Damned Lies!

by Dennis Liggio

  Plan D: Go back, explain respectfully that we are not a match, pay the check, then take her home early. Have the most awkward ride ever. Flaws: Who are we kidding? That’s not who I am.

  Instead, I hatched a cunning plan. Except substitute cunning with “cowardly”, since that’s really what it was.

  I pulled out my phone and called Becky. I prayed she wasn’t on a date, at a movie, doing her hair, whatever. I prayed she was available and willing to do me a big favor. She was the only person crazy enough for what I had in mind. Sometimes you need to fight crazy with crazy.

  I waited in the bathroom as long as I felt I could get away with it before making the reluctant death march back to my table. I almost imagined a waiter calling out “Dead man walking!” as I passed. My chair had been righted. I slid back into it. A strained smile.

  “Did you fall in?” she asked with a genuine smile.

  I faked some laughter and grabbed some of the bread the waiter brought, stuffing it in my mouth to cover any facial expression. I like bread.

  “I took the liberty of asking the waiter to bring us a bottle of wine.” She said, coyly pointing to the bottle.

  White wine. Why was I not surprised?

  I chugged my beer. She looked at me oddly, but said nothing. I then poured myself a glass of wine and downed that. Then I poured myself a second glass. Her eyebrow was raised.

  "Do we need to order another bottle? Or one to take home?" she asked, trying to make light of it, but her humor felt strained too.

  I grunted a negative with a shake of my head as I drained another glass of wine and shoved more bread into my mouth. I chewed slowly, my cheeks puffy like a chipmunk.

  I was feeling pretty good by now, tapping on the table and humming a tune, while doing my best not to make eye contact with her. Still I wondered where the cavalry was. My drunken good humor would only last so long. Five long minutes had passed without us talking. How long could I keep it up for?

  “You know, you’re still on a date,” said Deborah, breaking the blessed silence with the cacophony of her mouth noises.

  “Yes, I know,” I said, trying my best to look sheepish. "I'm not good with dating," I mumbled over another piece of bread.

  I started to wonder if my original tactic was starting to work. Maybe I should have started drinking sooner. I could have played the alcoholic card and drank myself out of the date. Of course, that's assuming alcohol didn't have me doing something stupid like bringing her home. Drunk Me seems to really enjoy making me pay for mistakes.

  “So you’re just playing hard to get now, is that it?” she said. “I don’t mind. There’s something in the thrill of the hunt,” she finished, holding her wine glass in her hand. She gave me what should have been a sly smile, but instead it looked like she was glowering at me.

  At this moment, at my most uncomfortable, is when things started to change. I heard a familiar voice across the restaurant.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Just the nice mixture of shock and outrage, but it still felt honest. I liked it. She was getting into her role.

  Becky came storming up to our table, her face a mask of rage. She looked back and forth between me and Deborah, her eyes narrowing.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she said looking at me. Then, looking at Deborah, “And you! You damn slut! Who do you think you are?”

  “And just who are you?” said Deborah icily.

  “His girlfriend, that’s who!” replied Becky. “He’s my boyfriend! Who the hell are you?”

  There was a moment of silence. This is where Deborah would back down, then Becky would angrily drag me out of the restaurant while I looked appropriately chastised, and then when we were out of sight at the curb I would start jumping for joy.

  “I'm the girl who’s going to steal him away from you and show him what a real woman is like,” replied Deborah. “Cause if he’s out with me, you sure as hell aren’t doing it for him!”

  Ouch. I was admittedly surprised that Deborah decided to go on the offensive. I figured she’d think I was slime and she’d sympathize with Becky. I really was supposed to be the target. Deborah would follow Becky's lead and hate me, then I could wriggle out of this, the weight of cheater's guilt hanging on my shoulders. Instead, things were going to a very bad place. Deborah surprised me by fighting back, and Becky surprised me by throwing a punch at Deborah.

  Okay, I admit it. Becky’s punch wasn’t a surprise. I expect those kinds of reactions from her.

  Becky isn’t actually my girlfriend, as you may have guessed. There was some general interest when we first met in college, but it didn’t work out. She thought I was arrogant, I thought she was crazy. Both are correct. She is quite uninhibited, for better or for worse. She acts more through her emotions, but at the same time, she has a perverse sense of humor. For example, when I suggested that she come and act like a jealous girlfriend to get me out of this date, she thought it was hilarious. I wonder if she knew she was going to get into a fight. She likes fights.

  Deborah didn’t go down easily. Becky’s punch knocked her out of her chair, but she immediately got back up and socked Becky. Becky staggered, shocked. Usually she dominates fights precisely because the other person doesn’t want to fight. In this case, she met a very willing opponent. And while she likes fights, she wasn't expecting this to be a real one. She was expecting to at best punch a prissy girl, make that girl cry, and the fight would be over. She wasn't expecting a real slugfest, but she threw herself back into the fight anyway. Soon the two of them were locked in a desperate struggle.

  Other men would have stepped in to stop the fight. Better men. Men who were probably not the focus of both women’s anger right now. I was not one of those men.

  In the course of my life, I have dealt with zombies, fought hobos semiprofessionally, experienced worlds other than ours, sorted out clones, fought ancient alien deities, and had many adventures that most would not believe, but even I knew better than to leap in between the fury of women scorned.

  Instead, drenched in cowardice like it was cheap cologne, I slunk across the restaurant on my belly. Most of the other restaurant patrons were glued to the catfight at my table and never saw me slip by.

  I crept past the podium at the front of the restaurant as the hostess and one of the waiters talked frantically about calling the police. When I was last in earshot, they had already started dialing. I straightened up as I walked through the restaurant waiting area. I shook my head to the people there. “You might want to wait outside,” I said.

  In a moment, I stepped out into the cool, refreshing air of freedom. I felt a weight lift from my shoulders and I had a spring in my step. I stretched my arms wide. It was a wonderful feeling, my spirits lifting. I had escaped! The most important part was that I had extricated myself from that bad situation without having to bite the bullet and do the right thing.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, pulled out my car keys, and stepped off the curb.

  I remember the growl of an engine and somebody shouting. I remember turning to see myself reflected in the glass of the windshield before there was a terrible pain and I had the feeling of flying. I don't remember hitting the ground, just things going black.

  Birth

  I awoke on a bed in the patient wing of Our Lady of St Orpheus in downtown Austin. My left leg was in a cast and hung in traction. I was vaguely aware of Quincy MD playing on a TV hung from the ceiling in the corner. Covered in bandages, I was of course disoriented. Had someone slipped me a mickey? Did I still have both my kidneys? Was I at the facility of an enemy where they were planning an elaborate hoax of a normal life in the future to extract my military secrets? Had I just gone home with a girl who was really kinky?

  How to escape? Smash the window? Take a hostage? Infiltrate the laundry room to steal a doctor's uniform? Call in an airstrike? Make their heads explode with psychic powers? Play captive until I could glean their motives?

  My outlandish thoughts and scheming
continued until a nurse noticed I was awake. My cunning plan of escape was put on hold as the hospital staff took over. They initiated a flurry of activity where lights were turned on, doctors called, nurses fluttered back and forth, and Quincy was turned off. Too bad. Quincy knew the score. He'd have gotten me out.

  They briefly went over the facts. I had been the victim of a hit and run car accident. I had been brought here to Our Lady of St Orpheus where I spent a day in intensive care until I stabilized. Then they had put me here in the patient wing until I finally awoke. It had been five days.

  Two broken ribs, a broken leg, countless bruises, and thankfully no internal damage. I did have a concussion, and that's what concerns them the most. Though I was totally out of it, I heard myself assuring them I was completely fine and asking if I could go home to sleep in my own bed. Their eyes subtly slid to my leg in traction and back to me, and I appreciate that they did not mention that as they suggested I need more observation.

  Because we were dealing with a concussion, of course the doctors were concerned with the possibility of brain damage. Thus, tests were performed to see if I had any obvious mental problems that could have resulted from the concussion. Flashlights as bright as a supernova were shined deep in my eyes. As instructed, I followed the doctor's finger with my eyes as it moved up, down, side to side, then fluttered around before joining its fellow digits in vigorous jazz hands. Next was the typical barrage of questions: do I know who I am? (yes) Do I know where I am? (of course not, I was brought here unconscious) How many fingers are they holding up? (three) Do I know who the current President is? (why yes, it's Hapsburg P Wimplebucket Esq, a favorite of the Whigg party) Do you believe there is an international conspiracy created by intergalactic lizards to keep us all addicted to television, promote the brainwashing elements of antibacterial soaps, and support the still-alive head of JFK in drawing Excalibur and waging the last noble war against the minions of a cybernetic Walt Disney? (no, not entirely).

  Results were inconclusive.

  Hospitals are extremely boring places for patients, despite the excitement shown on television medical shows. Many, like myself, are only barely able to move, the idea of being able to move on my own to the attached bathroom to relieve myself like a normal human was an alluring but remote fantasy. It was rather unlike the TV depiction of being taken for granted by some troubled but handsome doctor that was banging one of the nurses with great regret. I knew well the four walls, the stiff medical sheets, and the old television that hung in the corner of the ceiling. Television helps with the boredom, don't get me wrong - I assure you madness would have overtaken all our finest medical centers if not for wretchedly old televisions and their mind numbing relief of daytime game shows and late night television. Even as a lifelong fan of the Price is Right and Bewitched, there's only so many game shows, daytime dramas, and reruns a human being can take without retching up society's lowest common denominator in the form of bile.

  I convinced the nurses to bring me a legal pad and a pen. They were happy to oblige just to get me to stop being so talkative. I wouldn't consider myself a particularly needy person, but when you're in agonizing boredom, you start really wanting to get the most out of social interactions as possible. So when I asked for resources to engage myself, they let out a relieved sigh and enthusiastically agreed to get whatever I wanted so I could write a memoir.

  I'm not sure where I got the idea. Maybe it had always lurked in the back of my head that I should write my life down and commit it to paper. Maybe I could forge some immortality out of it, as the longevity of my memoir would extend past my meager lifespan. Maybe I saw it on one of the morning talk shows I watched in a daze on that hospital TV. Maybe Regis was talking up someone that was telling their true to life stories of how they pulled themselves up from being a drug addled hooker to writing a positive living book and a guest spot on the Today show. Maybe it was some cosmic design that my voice get out to the world and relay all the things I've known.

  It was probably just ego.

  All good memoirs have some intimate yet ambivalent beginning, like how their parents were poor, starving potato farmers, good in their way, but rigid in their values. Then there's some story about some family antique that coincides with the day of birth. That's how it seems to be done these days. I miss the old days, and I mean the old old days when there were some really awesome birth stories. When Hercules was still in his crib, he was attacked by two snakes sent by Hera, the unhappy wife of his father. Wee Baby Hercules strangled those two snakes by himself with nothing but his bare hands. Yes, Wee Baby Hercules was more of a badass than most of us ever reach in our entire lifespan. We should all aspire to have life stories as amazing as that.

  My birth was not nearly so epic. I did not come out of the womb leading a chariot of soldiers, I did not spring fully-formed from my father's head. No evil overlord sought my pregnant mother due to prophecy, and no odd-shaped birth mark identified me as a child of destiny. I was not orphaned at birth by dire circumstances or diabolical villain, I was not seized immediately by a shadowy organization for training in the war of good versus evil. As far as epic tales start, mine started rather poorly.

  I was born on a Monday, much like Solomon Grundy. The day was the color of a wet newspaper whose inks have long ago seeped into the drain. It was a rainy day in 1976, the temperature slightly chilly, the puddles not too deep. The number one song of the week in America was "Shake Your Booty" by KC and the Sunshine Band. Despite such a posterior-happy atmosphere in the nation at large, the rainy day had made things somber at the hospital. Outside people sloshed through puddles, but safe and dry within the hospital, my mother was in labor.

  My mother had been wheeled into the hospital ten hours ago, the nurses peppy, the doctors ready, my father nervous but not overly so. I was his fourth child, so he had been through this song and dance before. An old woman hobbled out of her room and swore she saw with her glass eye a nimbus around my mother as she was wheeled by. "He will be King," she cackled. The nurses gently guided her back into her room and tried to find out why she wasn't taking her meds.

  At 6:46pm, there was a cry from my mother's room. Across the hospital there were signs. A male nurse swore the candy machine gave him his Snickers without having to pay. Parking validated itself. Cold toilet seats became warm, much to the delight of sheepish patients. Hospital administrator's budgets somehow balanced. People who had waited in the ER for hours were suddenly seen. In the wake of these strange events, I was born.

  The doctor pulled me from between my mother's legs, my small face stoic and silent. He tried to raise me up to show off to the room, but I slipped from his hands and skidded across the floor. This was a major faux pas, so both the doctor and nurse quickly bent to grab me and comically bumped their heads together.

  As they rubbed their heads, they looked to where I had come to a halt. With surprise, they watched as I stood up of my own accord, finding unexpected strength in my baby legs. I stood tall - for a baby - my oddly-shaped baby head held high, tiny little hands held defiantly on my hips. I scanned the room and the faces of all present.

  "Nothing is true; everything is permitted," I stated in a voice far deeper than it should be.

  The doctor, the nurse, and my father looked on in stunned silence, motionless. My mother, exhausted and loopy from the experience was unable to see me on the floor. "Who said that?" she asked.

  My father stuttered to say something, but nothing meaningful came out. The doctor and nurse crouched on the floor and moved towards me slowly, as if to grab a small animal that could bite them. My baby-self basked in this moment, but a moment was all it was. Seconds later, my expression changed. The serious and intelligent face grew dull and those strong legs became weak. I abruptly fell down onto my bottom, surprised, but unhurt.

  The doctor stared at me, hoping for further declarations of wisdom - this was the first time a baby had said something pithy to him and he didn't want to waste this chance. Alas, I instead ma
de goo-goo-ga-ga sounds that are typical of any baby stereotype. Dismayed, the doctor frowned, which made me cry. The nurse, far more practical and uninterested in baby-dispensed philosophy, stepped in and scooped me up. The well-oiled machine of the post-birthing process resumed.

  The incident was forgotten. My parents, for their part, were happy to have a bouncing baby boy, free of complications. The nurse had shrugged off the event with a vague mumble about having seen stranger things. The doctor, however, couldn't get the experience out of his head. It had left a mark that just wouldn't go away. Despite my parents' wishes, he kept me a week in the hospital under as much observation as possible. By the end of the week, my parents were pleading with him to let me go home and he was running out of medical excuses to keep me there. Reluctantly he agreed; though he had hours of surveillance footage, I had not spoken. He had to admit, I seemed just an average baby. That's when he started drinking pretty heavily.

  I was finally free to go home. My mother carried me out of the hospital wrapped in a blanket. As she walked through the hospital, the old woman with the glass eye nodded to me. That lucky male nurse somehow knew me too and raised a free Snickers triumphantly, toasting my exodus. The glass doors opened and I entered a brave new world.

  What do I remember about that first day out of the hospital? I remember my homecoming. It's not my brothers I remember specifically, though they greeted me in their own ways, mere children themselves. No, I remember my parents' dog.

  My parents had placed me in the crib and my mom went to lay down for some well needed rest. My dad stayed to watch me. The old dog waddled into the room and my father watched its behavior with amusement. The dog was an ornery fifteen year old canine that was not long for the world. His eyes were milky, his fur tangled and mixed with grey, his legs and bowels not working as they should. His presence was a mix of scents: slobber, Milkbones, and dried dogshit. He stuck his snout through the bars of the crib and sniffed me bitterly.