This Title Is False (Fiction/Non-Fiction Story)

This Title Is False

by Vaughn Demont

My mother has told me repeatedly that every lie I am ever going to tell in my life, she has already told, so there was no point in trying to slip one past her. I never took it as a challenge until I was in my teens. I was a terrible liar. One stray feeling of tension and my delivery would be screwed by fits of hysterical laughter that claimed my breath. My mother quickly picked up on this tell and set to changing confrontations to interrogations.

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She would begin by invoking my full name, to inform me that I was in trouble and had about two minutes to come up with a story. The interrogation would be in the living room or bedroom, someplace that was undeniably her turf, and she would take a rigid stance, fold her arms, and commence with the opening evidence of the conflict, all of which would culminate with the inevitable, “And don't you lie to me.” I'd stumble through the first four or five words of the rehearsed story in my head and invariably I would guffaw like a drunk and continue laughing even as additional days and later weeks were piled onto my sentence. I would hear my full name said and I would stifle a snicker as the tension raised, wondering what I had to cover myself on. I couldn't even tell the truth without giggling.

Like any skill, lying required practice and study. You have to adopt a philosophy, a style, a rational filter. Who gets lied to, who gets the truth? I learned the various species of lie: the white (“I'll be home at six”), the whopper (“Yeah, I've got a condom”), the half-truth (“That was the best I've ever had... with you”), the omission of detail (“This is my... roommate”), the bald-face (“It's not what it looks like”), the plea bargain (“Ok, I took the car but I'm not the one who totaled it”), there were too many. Lying, like any sport, requires specialization. Just like pitchers who do either off-speed or throw heat, you had to find your niche in the game and run with it. You also need to know who to throw to, and who to just walk. Anyone you'll be maintaining a long term relationship with will require honesty about ninety percent of the time, with nothing higher than a white lie. Anything higher tends to get complicated. A total stranger, however? Lie your fucking ass off.

I found ease in the detailed lie. Numbers, names, places, dates, times, I would pack in as much as I could. The more work it would take to verify, the more likely the person you're lying to will simply give you the benefit of the doubt and just let it go. This helped a lot when I was working as a grocery store cashier. With long orders to scan and bag, it would all go by faster if I would start talking to the customers and telling various stories that would make me seem a little more interesting, but not outrageously so. I'd talk about the time I met Tom Cruise in an elevator and got to shake his hand and that he was pretty cool in real life. I'd talk about my prowess in baking brownies that were essentially bricks of fudge that I would sell to the women I knew on campus during their “special time.” I'd joke about my sister and her fiancée and how she had him on a short leash. The only real truths in any of this was that I'd heard someone mention they thought they'd seen Tom Cruise once, that I could bake brownies if I had four hours to kill, and that my sister was engaged at the time. I got rather popular, actually. People would remember me and come back through my line on later occasions just to catch up.

I'd come a long way. I'd started out as a four year old eating a cookie I shouldn't have taken and saying I never took it, even though my shirt was covered in crumbs and my tongue was pocked with tan congealed clumps that dribbled out onto my lower lip, waiting to be wiped off onto a shirt sleeve. My mother looked down at me for a moment, no indulgent smile, not thinking it's cute or adorable that I was a mischievous little devil, just a look, the knowledge that her child has strayed from the path of honesty and lied to her for the first time. This is where it changed for her. This is when every word from my mouth that followed after would be scrutinized, examined, tested for veracity.

And now at sixteen I was selling what I felt to be high quality bullshit to the general public. I was considering a career in law to back up my writing.

It never occurred to me, however, that perhaps the mother of my sister's fiancée might happen through my line one day and I'd have no idea who she was. She listened to my stories with interest and recognized my last name on my tag, and later told her son that the cashier at the store was talking about how he was whipped. He in turn had a few words for my sister, who in turn would had quite a few words for me, and then she informed me that the sole reason I had any interest in writing at all was that it was all lies.

It was right about then that I took up lying as a challenge. I would start lying about things that didn't even need covering up, just to see if I could get away with it. After that I'd go bigger, to make myself not seem so ordinary. You would think that I'd go with something heroic, say my family was rich or that my absent father was a U.S. Attorney or that my second cousin was in Pearl Jam. Heroic lies are for the guy you met in the airport lounge, where there's zero upkeep. Heroic lies only get you limited attention and phantom envy and the eventual need to prove it. The other end of the spectrum is the tragic lie, where you make your life seem worse to contrast your relatively sheltered existence. They're easy to maintain, and they reward you with pity and sympathy. When you speak people care what you say.

“Yeah, I drink every now and then. I like vodka, but only Grey Goose.” I've never had more than wine.

“Yeah, did acid a bit, really didn't like it, but I've done it the prerequisite five times to be considered legally insane. Heavy shit called Mad Hatter. Ever done it?” Most I ever did was speed, but that was a drug for nerds.

“I've got an identical twin named Gwyn. Lives with my Dad down in North Carolina and works at a supermarket. Sometimes when he visits I bribe him into taking my shifts at work and no one's the wiser.” No twin brother, and I ended up in a conference with management wanting to clear up the rumor that someone else was restocking the frozen section. Every now and then, though, I just wished I had someone to stand in for me.

“Did I ever tell you about that party I went to a couple months ago, got drunk, and woke up next to a girl in college? She goes to Auburn but she used to go here. I didn't tell you about her? Five ten, black hair, takes karate, allergic to peanuts? Anyway, she called me up yesterday, she was at class and took a kick hard in the stomach and had a miscarriage. I had a daughter.” I've since found out that the sex of the fetus couldn't be determined after two months, but these were high school guys I was telling this to preemptively counter any claims about my sexual history. It didn't matter anyway. I've never been with a woman.

Lying stopped being cute.

Lying became a full time job, remembering the personas I'd created and which were shown to which people. Who'd heard which stories, which jokes, who knew the happy and engaged me and who knew the traumatized recovering drug addict me and who knew whichever other mask I had felt like creating one day out of boredom for someone who unwittingly became a part of my life. Variations were only for set groups, work would have the energetic and gregarious persona, somewhat mischievous but always helpful. My friends were split into two sets, the ones who were well-adjusted got the persona closest to actually being me, only edited down, the others getting the smoldering wreck I'd created. My parents knew me as nothing more than official notices from school and occasional chats from someone they knew who'd go through my line at work. Other than that I was a shadowy figure who dwelt in their house.

There was a girl at school named Katie who was the younger sister of someone I knew at work. I talked with her every now and then and I'd heard from a few people that she thought I was cute.

I'd been spending the last week and a half trying not to think about my friend Bryan and that time during the summer when it was ninety-nine degrees and he took his shirt off and his skin was slick and shiny with sweat. I didn't like where my mind was going. I didn't want to be one of those people the guys in the locker room would talk about, that word they would spit out with such force and hatred. “Fag.”

So I bought a rose and went to see Katie during her lunch period, gave her the flower, and asked her out. My words were carefully chosen, delivery was smooth, I'd picked out the clothes for the moment, I'd played it out about five times in my head before I even went through with it. Everything was rehearsed. I walked to her, handed her the rose, and told her that I would be honored if she would consider going out with me. I then kissed her hand and told her I didn't need an answer immediately, and that she would know where to find me when she made her decision. Then I walked out.

Even I almost believed it.

She came to see me later in the day and told me she wasn't ready for a relationship. Three days later I saw her walking down the hall to her English class holding another guy's hand. When I got home that night I let myself jerk off while thinking about Bryan. I told my parents I was shaving.

“I want to move out.”

I was seventeen and my parents were tired of not knowing where I was going or when I was getting home. I'd gotten caught taking some loose change and stealing of any degree was not going to be permitted. I didn't want to go live at my friend Bryan's house, actually, even though his Mom had offered. I just figured it was best to make a preemptive strike. It was dark outside, I was seated on the floor looking down while my parents sat off to the right, a united front, already emptying weeks of pent-up lecture, all of it mostly phasing into a dull buzz.

It was an idle threat. It was meant to throw them off guard and maybe arrange a bit of plea bargaining and make it so that I could reduce my sentence to a simple grounding. Then I'd just do my time and set up another mask for myself, maybe a good and earnest worker who'd try to be honest more. It'd even stick for a week or so.

“Fine.”

Instead my face went slack and my hands and feet felt cold, my throat feeling tight and my shirt feeling like sandpaper against my skin. There weren't any words left.

They were throwing me out.

Two words managed to traverse my dry and rough throat, ride a soft sputter of breath, be shaped by a quiver of my lips, emerge cracked and broken, “I'm gay.”

It didn't seem the wisest thing to say when my parents were threatening me with expulsion from the house, but I didn't have anything left.

But I remember my mother taking her interrogator stance, standing firm, arms folding, looking down toward me, and then taking in the words as they came out, and firing right back, “No you're not!” She knew at any moment I would smirk or titter or look away or clench my fist tight, digging in the fingernails to concentrate on the pain, or grit my teeth and time my breathing, or close my eyes into wrinkled lines and it would all be over.

She never expected tears. Or choked sobs.

I still wonder how much she wanted to hear me laugh right then.

After an hour and a half she sent me to my room.

I toned it down after that.

I wish I could say I stopped lying, that I had some grand epiphany, but there's always going to boredom in the airport lounge, late assignments that need an excuse, fights with a boyfriend that need to be contained, bland meals that need to be complimented, stories that need that extra bit of spice to squeeze in that moral. Honesty is what gives my life credibility. The lie gives it meaning.

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