Liar

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by Rob Roberge


  Plus, when you’re an addict who stopped, it’s something of a redemption tale. And everybody loves one of those. When you have a mental illness that might only get worse, people don’t really want to hear about that. The story arc of mental illness does not conform to the redemption tale.

  More and more you are realizing that if you are ashamed of certain things you did when you drank and used drugs, you are ashamed of who you are with mental illness.

  —

  2002: You discover Schopenhauer is fabulous music to have playing when a woman uses a riding crop or a cane on your ass. You can’t have music with lyrics. Tom Verlaine’s Warm and Cool is great, too. Any Glenn Gould. Mingus at Antibes. Instrumentals are by far a superior soundtrack for this activity. Words can intrude when the body wants to take over. Lyrics make you think—music helps you just feel.

  —

  1981: Your dad’s friend is visiting. He sleeps on your living-room floor and your mother clearly hates him. It’s an awkward visit, as your dad is trying to talk his friend (who has just gotten divorced) into rehab. Your father’s friend has served in Vietnam and done time in jail. He calls jail “the joint.”

  You are listening to Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers’ L.A.M.F. Your dad is in the garage working on a car and you are alone at the kitchen table with his friend.

  Your father’s friend asks, “What is this fucking noise?” He has a gravelly deep voice that kind of scares you.

  “It’s punk,” you say.

  “Punk?” he says, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. “This is punk?”

  “Punk music,” you say. “They’re a punk band.”

  “Is your band a punk band?”

  You say yes.

  “In the joint a punk is someone who takes it up the ass.” He laughs. “You take it up the ass, kid?”

  The thought has never occurred to you. You’re fifteen, a slow developer. You’ve barely done more than make out with anyone. But you pick up on what he thinks the right answer is: “No.”

  “Then don’t go calling yourself a punk. Punks take it up the ass. You tell the wrong person you’re a punk and you’ll be getting fucked in the ass, understand me, kid?”

  Your dad walks in during his friend’s last sentence. “What are you talking to my kid about?”

  The friend shrugs. “Some life advice.” He winks at you.

  Years later, another band of yours plays a bar called the Joint. That night is also the first night a woman ever fucks you with a strap-on. She is the bartender at the Joint, and she drives you to her place while the band shares a room at some shit motel near the highway. She wears a vintage dress, fishnets, and Chuck Taylors, none of which she has taken off, while you are naked in front of her.

  Just as she starts to fuck you, you remember what your father’s friend said. You think of having met this woman in the Joint and that you are in a band that gets labeled in the press as “Cow-Punk.” You are a punk and you hear that gravelly voice say, “A punk is someone who takes it up the ass, kid.” You think of all these things and you start to laugh.

  The bartender stops for a moment. “Are you okay?”

  You are drunk. You try to stop laughing because it seems inappropriate at the moment. “I’m fine,” you say, still trying to stop laughing. “Sorry.”

  —

  1973: For show-and-tell in the third grade, you bring in your father’s copy of Redd Foxx’s You Gotta Wash Your Ass. You lip-synch to his performance. You get suspended.

  The next week, you bring Tom Waits’s Small Change, which has a stripper with pasties on the album cover. You are suspended again.

  Your favorite song this year is “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack. So you go to the public library and read about the movie. You like the name of one of the movie’s characters. Ratso Rizzo. There is a picture of Dustin Hoffman as Ratso. He looks cool.

  For the third-grade Halloween costume party, you dress as Ratso Rizzo. You slick your hair back with soap and your father’s VO5. You wear your raincoat with nothing on underneath—you take your clothes off in the bathroom. You walk around, hitting other students’ desks, the walls, the lockers, screaming “I’m walkin’ here!” in your best approximation of a Ratso Rizzo voice. You’ve only read about the scene, so you have no idea what Ratso really sounds like.

  When the principal asks you why you’re naked under the coat, you say you thought that’s how perverts dressed.

  He shakes his head. “Perverts?” he says. “A pervert costume?” He’s still shaking his head as he dials what you assume is your parents’ phone number.

  —

  FEBRUARY 27, 2006: Your wife, Gayle, wakes up in extreme pain. The band you’re in together, the Danbury Shakes, had played a show earlier and her shoulders were too sore to carry her bass cabinet. This is unusual. Gayle spends three hours at the gym every day. She’s cut and ripped and takes tremendous pride in her body. Exercise is the way she blows off steam from a stressful day of grading papers.

  You met Gayle in grad school in 1989. You moved in together in 1993 when she was getting her PhD in French feminism. You’d never met someone that put together. Someone able to read Derrida and Lacan and Irigaray and make heads or tails of them. You are stunned. You, who bounced through five states and three graduate programs, having someone so well-adjusted and smart and high-functioning and ambitious fall in love with you. In her thirties, just for fun, Gayle takes up the bass, so you guys can have a band together. She gets everything done she ever sets her mind to.

  That night, after the show, she wakes up with her entire body in debilitating pain. Her legs and feet are cramping. She says, “It’s like my body’s betraying me.”

  The pain has been building, but not for that long. When she tiled the bathroom you were restoring during winter break, her hands grew fatigued and sore after only a few hours of work.

  Now her pain seems excruciating. You desperately want to fix whatever is wrong with her. You wish it could be you suffering instead.

  This leads to the Year of Doctors. Diagnosis after diagnosis, treatment after treatment. When nothing Western works, she tries acupuncture; she tries every Eastern-medicine quack she can find. Nothing seems to help. Eventually, she gets so exhausted from seeking treatments, she sees a pain doctor who puts her on OxyContin for the daily pain and Vicodin for the breakthrough pain. You don’t think much about it. You’ve had liquor in the house for fifteen years since you cleaned up and never been tempted to touch it. It’s simply part of your past—nothing more or less. That’s just not you anymore.

  —

  2007: Gayle’s diagnoses continue to mount. Doctor after doctor calls her a medical mystery. One thinks she has fibromyalgia. Another mentions something the medical community is calling a newly discovered form of MS. The only good news is that these are non-degenerative. She’s also battling chronic fatigue syndrome, which you quickly realize should have a more serious name. She can spend more than a week in bed, unable to read or do anything, and not get restorative sleep. They have no idea how any of these illnesses started but suspect the chronic fatigue was as a result of a virus that attacked her stomach, maybe years earlier, and then eventually shot her immune system to hell.

  Another doctor says she doesn’t believe in fibromyalgia. Out in the parking lot, Gayle says to you, “Well, if she doesn’t believe in it, what the fuck is wrong with me?”

  You don’t know what to say.

  She says, “Something is very fucking wrong with me.”

  You say yes, something is clearly wrong, and you both curse the doctor who just treated her like shit.

  “If a fucking man walked in there,” she asks, “would some doctor tell him it was all in his head?”

  With her meds, Gayle can grit her way through the pain. But there’s no way to fight total exhaustion. For the first time in her life, she calls in sick to work. Many people with her conditions go on permanent disability. Some kill themselves.

 
You stop making plans with friends for dinner because there’s no way she can know how she’ll feel on any given day. You stop seeing plays because it’s impossible to know if she will have the energy to make it anywhere on time, or even if she can make it out the door. You begin to have sex far less often. Your life grows smaller by degrees. Soon you are too exhausted to even think about sex, no matter how Gayle feels about it.

  You have no idea what to do.

  After Gayle’s pain begins, you massage her for at least an hour most nights, trying to alleviate her terrible pain. But nothing works. And you are doing nothing but brooding and falling apart. After a year of this, you start to withdraw. You are reminded of Hemingway’s line about how you go bankrupt—slowly at first, and then all of a sudden. It builds, and then you break. You turn inward. You are ignoring friends and not returning e-mails or phone calls. It is less than six months before you relapse. Your shrink, who you start seeing when thoughts of suicide get more intense, tells you to be careful of “caregiver fatigue,” something you have never heard of.

  There is a saying in AA and NA: You go out before you ever go out. You don’t think this will happen to you. You are just exhausted. That’s all it is.

  —

  MID-1970S: Every Sunday, you have to visit your mother’s parents. You don’t like them. You don’t particularly hate them, though your dad does seem to actively dislike them. But, then, they hate him and treat him like shit, so you can kind of see where he’s coming from. Both of your parents do nothing but complain about them.

  But, even though you don’t hate them, you still have no interest in wasting your Sundays when you could be with your friends, or playing basketball, or simply be alone. Plus, every week you have to eat something known as “Great-Grandma Mary’s Meat Recipe,” which makes everyone ill. The whole family either has to crap or puke halfway home. Plus, their house is a mess. As a kid, you will only think it’s messy, but over the years you’ll see that it is more than messy. Your grandmother never throws anything away. Even in the ’70s, there’s a basement filled with so much stuff, you can’t walk around—it’s just a pile of furniture and clothing and huge garbage bags swollen and piled all over one another. The attic is impossible to get into.

  Your grandparents are the only people you know of who have a party line for a phone. You find this otherworldly. You pick up their phone, and any one of their neighbors might be using it. About the only fun you and your sister have at their house is picking up the receiver as gently as possible, hoping to hear a voice instead of a dial tone. When you do hear a voice, it’s usually pretty mundane—you will remember a woman talking about slippage in her dentures—but at least it’s more entertaining than what’s happening in the house.

  One Sunday, you get to their house and the screen door is unlocked and you see your grandmother rolling cigarettes in the kitchen. She’s using her brown rolling machine, the one you kind of love. Some of your best memories with her are rolling her cigarettes while she drinks, her smeared lipstick staining her whiskey glass as her speech slowly becomes more slurred. After she passes out in her chair, you take sips from her glass. The whiskey is strong, but the more disgusting part is the lipstick residue, which tastes like a greasy pair of wax lips.

  What’s weird today is the band of gauze wrapped around her head, bloodied on one temple so she looks like the fife player in the Spirit of ’76 painting. She’s staring straight ahead blankly, as if she doesn’t notice that the four of you have come into the kitchen.

  Your mother says, “Mom! What happened?”

  Your grandmother is clearly drunk—pretty early in the day, even for her. She slurs, “Your father shot me.”

  “What?”

  Your grandmother doesn’t seem that upset. Maybe dazed, but not angry. “Your father shot me, dear.”

  Your father says, “Shot you?”

  It’s the first time you’ve ever heard your grandmother say “dear.” It’s about the most cordial she’s ever sounded.

  You and your sister look at each other, confused.

  “Where the hell is Bob?” your father asks, referring to your grandfather.

  Your grandmother never interrupts her cigarette rolling, except to take another sip of her drink or a drag of her smoke. “Outside.” She pauses. “Be careful, dear. He has a gun.”

  Eventually your grandfather walks into the kitchen with his .22-caliber rifle. “I didn’t hear you pull up.”

  Your mother turns around and points at the rifle. “Is that loaded?”

  “Of course it’s loaded. It’s hard to shoot if it’s not.”

  “You shot Mom?”

  “I was outside,” he says.

  “What the fuck does that matter?”

  Your grandmother says, in a flat emotionless slur, “You’re in front of the children.”

  Your mother takes a deep breath and looks at her mother. “And your husband has a loaded gun in front of my children.”

  Your father says, “Could you put the gun in the barn, Bob?”

  “Why is everybody treating me like I don’t know how to use a gun?”

  Your mother says, “It looks like you know how to use a gun pretty well, Dad.”

  “I was out shooting gophers,” he says. “One shot ricocheted off a rock and came into the house.”

  “And hit Mom!” your mother says.

  You are a little confused, because your mother can’t seem to stand her mother. It will take you many more years to realize that relationships between parents and children can be complex enough that you can not want to see them, you might even fear or hate them, but you will still not want them dead.

  Your father orders you and your sister into the living room, where the big stone fireplace is, but you can still hear all the yelling from the kitchen.

  Your mother says, “Do you need a hospital?”

  Your grandfather says, “Oh, Jesus Christ. It was an accident.”

  “She could still need a hospital, Bob,” your father says.

  “It grazed her,” he says. “Plus, then I’d have to explain that I didn’t shoot her.”

  Your mother says, “You did shoot her!”

  “I shot her,” your grandfather says. “But I didn’t shoot her!”

  You don’t remember much more about that day, except for your father going outside and walking around, and then later looking at the hole in the window from the bullet.

  On the way home, your father says to your mother, “There’s no way that bullet could have come from him shooting in the garden.”

  Your father’s not a ballistics expert, but he is in law enforcement. You believe him on that drive home. You believe him now.

  —

  1995: Driving cross-country from visiting her family in California, you and Gayle decide on a whim to get married in Las Vegas. You didn’t plan this. But you didn’t plan on moving in together either, and that’s been going great for two years, so it seems like something fun to do. Gayle’s always been against the institution of marriage. You’ve never cared one way or the other—though you did once ask Mary to marry you, but you did that when you were desperate not to lose her and it seemed only some grand gesture would prevent that. But with Gayle, somewhere between Southern California and Las Vegas, getting married goes from being a joke to an idea to a plan.

  When you get to Vegas, though, all the hotels are full except for one that’s having some labor dispute. The workers picket out front, protesting their wages.

  “That’s a bad sign,” Gayle says.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t want some scab wedding,” she says, and you fall in love just a little more.

  You end up getting married in Salt Lake City. It takes all of an hour. You ask the lady doing it to leave out god, but she still asks if you will marry Gayle in front of god and all these witnesses.

  You pause. “Okay.”

  The lady looks at you sternly.

  “I do,” you say.

  Then she gives yo
u a list of about twenty things, including your soul, that you are promising Gayle for the rest of your lives. When she turns to Gayle, she only asks if Gayle will cherish you. Gayle waits for the rest of her list and, finally realizing there’s nothing more coming, she says yes.

  When you are walking out of the building, you turn to her and jokingly say, “I better feel cherished.”

  —

  1972: You watch some animated PBS children’s special about protecting the environment. They try to get kids to care by focusing on the extinction of various species. They focus on one called the Newfoundland wolf, which went extinct in 1911. Your grandmother lived in a world that had this wolf, and now it’s gone forever. For some reason this devastates you. This is your earliest memory of being too upset to eat. You sit at the dinner table, thinking about the last Newfoundland wolf, still alive but without any hope. You wonder if it was capable of feeling how alone it was in the world.

  “What’s wrong?” your father says. “Why aren’t you eating?”

  But you are afraid to talk. Afraid that if you even open your mouth, you’ll start crying, and you know that you are not supposed to cry, so you just move your food around and try to disappear.

  You become obsessed with extinct animals. You spend all your time thinking about what it would be like to be the last of your kind. First, as one of the last two of your kind, and then just alone, waiting to die. You think of the most alone you have ever felt and realize it can always be worse. There are types of alone you can only imagine until they happen.

  You make lists of all the extinct animals you care about in your notebooks. You do several show-and-tells in a row where you present reports about the Catahoula salamander (date of extinction, 1964), the Tacoma pocket gopher (1970), the Cuban red macaw (1860s), and the passenger pigeon (1914).

 

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