I love Lies. She smells of roses. Dozens of red, red roses. Roses with nothing but petals.
No thorns.
She makes a bed of them for me to lie down on. She lies down beside me, holds me to her breasts, and coos sweet nothings into my ear. She strokes my cheek with the softness of a single, delicate fingertip. If she finds a tear there, Lies wipes it away. She wraps her arms around me, and in her embrace I am all I have ever hoped to be.
She tastes like honey. Sweet. Never bitter. Her skin, soft as feathers.
She wears short skirts. High heels. On occasion, fishnet stockings. Bright red lipstick on her soft, moist lips.
It’s no secret. She has a tawdry reputation.
But what do I care? I am never happier than when I am with Lies. I wish I never had to leave her.
But when Truth arrives, wearing her starched white shirt, dark blue tie, and impeccably tailored Armani suit—black with a dark blue pocket square to match the tie—and sternly clicks her black Italian shoes, my beloved Lies must flee. She cannot bear the presence of Truth.
Neither can I.
Truth pretends to be my friend, putting an arm around me, giving my shoulder a squeeze, and smiling. But it’s a hard, cold smile, one with no love, joy, or merriment in it. The smile of a sadist. A smile that condemns me to despair, condemns me to my own personal Hell.
“I’m doing this for your own good,” Truth says, and grins her almost perfect smile. Perfect except that with its icy coldness it appears ready to crack like a sliver of a glacier cascading into the sea. Perfect except that her bright, white teeth are just a little too sharp. Perfect except that her black eyes stare at you, unblinking, and if you dare return the stare, you are drawn into their darkness as if they have no end.
I don’t believe for a minute that Truth has interrupted my time with Lies for my own good. Truth says that she will set me free, but she cares nothing for me or my freedom. She hates Lies, and when she sees the two of us together, so very happy, Truth cannot stand it.
For my own good? Hardly. Truth is a sadist, ever seeking to inflict her pain, upon the likes of me—of everyone!—and upon Lies herself, who she sends scurrying into the shadows, unable to withstand her glare. It’s a lust for pain that Truth can never fully satisfy.
And so she persists, each time driving Lies away.
* * *
My oldest memory of Truth and Lies was as a short, pudgy little child. Was I four, or five, or six? It does not matter. What matters is that I believed in Lies so fully, so absolutely, and she made me so very, very happy.
She came to me then in the form of Santa Claus. Laugh all you want. Mock me if you will. But I was happy! It was Christmastime and I helped my mother decorate the tree beside the staircase, dressing it with lights and bulbs of all colors and strings of silver tinsel. I squealed with delight when together we climbed the wooden stepladder and she helped me mount the glowing angel atop the tree. For weeks the house smelled of pine and home-cooked cookies: oatmeal and raisin, chocolate chip, and sugar.
I was an only child and thus had my own upstairs bedroom, small and cramped with cheap, second-hand furniture, the wood chipped and discolored with dark blotches sprinkled across its light brown hue. But it was mine. And in that little bedroom, musty with all its little boy smells, I had a dresser against one wall, a desk against the opposite one, and my bed in the middle. And I sat at that desk and wrote my letter to Santa Claus.
Unbeknownst to me, it was really to Lies.
Dear Santa, I printed in awkwardly drawn, scrawling letters. I have tried very hard to be good. I went on extolling my virtues that year while explaining the reasons behind my failings, certain that Santa would find merit in the one and understand the other. I then begged that he would bring me the red Schwinn bike I coveted, the one centered on page 235 in that year’s Sears catalog. I even included the page number for Santa so there would be no mistake. I watched Captain Kangaroo on TV—never missed a show—and even the Captain agreed that there was no bike like a Schwinn.
I told Santa how I would use my spare baseball cards, the duplicates of bad players—worthless to me despite the intoxicating residual smell of the pink, flat stick of gum that came with each pack and even today takes me back to those cherished days—and I would do like Robby Comeau down the street and attach them to the spokes of the wheels so they would go thwack, thwack, thwack as I pedaled proudly down the sidewalk.
And when Christmas morning arrived, I flew down the steps so fast I almost tripped and fell, surely breaking my arm or wrist or neck, but I arrived safely at the landing, and there beside the wonderfully decorated tree was the most poorly disguised gift of all time, red and green wrapping paper around what was undoubtedly the red Schwinn bike from page 235 of the catalog.
I tore that paper off, shrieking with euphoric delight.
“Santa got my letter! Santa got my letter!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, as my parents looked on, my father’s arm around my mother, and they shared my joy.
I was happy, so very happy, with what Santa—what Lies—had brought me.
It was pure bliss until Truth, in the form of Robby Comeau’s older brother, informed me what a fool I was. It was my parents who had bought that bike, not Santa Claus.
There was no Santa Claus. No magical appearance from him on the night before Christmas in answer to my carefully constructed letter. Only stupid babies thought that.
A fistful of joy and all of the magic was ripped out of that red Schwinn bike.
By Truth.
Robby Comeau’s older brother was right, of course. There was no Santa Claus. And I was just a stupid, little baby, who couldn’t help crying at what I’d learned.
But I had been so delighted!
Truth hadn’t been able to bear my happiness. She’d had to unmask Santa Claus—unmask Lies—as a fraud.
For my own good? Because it was time to grow up?
Already, I hated Truth.
* * *
Don’t be a baby, I’m sure you’re thinking. It was just Santa Claus. Every kid goes through that.
I don’t disagree. I never said I was unique. In fact, I say the opposite. I am everyman. I am everywoman. Only the rarest exceptions walk among us.
We are all told we are special. We are all told we can be anything we want to be. Those are some of the sweetest nothings that Lies whispers in our young, gullible ears. So intoxicating, so hypnotic.
“You’re special,” we hear, and Lies kisses our forehead and rumples our hair as we hear those words. Words we want to hear. Words we must hear, for to think anything different—“You’ll never amount to anything! You’re useless!”—would be intolerable. No, we must hear, “You can be anything!”
When I first heard those words, I decided that I wanted to be an astronaut. I dreamed of floating weightlessly in space... of looking down upon the pale blue globe we call Earth... of walking on the moon, bouncing with every step like Neil Armstrong... of maybe even living on Mars and every night cleaning its dry, red grit from my spacesuit.
I dreamed it all until in the sixth grade nearsightedness forced me to get my first set of glasses, and Truth gleefully told me—I could sense the mocking glee even as the most fraudulent sadness covered her face and heavy-lidded eyes—that astronauts must have perfect twenty-twenty vision. Not a one wore glasses.
And so my dream of becoming an astronaut came crashing down to Earth. I couldn’t be anything I wanted to be. That lie was exposed.
But I was still special, wasn’t I? Surely, that much still had to be true. I was special, but had simply been misguided in my initial choice. No, I wouldn’t—couldn’t—be an astronaut. I’d instead be a point guard in the NBA. And when I couldn’t even make the junior high team, still short and pudgy and strikingly lacking in even the most modest athletic skills, I decided I’d become a leading actor in the movies. And after striking out with the Drama Club—“hopelessly wooden delivery” is the phrase I still recall, I decided, briefly, to become the President of the United States.
No sooner did I decide on a new “anything you want to be” choice than Truth squashed it beneath her Italian-shoed foot like a cockroach on cracked concrete, grinding the sole of the shoe over what remained of that dream long after the initial satisfying crunch.
Eventually, I fell in love with the guitar. At the age of seventeen, still short and pudgy and with a forehead dotted with acne, I fell for a Fender Stratocaster just like the one Eric Clapton used to play “Layla” while with Derek and the Dominos. And for the first time, Truth couldn’t slap me down and stomp me underfoot.
I wasn’t half bad and I was in love. I’d play that Fender until I got blisters on my fingers and then I kept going. I didn’t play that guitar to impress others or to get girls, which was impossible because I was still distinctively unattractive.
I played it because of love. Love of music. Love of the instrument. Love of creating sounds that could maybe, some day, please-God-let-it-happen move people.
Soon, only the most highly trained ear could distinguish my “Layla” guitar solo from the master’s. Same with “Stairway to Heaven” and “Free Bird.” I learned ‘em all.
God help me, I was in love.
I believed I was special. And while I might not be able to pursue the most fanciful of goals—astronaut to Mars, point guard in the NBA, the next Dustin Hoffman, or the President of the United States—I believed that now I could be whatever I wanted to be because I had found my true calling. I would be a musician, a guitarist, who would create art people would appreciate, enjoy, and remember.
This was within my reach. I was, after all, special.
And so I spent decade after decade pursuing that dream. Traveling the country. Getting ripped off by one bar owner after another. Getting ignored by one drunk after another. Living hand to mouth. Missing so many meals that I was still short but no longer pudgy. I took on the near emaciated look of the severely addicted, though I never once touched any drug.
I kept going long after every chord of common sense screamed in a cacophonous howl that I was wasting my time.
* * *
In the end, I wasn’t special. Not at all. I was a dime a dozen. If that. Whether performing alone or part of a band. Whether the front man or back in the shadows.
In the approximate words of more than one bar owner after he stiffed me my fair due, “There are a million, billion guys like you. As soon as one of you drops dead, another ten come along to take your place. It don’t matter to me. It don’t matter to no one.”
Believing that I was special, believing that I could be what I so desperately wanted to be—believing Lies—I gave my all. In the process, I forfeited all attempts at true love. I even wrote a song about it, “You’re Never Home, and I Got Lonely.” Not a half bad song and with a catchy guitar riff in the middle, if I may say so myself. But other than a whole lot of drunks in a whole lot of bars, hardly anyone heard it. And seems like no one remembers it at all.
No, don’t get me started about true love. Don’t you dare get me started.
And what did I end up with when it was all said and done?
I’m broke. In every which way. Financially, to be sure. I’ll never pay off the hospital bills. But my body is also broken. Hands and fingers now arthritic. The ringing of tinnitus roars in my ears all day like an aural stabbing, the payday for years of turning the volume up to the max.
Nobody remembers me or my music. Whatever joy I gave those who heard me play is forgotten, and perhaps never even existed in the first place.
I wasn’t special at all.
Not one bit.
“Only the very select few are special,” Truth says to me in a tired tone usually reserved for speaking to simpletons. “That’s what makes them special.”
Over and over, she says those words, mocking the gullibility of my youth when I believed that I truly was special, and even worse, that same gullibility that continued as an adult.
I’m a fool. At last I know it.
“Acceptance is the first step,” Truth says, not fully suppressing a smirk. Then she adds with that duplicitous gleam in her eye, “I’m only trying to help.”
* * *
The end is near. I’ve run the full gamut. I lie in my death bed, gaunt almost to the point of skeletal, my breathing agonized and wheezing, like an accordion being drawn slowly in and out. My ragged clothing is drenched in sweat, both old and new. The sheets reek of urine.
I am, of course, alone. Alone except for Truth.
Would that I be alone.
“You’ve wasted your life,” she says. “You’re going down into the ground. Worm food. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Nothing more remains. Your light will be extinguished, and no one will remember.”
And then finally, she leaves, whether as one final parting mercy or far more likely, because there’s no more sadistic sustenance to suck out of my marrow.
And so I call for Lies to come join me. I plead. I’ve never needed her more.
Lies, I beg of you, come to me now, I cry out in a deathlike rasp, my mouth and lips dry. Tell me that I was special, even if I was not. Tell me that I will be remembered, even if I have already been forgotten. Tell me that I had worth even if that was no more than a dime a dozen.
I was special! I need to hear it! You can’t whisper those words to me when I am young and then fall silent now!
And then I feel her presence all about me. The smell of her roses. The stroke of her feather-soft fingertips upon my cheek. Her kisses upon my ears.
Thank you! From the bottom of my heart, thank you for not abandoning me now.
I love you, Lies. I have always loved you. I have worshipped you all my life.
Lie down beside me now. Forgive the rank smells of death. I can do nothing about them.
Here. Right here. Yes.
Hold me. Forgive me for shaking.
Yes, that is good. Yes.
Now whisper into my ears those sweetest words of all. Tell me that something other than darkness awaits me. It need not be eternal bliss. Perhaps a chance to live it all over again, and next time get it right. Next time, I can be special. Or eternal bliss. That would be best of all. Of course, eternal bliss!
Anything but the darkness.
Yes, I can see the bright light coming for me.
Thank you, my sweet, sweet Lies. Thank you.
It is coming closer now. Closer and closer still.
Bless you for giving me this one last relief. Anything but the darkness.
Lies, I have always loved you. You are the sweetest and fairest of them all.
I will always remember you. Somewhere in your loving heart, Lies, please remember me. Even if you won’t, please say that you will.