Justin Timberlake and the Whoever of Whatever
About six years ago, I was putting a new roof on a 200-year-old house on an island in Maine when I got a call from Justin Timberlake’s cousin and assistant, a girl named Melissa. I put down my nail gun, told my boss I was taking five, and answered.
I had met Melissa the previous winter, through my best buddy, Antonio. While playing minor league baseball in Southern California, Antonio had started dating Melissa during an offseason he spent in Hollywood. Around Christmas of that year, Antonio sent me pictures of him and Melissa on vacation in Aspen. In several of the photos—riding chairlifts, drinking champagne in hot tubs, making silly faces in the backseat of an SUV—were two people that Antonio now referred to as “Cameron” and “Justin”—as in Diaz, as in Timberlake. Antonio’s connection to such famous people soon became the hot gossip of our hometown, but I, as his best friend, was the first to declare that I could care less. I was 27 at the time, living at home, and working construction while trying to finish my first book—a memoir about the summer I spent as a monk in my mother’s village in Thailand. Hot-tubbing with pop-stars in Aspen was not the eternal stuff of literature.
Later that winter, Antonio brought Melissa home to Maine. I assumed she’d be fake and full of herself, and pretentious—like all celebrities—but her first night in town, Melissa happily got drunk at our local dive bar. The next morning, when I took her on a hike to a remote beach in subzero temperatures—as a test of her fortitude, I guess—she didn’t complain one bit. Like her famous cousin, Melissa came from good people in Tennessee—country blood.
The night before she and Antonio flew back to LA, Melissa gave me a gift: a brand new pair of Nike Air Force Ones, made of red, black, and brown nubuck leather, with little golden tabs on the laces. “You and Justin have the same size feet,” she said. I put the shoes on, imagining that they’d been made in some secret factory under Justin Timberlake’s mansion, staffed by an assembly line of midgets and aging members of ‘N Sync, with Nelly, in a headset, running quality control at the end of a conveyor belt. The shoes fit—perfectly.
Melissa also gave me a Nike sweatsuit that she’d dug out of her cousin’s closet. I tried it on. Apparently, Justin Timberlake and I were also the same height, weight, and build.
“I’m like his half-Asian doppelganger!” I said, a little bit too loudly.
Melissa laughed. Earlier that day, we’d read a newspaper article about Rain, the Korean pop star who the media had dubbed, “The Korean Justin Timberlake.” Because my mom was Asian, I allowed myself the indulgence of punch-lining several jokes with the fundamental American truth that no Asian could ever be famous like Justin Timberlake.
The joke should have ended there, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Hey Melissa!” I said, moonwalking across Antonio’s kitchen while humming “SexyBack”—the hit from Timberlake’s album, FutureSex/LoveSounds, that had spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. “Tell your cousin to check the weather forecast! Heard that Hollywood’s gonna get some Rain!”
The next morning as I sat down at my desk to write, I felt depressed and uninspired. Antonio and Melissa were back in LA, and I was stuck in boring Maine writing a book about monks.
For the next few months and into the spring, while Justin Timberlake toured around the world singing and dancing in front of sellout stadium crowds, I sarcastically bragged about the origin of my sneakers to people who, I knew, gave less of a damn about Justin Timberlake than I did. But
