Michigan, they would lack the aforementioned holograms and, depending on who you are sharing these memories with—say it’s someone who looks at a lot of different ‘memories’ each night, as say his job at, oh I don’t know, a bar?—that kind of person might notice the missing holograms.”

“On our memories?”

“Yes, on your memories.”

“I don’t know,” I replied, speculating out loud, “I think five guys entering a bar in Cleveland, all from Wyoming, is more suspicious than missing holograms. I mean, if we go to dive bars, they just want to see something passable, but five guys from the least-populated state in the US entering together...I mean, it’s like we are daring them.”

“But,” the owner interjected, “this memory is indistinguishable from an official Wyoming license. No technology on earth could differentiate it!”

“What would we say?” I asked the group.

“We could say we are all at Case Western, like we got some group scholarship?” someone suggested.

“We could say we are on the hockey team? We could look like hockey players,” another offered.

“Say you’re in town for the rodeo!” the owner pitched in.

“I don’t know,” I demurred, “as I said before, it’s the least-populated state in the U.S. so, to have five Wyomingian...Wyoman…”

“Wyomingite,” corrected the owner.

“To have five Wyomingites walking into the same bar in Cleveland? Statistically, it’s like having five Oscar winners walk in. It’s just as unlikely.”

“Well, Sean,” my buddy Tyson replied, “let’s hope bouncers don’t know as much about geography or statistics as you do.”

We plunked down the cash for five Wyoming “memories.”

The first time we used them as a group, we were all arrested.
 

And so we decided that these half measures—strangers at a gas station, out-of-state ‘memories’—were not sufficient for a group of truly dedicated under-age drinkers such as these. We decided we must have real IDs; we decided to trick the state of Ohio into giving us real licenses.

Our idea was very bold, but also very simple: We would pay a twenty-one-year-old who matched our general physical description to give us their birth certificate and social security card for a few hours; then we use those documents to get a new license with our photo on it. Straightforward enough, but very risky. It was a bit like lion taming; a simple enough concept, but there were lots of ways it could go wrong.

Back then, one did not walk out of the DMV with your new license. You received it about a week later in the mail. We had researched our plan a bit and been informed by someone—I can’t even remember who told us this— that the reason for the delay was because every new photograph was sent down to Columbus where a human compared the new photo to your last picture to prevent fraud; if the pictures looked too different, they would not issue the license and begin legal proceedings against every party involved.

Looking back at it, this claim is laughable: that a staff of—what, a dozen people?—was looking at every new license (in the seventh most populous state in the union) and asking themselves, “Can a person really lose this much weight or change their hair that much in five years?”

Nevertheless we, being teenagers, found the whole scenario highly credible. So much so that we decided to test the integrity of the system: we wanted to see just how different someone could look between licenses and still receive a new one. We had a buddy who was twenty-one and we asked if he’d be willing to get a new license looking very different; so different, in fact—that if the state of Ohio was really scrutinizing these pictures—there is no way he would receive the new license.

“Can I get in trouble?” he asked.

“I don’t see how. At the end of the day, you’re just choosing a radically different new look for yourself.”

You may ask: How do teenagers with no experience in cosmetics, makeovers, or general aesthetics make a man look vastly different for his photograph? Well, we bought a werewolf costume. We used the costume paint to make his skin look considerably darker then glued the beard on him and dyed his hair. My buddy also borrowed his grandmother’s impossibly large eyeglasses, each lens shaped like a giant hexagon. Our test subject looked absolutely nothing like himself as he went off to apply for his replacement ID.

He received his new license a week later. We had to pay him an extra $150 because he failed his eye exam due to being disoriented by the strong prescription on the glasses: his license had a vision restriction on it for a whole year. But overall, we had proved our plan would work.

Later that week we were at a Bob Evans, eating breakfast, and one of the waitresses called me by the wrong name and asked why I was eating “out here”; only after squinting at me a bit closer did she realize she had mistaken me for someone else.

“I’m sorry,” she explained, “it’s just that you look exactly like one of our cooks!”

“Is he twenty-one?” my friend asked instantly. “And if so, could we talk to him?”

And that is how we met the person that would rent his social security card and birth certificate to me, to get what we were now calling “a misrepresentative ID,” rather than a fake ID, since it was a genuine Ohio state ID; it just had the wrong driver on it.

The plan was an abysmal failure and we were very lucky to not get arrested.

I entered the DMV with the cook’s papers, explained I needed a license and sat down for my picture and, as I was preparing to smile with all the jubilation of a person about to finalize a Mission Impossible-esque heist, they asked me, “And, Geoff,”—that was the name of the cook—“can you tell me your mother’s maiden name?” I wish they had taken the photo of me right as I was reacting to that question. Even more I wish there was some way for me to get a copy of that picture, because I don’t think anyone—not in vaudeville, in silent movies, in opera—made a face more visibly and comically aghast as I did when they when asked me to verify the name of my misappropriated grandmother.

“You mean, the name my mom had before marriage,” I asked.

“Yes.”

Panicked, I scanned my eyes around the office and noticed that behind the person asking this question was a billboard detailing the fees for each DMV service. A license renewal was listed as seven dollars.

“WHOA!,” I exclaimed. “Hold on. Is this seven dollars?”

“What? Yes, a license replacement is seven dollars.”

“I thought it would be free, ya know, off my taxes!” (I knew enough about impersonating adults to bring up that you pay taxes and expect that that entitles you to a vast array of unrealistic benefits.)

“Of course there’s a fee.”

“Well, because I don’t have a license, I didn’t even bring my wallet; didn’t see a point. I need to go get my wallet.”

“All right, well, that should not take long. I will just keep all your papers right here.”

Something inside me sank as I realized I was now going to have to pay that cook at Bob Evans a lot more money now that I’d lost his identity papers at a DMV in Fairlawn, Ohio. And potentially implicated him in a federal crime. But I managed to conceal my alarm and responded, with relative calm, “Given that I don’t have a wallet, I appreciate you keeping the papers here.”

I rose from my chair and headed out of the DMV. I had to pay that cook at Bob Evans $300.

“What am I going to do?!” he screamed at me, justifiably.

“Just go to the DMV and follow through with the plan,” I explained. “Say you need a new license; they have your papers; you look enough like me, they won’t notice you are a different person.”

He did so and it worked. The DMV clerk even joked with him (thinking he was me), “I thought you were trying to scam us. Sorry.”

“I appreciate you being so careful,” he replied, in an artificial voice, “think of what would happen to me, if it was a scammer! My identity gone? No thank you. Good to see my tax dollars at work here!”
 

But those were our bad plans. Great stories, bad plans. The Canada trip was a good plan.
 

We left Akron Ohio around 6 a.m. We told our parents we were developing film at school—in those old-fashioned dark rooms with the red light and vats full of chemicals—for a study we did about local wildlife and the dark room was only available in the morning. I don’t think our school even had a dark room.

We reached Niagara Falls around noon.

One of my friends used his dad’s car phone to call the school, and we each took turns pretending to be each other’s father, saying our son would not be attending today, giving various excuse as to why. But, as we entered eastern Pennsylvania, he remembered that his dad’s plan only worked in Ohio, so we had to do the last two calls quickly:

“Hello?! Hello!” I barked into the phone, in my best “somebody’s dad” voice, “this is Doctor Phil Addemack, father of John Addemack. John is not feeling himself today and will be staying at home. Very good. Very good. Thank you. Now, well, due to an unusual set of circumstances, my dear friend Harley Kastner—successful lawyer—is seated next to me and requires the phone…”

John Addemack grabbed the phone. “Yes? Yes? Good, I have you? This is Harley Kastner, known lawyer. My son Jeff is also not feeling well and will not be...”

About four hours later, we reached the border. We had heard various reports on what you had to bring so we had our social security cards and birth certificates with us in plastic bags (which was also a funny addition to our early morning plans: “Mom, I am using the school’s dark room at 6 a.m. so you will not see me today...also, can I have my birth certificate?”).

As we approached the border security guard, we reminded each other, “Be cool, be cool; we have our documents if needed.”

We were surprised by how empty it looked. We were arriving at an odd time, in the late morning, and the weather was atrocious—bitterly cold with whipping winds. We were the only car.

The guard asked, “U.S. citizens?”

“Yes.”

“How long are you staying?”

“How long does it take to do a U-turn?” our driver laughed. We explained that we were only entering the country to win a bet and will immediately turn around. Today, that answer would probably get you shot, or at least bitten by a Doberman. But, back in the 1990s, it resulted in hilarity; the guard waved us forward, laughing, “That’s the perfect damn reason to visit!” He further offered to take a photo for us to prove we won our bet.

We have a photo of the four of us, outside our car at the border, taken by a border guard.

As we walked back to the car to leave, the guard asked, “How are you doing on time?”

“Pretty good,” answered our driver.

“If you think you have thirty minutes,” the guard suggested, “I recommend the Ripley’s Believe or Not Wax Museum. It’s one of Canada’s great sites.”

_ _ _ _ _
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Astute readers may have noticed that while this chapter is called “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,” the titular attraction shows up exactly once in the entire story, in the very last line. The Editor dutifully brought this up to the Author, who merely shrugged and ordered another Negroni.