the writings of john scott ridgway
No one around Cripville didn't have at least one story about being lied to by Frank Schlong. He told whoppers that no one much believed even as he was telling them, and little ones about nothing no one else would ever think to lie about. Other than this he was a fairly bright guy, decent athlete, funny. By virtue of sheer geographical scarcity of kids, he made freinds, and they accepted that sometimes he was full of shit.
Frank's teacher's had an inkling about why he lied so much, read as much in his occasional bruised back, the fear in his eyes when he spoke of his father. Cripville people pretty much knew each other's business, and Frank's father was known as a religious nut who occasionally flew into rages and beat his wife and kids. Between hiding himself and being addicted to reading to escape his surroundings, Frank developed into quite a liar.
Frank got over his lying habit in college for awhile, after burning bridge after bridge with stupid lies; outside of his hometown, people simply would not put up with it. Like reformed folk of any cloth, Frank took a certain pride in not lying, and hated being called a liar when he wasn't more than anything in life.
In school, Frank also started reading a lot of philosophy about why people lie, and learned that people are constantly misjudging each other based on subjective interpretations of reality. He learned as much while he was going to school and driving cab. As an experiment for a paper he took control of his signifiers.... and started pretending that he was whoever seemed most likely to get tipped by the person. The experiment worked almost too well. In fact, he realized that he could lie about himself his entire life and thus effectively convince someone to love someone who was not him, and thus deprieve him of love his entire life.... the cold, deadening feeling this knowledge brought with it made him want to blow his brains out.
Frank took a job as an engineer at IBM and worked for almost ten years dating women who could live without him before even caring. He went out for Burritos with the guys, drank a lot of beer, saw a lot of movies, took elaborate european vacations with groups of stangers or his family. Finally, he bought a house, and that seemed to trigger something in him, as if he were finally ready to set aside his childish selfishness, and fall in love with a woman.
When he started dating with a longer relationship in view, he looked at finding a mate like he would an engineering project, and decided that one way for him to achieve maximum results for the expense of his personal ad's was to tell the women he was interested in all of his faults... then, if she could not live with him, he could write her off with the minimal financial and emotional involvement.
His years of lying had also taught him the folly of trying to be other than he was. So he told her, the one he would marry, among his many faults real and percieved, that he was liar. He meant this as in the past, as in the way of a reformed person who takes the label as their own, like a reformed alcoholic. At the time, in the first pink blush of love, the woman nodded addoringly and applauded his bravery. As the years passed though, of course, she would use this against him, like she would all his faults, and Frank wished he had never told her as much. . .
She died before he did. Just seven months. Frank was pretty much alone on his death bed and spent those last twisted weeks eating mostly unidentifiable mush and thinking back over his life, feeling almost like the narcotics were slipping him back in time, allowing him to re-live some of his brighter moments. Mostly he thought about her. She had been his delight. He wished he had never told the woman that he was liar. Listed that incident up under the column of his mistakes. Came to the conclusion that sometimes you should just lie sometimes, just let life seem a little better smelling than it is...