Historical Lies

I have been comissioned to write a book about Lewis and Clark for children. The initial research for the project has been interesting and revelatory. Everything you know about Lewis and Clark is a whitewash. This is all a way of saying that everything I write about Lewis and Clark and submit to my publisher will be a whitewash. A whitewash is a species of lie, perhaps the worst kind and so it's proper for me to confess it here. It will also allow me to give the publisher the desired product while alleviating my desire to hang myself from a waterpipe in the basement.

I've not yet begun reading Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose's account of the journey. I'm not looking forward to it, but given that it's such a popular book on the same subject, I'm professionally obliged to read it. Ambrose is famous for his heroic accounts of heroic people who live in heroic times and all that crap. I've no doubt that he bestows the same treatment on Lewis and Clark because, well that's what everyone wants. When we were in school we were told that they were brave and smart. All that.

But this is where historical whitewashes get fucked up. Lewis and Clark kept journals through the course of their journey. Each man made his own entries, and so there's a certain degree of corroboration or comparision that a student can make with these first-hand accounts. Since the journals are public domain, you can buy cheap paperbacks of the journals at any bookstore. Each edition of the journals comes with a foreword by Mr. Owl Phd who inscribes some nonsense about the American Spirit and Merriwether Lewis and Bill Clarks Indominable Spirits. Yet even a cursory reading of the journals reveals that, first and foremost, Lewis and Clark were dumb.

They could not spell. At all. I don't mean they sometimes misspelled a word here or there. I'm not the copyeditor type who condemns a man for writing "to" when he meant to write "too." I mean if a word has more than three letters, there's a fair chance Lewis and Clark misspell it. Not only will they misspell it, they will misspell the word in an innovative way, every time they write it. I cannot count the variations on the words "mosquitoes" and "fatiguing" these two men discovered. For this accomplishment they have gone unlauded until now.

Now I know, they were explorers, not grammarians. Dictionaries and standardized spelling were not established in 1804. But Lewis's last job was Personal Secretary to the President, Thomas fucking Jefferson. You would hope that a guy who served as the personal secretary to the Mayor of Idiot town would at least settle on a single spelling of mosquitoes, no?

It runs much deeper than that though. In an early entry, before the beginning of the trip, Clark wonders in print, whether or not the religious rituals of Native Americans bear any relationship to those of "the Jews." This is one of the primary questions ole Bill sought to answer on his trip. There's no clear implication that Clark had anti-semitism on his mind when he wrote this. I think he moronically equated all cultures different from his own with "the Jews."

Once underway the journey unfolded with all the scientific and military precision of a cat race. While almost every account you read will describe the 40 odd men on the trip as "carefully chosen" for their skill, discipline and courage, there's little evidence of any of these traits in the journals. They are more like the Dirty Dozen than the A Team, but less competent. Men fall asleep on watch and get beaten for it. (Clark loves running a Court Martial.) By the end of the first summer Lewis writes that everyone is in good health "except for venereal concerns." This is his polite way of saying that all the boys caught the clap from fucking Indian women.

It should come as no surprise that they kill nearly every animal that crosses their path. Deer, mule deer, buffalo, black bear, grizzly bears, none of them stand a chance. (Though one grizzly bear very nearly makes a lunch of a few members of the expedition). They have no practical way to store the meat they kill, but that doesn't stop them from the slaughter. The one act of mercy I've found so far comes when a few guys nap a live ibis and bring it to Lewis. He turns all Francis of Assisi and lets it free, then he breaks his own arm patting himself on the back for his decency.

When they come upon a new Indian tribe the two intrepid explorers always set about diplomatically wooing the chief. In order to do this, Lewis demonstrates his bb gun (he calls it an "air rifle," but a bb gun is a bb gun) with pride that would shame Ralphie from A Christmas Story. In Lewis's accounting, the chiefs are always much impressed. Clark, not to be out done, commands his slave York, a gigantic black man, to dance for the Indians. Most of the chiefs have never seen a black man before, and the sight of a 6'5'' giant busting a move by the campfire is certainly impressive to them. At least according to Clark it is. (The knowledge that York had been Clark's personal slave since childhood makes this all the more creepy.)

Now to bring it all back home, it nearly shocks me that no one else seems to be aware of all this, despite the fact that unexpurgated editions of the journals have been in print for most of the last hundred years. Am I the only person who's read these things?

Pretty Lies

I received my first fan letter the other day. A boy in Pennsylvania wrote to tell me that he loved a version of the Robin Hood stories that I wrote a few years ago. "By the time you get this letter, I will have read it four times already," he said of my goofy little book.

So yeah, I got all gushy and warm. I'm an ardent writer of fan letters. As a kid I wrote to Henry Rollins, William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson among others. I still write fan letters, though nowadays it's an email that I send. I figure that if I've got something simple and nice to tell a stranger, I should say it.

I sat down with his letter to compose my reply. An image of the boy's family came into my head. The whole bunch of them would read the letter, mother, father, child. The boy, I imagined, was an only child. Homeschooled. That's what it comes to in my mind, a boy who enages in one of my old hobbies must be an lonely, homeschooled, weirdo with crooked teeth and a head the size of a soccer ball. (I had two siblings, attended public school, had straight teeth and a head the size of a soccer ball.) He wears velour shirts and when he eats Doritos his mother breaks them into smaller triangles so that he won't cut the inside of his mouth.

They are almost certainly Christians. All that they do-- eat, sleep, shit, walk, talk-- is viewed through the lens of scripture. They are rural people. Anyone who lives in Brooklyn is foreign and strange to them, almost druidic in their imagination.

These are the thoughts that were on my mind as I wrote, I had to speak to this audience and convey a sense of appropriate interest in the boy, communicate a (very genuine) gratitude for his letter, and balance this with the awareness that a 34 year-old man who sends letters to 8 year-old boys run the risk of being creepy.

And so I lie a little bit. After thanking him for his letter, I ask what he reads, what else he's interested in. I tell him some of my favorite books from childhood. These are weighed carefully. Can I suggest that he read Roald Dahl? Probably not if the parents are the Christians I suspect them of being. What about My Side of the Mountain? A kid runs away from home and makes a life for himself in the Catskills. What the hell, they'll live.

Of course I am not obiliged to inform the boy that I've been a cigarette smoker for most of the last fifteen years. He doesn't need to know that I've got kleptomaniac tendencies, or any of the other unsavory truths about myself. But what can a bachelor say to a kid that's acceptable? I went to the man playbook and over emphasized guy stuff: sports, motorcycles, fighting with my brother. What wholesome american family would argue with that?

Cars from Heaven, literally

Last week I started getting buggy in New York. In need of a scenery change, I came up to Maine to visit my aunt. Much to my surprise, she had my grandmothers Pontiac Grand Prix sitting in her driveway, rusting very slowly. My Grandmother died two years ago, and the car has been at my Aunt's ever since. After a series of discussions, it became clear that I must take the car.

I have not owned a car since 1990. I feel like an exile returning to his homeland. The Flannery O'Connor story Wiseblood runs through my head as I call the mechanic to see about getting the brake rotors turned. No one with a good car needs to be justified

Maine

Aunt Sue and I were driving down I-95 from Portland, on our way to visit our 102 year old aunt (technically she won't be 102 until August, but I figure once you pass 100 it's gracious to round up). We passed a sign for the speedway. I asked Sue about it. She didn't know what I was talking about, either the sign or the actual speedway. As car agnostic kind of person, both had escaped her awareness or concern.

"Sue," I said. "Next time we're driving around up here and I ask you about something and you don't know, please lie. It's more fun that way."

The Worst Lie I've Heard in a While

Recently someone told me a story about a gay acquantance of her's. The story, heard second hand, is that he walked out of a gayish bar one night. By gayish I mean that everyone in the neighborhood thinks of the place as being gay friendly, but it's not like the Blue Oyster Bar in Police Academy. As he walked away from the bar, a Ford Econoline van rolled up. A hasid at the wheel, it came to a stop. The driver said to him, "You wanna get in the van?"

This young man has a reputation for being adventurous, and he likes to live up to it. He got in the van. Once there, he saw that there were six other hasids in the back, gathered around a glass coffee table.

At this point in the story, I said, "Wait, are you going to tell me that they plated him?" (For those of you who don't know what plating is, uh, it's a sex practice that involves defecation and a pane of glass and an usual vantage point.)

She said, "Yeah."

"That did not happen."

"How do you know?"

Well, first of all it's too tidy, the story I mean, not the sex practice. Untrue stories ignore the messy loose ends of life. Complex behaviors happen effortlessly in a lie. A vast government conspiracy conceals the existinence of aliens in New Mexico. Satanists operate a string of daycare centers. Etc.

Now take this story. We, the audience of the tale, are expected to believe that a half a dozen hasids made a club out of their shared love of caprophilia and gone cruizing for goyish objects of this fetish. Absurd. Think about how hard it is for half a dozen people to choose a restaurant. Now consider that these folks are engaging in an act that is universally regarded to be filthy and disgusting. Now consider that the guys in this story, Hasids, live in a closed community that eschews unneccessary contact with people outside their community. How did this little consortium of perverts find one another? Did they post to Craigslist? "Hasidic Jews seek other Hasidic Jews to enjoy shitting on gay gentiles in the back of a van?"

Unlikely.

What's more, this particular lie rests on the rock-solid foundation of good ole fashioned anti-semitism. Hasids mind their own business, and since the rest of us are dirty bastards we imagine that they're up to no good. I mean, why else do they avoid us good Christians? Isn't it obvious that they want to poo on us?

Help me

There is a nuance to the best lies. They have a texture and a rhythm that draws you in. A good lie is complex, a tapestery of solid indisputable truths woven together with unproveable vaguries that presents something that looks like the truth, so much so that you seem like an asshole if you question its veracity.

Now in this vein a lot of people will pick on advertisements. And those are a fine example. I mean the core message of every Bud Lite ad is that it will get you laid. This is a blatant lie. Barring the lapses of judgement that go along with being wasted, no one has ever gotten pussy because of an Anheiser Bush product. We all know this in an academic sense of the word, but when you see the ad, and you see that hot girl with big tits making a sassy remark that comments on the zeitgeist of this particular cultural moment, you think about fucking. That makes you feel something for Bud Lite. And maybe it makes you feel some loathing for Bud Lite because you're a sophisticated guy and you understand what they're trying to do to you. So you sit there with your sour puss on your face and your bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale every time you go out to play pool. But for every one of you dudes in Williamsburg and Oakland there's about two hundred guys having a blast in Ohio chugging Bud Lite.

But the most commendable lies in this vein are self-help books. For example:

http://jobs.aol.com/article/_a/does-daddy-affect-your-job/20060517161909990002

The underlying statement of this self help book is that the type of dad you have dictates what kind of worker you will be. Well who can argue with that? The lie comes in when we accept the authors premise that he has some real wisdom to share with us. He presents the Trojan horse of faux-freudian the-sky-is-blue type of observations and then follows up with observations like this, "Children of the "time-bomb" father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes."

Now how does he know this? How does he even categorize "time bomb" fathers? Isn't every father a time bomb? It's just a matter of time until you use his favorite driver to whack rocks into the lake, and boom! The "time" bomb goes off right about the moment he sees the nicks in the head of the club.

When a Lie Beats the Truth

In college I worked for a fancy Boston catering company. One fall Saturday we did a wedding at a Brocton art museum. I was happy to go on a drive out of the city for the afternoon so I could see the leaves change, at least from the highway.

As these things went, it was a fairly high-toned event. More than anything, the bride wanted to demonstrate that she had class. This is almost always a mistake, especially when it's reflected in the menu. As part of the meal, she had chosen a sorbet course as a traditional pallet cleanser in between the appetizer and the entree.

Now even among lace-curtin, banking Irish folks, sorbet is not a regular part of any meal. So as the first servers went out onto the floor with trays of champaign glasses filled with scoops of bitter, citrus ice, you could see the perplexed looks on the faces of all the crag-faced old hibernians in the room. When they tasted it, their confused looks turned to outright scowls. Everyone on staff knew this would happen.

Back in the kitchen, we hustled to get the stuff out so we could finish the dinner. Robbie, the manager, scooped the sorbet from a big pickle bucket furiously. But then a funny thing happened. We ran out. One table of ten remained, and all that was left of the sorbet was a runny soup at the bottom of the pickle bucket.

This is a fairly common occurence in event catering. You run out of a dish, or you forget it at the shop, and then you improvise. In most cases you wind up dashing off to a Cumberland Farms or 7-11 and buying a substitute. In this case, the museum was 5 miles from the nearest store and folks were waiting for their sorbet. So we upended the kitchen. By the grace of God, a museum staffer clearly had a thing for Squeeze Pops. The freezer held a box and a half of the things. So we busted out the box, cut open the plastic envelopes of flavored ice, mashed them up with the remains of the sorbet and scooped the whole mess out into 10 marie antoinette champaign glasses. Garnished with a mint leaf, they looked pretty good.

Then I took the tray on my shoulder and walked out into the room. I smirked the whole time I was serving.

Now here's the funny part. The table that received the Squeeze Pop sorbet was the only table at which everyone finished their sorbet.

Map

Several years ago I was looking at a map of North America. This was at a moment at work when I should have been working but was not. Like you, I do a lot of this. The standard daydream of driving a car across the United States scrolled through my mind, reflexively as it does anytime anyone looks at a map.

We've been programmed to imagine our own personal Dean Moriarty showing up on our doorstep, fresh from prison or reform school, holding the keys to a Hudson of dubious origin, urging us to just go. And in our minds, we go, for a second. We grab a clean shirt, a pack of smokes and get in the car.

New York's gravity falls away suddenly. What seemed impossible, escaping the pull of our familiar neighborhood, our effete comfy friends is now easy, inevitable. The car rolls down the BQE, over the Williamsburg Bridge, through the rotting gothic archways of steel from whence we watched the Twin Towers burn and peel down to the street like a wilting lily, down to the perpetual low-grade catastrophe of Delancy street and across the cluttered blur of fancy Soho shops until we plunge into the tunnel and emerge squinting in the daylight of New Jersey. At this moment even Newark, rising halfway to the horizon holds greater promise than anything we've seen in years. Out there beyond the stacks of Newark lay Pennsylvania, and we know it will seem huge when we're in it, but in the coming weeks it will be a fleeting blip when compared to the eternity of Nebraska.

Most of us, at this moment in the daydream just click on another link and navigate from Google maps to Gawker or the Hun. We had a Dean Moriarty in our lives once, but we stopped hanging out with him years ago, when he almost got us arrested in Flagstaff. (Guns were involved, as was the threat of sodomy.) Even if we did still know someone like Dean Moriarty, we'd keep him and his borrowed cars and bennies and slutty jazz-loving girlfriends at arms length. Hectic adventures are nice to read about, and maybe even pretty good to watch on TV, but what with the prospect of venerial diseases, twisted highway wrecks in cars that have no seatbelts nevermind airbags, yee. An image flashes through our mind of our body crushing against the windshield when our Dean dozes off, and we keep the daydream in its unrealized state, like the crush we've got on that girl at work.

But I have been sitting at someone else's desk, doing someone elses work for too long. My daydreams are overwhelming me now, spilling out in meetings, right on the conference room table. Someone suggests that we need to "streamline our workflow," and I say, "No, we all need to quit this shit and be dangerous. It's the last chance we've got."

They write it up on the whiteboard. The marker squeaks and in bright blue ink, it looks less real.

In Defense of James Frey

A random short list of popular "non-fiction" books that contain either obvious or documented falsehoods, or plaigarized elements:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, By Dave Eggers
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, By John Berendt
Mole People, By Jennifer Toth
A Rock and a Hard Place, By Anthony Godby Johnson
You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish, By Jimmy A. Lerner
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Running With Scissors, By Augusten Burroughs.
In Cold Blood, By Truman Capote.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, By Hunter S. Thompson
Locked in the Cabinet, By Robert B. Reich

Ask Me No Questions:

I sent out an email a few weeks ago asking for people's lies. I wanted confessions of lies people have told, their best lies. A lot of folks were intriqued by the idea but less than forthcoming. The main theme that came up was one of responses to unanswerable questions.

For example, you're standing on the altar with your sweety on your wedding day. The priest goes through his incantative question: do you take this man, to have to hold honor and obey through sickness and health until death do you part?

There's only one answer to this question. Everyone knows that fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce, but the only answer ever uttered is "I do."

The other classic and more base response lie is: do these jeans make my ass look fat?

They do, of course. Everyone knows this. The jeans always make your ass look fat. That's why he likes them. But he also knows that if you are a white girl, and you almost surely are if you're asking this question, you do not want to hear that the jeans enhance your rear end.

Now this is where the codifcation of lies gets interesting. In the first instance, is saying "I do" in response to the priests question really and truly a lie? Is it a lie if you mean it at the time, even though a voice nags you in the back of your head, the prescient voice that forsees the ugly divorce and child custody dispute? I know at least one person who knew his marriage wouldn't last, but he still said, "I do."

In the second example, is it ever a lie to tell her, "No baby, those jeans don't make your ass look fat" Because she knows you're lying.