Liar

by Rob Roberge

  You will always remember that taste. That smell. That feeling that you can’t wait until you’re big enough to kick the shit out of every adult you know. Starting, yes, with your father.

  You will feel guilty about this urge for years.

  He should not be defined by this one action.

  He’s a good person.

  He sacrificed for his family. He worked on himself for years, to the point that he stopped being the angry man you grow up with. He grew up in a house that would make yours look like The Brady Bunch. His parents were terrible and incredibly neglectful and your childhood is better in every way. He will loan—and even give—you thousands of dollars when you need it. You will become much closer over the years, even if you never totally understand each other. He will do the most we can ask of anyone—he will do his best.

  You will tell this story for years—about the time your father made you eat your own puke. Some people will think it’s horrifying. Some won’t believe it. Some will think it’s funny—and you wonder what their childhood may have been like.

  Over the years, you will come to not trust the story as you tell it. You know for sure it’s not a lie. But what if you are remembering it wrong? The least reliable thing in a court of law is eyewitness testimony. What if your dad never made you eat your own vomit? Then it should never be here in this book. Sure, it’s emotionally true—you are terrorized in this way throughout your childhood. And you are almost positive this happened exactly as you will always remember it.

  Even if it’s true (and you swear to the best of your ability that it is), is it ethical to reduce your father to this one act when he does so much good over the course of your life? You have never felt guilty telling this story to friends. You feel enormous guilt now.

  You ask your sister—you have to make sure—if this happened as you remember it.

  She says she remembers your father telling you he was going to make you eat your puke.

  “Then,” she says, “I ran out of the room. I couldn’t watch.”

  —

  1986: You are living in Holland and you’ve developed a painkiller habit. You can, most days, get enough drugs to keep you high from a corrupt dentist your girlfriend Charlette knows.

  You spend day after day nodding in bed with Charlette, listening to a cassette tape that has the Dream Syndicate’s The Days of Wine and Roses on one side and the Velvet Underground’s eponymous third album on the other side. They may be two of the only perfect albums you’ve ever heard. They are, without a doubt, two of the most perfect albums to nod in bed to on Dilaudid.

  This goes on, you and Charlette alone in your room with this one cassette and your drugs, for maybe a month. When you finally leave your bed, you end up going to a party thrown by some friends of Charlette’s at a post-hippie commune.

  You black out. You have no idea what happens, but you wake up in the morning with no memory of the night before. There’s a guy from Brazil named Tony standing at the foot of your bed with an acoustic guitar, singing Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” in a thick Brazilian accent. You turn to your left and realize you are in bed with Anne—Charlette’s best friend. This is a very bad habit of yours during these years. You sleep with a lot of your girlfriends’ friends. A lot of your girlfriends’ best friends. You have yet to learn that, even in an “open relationship,” fucking the best friend is not a great move.

  Tony from Brazil keeps singing at the foot of the bed. Anne decides that this is, for some reason unknown to you, a good time to go down on you. You have a hard time getting into it, with this Brazilian guy singing and looking at you while your girlfriend’s best friend is going down on your semi-hard cock.

  Anne stops for a second. She pukes all over your cock and then, with a groan, rolls on her side and falls asleep. Tony keeps playing the Springsteen song. The puke is warm but starts to grow cool on your shrinking cock and your thighs. It pools in your navel.

  You are nineteen years old. You are starting to realize you have a taste for some sexual fetishes that many people think are weird. You are learning about things you enjoy that six months before you had no idea even existed. You have just learned, however, that having someone puke on your cock is not one of your new fetishes.

  —

  2010: The Urinals play a show where you open for Steve Wynn and the Miracle Three. Steve Wynn led the Dream Syndicate. Twenty-five years ago, in college, you had a poster of the Dream Syndicate on your bedroom wall. Now the two of you are friends. You e-mail each other. He ends up joining your band for a song. You share the stage with Steve Wynn. You may as well be playing with Bob Dylan for all this means to you. It embarrasses you how much this matters, but it does. You think about the three months straight in Holland you fell asleep every night with The Days of Wine and Roses playing while you were drunk and high. Steve Wynn is part of the soundtrack of your life.

  You are clean. You have a house. You have a job, three books out. You’re onstage with Steve Wynn. You think that fifteen years ago, there’s no way you would recognize the life you have now. You almost fuck up the simplest of songs thinking about this in amazement when you shouldn’t be thinking at all and just playing. You are, for the moment, happy.

  —

  1989: You stay with your friend Deb and her numerous roommates, down in the low numbers on Avenue B in New York. There are at least ten people in the apartment at any one time.

  One night, you are on an abandoned building’s roof and you take acid along with three or four of her friends. You and Deb used to be very close, but something’s off on this visit, and her roommates don’t seem to like you at all. But, you tell yourself, you always think people don’t like you and you find out later they do. You tell yourself to lighten up and not worry. Not only do they not dislike you, they probably don’t even think about you. You’re not the center of the universe. You tell yourself to stop worrying about what other people think because all they are worried about is what other people think. You feel more mature just coming to this realization. Maybe you’re getting less insecure.

  You look out at the city about an hour after the acid comes on full force. You realize that you understand how cities work. You get it! You turn to tell Deb that you know how cities function—every single fucking level of how they function—you understand it so well, you may have fucking invented cities.

  She looks up at you, very confused, and says, “What, dude?”

  Her friend looks at you and then back at Deb. Then back at you, and back at Deb. The friend says, “I don’t like him.”

  —

  1985: Of all your head injuries, this is easily the most ridiculous. A gallon can of fudge falls on your head when you’re a manager at a Häagen-Dazs. This is one of the rare times you go to a hospital after an injury. Your friend insists—her family has money and she can secretly pay for it.

  You have trouble talking that night. This is also the first time a doctor warns you about having too many concussions.

  “How many is too many?”

  “More than two,” he says. “Three at the outside.”

  “I’ve had more than that already,” you say.

  “How many?”

  You shrug. The lights in the office hurt your eyes and you want to sleep. “Way more than that.” You notice that your words are coming slowly and your tongue feels swollen and you can’t totally control it and there are times where you are trying to find a word you want to say and you can’t think of it.

  He gives you pamphlets you can’t read for two days because you’re seeing double and any light in your eyes feels like your brain is a throbbing toothache.

  He tells you any head injuries from this point forward will only add to what brain damage there already is.

  He’s making it all sound terribly serious. You’re nineteen years old. So you’ve had a few knocks on the head, so what? “Brain damage?”

  “This is a condition of accumulation. You’ve already done damage.” He looks at your friend, then back t
o you. “This isn’t some headache. Repeated trauma…what you’ve done to your brain is done. You can only avoid more trauma from now on.”

  You ask your friend to take you home to bed. The doctor says you can’t sleep.

  “I just want to sleep,” you tell him.

  He gets close up into your face and screams, “This is serious! You cannot have any more major head injuries!”

  His yelling is like a jackhammer inside your head. He backs away. You’re seeing double and fuzzy, and you feel like you might throw up. You say, “It’s not like I’ve planned any of these.”

  —

  1971: The photographer Diane Arbus, famous for her photographs of “freaks” and marginalized people, overdoses on pills and slashes her wrists.

  —

  FALL 1986: In Amsterdam, you and Anne have broken up. You’ve lied to her and said that you’d quit doing Dilaudid and you didn’t.

  You hang out at a hash bar with your friend Ted, watching Andy Warhol’s Empire—eight hours and five minutes of continuous footage of the Empire State Building. They show it from midnight to 8:05 a.m. every night in the basement. You buy a ticket for the whole week and you can come and go as you please. Eventually, you will see the whole movie.

  The third night at the hash bar—maybe four or five hours in, you and Ted are on the couch, wasted and staring at the grainy black-and-white footage. It’s night in New York. Somewhere around the eightieth or so floor, a light goes on in a window at the corner of the building.

  Ted says, “What is this fucking shit, man?”

  The light stays on for about ten minutes. The window goes dark and only seconds later, the window in the next room to the right comes on. It stays light for another ten minutes. It goes dark. The light comes on quickly in the next window down.

  Ted beams. “Dude,” he says. “Cleaning woman!”

  You will always think of this when you think of narrative. Of the desire to make things that happen have some reason for happening.

  —

  2012: One day in an MFA workshop you’re teaching, one of the students—a quick-witted and sharp, funny woman—asks in front of the class, “Do you have any stories that don’t end with you passed out in an elevator, or pissing blood, or in a drunk tank? Don’t you have any stories that end with you having a cup of tea and going to bed early?”

  —

  1911–1916: Violet Jessop, working for the White Star Line, is on board the Olympic, one of the two sister ships to the Titanic, when it collides with the HMS Hawke. A year later, she is one of the seven hundred and five people to live through the sinking of the Titanic. In 1916, while working on the third of the sister ships, the Britannic, she survives again when the ship hits a mine in the Aegean Sea. Thirty people die. Jessop survives. She is the only person to be involved in all three accidents.

  —

  2007: You still have occasional tremendous pain from the broken neck you suffered in Florida so many years ago. For years, it causes blinding migraines that put you down for days at a time, puking, forcing you to lie in the dark until the pain becomes manageable. They start with auras and a stabbing pain behind your eyes. Soon lights begin strobing and the only thing that helps is to turn the water on as hot as it will go in the shower and steam the room up and lie on the floor in the dark. You have, at times, two or three of these migraines a month, but that pace slows over the years. You still wake up in the morning with terrible neck and back pain. Your surgically repaired right knee feels like there is cut glass under the kneecap. The torn ligaments (five times) in your right ankle make it so that it takes at least fifteen minutes before you can walk without a severe painful limp—before you can walk normally—every morning.

  One morning, the pain is agonizing. You ask your wife for one of the pain pills she takes for her condition. You will go over this moment in your head for years after, but it really doesn’t seem like that big a deal to you at the time. You have gotten lax in your recovery. You are not going to meetings, and you’re acting like being an addict is who you used to be, not who you are. Gayle doesn’t know you were a junkie—only a drunk. When you met, back in 1989, she only knew you as a drinker, and even then, you were trying to quit and she only saw you drink for a couple of months before you got together.

  You take one eighty-milligram OxyContin and it wakes something up in you. Something horrible. But at first, you don’t see it as dangerous—you only enjoy the euphoria and lack of pain. You take some more without telling Gayle. You enjoy playing guitar for the first time in a while. You are better at your job. Things feel great.

  —

  1989: You are partying with some friends in Boston. It’s around five in the morning and you are so drunk you can barely stand. Your friend Ted mentions the LSATs.

  “Gotta take them next week,” he says.

  “I’m taking the GREs next week,” you say.

  “I thought those were on the eighth,” he says.

  “They are.”

  “Dude,” he says. “That’s today.”

  You laugh. “Fuck you.”

  “I’m serious, dude.”

  You ask Mary. She laughs and says, yes, it’s three hours from now.

  You really need to pass out. You wonder if you should just skip it, but you need it to fill out your Humboldt State application.

  Around six o’clock, you stop drinking and have a couple of cups of coffee. A friend gives you a one-hitter of blow. At seven thirty, you walk to the Garner Museum, where the test begins at eight.

  You will later forget your score. But it’s predictably awful. You shrug it off. You’ve long ago gotten used to disappointing yourself and others. You take some pride in it. Your friends think it’s hilarious how much you don’t give a shit. If that’s where there’s a role, that’s the role you’ll play. You’re the fuckup in a group of fuckups. That’s just who you are.

  —

  2007: You are at your home AA meeting. You are a couple of weeks away from taking your fifteen-year cake.

  Everyone there knows an addict can go out at any time, but no one suspects that addict currently is you. You’ve got lots of time—people ask you for advice. You are using opiates every day at this point, along with large amounts of Valium, but you are careful to avoid them the day before this meeting so that no one can see your pinned pupils and hear your slurred speech. You know they will recognize your symptoms immediately. You are no longer taking your wife’s pills—you have a friend who works at a pharmacy in Los Angeles and you are buying more and more from her.

  You’ve become as big a liar as you’ve ever been. Your lies before didn’t necessarily make you a terrible person—they made you a person who was often full of shit—but now you are lying to friends who think you’re clean. The people you’re lying to are clean themselves and fight a daily battle to stay that way and not ruin their lives. You are letting everyone down, whether they know it yet or not.

  At the meeting two weeks before you take your fifteen-year cake, some twenty-year-old kid with six days off meth comes up to you and asks you how to do it.

  “I just don’t think I’ll ever make it,” he says.

  And you think, You probably won’t, kid. You tell him, “Just hang in. Just make it through the day. If you can’t make it through the day, tell yourself you won’t get high for an hour. Or ten minutes. Or five minutes if that’s what it takes.” You’re supposed to give him your number and tell him to call you any time. That’s what people in AA do. But you don’t.

  You go home and get high.

  A friend in the program calls you later that day and asks you if you’re all right.

  “Exhausted,” you tell him. “But, yeah. I’m doing okay.”

  He may or may not believe you.

  When you’re an addict and people think you’re straight, just saying hello is a lie. You stop answering your phone. You know your friends will take this as a bad sign, but you are starting to not care. Thoughts of killing yourself have already started
to crowd your head.

  —

  JULY 1991: You are in a drunk tank in Sarasota, Florida. You are praying your friends can get you out tonight. You’re among dangerous, violent people. You look around the cell and think that to any random observer, you would win the award for Most Likely to Get His Ass Pummeled. You don’t dare sit on a bench. You don’t dare fall asleep. You’re afraid to piss in front of these guys, but you do have to make it to the exposed toilet to puke at one point. You are in that terrible stage where you are still drunk, but your hangover has already started.

  At one point, you do drift off to sleep in the corner on the floor. You get woken up by a lot of noise. All the cops head to one section of the jail. There’s no one watching the cell. All the guys in the cell are pressed up against the bars, trying to see what’s going on.

  The next morning, after the normal drunk-tank peanut butter and jelly sandwich, your friends come and get you and you find out what all the fuss was about. It was the night Paul Reubens, aka Pee-Wee Herman, got arrested for indecent exposure in some porn theater. There must have been ten cops loitering by where he was. It made no sense to even arrest him. It made no sense to have arrested you. You would have gone home and passed out.

  You think, Isn’t there any real crime in this town?

  —

  2011: The singer Amy Winehouse dies of alcohol poisoning at age twenty-seven, the age you got sober for the first time.

  —

  2013: You look up the date for the night you were in that drunk tank in Sarasota. You could have sworn you were not living in Florida in July 1991. That you were in Connecticut. But you must have been in Florida, since you were arrested on the same night as Paul Reubens, and it’s a matter of public record—easy to Google—that he was arrested in July 1991.

  Your best guess would have placed that night in 1989 or 1990. You never would have said summer of 1991.

  —

  1979: There is a picture of your family at Disneyland. Your uncle and your aunt (your mother’s half sister) have taken you to Disneyland because you are staying with them as part of a cross-country trip the summer you are thirteen.