There's a Sucker Born Every Minute
When I was 13 or 14, the front tire of my bike hit a rock and I flew over the handlebars, landing in my father's recently chopped woodpile. My forehead connected with the perfectly round cut end of a smallish stick, exactly one inch in diameter.
It was because of this bizarre accident that I came to school the following day with a bruise so perfectly circular, and so neatly centred above my eyes, that it almost resembled a less exciting version of the Harry Potter lightning bolt scar.
Or at least that's what I told people.
The truth behind my bruise was in some ways more believable and in some ways less believable. On the evening in question, I'd been plunked on the couch watching some crappy sitcom and fiddling with one of my brother's action figures, a villain from the Masters of the Universe collection. The character was called "The Leech," and true to his name he had a suction cup on his face.
I don't really remember what possessed me to stick the toy to my face. I was probably just bored, and absent-mindedly decided to test its suction abilities on the nearest wide flat surface, which happened to be my forehead. It wasn't until much later, after I'd tossed the thing aside, watched a couple more hours of TV, and gone upstairs to brush my teeth, that I noticed the Toonie sized hickey adorning my face like a supersized blush-colored bindi.
If I'd been the kind of teenager who got real hickeys, I might known enough to steal some of my mom's concealer and try to hide it. Come to think of it, if I'd been the kind of teenager who got real hickeys, I probably would have had better things to do on your average weeknight than sit around testing suction cups on my face. But you work with the tools you were born with, I guess, and so I cranked my imagination into overdrive and headed to school the next morning prepared to tell the most plausible lie I could come up under the circumstance.
And lie I did. For the better part of a week I cheerfully, and with gripping detail, told the story of the stunt-worthy bicycle flip over and over again – to my classmates, my teachers, and basically anyone who so much as glanced at me in the hallway. I still don't know if anyone believed me, or if they saw through my story from the get-go, but looking back, I'm guessing that people generally didn't much care one way or the other.
I tell this story to illustrate a point, which is that I have always, since the day I first learned to talk, had a tendency to make shit up.
In my younger years, this character trait (or personality flaw, take your pick) could sometimes manifest itself in some pretty dramatic ways. There was the summer I worked at a convenience store and convinced a tourist kid that Jodie Foster was my godmother. There was the massive estate in Northern England that I told a co-worker (still a good friend) that I stood to inherit on my 21st birthday. I once stood at the kitchen counter and compulsively ate all of the frosting from a cake my mom had baked, and then successfully blamed it on my younger brothers. (I kind of hope that admitting that last one to the world wide web will finally convince them to forgive me, because I'm telling you, it was well over 20 years ago and in their minds the statue of limitations on it has yet to run out.)
Now that I'm older and wiser, my stretchings of the truth tend to lean more towards healthy embellishments. The pub in our neighbourhood is "the best" neighbourhood pub I've ever frequented. The ribs I ordered last night were "the most amazing," I've ever eaten. My dog has learned to "speak English" when nobody else is around but me.
On good days, I tell myself that these tendencies are what make me want to write, to tell stories. That's probably true, at least to some extent. When I'm in a writing trance, the stories and characters and events that I'm imagining onto paper seem real to me – in many ways, they are real, and there's no question that they're informed by things that I've experienced, and people that I've known, if only in very subtle ways. The best "made up" stories, in my opinion, are peppered throughout with the truth. "Black Swan" was completely over the top, but clearly inspired by the dramatic, obsessive and very real ways in which an artist can be consumed by their art. Although set in a galaxy far far away, "Star Wars" wouldn't have had such emotional resonance if we as an audience weren't all too aware of the miserable plight of the Wookies and their sad, doomed planet.
On bad days, I tell myself that my tricky relationship with the truth has me walking a very fine line between coming across as a transparent yarn-spinner or a delusional sociopath.
I'm guessing that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I'd like to think I always know what's going on when I'm playing with facts to develop a better story, or trying to convince someone that I was late for our coffee date because a Kangaroo escaped from the zoo and traffic was shut down. On the other hand, there's the uncomfortable reality that sometimes I have a hard time remembering which parts of my story are true, and which are thrown in to spice things up a little. It's not unusual for me to end up falling for my own fabrications, and I have no idea how to figure that one out.
I'll have to ask the dog what he thinks.
