Fake IDs

Article in the Times about fake IDs, and the length kids go to get them:

nyti.ms/1jZnW3u

Did you have a fake ID when you were younger? How'd you get it, and did it work?

Before I left for college, I got my picture on my older brother's drivers license, so it was bullet proof -- even used it for a traffic ticket. (He got off when he went to court, and the cop could not identify him as the driver of the car.)

Before that, as a freshman in high school, a bunch of us got fake college IDs in Times Square (I think the drinking age was 19 then), which worked in places that didn't really give a shit, which was a pretty good number of places.

 

Got one from a college friend of my sister's who, yeah, looked not very much like me but enough to give a bouncer reason to wave me through. There were definitely places I didn't bother trying to go with it.

My sister did it the foolproof and totally illegal way -- she went to the DMV and got a license with an older friend's info on it. Then I think the friend had to go and say she lost her license and get another one. I'm thinking these days the same license being lost twice in a short time wouldn't be so easy to pull off.

 

Yeah, that's the way I did it, too. Took my friends info and got a license. I was sitting and waiting for it to be printed, head deep in a magazine, and they kept shouting, "PETER? PETER? Your license is ready!" and I totally blanked it out until it finally clicked. "Oh, uh, yes, I, Peter, am ready to pick up my license."

Any time I was with the real Pete, of course, I had to be super careful. One of the first things we did was go to a new movie theater in town that served beer. We went to see a Bond movie. We got there really early, and he went in first. Then, like 20 minutes later I went in. A manager was checking IDs at the door, and he looked and looked and looked at mine. Then he goes, "Hmmm... this is strange. The only two people in this theater were born on the same day."

I nearly had a heart attack! I spent the whole movie convinced a cop was going to tap me on the shoulder.

 

I never had one. I just took advantage of being short and having tall friends. While the guy at the door was checking my taller friend's ID, I'd walk in behind him.
I don't ever remember it not working.

 

Was at a Kinko's some time ago and a couple of kids were obviously trying to photoshop/manufacture a fake ID. Eventually a worker came over and shooed them off with a "You can't do that here."

 

My freshman year college roommate used some chalk to scratch out part of one of his year numbers to make his age older. A couple of weeks later, he had a really unhappy look when he came back to our room. A cop had come into the bar he was in, checked IDs, and discovered his was fake. He ended up paying a couple hundred dollar fine.

That scared me into never trying.

 

I once tried to buy beer with a fishing license. Didn't work, mainly because it didn't have a photo.

 

That's pretty hard to believe.

 

When I got my driver's license in 1974, the drinking age was 18.

The license was directly printed on a hard plastic background.

It was easy to take a hobby knife and scratch out part of the '58' to make it a '56.' Buff it up a bit with steel wool and touch it up with nail polish, and I was good to go.

Probably wouldn't have fooled a cop with a magnifying glass, but it fooled all the bar bouncers and beer-store clerks for two years.

 

I hobby-knifed mine (when you could buy beer at 18), but failed to follow up with step two, which involved going to the DMV and getting a legit replacement. Naturally a few weeks later I got caught up in one of those routine (for then) broad-brush traffic stops. The officer looked closely at mine, scratched his fingernails across the obvious alterations, looked up at me for a long, long, pause, then ... looked away and handed it back with 'nary a word. I went STRAIGHT to the DMV and got a replacement.

 

I never had a fake ID. Never had any desire to drink until well after I turned 21.

 

The drinking age was 18 in my day and NY didn't have photos on drivers licenses. Not that very many places even required ID.