The Snitch had balls of steel.

I know that sentence is hard to believe, but it's true. When the chips were down, the snitch sacked up and pulled it off. This is the story of how he got his first (and only) fake ID.

The drinking age in NY changed twice -- the first time it went from 18 to 19, the second time from 19 to 21. Luckily for me I was born in the spring which was apparently a good time to weasel your way past shitty legislation. There may have been a period of a few months between 20 and 21 where things went a little dry for me, but for the most part I rode the wave.

On the one hand, I think it's a shitty law. I think that if you can enlist in the armed services and die for your country at 18, then you should be able to go out and get shitfaced if that's your thing. On the other hand, I remember what it was like to be 18 and invincible, and driving a two-ton slab of late 60's Detroit iron.

As a result of the drinking age being the exact age I was, I drank. Mostly because I could, but also as a by-product of seeing a lot of shitty bands in a lot of shitty clubs. At the time, most of my friends were either away at college or working full-time jobs, and they weren't really into the rock club scene anyway. As a result, I was always looking for someone to go with me.

I decided that The Snitch would be my wing man. At that point we were both old enough to have outgrown most of the contention between us. He no longer ran to our parents when Houdini and I committed misdemeanors, and he was tired of watching the drinking age out-run him. He was a prime candidate for a fake ID. Plus, I figured I would never get Houdini into a bar at the age of 15, no matter what his fake ID looked like.

I've seen a lot of fake IDs in my time. I've seen some that were great and some so bad they wouldn't fool a blind bouncer. I've even made a couple for friends that were pretty damn sweet. I made one for my girlfriend by switching her picture into an out-of-state license that we found somewhere, and other than her having to repeatedly say "Yeah, I lost a lot of weight since then" -- because the rightful owner was something like 152 pounds -- it was perfect.

No such luck for The Snitch though. We thought about taking one of my old licenses and doctoring it up, but a lot of places were only taking picture IDs by then, and NY was one of the last states to switch over.

After thinking about the dilemma for a bit, I had an idea. It was risky, and a lot of it would ride on The Snitch and his ability to keep his cool, but I thought it might work.

At the beginning of my freshman year in college, everyone was issued a student ID. Somehow, I managed to lose mine and I had to go to the registrar's office to get another one. At the time, none of this was computerized so if you lost your ID it was a major pain in the ass for all parties involved, mostly because they had to re-shoot your picture. All the other stuff they had on file in something that looked like a series of recipe boxes. The way the replacement card procedure worked was like this: You would get your picture taken a few times, they'd show you the strip and you'd pick which one you wanted. Then they would take the info on the index card, type it into a machine holding an official ID card blank, and then have you sign it. They'd match the sig against the one on file, and then stick your fresh picture on it and laminate it. The whole exercise took about 10 minutes if there wasn't a line.

You can see the flaw in this procedure, right?

For about two weeks, The Snitch practiced signing my name until he had it down perfect.

Armed with his freshly honed forgery skills and my birth certificate, we jumped in my 1969 Impala and drove down to the registrar's office. I gave him a pep talk along the way. "You can do this," I said. "It's a piece of cake. You have the signature down pat. You have my birth certificate. It's a slam dunk."

I could tell he was starting to lose his nerve. Ironically, all he probably needed was a stiff drink.

We sat in the car for a bit while he collected himself. Finally, he said, "OK, let's do this" and jumped out of the car. I watched him walk to the front door and disappear inside. I started the count down. I figured I had about a ten minute wait, since there didn't appear to be many other cars in the lot.

At about the 15-minute mark, I started to get a little worried. He should have been out by now. 20 minutes. 25 minutes. I started thinking we were busted and any minute now I'd be surrounded by campus security. I started the car, rolled down the windows and turned off the stereo.

At the 30 minute mark, the door swung open and The Snitch ran to the car. He jumped in and yelled, "GO! GO! GO!" I didn't waste any time taking that advice to heart, even though my heart was in my throat instead of where it usually hung out. I gunned the Impala and left the parking lot in a squeal of rubber and a cloud of dust.

"What happened? Did you get it? Tell me what happened!" I said over the roar of the side pipes. He didn't say anything. Instead he just reached in his pocket and held up The Perfect Un-fake Fake ID. Original lamination. My birth date. My details. His picture. It was fantastic.

I finally got the story out of him, and it was a very close call. He was nervous, and he almost bailed out and came back to the car empty-handed, but when he told the woman at the registrar's office that he lost his ID, she just asked him for his birth certificate and sat him down in front of the camera. He knew he was committed at that point. He had two choices -- either go through with it, or take off and leave my birth certificate behind.

Our plan had worked perfectly thus far. However, my brother soon realized that it had one fatal flaw.

Remember I said that they took three pictures and you picked the best one? Well, the other ones didn't go into the garbage. The other two went into the card file with the rest of your information.

We were brothers, but he did not look like me. At all.

So he did the only thing he could do. He sat down in the chair in front of the registrar lady's desk, and pretended that he couldn't decide which picture he thought was best. While she was waiting for him to make up his mind, she pulled the info card out, and started punching in the data for the new ID. When he glanced over at the recipe box, he could see my face peeking out of the index card file, staring right at him. He had no idea what to do. His luck was running out.

But it didn't. Right when he was going to confess and beg for the birth certificate back, she dropped something on the floor. When she bent down to pick it up, my brother reached out and grabbed the pictures from the file.

Balls. Of. Steel.

Then, as calmly as he could, he said, "I like this picture the best" and pointed to the last one on the strip.

The registrar lady took the pictures from him and cut out the one he liked, and then put the others in the file. She rooted around in there for a second, a look of concern on her face.

"What's the matter?" The Snitch asked.

"There are supposed to be other photos in here," she replied. "But I don't see them. They must have been misplaced. That's odd."

She shrugged, flipped a few of the index cards back and forth for a second, then rolled the card out of the machine and had him sign the back. She compared it to the one on record, then laminated the ID, handed it back to him and told him to have a nice day. He thanked her and left.

On the drive home, I asked him why he came running out of the building screaming for me to get the hell out of dodge when everything had actually gone pretty smoothly.

"I don't know," he said. "I just thought it would be cooler if we peeled out."

Luckily or not, I transferred to a different school the following year and never needed to get another ID from that office.

I still find it funny to think that somewhere, on a dusty shelf in a record hall basement, there might be a moldy box holding an index card containing all my information -- with a picture of my brother's smiling face fastened to it with a rusty paperclip.

We used the hell out of that thing for almost two years. The only catch was that we could never walk in together. We'd usually wait about 15 minutes before the second JV would make his appearance.

Obviously, whoever got to go in first bought the first round. It was only fair.