If something in me changed that day, I didn’t feel it. But my behavior has changed. Like many poor people, we were subject to the uncertainty and chaos that comes with a life of bad jobs and worse landlords, and we moved often. The next time we moved, I made sure none of my friends found out where I lived. When someone else’s parents took me home from a sleepover or to a sporting event, I would give them directions to a nicer house in a nicer neighborhood and walk home after they drove off. Sometimes many miles. Instead of a string of low-paying jobs, my mother had a career, and instead of alcoholism, my stepfather had health problems.
My fear of being seen for who I really was became so strong that it almost became limbic – one time, while walking home from the supermarket, I broke into a full-blown sprint to dodge a friend who was pushing me from the street shouted. It was pure instinct, like an animal feeling a predator, and when my friend asked about it the next day, it took an extensive series of lies to convince him I hadn’t lost my mind. The fact that I was somehow going crazy never crossed my mind.
In every new school and in every new city I imposed all the inventions I had lived with since the last time we moved. The first lie was always about something pointless, like being good at a video game I’d never actually played. It can impress someone, or it can just move the conversation forward. Most of my lies were so trivial that they probably weren’t even registered with the people who heard them. But for me they became more false biography to internalize. Instead of being the person I was, or even the person I wanted to be, I moved through the world as the person my lies made me.
My skill with the lies for survival provided the basis for my more selfish lies, imbued with the texture of a method actor’s performance; I twisted lies from the truth with such skill that sometimes I lost track of what was what. Living with lies is much easier if you can keep them simple. To sell them on the other hand, you have to be able to recall the details that make real experiences memorable: Even the most skeptical friend will believe you’ve seen the hottest concert of the summer if your story focuses on the misery of the day crushed against a security barricade. No lie was too big or too small, as long as it helped me project an aura of everydayness.
Lying as a way of coping with poverty had given way to something more pathological. Instead of facilitating my passage through reality, lying had become a way of denying it altogether. To the extent that lying can become a game, its goals have something in common with gambling: it escalates not because people are hard to fool, but because they are fooled so easily that experienced liars become bored with their habit . The stakes of the gamble ultimately become life and death; once captured, the person you created vaporizes, leaving a vapor trail to annoy those who thought they knew you. The endgame, and perhaps the impulse itself, is as much about self-destruction as it is about self-deception.
When I left home at age 17, the stakes of this game went beyond the realm of the psyche. With barely enough money for a bus ticket to Los Angeles, where an acquaintance had offered me an internship and a chance at a mailroom job with a small record company, I persuaded a complete stranger to let me live in her spare room for free until the paychecks started to come out. come. But the paid job never materialized, so I persuaded a friend to transfer me enough money for a bus ticket to Oregon; while fleeing under cover of night, I was caught by the friendly homeowner, but convinced her that I was going to the laundromat only after a bout of insomnia. A few months later, I pulled the same stunt on two high school classmates whose years of friendship provided them with a brief apology for my sudden departure. The next stop was Minnesota, where I lived for weeks as a stowaway in the dorm room of a girl I met online — no easy feat at the College of St. Catherine, an all-girls school, where dozens of students found our sinful living situation.