Liar: A Memoir - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ROB ROBERGE is the author of four books of fiction, most recently The Cost of Living (2013). He teaches creative writing and his work has been widely anthologized. He also plays guitar and sings with the Los Angeles-based band the Urinals.

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1

1977: You have your first girlfriend and you are, as far as your ten-year old self knows, madly in love. You are Nicole‘s “buddy” in science class—that‘s how you meet, because she is a bright girl who has been advanced a grade and she needs an older student to help her fit in. And the principal—a man who knows you incredibly well from your frightening number of trips to his office—seems to have decided that it might be good for you to be responsible for once. To take care of someone and not get in trouble.

You and Nicole pass notes in class with questions like Do you like me? with “Yes” and “No”?boxes. You hold hands in the coatroom. Instead of teaching her to behave, you teach her that the more you misbehave the less adult supervision you tend to have. Screw up and you are out back clapping erasers together. Screw up even worse and you get sent to the coatroom. Really screw up and you get to read books together in the library.

On your eleventh birthday, she is killed in the woods that back three or four neighborhood developments. Woods that you all played in.

You try to think about what she looked like, but you really have no memories this. You remember two long brown pigtails, but you could be getting those from her picture now on an Unsolved Murders in CT website, in her last school picture ever, taken the year she was killed. She wears a white and red print dress. She has brown eyes that match her hair, which is pulled into two shoulder-length pigtails. She has a posed, but happy smile. That photo has replaced your actual memory. You think of her now, you see that picture that everyone else can see.

In the woods, Nicole‘s head was crushed with a large rock. “Bludgeoned” is the word the newspapers use, and you have to look up the word and it will remain your most vivid memory of finding a definition in a dictionary. You are old enough to realize none of this can be your fault, but you remember the principal telling you that your job is to take care of Nicole and the phrase will not leave your head no matter how much you want it to.

For years, you think (there were rumors, after all) she was raped and then bludgeoned. She was never raped, you find out much later. Though, for so many years in your head, she was—the facts, for years, were not the truth. You only learn she wasn‘t raped when you try to research her case in your early 40‘s—thinking, somehow, that it might help your life make sense if you could make some sense of her death.

From that day in 1977, you never —especially until you leave your hometown at 18— look at a man without thinking, it could be him. Every coach. Every teacher. Every strange man who ever walks by you. For years you‘re horrified whenever you‘re left alone with a man. Sometimes, without warning, you flush with rage and want to hurt some guy you‘ve never seen before. Your reaction to everything in the world starts to frighten you.

Her case remains unsolved thirty-five years later. It will never be resolved and it won‘t reduce itself to meaning. She has been gone from this earth nearly five times as long as the time she was here and sometimes—even though you have known hundreds of people better—you think that relationship may be the most formative one of your life. While many things happened before Nicole was killed, this is really where all the other things start and, to a certain degree, end.

1974: Your parents throw a party on a Saturday night. You sit on the top of the stairs listening to their music, their laughter and the clinking of bottles and ice in a bucket. Smell the cigarette smoke. They play Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash records all night long.

The next morning, while your parents are sleeping, you‘re in the basement looking at all the different colors of liquor in the different sized glasses. You drink them, one-by-one, a red one first because you tend to like red foods and red candy, so why not red drinks? It tastes fine. Not as good as, say, Hi-C, but a few minutes in, you feel better than you ever have in your life, except for that accidental overdose two years ago on some pill at the mental institution where your father works.

A beautiful new world floods through you. You smoke half-cigarettes from ashtrays. You know you have to feel like this again.

From this day forward, if you are not high, you are not happy.

Fall 1985: You and your girlfriend Sasha have broken up. No one understands the kind of pain you are in. Your pain and loneliness are undocumented in the history of human pain and loneliness.

All day and all night, you lay on your bed with your Walkman on your chest and Bob Dylan‘s Blood on the Tracks playing as loud as the machine can go into your headphones. Your eyes are closed. You don‘t move except to smoke cigarettes or drink beer. One side of the tape plays to the end and you open up the Walkman and flip the tape and listen to the other side.

You do this for weeks. Your life is over. You will never know love again—of that much you are sure. Friends try to get you to come out. To drink. To party. To talk. If you had enough money, you might go see the friends of yours who sell Percocet and morphine, but you don‘t have the money so why bother seeing those people?

You ignore them all and get wasted and smoke and listen to Bob Dylan because, really, only Bob Dylan has any idea of the amount of pain you are in.

Only you and Bob Dylan have ever known this kind of love and only you and Bob Dylan have ever known what it‘s like to lose this kind of love.

Fall 1984: You are diagnosed bi-polar with rapid cycling and occasional psychotic episodes. You‘ve been up for almost a week and you don‘t remember any of what a friend later tells you that you said and did the last two or three days you were awake. It‘s like a drunken blackout, but longer and worse, since apparently you were acting ?pretty full blown crazy,? according to your friend. He‘s a few years older than you and his ex-wife is a schizophrenic. He thinks you may be one too. He convinces you to see the college psychiatrist who sends you somewhere else and that doctor tells you that you have been self-medicating—for years, from what you say.

The good news is you are not schizophrenic. The bad news is you are pretty full blown crazy. From this point, for a decade or so, you will only tell people very close to you that it‘s possible they might have to take you to a hospital someday. That you won‘t want to let them and that they have to ignore whatever you say at those times. This makes even the people closest to you tense and nervous about what it means to love you. And you will hate yourself for it.

The doctor puts you on medicines you can‘t pronounce and tells you that, no matter what you do, you should not drink alcohol with them, you shouldn‘t do any other recreational drugs and, especially, that you should never, “with a brain like yours,” take any hallucinogens like acid, mescaline, or mushrooms again. When you‘re released, you take his medicine, but you don‘t really stop taking your drugs. You do try to slow down. But only because you are afraid he‘s right and you could go fully insane. A week after the appointment, you drop acid and hang out in the Boston Commons playing your guitar for hours.

He‘s right. His medicine and your drugs don‘t go together at all. Your drugs make you feel better. The ones the doctor puts you on make you feel stupid and like someone packed your brain in...