My father smelled like cigarettes and trees. He wrote a book that was published in French, a language he didn’t speak. He never paid child support. He was dear friends with gay rights activists Harry Hay and John Burnside. He spent a third of his life training to be a medicine man with a Yurok Indian doctor. He was a liar. Sometimes I was a liar too.
My father grew up on a dude ranch in Tucson, Arizona. His parents were first cousins who married to piss off his mother’s holy-rolling preacher father. After they eloped, they ran away and joined a vaudeville troupe and eventually worked the rodeo circuit. My grandfather breathed fire and participated in lasso competitions. My grandmother was a trick rider. I have a picture of her dangling dangerously off her horse: her arms are outstretched, and there is a wide, full smile on her face. I think she was already pregnant with my father when that picture was taken.
My father had an older brother named Rex. When Gary was two years old and Rex was four, their mom split and left the two boys behind. My father grew up in the company of cowboys, horses, and the desert. His days were long, and the chores brutal. I grew up hearing stories about the violence cowboys inflicted on their own bodies, cattle that somehow got stuck in the tops of trees, and days when Gary would point his horse in any direction and wander off into the desert. He told me a story once of a young boy on a nearby ranch who was accidentally hanged to death during a game of cops and robbers. “It’s hard to hang a man,” he’d say. “I wasn’t playing with them that day, but I sure as hell coulda been.” His childhood sounded like an old movie.
My father told me that my grandfather was a prostitute. Rich men would send their wives and children to the dude ranch for the authentic cowboy experience, and my grandfather would take the wives on night rides that ended with sweaty saddle blankets and large tips. He eventually remarried, to a woman both brothers described as a monster. My father didn’t speak of her often, but I heard of cigarette burns, little hands held over hot stoves, and bathroom doors kept open in order to humiliate. When Rex turned sixteen, he ran away. Two years later my father followed.
Gary cheated, a lot. My mother, in turn, was mad, a lot. Furious, she once took a giant container of cinnamon and shook it all over the seats of his Toyota. For months, he smelled like the angriest I had ever seen her. He was legally married twice, but never to her. They had a wedding; I was there. I was six years old, and my sister was an infant. In every picture I have my hand up my dress, scratching and pulling at the itchy tights I had to wear. But after their ceremony, my father refused to sign the marriage license.
These are a few small details about my father’s life—the ones I believe are most true. I have spent a portion of my adult life turning over these and other stories about my father and examining them, looking for a pattern to the truths and the lies. I have searched for the thread that connects him to me, to the behaviors in me that signal I am his daughter. I was a good liar. I have an ability to adapt to different groups of people to fit in. I can be charming. Strangers like to tell me secrets. I have used all these to my advantage. I have been ashamed of doing so, but I have still done it.
My sister started lying very young. Small things at first, denying she had made a mess or pretending she hadn’t borrowed something. My father punished us when we lied to him but encouraged lying to others, especially when it came to our mother. “Deny, deny, deny,” he always told us.
When Sarah was eleven, she told us her choir group was doing a medley of songs from Moulin Rouge, and she had been chosen as lead soloist. For months, we helped her rehearse. She would stand in Sharon’s living room and belt out: “One day I’ll fly away, leave all this to yesterday.” We followed along with sheet music, making sure she got the lyrics right and running lines from some of the patter. She told us about practicing choreography and had my mom drop her off for costume fittings. The whole family knew every song by heart. My mother eventually ran into Sarah’s choir leader at the local co-op. “We are all so excited to see the big performance,” my mom told her.
The choir director looked puzzled. “You mean the one coming up in spring?”
“No, the Moulin Rouge medley. Sarah told us all about it.”
“I’m sorry,” the choir director replied. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
In a phone call to a family friend, Kim, an incredulous Sharon relayed the story. Kim was silent for a moment. “This is really serious,” she said. “She could be a pathological liar.”
In less than three months I should be graduating high school but I am not. Instead I am laying in this bed. I will wake up tomorrow around two, eat some food, shower and then go on my daily hustle to find some way of making money so I can buy drugs.
—Sarah’s journal, April 5, 2007
When I was a young teenager, I was obsessed with pigs. I swore off all bacon and pork chops and even briefly adopted a pet pig that lived nearby on a farm. On a warm summer day, my stepmom made a big stack of bacon for BLT sandwiches for her and my father. I was sitting in the kitchen, reading a book, while the bacon sat resting on the counter. The smell was irresistible, so I snuck a piece, and then another and then another, until only a few pieces were left. When my stepmom came back inside to make sandwiches, she searched for the bacon thief, and I pointed the finger at my sister. Though she was only seven years old at the time, my sister’s habit of lying was well-known, and she loved bacon. It was an easy sell, despite her protests that she had done nothing.
For years, the story of the stolen bacon was told in my family. It so nicely illustrated my sister’s sneaky personality, her willingness to lie in the face of irrefutable proof. The story evolved: eventually my stepmom even claimed to have seen bacon grease smeared on Sarah’s mouth. I occasionally brought up the missing bacon story because I didn’t want anyone to forget it. Many years later, when my sister was nearing nineteen, even she began to believe the myth, and confessed to having eaten the bacon. My sister’s own memory of the incident had changed: she believed my lie.
I kept it going for a few more years after that before I admitted to everyone that I was the one who had eaten the bacon. We were sitting in my stepmom’s remote mountain home, she and I reading while Sarah paced the room, trying to find cell reception. I looked up from my book and said casually, “Hey, remember the bacon? I was the one who ate it.” My sister shrieked, and Sharon dissolved into laughter.
“I always get blamed for everything,” Sarah protested.
“I know,” I said, grinning. “That’s why it was a perfect long con.”
She looked at me.
“I can’t believe you kept this up for so long.”
“It just got funnier every year,” I replied. Then we laughed.
My worst lies happened when I was drinking and using coke. Stealing—probably $10,000—from my mother, writing checks to myself, swiping her debit card. I took beer from the sandwich shop I worked at and did lines on their yellowing toilet seat. I fucked married men and sad men and scary men. I categorized my lying: social lies, omissions, white lies, gray lies, kind lies, terrible lies. I am the one friends call when they need a perfect lie for missing work. I have lied in most of my relationships and never been caught. Through the process of sobriety, I have tried to address this part of my past personality. I apologize when I am in the wrong. I make amends quickly. Instead of lying, I curate my life story so that I can hide the most vulnerable parts. I will still lie about certain things: my depression, the feeling of relief when I vomit after overeating, anxiety about money.
I don’t know why I never questioned my father’s insistence that we lie to our mother, that we keep things from her. Do we inherit such behaviors? I wake up most days with a monster curled up in my chest, softly growling. I have to take a few moments before I swing my legs over the side of the bed to remind myself that I need to be a good person today. I am convinced I am no good. My sister, too, was convinced she was no good.
Perhaps this was because we knew, on some level, that our father was not a good man. Or that he was not a good man when he lied and cheated and stole. He was the best storyteller I’ve ever heard, he could play guitar beautifully, and when he focused his attention on you, it felt like the most brilliant, warm light. How do you reconcile the monster and the man? At the end of his life, my father was not speaking to any of his children. He was in a long-distance relationship with a woman in the Philippines who he “married” and then sent money to every week. He lived off-grid in a one-bedroom cabin he built. After he died, pictures of all his children were found framed on every wall of his house. This is what I am afraid I will become.
During the one-year period my sister was sober, she made amends to me as part of her twelve-step program. She apologized for stealing from me: money, drugs, clothing. She told me she used to cut the cocaine I would buy from her because she liked the idea that she was fucking me over. She said she was sorry for all the times she faked a crisis so she could get money, sympathy, or a ride. I had made my amends to her a few years prior. I cannot remember what I apologized for.
I make amends to her now, sitting on the back porch of our mountain home. I say, I am sorry we had the father we did. I am sorry that he tried to put inside us the worst parts of himself. I wish that I had told you more often that I didn’t just love you, I liked you. I am sorry that I so often reduced you to your addiction, to your lies. I regret not hugging you the last time I saw you. I am sorry. I am so sorry that I am here and you are not.
I am a weak human being who is bitching about her life but is too weak to even change it. So I will stop bitching and face reality. This is who I am, and I hate every inch of my pathetic, ugly, weak self.
—Sarah’s journal, April 5, 2007