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Issue 11: August 2007.
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Home > Issue 11: August 2007 > Non-Fiction

Tell Me if You're Lying
by Sarah Sweeney

In the summer of 1992 my mother wore a purple Rod Stewart T-shirt around the house or to mow the lawn. Back then they had similar haircuts, like a fuzzy headed dandelion cloud, silvery-blonde, and they even shared the same bone structure. My mother’s face was very British, all fine-pointedness, a regal brow, nose, and chin—people told me I looked nothing like her. Even if she were dusting or setting a bowl of sliced cucumbers on the table, I looked at that T-shirt and believed she could be Rod and it made me happy. It was something likable about a parent I could brag about. I never told stories that featured my father. He wasn’t clean-cut like other fathers; he didn’t polish his car all summer long, amiably chatting up neighbors. His belly peeled out over his waistband due to high doses of Prednisone to keep his Crohn’s disease in remission. His face puffed out, remained red; a close-up revealed the millimeter-wide broken capillaries threading his cheeks. When I laid my head on his shoulder, I stared at them in the sunlight.

“Why is your face so red?” I remember asking.

Neighborhood kids said my father looked like Santa with his beard and belly, shirtless in summertime as he strung the hose across the lawn to fill up our Kmart kiddie pool, strategically placed over the oil slicks in our driveway. Six feet tall, he carried weight well in that he looked sturdy, reliable, and likable, if a little sad—like Santa. He wasn’t that fat, either, but neighborhood kids were never discriminatory in their cruelness. Nor were their parents sick. I didn’t know how to defend my father without giving away a part of my life that I could never verbalize, and besides, I told myself, the neighborhood kids would never understand disease if I myself couldn’t. Instead, I began to tell people that he wasn’t my father. A girl who’d lived across the street from me for so many years reminded me of this. It was in high school that she embarrassingly admitted, “I believed that lie about your father for so long!” I was confused—what lie?— and then I remembered with such clarity that I wondered how I could’ve forgotten in the first place. No telling how many children I told, how many afternoons on the school bus where I fabricated details about his busy shooting schedule, if I ever danced with him, and maybe even about his hair products.

In 1992, my favorite movie was Dirty Dancing. And so I’d begun to tell all who cared that my real father was Patrick Swayze.

***

When my parents were first married, my father kept his Crohn’s a secret. When he was hospitalized shortly after I was born, my mother learned he had one of the worst cases his gastroenterologist had ever seen and would only worsen with age. As a child, his illness ran through our house like electricity, a shade-less bulb illuminating everything from which we could never escape. Not one of us knew how to deal with the fact that his whole life would be altered by this genetic thing, something invisible and yet so present. I knew it meant pain, that tricky word disease, meant the delicate origami of our insides, meant his intestines and anus.

I suppose, then, we all lost it in some way. My father sat on our couch drinking Budweiser after Budweiser. My mother smoked Virginia Slims and bought a sports car. On errands with her, my brother John and I would inquire where we were going. Her reply was always the same: crazy. John and I snuck our bikes out at night, casing the neighborhood like thieves, damaging cars, egging houses, toilet-papering trees. That year we were caught stealing from a nearby drug store, smoking cigarettes in the woods; I was expelled from our private school in fourth grade for back-sassing the math teacher. In the principal’s office they used a picture I’d drawn as evidence of my instability. It was of a monkey smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. It was my father.

Without explanation, my mother quit her job as an X-ray technologist to be a cocktail waitress at a pub named Buffalo’s. It was 1993; I was in fifth grade and could hardly sleep until I knew she was home and everyone was safe. I remember my father and I up late at night, how I ate popsicles while he smoked a joint in the living room, John sleepy and oblivious in his bed. I could tell there was more to his anxiety than my mother counting her tips and waiting for last call to be over; my father believed she might not come back and so did I.

After a while I’d begin to cry. When is mom coming home? He pleaded with me to go to bed, said all would be settled by morning, but it didn’t make sense to me to leave him alone and suffering, the clock nearing 2 a.m. and us both imagining the fight they’d soon have. I told myself someone would have to stop it. Then John awoke, startled by our voices. My father convinced us both to go back to bed but left our doors cracked, reassuring us because we knew and believed in the strange power of the night; we were relieved that he stood as our watchdog of sorts. He’d play his cassette tape of Van Morrison’s Moondance on the stereo until we’d drift again to sleep. Only I hardly ever fell asleep again. I’d listen closely to the album because it comforted me in that way that only music can. Lying in my bed, I imagined flying over the neighborhood, dropping our troubles deep in the woods where they would never be found. I closed my eyes and sang the songs I’d memorized, unable to sleep until I heard my favorite track, “It Stoned Me”:

On the way back home we sang a song
But our throats were getting dry
Then we saw the man from across the road
With the sunshine in his eyes
Well he lived all alone in his own little home
With a great big gallon jar
There were bottles too, one for me and you
And he said Hey! There you are.

I imagined that the man Van Morrison sang of was my father living “all alone in his own little home,” and I cried at that verse.

My father told us all the time that Moondance was magical; he said Van Morrison was Irish and that there was something about us Irish people. He’d say, “This is the real shit right here,” and close his eyes. I used to stare at the album cover, Van’s peach-lit face in a contemplative glance, the ruddy brown beard, the unkempt hair—he reminded me of my father and so I admired him even more. One night when my mother was at work and the album was playing, I closed my eyes to wish her home and, I swear to God, I could see her in her car driving. I saw her make the left onto Westridge Road, then a right onto Whitehouse Road, then make the last few turns onto our street and pull into the driveway. In the vision, after she’d pulled in was when I heard her car door shut in real life. I couldn’t believe it; I told myself I was psychic, all due to Van and our shared magic, our Irishness. I ran into the living room just as my mother was coming in the door. But they had already started fighting.

***

My father’s post-divorce apartment was not the consoling vacation pad I expected it to be. Just the opposite; it was shocking and even a little frightening. It showed me who he really was stripped down to, without my mother’s feminine overseeing, through his own tastes and housekeeping style. His sunny, boxy apartment was a one-bedroom, almost impossibly small on his custody weekends with two extra bodies wafting throughout. I hated everything about the place—from his side-of-the-road furniture to the grease-stained countertops, the dust floating and landing, then taking off again, the grimy black ring of mildew that made its home in the toilet bowl, the small twin bed John and I rotated on, uncomfortably adjacent to his own king-size bed and king-size snores. The various messes emphasized the smallness we inhabited, and the two in conjunction were suffocating for me.

He kept a desk in a tiny alcove off the living room where he worked on making model cars and airplanes, vintage 50’s and 60’s types that he would paint in flamingo pink or sea foam green. On his work area walls were posters of Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, James Brown, Gram Parsons, Jimi Hendrix, and a dated 1973 Lee jeans ad he’d snipped from a magazine with a denim-clad woman and man cuddling next to a motorcycle in the woods, the caption reading: The country feeling. Live it while you can. There was also a large black-and-white Rolling Stone photo of Frank Zappa that my father had scissored and saved. In the photo, Zappa’s giving the camera the finger. My father worshipped Zappa and these other cult figures for being brazen, troubled, drunk, and utterly outrageous. He liked things and people on the fringe, those that did it their way and sometimes paid the price for it. That would become his philosophy in some way. He told me about Marilyn and how she was truly a genius, but they were out to get her, that she never could’ve made it. He said Zappa was one of the most innovative people and musicians ever, and he’d go on to quote some song lyric that I couldn’t make sense of. He told me most, if not all, of the people on his wall collage were dead. I wondered why he was fascinated with these figures and what they meant for him. I didn’t find them amusing or funny—I was scared of this new world and its governors. I never could’ve imagined this happening in our quaint brick house. Most of the time I longed for home, for my mother’s comfort food and not my father’s pan-cooked hamburger patties and from-the-box macaroni and cheese. My mother was normal in comparison to my father, and our house was a palace next to his.

On Fridays my mother dropped us off at his place around six so he had enough time to drive home from work and change clothes. He’d take us to the grocery store to pick out our menus for the weekend, letting us go wild with junk food. The main rule at my father’s was there were no rules and we as children took advantage of such luxury.

In 1993, The X-Files was a big hit, and on Friday evenings after dinner we’d line up on the couch to watch. We were present for the premiere and the show kept us scintillated on that couch for some years. Afterward, we would watch Sightings. Its premise was investigating “true” paranormal events—stories about ghosts and hauntings; aliens and UFOs; Bigfoots and Nessies of the world. John and I didn’t know what to believe, but the biggest lore surrounded aliens. We turned to my father for answers.

“The universe is just too big for us to say there aren’t aliens. Who knows what’s out there,” he’d say.

In 1995 Alien Autopsy premiered on FOX. Though the show was revealed to be a hoax, all three of us believed what we watched at the time. I was thirteen and John was eleven. As we sat stunned, my father told us about an incident of his own.

He said he believed he’d been “taken” as a boy.

“Taken where?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” my father said. “Outer space?”

“Nuh-uh!” I squealed. I could hardly blink an eye. “What do you remember?” I asked.

He told us of being a boy, about six, about the light from his window that lit up the backyard. And then waking up.

“They were hovering over me,” he said, “like you see in the shows, you know, where you’re laying down on this table, kind of like a doctor’s office. And they kind of did look like that—shadows, with the big eyes—from what I remember, anyway.”

“Dad, are you lying?!” I screamed. “Tell me if you’re lying!”

I looked at John and John looked at me. Clearly, he didn’t want me to let my father know I was terrified. “He’s not lying, so shut up,” he whispered.

“Fine. What else?” I wanted to know.

“No, that’s all there is. It’s like I can’t really remember it,” my father’s voice strained, his eyes squinted as he waved his hands before him for emphasis, “but when I close my eyes I can see it. Like I know that it happened.”

But there was more.

I don’t remember how long after his confession happened that my father revealed another glimpse of his abduction. He said he was a kid taking a bath when he felt a weird sensation in his testicles. When he touched them, he felt something hard, small, and flat underneath one. He said that it was still there, that he could still feel it.

“You think it was an implantation device?” I remember asking. That was a phrase I’d gleaned off the X-Files.

My father nodded.

“Do you think that’s why you have Crohn’s?” I asked.

“I’ve certainly thought about it.”

After this confession, my father referenced this event fairly often. He told us about our Uncle Jason who lived with his family in the small country town of Liberty, North Carolina, out on an open field, away from the city where you could really see the stars. He told us Uncle Jason had seen UFOs at night before, and that he himself had seen a “cigar-shaped object” floating in the night sky once. It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard, but I believed it. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d think about the aliens, about his Crohn’s, whether or not I’d get it, or if the aliens would come for me too.

I always believed the story about my father because it just sounded right, likely to happen to him and only him. He perceived himself as a cowboy saint of the people in his refusal to commit to his place in a society which made no sense to him, much like the celebrities on his wall collage. The world is fucked up, kids. When I was young, hated it when he cursed. He put stress on the word fuck so that it sounded extra bad; I pictured other father’s cursing and it just didn’t seem natural. John and I started cursing too. Goddamnit, we’d say, give me the remote control.

Our father loved the outdoors and, being in a period of unhindered mobility, he often took us deep into the heart of the woods for exploring. Sometimes we’d fish, other times we’d nature-watch, and we almost always took pictures—pictures of my dad wearing a red bandanna around his neck, a BB gun pointed at a target not in the frame; pictures of John and me posing up against trees or coming down a dirt path. The BB gun was my father’s idea and he taught us to shoot in those woods. He’d pack a bag of beer, and not long after he’d finished them off, he’d find a place to line up the cans and we’d take turns aiming. Whenever my father and brother tried live targets like birds or squirrels, I cried. I cried because I always imagined my father growing sicker and dying and to witness his disregard for life made a small piece of me turn against him.

Being isolated with him gave us opportunities to hear stories about his life, a life we knew little about. We didn’t even know that he and my mother had gone to high school together, only he was older, and they never once met there; nor did we know that he had been born in Savannah, Georgia, and once moved to Texas for the hell of it. I’ve now seen the Polaroid picture proof of his Texas days—him with shaggy brown hair, blue jeans, a plaid shirt in the typical Western style, and a vest. He’s with his brother and some friends; there are muscle cars in the background and furious dust bowls behind them, swirling tan particles into a heaven-like backdrop so that my father and his friends look like movie-poster renegades, holding their whiskey and beer bottles, a gun (“just a prop,” he once said) and all the palpable 70’s mischief they could muster.

After those walks we’d eat dinner. After dinner we’d push aside our empty plates and play Scrabble. My father played records by Humble Pie, the Byrds, the Allman Brothers, and Steely Dan, singing loudly over each track: They got a name for the winners in the world; I want a name when I lose. He looked so happy when the music was on, and he’d tell us stories about his youth.

One of the characters in the photograph, my father said, was his old best friend, a man named Dee. When asked what happened to him, my father nonchalantly let it slip that he was dead. He said he was buried in Westminster Gardens, our neighborhood cemetery which was a five-minute walk from my mother’s house.

My father told us the story like this: “Well, I was in the hospital with your mother, just a few days after you were born, Sarah. And I call up Dee like ‘Hey, she’s here, man,’ and he says he’s gonna try and make it up from Texas to see you. But when he went hitchhiking some fucker came and mowed him down. They never found the guy.”

I used to wonder, who else has stories like these? It was only after his death, when my father’s ashes were buried in Westminster Gardens, too, that my brother told me what really happened to Dee. “He was murdered. He was a drug smuggler who dipped his hand into the pot one too many times.” When I contested this, my brother shot back, “Sarah, they found him run over with his hand cut off, you know, for punishment. I don’t know why dad told us that lie, but Dad even told me. He was murdered.”

Out of these stories my father carved an even greater myth of himself in a way that represented then, and still represents, all that is Southern. His permanent and romantic infatuation with his youth and the past went hand-in-hand with the overblown azaleas, the pats of butter we used to eat plain, the hushpuppies—all innately Southern. And the autonomous cowboy archetype he modeled himself after was too. There is no specific anecdote I can provide for evidence—instead, the proof is in details; it was in the manner of his storytelling, in the soothing twang of his voice, in the general landscape I watched from a passenger window while he drove, imagining it to be his tromping ground, a ground which was steeped in histories-old blood and sweat and, as my father experienced them: the good ‘ole days. His stories made me feel incomplete; me, being a child of the eighties and nineties, who managed to feel a deep, soulful suffering at having missed out on what he believed were the prime years of history, rebellion, and rock. My father was the worst Scrabble player and I the best. Maybe he was too caught up in his own tales to really concentrate.

After finishing the Dee story, he went on to say how he’d never again found a friend quite like Dee and that it’s hard to trust someone, to find a real friend. Sometimes my father had to remind us of this world was not the world we knew. He liked to scare John and me, wanted to make sure our preconceived notions were lost, to wake us from our dreams with an ugly mask on. He did this in a way that was tiring and didactic, but not without merit. From him, John and I both learned that in this world the only thing we could rely on was ourselves. We learned this outright and often, our father soap-boxing at even the smallest of occurrences. For me, it was painful to listen to him sometimes, even when I knew he was right, that we would never be satisfied, that nothing would ever be perfect, that all we’d come to love and cherish could and would be taken away from us. After that, it was up to us how to proceed and, being so young for these lessons, my father often moved us to tears. We cried because we knew it was the truth and he the evidence.

He told us that the world was helpless, that there was no culture left, that everything had been bought and sold off to the politicians and the rich. He’d continue on about this notion of us against the man as his soundtrack kept on: not gon’ let them catch me, no, not gon’ let ‘em catch the midnight rider.

And yet he worked a middle-class job as a sales representative for a Fortune 500 company, which made his blue-collar heart all the more ironic. If you want something they’ll make you pay for it, he’d say. They’ll make you break your back for it. Because of this, we knew nothing came for free, that if you had to conform, do it in your own way, or else they’ll own you, but we really had no idea what he was talking about. My father said work was like selling your soul to the devil. It was evident when we visited his office. On the front of his desk he’d taped up various quotes and cartoons that represented his viewpoints and had photocopied that Zappa photo from Rolling Stone. His desk was positioned at the back of the building, where they kept extra office supplies and spare computer parts, almost as if the bosses had made a decision to tuck him away. His work answering machine message was equally sarcastic:

“Hello, you’ve reached David Sweeney. I am either away from my desk or extremely busy. Please leave a message and I will respond as soon as is humanly possible.”

***

Saturday mornings were for car rides to the flea market or around the country. Sometimes my dad gave us his historical tour of Greensboro, would show us his first house where he lived with my mother, or he’d tell us how this building never used to be there, or how that strip mall used to be all woods. From the turns in his voice I knew he was sad—his kids’ Greensboro was no longer his. There was a divide and it wouldn’t end there. In the car we heard The Who, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and old Rod Stewart, which always made me smile. Only now I imagined my mother as Maggie Mae and my father as Rod, singing about how she’d ruined him. I held my breath until the mandolin intermission was over and then wailed Rod’s painful ending notes, Maggie! I wish I’d never seen your face!

Sometimes on those drives I’d find myself nostalgic in the way I imagined my father was. I was nostalgic for what was happening now like he was nostalgic for the past. I wanted to stay young and safe because that meant he’d stay alive. There alongside him, I knew then he’d die young. I just knew. Maybe I thought it was appropriate, from a rock-n-roll standpoint, or perhaps it was in the folds of his face, the soft, curled fingers around the steering wheel as we kicked up dust pulling into the old flea market off Route 29. Maybe all his lessons were to tell us he wasn’t meant for this era. Maybe he wanted to show us all that was real, all that mattered to him; maybe he didn’t trust that we believed him enough to lead our lives in his same manner, that we’d be converted by age and time, forgetting his words for what they put together for us in nice attractive packages. At the flea market he bought us trinkets, old tin wall hangings, vintage bottles, and all the rock records we could carry. We listened to them when we got home, and when Mick Jagger sang, Time waits for no one and it won’t wait for me, I knew he was telling the truth.