The Liar

There’s a school of thought that people who were the only child in their household have some sort of maladjusted little emperor complex that easily explains away any and all behavioral problems. Some think that those without siblings are preconditioned to have loneliness, selfishness, and myriad other societal no-no’s ingrained in their psyche as a sort of dark gift that they’re handed down at birth.

These thoughts are just conjecture, as numerous studies have lined out in extensive detail.

I’m an only child.

Uttering this has been followed up by clichéd droning about “Well, that explains a lot” or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Compare this against the fact that the number, or lack of, my siblings really doesn’t explain anything about me. It didn’t make me feel differently as a child because I didn’t know any other alternative to what I was doing.

Flashback to Smyrna, TN, 1982. Reagan is in the White House, Mandela is still in a South African prison cell and I’m firmly ensconced under a card table, belly down on the floor, putting letters together to make words on the four-color newspaper printings of Alley Oop and Garfield, much to the delight of mother. She cheered me on and it felt so good.

This is a typical scene. My mother and I being around each other. Dad had other things to do, and that’s fine.

If I wasn’t around her, I was at a white brick house on Clearview Drive in Murfreesboro, staying with my Grandmother, Dorothy and sometimes, my Grandfather, Jess, who seemed to like me less the older I got. Recently, I realized how it was strange that he was only around for a very short while since I was born and that he’s been gone much longer than he was here during my life. I’d spend the days standing outside behind a hanging plant stand, treating it like an altar, mimicking the silly men I saw on tv loudly and passionately talking about “Jeeeee-susssss!” to the people at home. My Grandmother reportedly found this incredibly amusing.

I didn’t even know other kids existed for the most part. I would wake up at my Grandmother’s house, and not go down the hall into her bedroom because I was terrified of the sandbagged Spider-Man punching bag standing between myself and it. I’d eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she’d clothespin a towel around my neck and I’d run around like I was Superman with a cape.

It was my tiny little world, and probably the only time I was only doing things because I felt like doing them, and not to impress other people, or to try and make them like me.

I didn’t know any different. I still wish I didn’t.

My first run-in with other people that weren’t immediate family was pre-school/daycare. I don’t remember much about it. I do remember something about either myself being attacked or myself attacking someone else, but I can’t remember which. I played Abraham Lincoln in some little-kid July 4th play and was the lead photograph on the front page of the Daily News Journal bringing the former President back to life in a stuttering tiny form. It’s all a blur.

Real school finally began and I was entered into general population. Meeting other kids was terrifying and wildly interesting at the same time. One kid named David ate glue one day and I didn’t understand why because it wasn’t food. I saw a red-haired girl and was fascinated by her because she was some sort of strangely colored alien that I had never seen before. I would sit at my desk and stare at other people because I didn’t know who they were or where they came from or how so many people my size had suddenly appeared. My teacher would nicely grab me by the shoulders and escort me to where all the other children were sitting because I would rather look at something across the room than sit down with everyone else when she told us to sit down together.

I didn’t like being told to do things, especially when I didn’t want to do them, but I did what they told me because then they weren’t angry with me. It was the path of least resistance, I guess, and at that age it felt like the best route to take. I didn’t know there was an alternative.

This continued during school. The further I moved through the ranks of the public system, the more my behavior was chastised and told that it was wrong, or needed to be changed, or just weird. In first grade, I had a blue satin jacket with red sleeves that I loved more than anything. I wore it every day and never took it off. Ever. My teacher would tell me to take it off. She’d tell me that it was hot outside and wearing a jacket wasn’t right. Take it off. Stop wearing that thing. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. It was mine and I loved it.

It disappeared at some point.

I couldn’t play well with a lot of the kids because I had flat feet. Had to go to a doctor because my leg was hurting me and my ankles were constantly getting sprained and rolling inwards. I was prescribed orthotics that had to be inserted into my shoes. These were red, see-through plastic things, shaped like half a foot that would somehow cure the issue with my ankles. I would try and run like the other kids did, but they’d slide around in my shoes and trip me up. I’d regularly fall down, or become an easy victim in the oh-so-politically-correct playground game of “Smear the Queer.” A game that, looking back, I don’t think any of us really understood the ramifications of.

So I’d sit on the sidewalk by the playground, taking the orthotics out of my shoes and holding them up to my face so that I could see what Cyclops from the X-Men saw. Everything was red! I was told this was unacceptable. I would routinely climb to the top of this half sphere monkey bar thing and just sit there, watching the other kids go back into the school when recess was “over.” My teacher would then come outside five to ten minutes later and yell at me.

I didn’t really see why the fun had to end. I mean, I wasn’t having fun, but I liked watching other people do it.

I would sit in other people’s assigned seats and tell them “I’m you.” when they told me to move. One girl named Amanda Witt had a white plastic comb that said “Unbreakable” on it that I took as a personal challenge. I felt like perhaps I had some sort of super strength since I snapped it so easily. This, it turns out, was not the case at all.

Over time I felt more and more pressure to be like other kids, even though it was weird to me. I had grown up in a very small nuclear family and as long as I followed the rules of “Don’t leave the yard” I was pretty much free to be as weird as I wanted.

We had a “talent show” day in my third grade classroom at David Youree elementary school. I had asked a bunch of kids to “be in my band” and they’d agreed. I was going to play a cardboard guitar that my mom had drawn, cutout and colored for me to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and in my head I was going to be a rock star. Some other kid brought an actual Fender guitar and kids who had agreed to be in “my band” were up there smiling and dancing and singing along with this kid with the real guitar. I felt so stupid. I suddenly hated this thing my mom and I had built and when no kids got up with me to “perform” I lost my shit completely.

I cried in the bathroom and my teacher came in and told me it was okay. I guess I was doing it loud enough that the kids in the class heard me across the hall so I got laughed at after coming back in the classroom as a snotty, red-eyed third grade F-List version of The Boss. It flipped a switch on me that kind of defines a lot.

I tripped some kid who was walking to the front of the class to write on the chalkboard and everyone laughed at him. If I saw anyone doing something weird I would call them out on it loudly. If you were in any way unfortunate, ugly, poor or odd, I jumped on you like a vulture would on roadkill. I was awful and shitty and everything was a purely defensive strategy to surviving in a world full of people who are the worst.

I secretly felt bad for people like this girl who (I kid you not) was named Mildred. She was big and tall. Obscenely overweight. Altogether unpleasant-looking and often dirty. She had had a terrible life, and I made it my life’s work to verbally shit on her as often as I could. I would tell people that I saw them kissing her earlier and they’d react to it in shock and anger. I would tell people I saw her eating garbage out of the dumpster. Looking back now I feel horrible about it. I would see her walking home from school as my bus passed, and I wondered what kind of life she had at home. I sometimes wonder now whatever happened to her. I hope she got past all of the people picking on her. I’d even joked as recently as a few years ago that she grew up to be Kate Moss.

From all reports she didn’t go to any school reunions. Hell, why would she? I didn’t go either, but for entirely different reasons.

My newfound life as a person who shit on others before they had the chance to get him was fun in a way. I developed a sixth sense that enabled me to enter a room, and almost immediately find flaws, weaknesses and sore points on the majority of its inhabitants. My mind then raced to piece together stinging barbs, false stories and defamatory accusations for all of them in case I had to unload. Some who saw this in action would tell me I had a quick wit but internally I just knew that I prepared more than they did. My lines were ready to go on anyone, and I could tailor it to their issues with lightning speed.

I wouldn’t get picked on. At all.

And I would go home and the phone would never ring. And no one would ever come over. And I wouldn’t leave the yard.

My father worked in Nashville, which was roughly 30 miles from where I grew up. To a kid with no concept of how far anything is, and who has unrealistic expectations of their importance to the universe…it only stood to reason that my father, who was going to a major metropolitan city everyday, had ample time and opportunity to acquire amazing things for me. I would greet him coming in the door with a “did you get me anything?” which would then be followed by him blowing past me to the bedroom or the living room. Eventually, he told me to stop asking that.

The attitude I had at school started to move over to my life at home. My dad was often out with his singing group, or leading the choir at the church we attended, or doing something with whatever hobby he was currently into, so we didn’t get a chance to be around each other as my Mom and I did. Which was a lot, especially once she left Nursing to be a full-time parent. But one Saturday was the exception, and my Dad took me to McDonald’s for lunch. At some point he had to go to the bathroom, so he got up and told me to stay put. I chuckled to myself because I had a good prank for my Dad. I opened up the lid of his Sprite and sprinkled a moderate amount of pepper inside, and then closed it back up.

The look on his face, and the anger in his voice and the tensing of his jaw and hands scared the absolute shit out of me after he took a big drag off of his beverage. He threw it away with as much force as you can fling a paper cup. He was mad. I had screwed up big time. He asked me repeatedly why I would do that and I had no answer except that I thought it was funny and maybe that he would think it was funny, too. He didn’t.

The thing that hurt me a lot about it was the look on his face immediately after he tasted it, which was this confused expression of what I took to be a sense of betrayal. Like I had done the one thing he thought I’d never do. I never did anything like that to him again. I felt horrible.

I did everything I could to hang out with my Dad after that. I had to redeem myself somehow. He got really into baseball cards, so I, too, got into baseball cards. I’d read up on players and remember stupid things about them that I would spout off all the time. Dad would be amazed that I could remember statistics and ERA’s of certain players. He liked that my favorite player was the New York Yankees first baseman Don Mattingly, because he’d played for the AAA team from Nashville, The Sounds, for one season back in the early 80s.

Dad would show me off at card shows by asking me random stats about people and I would rattle them off, completely making them up, but impressing the adults that he’d parade me around in front of. This was when I discovered that I could just say things and people would take them at face value if I was confident enough about it. We’d buy a table at these shows, and bring our meager little collection of cards out for people to perhaps purchase. We looked hilariously tiny and underwhelming compared to the pros that sold their expansive collections.

I don’t remember who got tired of baseball cards first. Myself or my Dad, but whichever it was, it triggered the other to lose interest as well. And those days were over.

I would sit in my room with the door closed, drawing things on the drawing desk my mom and dad had bought me for Christmas. I’d stare at my drawings and be aggravated that they weren’t as good as I wanted them to be, and I’d shred them to tiny pieces. People at school would stand around and watch me draw, and would say things like “Hey draw me a Batman” or “Draw Mrs. Wood” and I would do it, because they would be appreciative and nice to me for a short period. A guy named Danny and I would trace the cover of Def Leppard’s Hysteria record and sell them to people for a dollar. They would then slice a thin opening at the edge of their Trappers Keepers and put the sketches in there to customize the folder. I thought things were finally falling into place, but I secretly hated anyone else who could draw and would find flaws in what they did and talk badly about them to other people.

I hated myself. I would routinely hide the picture proofs that were taken at my school and my mom then couldn’t order school pictures of me. There’s a large window of time where there is no photographic proof that I even existed from around 6th grade all the way to early high school.

By this point, my whole life was a lie. There was the me at home and the me at school. I would never see anyone from school when I wasn’t there, so it didn’t matter to me if anyone could verify my stories. I was so smart and they were so stupid that no one would ever figure out how full of shit I was. I lied about everything. All the time. I was so self-conscious about what I wore and how I looked and if the stuff I had was the right brand or not. I lied to kids about my buddy brand shoes when they were all wearing expensive Eastlands and tricked them into thinking the kind I wore were even more expensive than Eastlands and therefore better, and they believed it. I would tell people anything I thought that would impress them. I wouldn’t hang out at people’s houses or sleep over at anyone’s place because I was off doing something way cooler than what they were doing anyway, and people actually believed it.

In truth I was sitting at home, drawing, or playing with those big WWF Wrestling figures in the loud plastic ring, or with my cousin’s hand-me-down M.A.S.K. and Centurions toys. My Masters of the Universe collection was beyond reproach. And no one saw it. No one could ever come into my real life.

Once I got a little older, I would get permission to ride my bike outside of our land, but only on certain streets and under conditions. My mom was terrified something would happen to me, so she was over-protective, which I hated at the time, but has ultimately given me some survival skills that I think other people lack, especially in the common sense department. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that I had to learn to do as an adult that other people just knew how to do from having what I consider to be a “normal” childhood. But who wants normal?

On these bike rides, I would be alone, bombing down a hill, wind in my face, blisters rubbing themselves raw on the inside of my thumbs as they gripped the handlebars for hours on end. I liked going really really fast and then closing my eyes as my bike coasted down hills and straightaway streets. I would have dreams about riding my bike to a place where no one knew about the fake me that I had created among the people that I clamored for affection from but ultimately wanted nothing to actually do with.

I feel like my whole life has been building from being free, to wanting to be accepted, to realizing that I can be free if I stop caring about being accepted.

My good friend Cole straight busted me out in high school. Made a webpage of all the lies I’d told him and other people and posted it for all to see. It was TERRIBLE. I was mortified. I told my mom I was sick so I could avoid school (which is really hard to do when your mom is a nurse.) It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

Turns out not a lot of people really even cared. This was only a Hindenburg sized disaster to one person. The Liar. Me.

I tried to be myself more but it was strange. I didn’t really know who I was. Or what I wanted to be. I don’t know why I wanted others to like me. It was some sort of insatiable need. To be the “good guy” or probably more aptly, the “Cool guy.”

I am not cool. I never have been. I’m obsessive and selfish and I always want what I don’t have.

This continued in college. Whole new set of people. Whole new set of bullshit. I stopped for the most part before it got too crazy.

I met a girl (my now wife) online and talked a lot to her in the most honest way I’d communicated with anyone in ages. It felt amazing. Someone liked me for my actual personality. I would lie to her about stupid shit all the time though once the newness wore off and we actually lived together. I look back at myself now and hate who I was and the insecurity that built that whole heaping tower of bullshit.

I even did it when I got out in the real world and started having a career. I’d tell people my dad is a doctor so they’d be impressed. He’s not a doctor. He is in medicine and he is very very good at what he does, but he’s not a doctor. Some people might read this and actually find out that my dad isn’t a doctor for the first time from it. I’m sorry. That’s all I can really say. I was a weaker person then and I just wanted you to like me and think I was special/unique/whatever.

She’s the one that got me on the straight path. By constantly questioning my bullshit. By pointing out inconsistencies in what I said all the time. It made me look at how hard I’d been working to keep up some sort of silly “status quo” that nobody cared about and made me embrace just being honest about everything. My opinions, my beliefs, you name it. It’s so much easier.

These days, I’m almost completely different than how I used to be. I am still jokingly abusive to some folks. I am sometimes very cruel to people I do not like. I don’t mince words and I will tell you how I feel instead of how I think you want me to tell you how I feel. I am a raw open sore of an open book and will tell most anyone anything if they just ask…and most times even if they don’t.

It took me until I was almost 30 to come to terms that I was a sheltered, weird little art kid who built a whole one man support system around himself with chicken wire and bullshit and defensive tactics. It’s only taken a few years to rip the majority of it down, and it’s an ongoing process. I’m 33 now and feel like I am more myself than I have been since I was a little kid, before I had the unfortunate luck of having to meet others unprepared.

I love those of you who stick by me, and who support me, in spite of who I was in my past. I love you guys for more reasons than that, but you get what I’m saying. My defining characteristic to the majority of you now is hopefully that I am sincere, and loyal, and that I will always tell you what is true instead of what I think you want to hear.

This brings me back to the initial point — To have your personality just be something that is “ingrained” because of the amount of siblings you have, or what your specific situation is before you’ve even had a chance to do anything in your life is ridiculous. We are who we are because of the experiences we have and our reactions to them. Some people cope with things. Some people build a secret life and reactionary fortress to the perceived slights and judgments of others. Unfortunately, I was the latter.

With 33 years having passed with the good majority of them trying to meet goals of being liked or being what other people want me to be, I hold the keys now to the shiny new goal of being permanently belly-down on the floor, reading comics and doing what I want to, because I want to, with the people that I love and that love me, for years to come.