Liar

by Rob Roberge

  But you guess very wrong when you try to take the ball into Malcolm’s chest. He’s a foot taller and solid. He probably has fifty pounds on you. The last thing you remember is trying to decide in that split second whether to pass the ball to the teammate on your left, pull up for a safe ten-foot bank shot, or take the ball straight to the hoop, figuring the worst you’ll come away with is two free throws.

  The last thing you hear is Malcolm saying, “Don’t take that weak shit in here, Tom Pitty-Patty.”

  And then, nothing.

  You wake up to your coach cupping your head in his hands, talking to you. You can’t make out the words. Everything sounds the way it does when you first take a hit of nitrous oxide, which you have been doing for about a year at this point.

  Then, for the first time, someone uses smelling salts on you. It’s pretty amazing. You wake up fully. Your head hurts and you feel like you could sleep.

  “You really got your bell rung,” your coach says. “You ready to go?”

  Of course you’re ready to go. Guys who aren’t ready to go get replaced by guys who are. It gets drilled into you from the start: You play hurt, you play sore, you sure as hell play when all that’s happened is that you’ve taken a hit to the head.

  He slaps your cheek twice. You see stars. He says, “That’s what I want to hear.”

  You stand and your legs go rubbery. You barely stay up. You think you might puke.

  You say, “How much time is left in the half?”

  He laughs at you. “It’s halftime. You’ve been out for twenty minutes.”

  He seems to think it’s funny. To be fair, you don’t think much of it, except that you’re a beat slow and you throw up in a garbage pail off by the bleachers before the second half starts. You take the court and you and Malcolm give each other some five-step elaborate handshake you have only recently been allowed to learn.

  He says, “You shoulda passed, Tom Pitty-Patty.”

  Talking is hard. “Yup.”

  “At least you hit the free throws.”

  “I shot free throws?” you say.

  He laughs and hits you playfully in the chest with the back of his hand.

  You try to remember shooting free throws, but no. It’s gone. It must have happened, but you weren’t there for it.

  About five minutes into the half, you get run into a pick and your head snaps to the right and something crunches in your neck.

  The next thing you remember is the second time someone uses smelling salts on you.

  Your coach comes up and says, “You’re done for the day.” He doesn’t sound mad. He may even sound proud.

  You’ve played hurt. You’ve done what you were supposed to do.

  Later, when doctors ask you to list the concussions in your life, when they are testing your brain for damage, you cite this as the third concussion. You know it is at least that. You may have forgotten some. It could be your fourth or fifth. But that would be a guess.

  —

  WINTER 1979: You are the only white kid, drinking with your best friends from the winter basketball league, Malcolm and Terry and a few other kids you don’t know that well.

  Malcolm always brings red wine. You once ask him if he could get you some beer and he laughs at you. “Tom Pitty-Patty, beer is a very fucking white thing to drink. White people drink beer and then sit around the next day talking about how much beer they drank.”

  You are passing the bottle and you and Terry are sharing a Swisher Sweet and snow is falling in soft heavy flakes that look as big as packing peanuts.

  Someone complains that he’ll have to shovel that fucking snow in the morning. One of the guys says that Super John Williamson won’t have to shovel his snow.

  Super John Williamson is a hero of all of yours. He plays for the New Jersey Nets. He’s from the poorest, worst part of New Haven and it’s a famous story in local basketball circles that as a kid, Super John Williamson had to shovel snow just to help his family get enough money to eat.

  He was truly poor and you feel guilty, sitting around with guys like Malcolm and Terry, who are also poor, while you live two towns over and you’re fine. Your parents are solidly middle class and you are white and even at thirteen you know you have an enormous and unfair advantage.

  Super John Williamson shoveled snow from the time he was seven years old and he knew what it felt like to go to bed hungry and he dreamed about getting the fuck out of shitty New Haven and he did because he was one of the greatest basketball players anyone had ever seen.

  Super John Williamson vowed that when he made it, he would buy his mother a house and he would build himself a mansion and he would never shovel snow again.

  And now, everybody around knows that Super John Williamson signed a huge contract with the Nets and has a mansion in New Haven that has heating coils installed under the driveway, so that when it snows, he flicks a switch and the snow fucking melts and he’s done interviews about how he flicks that switch and he watches his snow melt and he remembers every shovel full of snow he ever had to lift.

  Super John Williamson has even, you’re pretty sure, had his name legally changed from his given name to his nickname. He was just John Williamson, but now he’s Super John Williamson and everyone has to call him that.

  He is the essence of cool to all of you. He is a sign of where basketball can take you.

  Every single one of you on these steps thinks he is going to be a pro basketball player. You and six million other kids are convinced they’ll be one of the three hundred NBA players.

  You’re all getting a little buzzed from the wine and someone says you should go watch the snow melt at Super John Williamson’s house.

  Seven of you pile into Malcolm’s brother’s car. None of you are old enough to drive. Malcolm is the oldest, at fifteen, but he shouldn’t be driving—maybe more than any of you. He’s been arrested at least twice for stealing and joyriding in stranger’s cars. With these priors, he could be arrested and locked up for driving his brother’s car. If you or Terry were driving, or any of the other guys, you’d be arrested, but it probably wouldn’t mean you’d be locked up. But you can’t drive and even if you could, you’d never take the risk. You are the smallest person in the car, so you sit on the center console between the two front seats, facing backward with your ass aching the whole way.

  The snow starts sticking to the road on Route 95 and it’s slick by the time you get to the house. You park across the street. The seven of you spill out of the car. The snow is falling more quickly now and you stand across the street, and you all watch in awe as the streets and sidewalks grow thick and white with snow and Super John Williamson’s driveway sits, black and wet and warm.

  You think you see someone look out at you from inside the house, but you can’t be sure if this is memory or invention.

  In three years, Malcolm will be dead—thrown off the roof of a six-story building in Bridgeport. Terry will be in a wheelchair, a quadriplegic from a gunshot to the neck. You are the only one who ever leaves his hometown. Even Super John Williamson will owe so much in back taxes to the IRS, he will one day lose the glorious house you are staring at in the falling snow.

  1920S AND 1930S: Johnny Eck, the amazing “Half-Boy” and “King of the Freaks,” performs in several sideshows, becoming most famous for his role as the Half Boy in Tod Browning’s 1932 cult classic, Freaks.

  Eck is born in 1911 with just over half a body due to sacral agenesis. He has unusable, underdeveloped legs and feet that he later hides under custom-made clothing. At birth, Eck weighs two pounds and is not even eight inches long. He grows to be eighteen inches tall. He has a fully bodied fraternal twin, Robert—though the two look remarkably alike and exploit this throughout their sideshow careers.

  In 1937 Eck and Robert join the “Miracles of 1937” show. In it, they perform probably the greatest variation ever on the classic illusion of a magician sawing a person in half. When the magician asks for a volunteer, Robert stands and goes to the st
age and gets in the box, preparing to be cut in half. During the trick, Robert is replaced by his brother in one side of the box and a dwarf wearing pants that come up over his head in the other side. When the halves are separated, Robert’s “legs” jump out of the box and run away—often up the aisle of the theater. Eck then jumps from his half of the box, propelling himself with his hands, shouting for his legs to stop and come back.

  A woman is hired who sits in the front row and can projectile vomit at will. Every night, while Eck chases his legs, she stands, vomits, and pretends to faint. The act plays to sold-out houses.

  —

  1990: You are living in Sarasota. You can’t remember if you are unemployed at this point or not, but you know that you have become increasingly erratic and need at least three beers every morning to stop shaking. You and Mary are still a couple but no longer live together—her roommates never agreed to live with you, and you move out to avoid the uncomfortable situation.

  You live in what used to be a motel on Route 41, but it’s been turned into apartments by some slumlord. Your unit is across from what used to be the complex’s pool, but is now an empty, cracked, kidney-bean-shaped concrete hole filled with rancid water from the summer rains, which grows a sickly, freakish neon green with algae. There are an astounding number of mosquitoes at night. Somehow frogs manage to survive in the muck at the bottom of the pool.

  Your neighbor and good friend on the other side of what used to be the pool is a guy named Dan—this causes some problems, as your roommate and Dan’s roommate are also named Dan. Collectively they are known as, understandably, “the Dans.” But when you need to refer to them individually, your good friend is Tat Dan (because he’s a tattoo artist), his roommate is Big Dan (because he’s six foot eight), and your roommate, who never pays rent and wracks up outrageous phone charges to Puerto Rico under your name, is known as Broke Dan.

  One night, Tat Dan gets an offer to do some work at Showtown, a bar in Gibsonton, known as Gibtown to locals. The whole trailer-park town is the off-season/retirement community for sideshow freaks. They don’t like going out in public, so Dan will do their tats at the bar. The residents of Gibtown are famous for disliking outsiders and for hyperaggressively trying to keep them away. But Dan knows you love sideshows—you have always been fascinated with people who don’t fit in some fundamental way—so he sells them on the story that you are his assistant and learning how to become a tattoo artist yourself. He convinces them that you are somehow necessary.

  So you end up being one of the rare outsiders who gets to go to Showtown. You are hoping, above all, to meet Grady Stiles Jr., Lobster Boy. You do not know it at this point—you find out later from the articles about his murder—but he rarely drinks at the bar, electing to spend most of his nights watching TV in his trailer, drinking and chain-smoking Pall Malls.

  Tat Dan is doing some touch-up work on a strongman who looks just like the most stereotypical strongman you can imagine—you can easily see him lifting weights that have black balls at the ends of the barbell. He has a handlebar mustache that reminds you of Greg Norton from Hüsker Dü. Or Rollie Fingers. You are aware of very few other men with handlebar mustaches.

  After standing around for a while not doing much of anything, you worry that it will become apparent that you are not Dan’s assistant but some outsider gawking at these people for no good reason. They get gawked at all the time, sure. They’re used to it. But that’s their profession. That’s their day job—and who wants to do their job when they’re sitting around having a few drinks and trying to relax? You are a little sick with yourself. These are human beings. They don’t exist so that you can look at them and see how different they are from you. In fact, you tell yourself, this is a moment to realize that you exist to understand that the sideshows aren’t different from you and deserve more respect than you had when you said yes to coming to Showtown. Than when you walked in the door and lied to them about what you were doing there.

  From overhearing a conversation at the bar over the intermittent buzz of Tat Dan’s gun, you understand that the barback has not shown up and the bartender’s doing double duty clearing and cleaning glasses and getting liquor from the back room. You volunteer to help. After looking at you for a moment, the bartender decides to take you on. There is nothing visibly different about this man and you guess that he might be one of the barkers. He could be a magician. He could run rides. The majority of the sideshow isn’t the freaks, after all.

  You work your ass off, trying to prove that you’re not there for the wrong reasons, even though, really, you are. Later, your barback duties finished, you are having a pleasant conversation about the funding of Social Security with the World’s Smallest Woman and the Alligator Man. They have been married to each other for decades. And then, you can’t help yourself. While he’s talking, you look at the scaly skin on his forearms instead of maintaining eye contact. You look at the skin on his neck while you should be looking at his wife when she’s talking. His skin looks like dead fish you’ve seen, washed up on the shore and gray in the sunlight, their scales flaking away in the breeze.

  He catches you looking at him and you look away, feeling ashamed that you are no different from anybody else who paid their money to go look at the freak.

  —

  2012: You are at a rest stop in California off the I-10 freeway. You are in a manic episode—but not yet a dangerous one. It’s one of the good ones, like your brain is a thousand Fourth of July sparklers and everything is in high focus and life is beautiful. You write your best friend, Gina, an e-mail from your phone, your fingers moving frantically from your mania:

  …i dont care about anything bad at the moment-ha! I’m in a little bit of a glorious manic high that clicked in about 4am when I couldn’t sleep and I started to get the taste of coins at the back of my tongue (a sure sign that I’m either about to snap manic or break down) and I’ve felt like so VERY aware and alive (though, yes, sick)…tired on one hand but so awake in another I feel like I’d electrocute anyone who shook my hand—it feels like my brain could juggle chainsaws right now—and it’s like my head is this in between quiet and loud…well, it IS loud, but it’s like it’s loud with the smallest things. Like I could stand on the road and hear ants eating if I tried hard enough.

  —

  2011: Your brain stabilizers, which you don’t dare stop taking, cause vicious and frequent leg spasms—but only at night. It’s a common side effect of the drug. Some people’s side effects are so bad that they commit suicide. When the spasms come on, they are like a seizure and at their worst can last up to six hours. One night, while Gayle is away visiting her parents, you spasm and jerk in bed so violently that you wake up with trouble breathing and a sharp pain in your chest. You go to the urgent care clinic, where they do an X-ray.

  The doctor comes into the room and tells you you’ve torn a muscle from your rib cage. She asks you if you’ve had an accident.

  You feel ashamed to tell her that you did it to yourself. You explain about the side effect of your meds.

  She says, “We don’t tend to see this unless someone was in a car accident.” She looks at you. “You’re telling me you did this in your sleep?”

  Technically, you did it in bed. You were not asleep. You can’t sleep though these episodes. You just have to wait until your body finally stops.

  You say, “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  She offers you a script of Vicodin for the pain. You are incredibly tempted. After all, you are in legitimate pain. Maybe you could take them like a normal person. But, whether or not you like yourself, you do know yourself. You want the pain meds badly. And who would know? You consider your options for a moment.

  “No,” you tell her. And then you admit that you’re an addict, which you hate, because they write it on your chart and it means you’ll never get pain meds there no matter how much you beg. You’ve been good. But you still want the option to fuck up later, even if you know it’s a mistake. You wish you hadn�
��t told her. And then you thank her and end up popping Advil for weeks, wishing you had taken the Vicodin. Still, you brag to your friends in recovery that you turned it down. You don’t tell them about your regret at having done so.

  —

  SEPTEMBER 1993: You quit drinking. One day you wake up and simply can’t do it anymore. Later you’ll find out at AA meetings that this is quite common. There’s no big epiphany. No moment of realization. Just a quiet final awareness that you are going to die if you keep this up and, for some reason, you don’t want to die. Maybe it’s simply exhaustion after a decade like this, but you can’t go on the way you’ve been going.

  You make the mistake of quitting alone and after nearly twenty-four hours without a drink, you have a grand mal seizure. You should be in a hospital. You are living alone under piles of garbage in your grandmother’s hoarder house—which you get to live in for free in exchange for cleaning it up. You don’t call anybody that first day.

  The seizure starts with an aura, a sort of buzzing, floating sensation at the base of your neck, and blue lights halo in front of your eyes. At first, it doesn’t seem much different than a migraine. You feel like this has happened before. There’s a mild sense of déjà vu, but you’re aware enough to know you’ve never felt anything quite like it. You are dizzy and you sit in the chair where you read. Your tongue feels heavy and tastes like a wet metallic rag, similar to the start of a manic episode but slightly different. You become scared you are going to die but you can’t get up to reach the phone.

  You begin seeing things. The shadows of the leaves through the windows start to look like claws coming toward you and you are hearing voices but you can’t make out words. The visual and auditory hallucinations are like a psychotic episode, but you can already tell it’s not one of those. There is no feeling of any high accompanying it. Plus, your head aches, which is not normal.

  You have no idea why, but you start clicking your reading light on and off. You later will find out this is a symptom of the first part of the seizure. The clock on the table reads 3:00 a.m.