Liar, Liar
Early Experiments in Deception
“One of you boys shit your pants, didn’t you?”
After a few seconds, I say, “No.”
This is the first lie I remember telling.
My brother Britt and I are sitting in the backseat of a large car moving slowly through Atlanta’s Bagley Park. I am five years old, Britt is six. The driver/inquisitor is our sixteen-year-old neighbor and occasional babysitter Regina. Every ten seconds or so we bounce over a speed bump. The windows are rolled down to a cooling, late summer afternoon, cicadas whirring.
“Well one of y’all smells of shit,” Regina says. She glances in the rearview, nose wrinkled. “Which one of y’all is it? It’s OK. Just tell me.”
“It’s not me,” I say.
“Did ya step in dog shit, then?”
Silence.
Regina is kindly trying to give me an out. She knows. And I know she knows. But I’m sticking to my story. Britt does not narc on me. In these pre-puberty days, we are thick as thieves.
The truth: while I have not exactly shit my pants, I am indeed the source of the fetid odor. Britt and I have been playing in the woods at the edge of Bagley Park, climbing trees, damming up the little creek. A few hours before, I’d been seized by “the call of nature.” Encouraged by my brother, I’d opted not to run the ten minutes home to sit on the toilet. For the first time in my young life, I’d shat under a tree, wiped myself with leaves, and carried on playing.
Soon thereafter, Regina is cruising the park, probably looking for a secluded place to smoke a reefer. She sees two little boys and insists she drive us home before the streetlights come on. Only upon sitting in Regina’s backseat do I realize I smell like a dirty diaper.
I recall the shame of stinking up the car, but also the fascination that, by crafting an alternate version of reality – wherein there is absolutely no shit in my pants – and committing to it whole hog, I control the situation.
I am uncomfortable with this power. But confessing would relinquish control to Regina, and, I fear, bring unpleasant consequences. So I lie. Hopefully my version of events will be accepted, at least outwardly, which is fine by me.
How do I know to engage this newly-minted part of my mind? Have I seen elders do it? No doubt. In time, I will learn everybody does it. Some more than others.
I’m lucky Regina is a sweet hippie girl not personally offended by a little boy trying to deceive her. Of course I see it now, but five-year-old me is not savvy enough to realize Regina would not have further humiliated me. I’m an anxious kindergartener, smart, but inexperienced in the ways of the world, only just learning how to recognize who is kind, and who is not. Who can be trusted, and who cannot.
In any event, my lie works. It takes the heat off me, even as it stresses me out. Beginner’s luck.
Fast forward thirty or so years. I’m recently settled with my wife, Holly, and four-year-old son, Jack, in the Hudson Valley of New York. I’ve accepted a position as a teacher’s assistant at Jack’s preschool, an occupation for which I have no schooling or certification. Nevertheless, I excel at it. My four years at School of the New Moon will be a crash course in early childhood development. My understanding of lying, among other things, will expand.
I am gobsmacked at how children’s brains blossom in this hothouse time. We’re talking two-to-four-year olds. This is generally when humans learn letters, numbers, seasons, days of the week, “morality,” differences in gender, and how to be quiet.
Most fascinating, this is when the human mind becomes attuned to the illusion of linear time. Two- and three-year-olds usually do not discern the difference between a day, a week, a month, a year; concepts like “the past” and “the future” are hazy at best. These kids are squarely in the moment. Like a stoner, a two- or three-year-old will confidently say, “I will see you last week!” or “I saw you the next day.” A four-year-old begins to be ensnared by a timeline. By age five, “time” as we know it is hardwired.
Although I’m good at it, and wowed by the science of it, escorting kids into our realm of clocks and deadlines will always make me melancholy.
While shepherding several dozen mostly neurotypical tykes from their trippy world to ours, I come to believe this codification of the abstract – numbers, increments of time, names – somehow sparks the engine of memory. Because age two through four – preschool time – is also where most people’s memories begin. This is when we learn to weave stories from both recollection and speculation, and it’s when we learn to lie.
I immediately notice School of the New Moon kids trying out lying. Sometimes half-pint liars are hilariously inept – “Yes, I DO have a pet dragon” – while others possess Academy Award-winning – and chilling – skill: “I am crying because she hit me,” when, in fact, the liar is the aggressor. (Junior gaslighting.)
Lying strikes me mostly as a matter of control. Like adults, some kids need to feel in control, some not so much. For some untouched by the concept of guilt, the adrenaline surge brought on by manipulating others with a lie registers as pleasurable.
Ask yourself why you told a lie, dear reader. I would wager that, like me with Regina, you wanted – maybe needed – to control someone else’s perception.
Witnessing the School of the New Moon kids lie, and seeing how that process affects both deceiver and deceived, my own memories of lying, and being lied to, flow.
When our father dies driving drunk when I’m seven and Britt is eight, my brother and I drift apart. As adolescence comes on, Britt is ever more confrontational and angry, an anti-authoritarian heartthrob with Peter Frampton hair. I do my homework and become a pleaser, with Coke-bottle-thick glasses and a passion for all things Star Wars. I wear a belt over a too-long T-shirt, aping Luke Skywalker’s getup, and run around in the woods behind our home singing the Star Wars theme to myself. Meanwhile, preteen Britt smokes weed and seduces a babysitter into our mother’s bed. (Not Regina. Another one named Edith.)
By the time I’m eleven and Britt is twelve, we are latchkey kids, spending a lot of unsupervised time in a two-bedroom bungalow. No more overseers. One next door neighbor is a disco goddess single mom for whom we babysit, the other is a woman who runs a filthy daycare out of her home.
One afternoon when I’m home alone watching TV, Britt and two wild friends burst in the front door. They’ve clearly been running. Britt locks the door behind him.
“We’re going up to the attic!” he breathlessly says. “We’re not here! Tell ‘em we’re not here!”
“What happened?” My heart is racing.
“We are not here!”
They scramble to the back of the house and up the cluttered stairway to our small tarpaper-lined attic to hide among boxed-up Christmas decorations and stacks of our mother’s Ms. and Time magazines.
Eventually, I will learn Britt and his friends had found a complete car wheel – not just a tire – and sent it rolling down the steepest street in our hilly Atlanta neighborhood. Reaching terminal velocity, the wheel had smashed into the driver’s side door of an elderly woman’s moving automobile, crumpling it with an explosive BOOM. (She is miraculously unhurt.) They’d fled, and some witnesses – two men – had pursued them through the streets.
Before I can gather my wits, someone is pounding on the front door. I am terrified. I can hear my brother and his friends on the floorboards above, laughing nervously. I pray they will quiet down. I consider hiding with them, but the idea of continued pounding is unbearable, and I am a “good kid.” A good kid would answer the door. The adult on the other side will be further offended if I don’t honor their will. And maybe, if I lie as instructed, and I’m successful, they will go away.
Trembling, I open the door to two angry men. In my memory they are mustachioed. I am unaccustomed to angry men looming over me.
“We know they’re here,” one says.
After a few seconds I shakily say, “What? Who?”
“Are your parents here?”
“No.”
“Well we know those kids are here. We saw them. Go get them. We just need to talk to them.”
My eyes burn, my stomach contracts. My glasses fog. At eleven, I am a dramatic cryer often seized by uncontrollable sobbing and seemingly endless tears. An influx of testosterone will eventually grant me some mastery over this, for good and for ill, but that is yet to come.
“Don’t lie,” the man repeats. “Where are they?”
“I… I don’t know. I don’t know…” My voice comes out high-pitched, tremulous.
“You don’t know?”
I shake my head. My face reddens and distorts as the familiar wave crashes within me. I dissolve into heaving sobs. No matter what my mind dictates, my body is running the show. But I will not tattle on my brother and his friends.
Britt and his cronies can hear what’s going on. They decide to run back down the attic steps and escape out the back door into the woods. This creates significant racket, clearly audible to the mustachioed men. They exchange a look.
In all their vigilante excitement, these guys must nevertheless realize that forcibly crossing the threshold of our home would be breaking a law. In fact, I am well within my rights to tell them to get off the property my mother owns. I don’t realize any of that, of course. (One of many instances in which I wish I could go back and counsel a younger version of me.) Finally, the mustachioed men decide to leave the sobbing, bespectacled kid. They stomp away, disgusted. Was this an act of mercy on their part, or self-preservation, or just a dip in their adrenaline, a cooling off? All of the above?
Amazingly, the elderly woman whose car my brother and his friends damaged never comes around, seeking damages. Once again, aside from evoking a crying fit, I suffer no repercussions for lying, even though my lie does not actually successfully deceive. But it’s not an experience I relish, or wish to repeat. Although I will.
Unlike many pathological/compulsive liars I will meet in my lifetime – and I’ll meet and be deceived by quite a few – the experience of lying doesn’t give me a dopamine rush. Some big lying, in fact, will almost destroy me. Which is not to say I don’t still do it in small ways. I do. But I endeavor not to, and I am hardly shameless.
Still, the storytelling aspect of lying fascinates me, even as it occasionally enrages me. I invest my devotional energy in art because, as Picasso reportedly said, “Art is the lie that makes us realize truth.” That concept resonates deep and wide. It can apply to song, literature, dance, poetry, film, painting, et al. In the context of art, we willfully relinquish control of our hold on “reality” and willfully allow the artist to lead us down the garden path to… truth. It’s my favorite paradox: creating something unreal to investigate reality. When it works, both artist and audience receive enlightenment. For it to be art, however, both must know what they’re getting into from the get-go.
Today, I perceive more bullshit than ever before, in part because I have levied some bullshit myself. After all that has happened, and all that is yet to happen, this process of experiencing truth through art not only feels righteous and good, it feels more necessary, more potentially redemptive, than ever. And that’s no lie.
Again, excellent storytelling!
Hey RObert, took me a while to get to this and so glad I did. The writing is superb, really is. I love how you weave different elements of the past with the present day. I guess if it comes to it we have all lied about something so painstakingly obviously true that it becomes pointless the inquisitor bugging us any more, because in the end the only person we deceive is ourselves; I will tell you mine off camera one day. I appreciate that you avoided discussing how lying will get you all the way into the White House and even provide a (false) excuse to try and hold on to that temporary occupation. Unfortunately, it's hard for us to tell children "George Washington couldn't tell a lie" (though I suspect that is a lie in itself) when we don't get better examples from above. Your story demonstrates how the persistent lie embarrasses most of us and we would prefer not to do it. Cheers!