I’m (Not) With Busey

Jeff Swanson sits in the lobby of his Belltown condo, dressed in a tux and camel-colored trench coat. His shoes are shined and his blond hair tousled. Even if you know he's not famous, it's hard not to do a double take. Swanson looks just like Gary Busey, and, fittingly, he's already a little wasted.

"Sometimes you try to be the charade," he says. "Sometimes you become the charade."

This night, he'll do both.

His evening begins at the Black Bottle, a quiet wine bar on First and Vine. Heads turn and people point, but no one approaches Swanson. The first "real" sighting happens a few blocks south at Twist, when a couple of spiky-haired 20-somethings who have been staring for several minutes approach. "Gary," one says, offering his hand.

Soon they're cajoling their girlfriends into getting their picture taken with Swanson/Busey. One takes off a brimmed stocking cap to fix her hair, but quickly puts it back on again after Swanson suggests she wear it for the photo. The guys are already calling their friends to brag about partying with one of Hollywood's most notorious stars.

But Swanson slips away before they ask too many questions, and heads a few doors down to Amber. Outside, some guy shouts "Nick!" (as in Nolte, who looks a little like Busey) before Swanson's ushered into the bumping crush of young women in lingerie-like tops.

Here the swarm of the adoring fans is so great that Swanson quickly moves on, first upstairs and then to the other end of the horseshoe-shaped bar. "Gary!" the girls squeal, and hang on him while their friends take pictures. The guy who "mistook" Swanson for Nolte eventually finds him to apologize. "I'm sorry, man," he says. "I didn't know who you were; I just knew you were famous."

Word that Busey's in town has already reached the See Sound Lounge by the time Swanson hits the velvet rope. The bouncer waves him in ahead of a line that stretches around the corner. The woman collecting cover charges suddenly looks as though she's won the lottery.

"We've been expecting you!" she chirps, before stamping the back of his right hand and steering him onto the neon-lit dance floor.

Some random woman comes up and kisses Swanson on the lips, followed by more cell-phone-camera shots, autographs, and expensive champagne. "We only drink Dom," an admirer says, offering a long-stemmed glass, on him.

Most of these gawkers weren't even a glimmer in their parents' eyes when the real Busey got an Oscar nomination for The Buddy Holly Story, and they were likely in grammar school during his memorable appearance as Keanu Reeves' grizzled partner in Point Break. Rather, they know Busey from the actor's guest appearance in season one of Entourage, an attempt at Celebrity Fit Club, and Comedy Central's single-season cult favorite, I'm With Busey.

Swanson acts the part, a messed-up cocktail of aloofness and charm with a generous splash of crazy. And too-cool-for-school Seattle eats it up.

Swanson doesn't just look like Busey. He looks better than Busey. In fact, Swanson is often approached by people who actually know the star and are all too happy to report that he's "lost weight" or that he "looks great"—"he" being Busey. Besides being younger and taller (Swanson's 59 and 6'4", Busey's 63 and 5'11"), and parting his floppy blond hair on the opposite side (Swanson left, Busey right), Swanson's a dead ringer for the eccentric actor.

He says the first "sighting," as he calls them, happened maybe 10 years ago, only Swanson didn't realize it at the time. He was at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo for a conference, and the people who were coordinating the entertainment kept calling him "Busey." Swanson says he didn't think much of it until five or six years later, when he was driving around Seattle in his red 1968 Cadillac convertible and some people clustered on the corner began staring and waving frantically. "Busey!" they screamed—and then he got it.

Swanson says the sightings have only increased since, to the point where he's now mistaken for Busey a few times a week. The sightings don't just happen in bars or his car, either: In the past few weeks alone, Swanson's been fingered in a plumbing store "by a couple of guys in paint-splattered jeans" and at a drugstore in the International District while procuring cold medicine.

"Sure, it's fun to be pointed out," he says. "You can walk into a room, you can feel eyes follow you across the room, and I'm always thinking, 'This is cool.' But when people actually...start really getting into conversations, I start thinking, 'Why?'"

Even so, Swanson, out on his own as a "stray dog," says he'll usually let people believe he's Busey if that's what they want to think.

"I'm not going to stick a pin in their balloon," Swanson explains. "I'm not going to say, 'What the hell do you think I'd be doing here? Are you stupid?' I try to grunt and moan and look down, just hoping they don't ask me some specific question.