You can bet I have been called out on my plagiarism, not once but many, many times. But I have prospered nonetheless and never considered giving it up. I’ll tell you why.

As early as elementary school I freely appropriated the words of others to bolster my insipid attempts at original essays and theme papers. In the fifth grade, penning a report on my favorite book at the time, Winnie the Pooh, I lifted lines from Jacqueline Susann, whose novel Valley of the Dolls I found on my mother’s bedside stand, and from Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita I found on my father’s. My teacher was stunned and thought I had misunderstood the Milne classic. Still I passed, and a light went on in my head.

In grade six, in a theme describing my activities over the summer, this time for a different teacher, I quoted liberally and without attribution Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, and Caitlyn Jenner. My teacher, old Mrs. Slayheath, may have suspected some exaggeration and even fabrication on my part, but she was far too old to penalize me. She merely reminded me, in red pencil, to credit my sources in future. I did not.

In junior high my thievery ran rampant. By that point I was convinced, and I think rightly so, that my plagiarism offered new insights into the real authors’ words and ideas. My pilfered words were actually an improvement on the originals! It was all due to place and timing. In a clever story by author Jorge Luis Borges, a modern writer replicates, through his own inspiration, the exact book Don Quixote. But because he lives in a different place and writes in a different era than Cervantes, it is a completely original work! So this isn’t as stupid as it sounds.

I won’t go so far as to say that my stolen words are pithier or more coherent than the exactly identical originals. After all, they differ from these by not so much as a comma. But in their new place within the dull word salad produced by the floundering and harebrained essayist that is yours truly, these appropriated gems gleam with a fiercer light than perhaps they ever shed before. So how can this still be plagiarism?

Tell me that. Tell Borges that.

Okay, it’s still plagiarism. But plagiarism never sounded so good.

I really came into my own as a word thief in high school. In an essay for American History class, I took a deep breath and passed off as my own a passage beginning “I hold these truths to be self-evident…” Of course I didn’t get away with it, not at first. But before my obviously bogus work dragged my final grade down to a humiliating C, that teacher died. Let me say at once that I had nothing to do with her demise, though I can’t say I grieved much.

For the substitute teacher who took her place, I wrote a putative biographical paper on the young Abe Lincoln, drawing equally from the Bible’s Book of Jonah, Jack London’s Yukon story White Fang, and a speech of Mussolini’s. She recognized the biblical part! The old lady wasn’t as dumb as I thought. But all she did was write a note on my paper that I must acknowlege any quotations. And I got a B+!

On to college, where I determined that the secret to not getting caught was to plunder works far afield from the subject I was writing about. Thus in psych class, my so-called original papers didn’t crib from famous experts like Freud or Jung, but instead I inserted whole paragraphs of Ann Landers, J. Edgar Hoover, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. For my philosophy essay, I avoided Nietzsche and Marx and inserted a disguised essay by Woody Allen, and once, in a paper called “The Humorous Side of Solipsism,” an entire routine of Rodney Dangerfield’s. For my journalism class, I had the inspired notion of submitting an already plagiarized piece by the recognized plagiarist Jayson Blair. I was really proud of that one. I had other tricks as well. For my creative writing course, I handed in Gogol’s “The Nose”, with this subtle difference: wherever Gogol used the word “nose,” I substituted “elbow.” Consequently my story was called “The Elbow,” but was otherwise the same as his, practically speaking. I also submitted Kafka’s Metamorphosis with Gregor Samsa turning into a deer.

Some of my instructors had their suspicions, of course, but hardly any called me out. Probably they assumed that, like everybody else, I bought my papers for $50 from an essay mill. And why interfere with tradition? Those that did question my authenticity only received another plagiarized effort in exchange for the first, and in the end I always got by, sometimes with praise.

In my current occupation as speechwriter for the mayor of a small Midwestern city, I continue to plagiarize with both hands in the cookie jar. No one cares what a small-town mayor says, not enough to reconstruct its provenance anyway, and so my sticky fingers sift freely. It’s a fun job. Only last week, while the mayor spoke before TV cameras on the need for more diversity at city hall, he had no idea he was quoting Jefferson Davis, Muammar Gaddafi, and the Unabomber. I agree with the positions of none of those folks, let me add, but remember: it’s all about time and place. My time and place.

She walked in front of him out of deference. But if it was deference, he thought, shouldn’t she walk to his rear? Show that she was his follower? After all, she was the producer of his cooking show, not the star herself. No one would tune in to watch Nikko gut a trout or wrestle an anemone or lick squid ink from her fingers. She remained in the background on his set at all times unless, in an emergency, he needed someone to pound his nori. His seaweed wrap was famous for its texture, and she had the touch.

And yet, as they walked to the studio past the gardens on Main Street, for assuredly there was a Main Street in Tokyo as there is in every city, and one lined with flowers at that, her lead position still somehow showed deference, even subservience. There is a saying: The upkeep of the blossoms at Mount Myogi will be added to your water bill. One thing was certain, her hoop earrings carried a lot of whoa babe. He had once heard an American use this term to describe an attractive woman in Kyoto, and although Americans were blunt you could say this about them: they also had other qualities. The term seemed to fit Nikko to a T. And her stylish earrings were the merest fraction of her appeal. She had whoa babe to spare, just dripped the stuff all over the street.

Two years ago they had been lovers, but no longer whispered to each other the tender words cameltoe and creampie. She, a native of the Kansai district, spoke with a Liverpool accent, a sign of her devotion to the Beatles throughout her youth. He, born and raised in Ashiya, sounded like a native New Yorker, due to his lifelong devotion to the Ramones. But he thought the Beatles were cool too, as long as Paul wasn’t singing. Though they no longer entangled themselves in knots of damp armpits and heaving thighs, they sometimes left together work together in the evening, hopped aboard the bullet train to a remote suburb, and cut a rug at a festive club. But they only did that after first gorging themselves on his culinary creations back at the studio.

And oh those tasty creations! Who but he could concoct a pickled rose that tasted like a McD’s cheeseburger? A sea urchin that conjured up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Or tuna sushi that was finger licking good, like KFC? This was his success and the theme of his show: how to take rarified, costly ingredients and make them taste like junk or fast food. For mysterious reasons, it was a huge hit throughout Japan and in some former Soviet Bloc countries.

As always, her body segued seamlessly from watusi to masked potato as the music in the club washed over her. Was it his habit of losing the tempo and crushing her foot beneath his own that had led to their end of their romance? Very likely that was a contributing factor. But there was also professional jealousy, stemming from the fact that he possessed double the usual number of taste buds. This fortuitous birth defect, or perhaps birth advantage was the truer term, was the result of his being born with a forked tongue. No, not quite rattle-snake forked, and not a cleft palate either, but a split tongue that gave him double buds for tasting, and even provided the name of his hit show: Double Buds. How could she, a serious chef herself and his classmate in culinary arts at Waseda University, compete with Mister Double Buds? Life was so unfair when you had to compete with gifted genetic freaks like that banjo player in Deliverance who had like, what, 20 fingers?

She wanted to scrape those double buds off his tongue with a Ginsu knife and slather them in cheap tomato sauce.

After a single date with her when they both still attended culinary school, he felt her unease and competitive edge. Further meetings with her were disappointments, like opening the door to an empty room when you expected to find your drunken uncle inside. He liked Uncle Kato, no matter what the rest of the family said. Kato always had a snack of dried eel for him. And he wore Blue Cheer Hearing Aids, the loudest made, and could tell what song a rock band was playing 60 miles away. There is a saying: When a man is lazy enough, his spine will grow a chair.

And so she had changed her major from culinary arts to TV production. There double buds would not best her, there double buds would offer no advantage. No longer needing those damned double buds with her new major, she could come out first in her class, as she did. The downside to her success in TV was, they were split apart. Even working together on Double Budscould not reunite them, not wholly. It was all so sad, so infinitely sad. Sad, it was. He carried that sadness all the way to the bank, singing “All You Need is Love,” his favorite Beatles song even if Paul sang on it.

There is a saying: Love is a wonderful thing, but nothing beats double buds.