Me and the Other Robert Longs

Being confused with a heroin addict is sometimes a good thing.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, is a thing people say who do not share a name with a notorious mass murderer.

Robert Aaron Long — no relation; and I mean zero relation — is the monster who murdered eight people in Atlanta a few years ago. His act of unforgivable violence, whatever his motives, triggered ripples of misery, heartbreak, grief and loss. 

He and I share a name, or at least most of a name. I have two middle names as it happens, and neither one of them is “Aaron,” thank God. Also, I am at least thirty years older and do not sport a ludicrous beard. One more crucial distinction: I am not a violent psychopath.

Still, were it not for the fact that I mostly go by “Rob,” my Google search results would be utterly swamped by articles and on-line debates and gruesome meditations on a person who, if I had my way, would be relegated to an anonymous pit somewhere.  Right after I sued him for ruining my name.

I’m not actually certain that you can do that, but I’d be willing to join with some other Robert Longs — we have a talented athlete, a radio host, and a couple of power lawyers among us — to file a class action suit.  People file lawsuits for stupider reasons, right?

And also, I’ve been in this position before.

I wrote a couple of books a few years ago.  They didn’t make much money — put it this way: neither one gave me any tax trouble — but it was fun to go on a book publicity tour.

The British book tour was the best because it was conveniently based entirely in London, so you shuttle around town to various studios and events and because it’s Britain someone is always offering you a drink. And because of the long tradition of British writers, no one expects even the mildest amount of sobriety.

When you politely decline their offer of a beer or tankard of wine by pointing out, politely, that it’s nine-thirty in the morning, they’re thrilled because it means that you might actually make it through the interview, unlike the last writer they had on the show. 

Best of all, British journalists and critics are so reflexively withering and nasty towards every successful British person they reserve all of their fawning adjectives for visiting American hacks. Which is nice, if you’re one of those. 

When my first book – a memoir of my early years as a television writer in Hollywood called Conversations with My Agent -- came out in the UK, my book tour overlapped with another American screenwriter’s book tour.

Jerry Stahl, a fine writer, had just published his book – a memoir of his years as a television writer in Hollywood, during which he was addicted to heroin. 

Our books differ in a lot of ways, but in this way in particular: there’s no heroin in mine. It was purely coincidental that two American television writers had written two different memoirs and were touring on overlapping dates. But a small, local London newspaper somehow sloppily got the books mixed up, and so the piece they wrote about me opened this way: “While Los Angeles burned in the riots of 1994, twenty-three year old Cheers writer Rob Long was in South Central LA, scoring a dime bag of Mexican brown junk to slam between his toes, the only thing that enabled him to write lines for Woody, Sam, and TV’s beloved Norm.” 

During the Los Angeles riots, for the record, I was on a fishing trip.

But libel laws in Britain are awfully strict. If you say something about someone that’s false and damaging – even if you did it without malice – you’re liable for some hefty damages. And when everyone at the publisher realized that a dreadful mistake had been made – a realization that came merely by glancing in my direction: I’m obviously not cool enough to ever have been a heroin addict – they contacted the editor of the mistaken paper who, after changing his pants, offered up a lot of compensatory goodies: free ad space for the book, a profile, that sort of thing. 

I settled for a framed copy of the article, which I keep hanging on my office wall, without comment. People come for meetings, they look at it, and I let them wonder. 

Me and my fellow Robert Longs will not be so gracious to the lowlife who stole our name and stained our Google search returns. Being confused with a heroin addict, by comparison, is a huge step up.