Wiretap - The Liar

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Jonathan enlists the help of a polygraph machine to trap Howard in his web of lies.

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You're listening to Wiretap with Jonathan Goldstein on CBC Radio 1. Today's episode, The Liar. The boy walked into the living room and made the announcement. I don't want to breathe the same air as you anymore. The father didn't take his eyes off his newspaper. And what do you propose, he asked. Oxygen tanks? Should I send you to school pulling a wagon full of tanks?

I wouldn't need to worry at school, the boy said, evenly. Just at home. What are you too good to share air with me, the man asked, trying to control his temper? It's not that, the boy said. It's just something I've decided. You can't just say things like that, the man said. He threw the paper down and grabbed the child by the shoulders. Does your old man smell? Can't stand the stink of your old man? The man realized he was shouting. He withdrew his hands. The trouble had begun two weeks earlier when he told the boy

he wouldn't be able to take him to the comic convention, as he'd promised. The truth was he'd somehow blown the whole workweek on boozy lunches and flirtatious banter with the new intern, and now he needed the weekend to catch up. But the boy, an intense kid with few friends, loved comics, had been looking forward to the convention for months. You lied to me, the boy had said. It isn't a lie, the man had replied. Sometimes things change.

When I get older, the boy had told him. I'll never lie, no matter what. Wait until you're my age, the man had said, getting on his knees in front of the boy. It gets hard. Does it ever, the man thought to himself? A lie here and a lie there was hardly the problem. You woke up one morning and realized your whole damn life was a lie,

and you had no choice but to roll with it. And now the kid wouldn't let up, constantly on his case, about everything. Do you really think I'm as good a drawer as Picasso? Or was that a lie, too? Or what about how you were the best running back your high school had ever seen? Really? The best? I'll show you the newspaper clippings the man had said, trying to control his voice. Keep it light, he reminded himself.

Come here, you little creep, he said, scruffing the boy's hair. He'd seen fathers pull the move on television, but could never get it quite right. It hurts my head when you do that. The boy said. That night, unable to sleep, the man headed to the kitchen for a nightcap. Along the way, he passed his son's bedroom, where the boy sat in his little kid rocking chair with his hands clamped on the armrest. He wasn't reading comics or playing.

He wasn't even rocking. Having a hard time sleeping, eh? the father asked. "'Me too.' "'I'm not sleeping tonight,' the boy responded. "'I just don't want to dream.' "'What's wrong with a little dreamy time?' "'I might dream of you,' the boy said. "'You don't mean that,' the man said.

"'I mean what I say,' the boy said. "'I don't lie.' He stared his father in the eye, and the father stared at him. The boy held his ground. confident that he was on to something, though not quite sure what. Maybe that if he stared hard enough, he'd eventually see right through his father, straight through to the truth, God's truth. What the boy did not know yet, but the father did,

was that God didn't care about the truth at all. God had given man the gift of lies so that he did not have to hurt those he loved. Lies were an act of mercy. But this was nothing the man could put into words. Polly had to express himself, were his hands, which were now holding the boy's shoulders, shaking them, trying desperately to break the terrible eye contact. During his first meeting, he was.

with me, Philip, pathological liar, listed some of the lies he'd recently told. At a school fundraiser, he'd told his daughter's music teacher that he was the son of a famous composer. And just before that, he'd told his father-in-law, a sports journalist, that he'd once been selected as a reserve for the UK men's archery team. The first lie he could remember telling was to a classmate. When Philip was 11 or 12, he'd insisted. that he'd been recruited by MI5 to train as an agent. He described his headmaster's admonishment. For goodness sake, if you're going to lie, at least do a better job of it.

The headmaster was right. Philip was a dreadful liar. While each lie seemed tailored to wow the listener, they were also pointlessly excessive, wildly risky. You don't seem to worry about people thinking you're a liar, I told him. He shrugged. As far as I could tell, Philip didn't empathize with the people to whom he had lied. For the most part, he just didn't seem to care.

That is, until the week before he came to see me for psychotherapy. His seven-year-old daughter had asked for his help with her French homework. He'd always told her that he was fluent. And now, instead of admitting that he didn't speak French, he told her that he just couldn't remember the names of the farm animals in her exercise book. She became silent and looked away. He saw her realize that he had lied to her. Throughout the consultation, I was struck by Philip's frankness,

but I knew that if he was to be himself with me, if he was to bring all of himself into our work, he would, at some point, lie to me. It happened soon enough. A month into treatment, he stopped paying his bill. He told me that he'd misplace his checkbook, that he would settle his account as soon as he found it. And the next month he told me that he had donated his month's salary to the Freud Museum.

After five months of tall tales, I had to inform him that we would stop at the end of that month unless he settled his debt. Just as he was about to leave, what would have been our final session, he took a check from his pocket and handed it to me. I was relieved to be paid, but uncertain about what had happened between us. Philip had told increasingly blatant lies, and I'd become increasingly withdrawn, more guarded when I spoke.

He was, I now realized, expert in tying his listener up in the social convention, that we meet lies with polite silence. But why? what possible psychological purpose could his behavior serve. We wrestled with this question for the next year of his treatment. We talked about his parents. His father was a surgeon and his mother had been a schoolteacher until her death, just before Philip's 12th birthday.

And then one day Philip described a memory from childhood, which had seemed too trivial to mention until then. From the age of three, he used to share a, bedroom with his twin brothers, who slept in cots nearby. He sometimes woke in the middle of the night to the sound of people shouting as they left the pub across the road. He was often aware of a need to pee, and knew that he should get up and walk down the hall, but he would stay in bed, motionless. I used to wet my bed as a child, Philip told me, and he described crumpling up his damp pajamas and pushing them deep into the

covers, only to find them at bedtime under his pillow, washed, and neatly folded. He never discussed it with his mother, and to the best of his knowledge, she never told anyone, including his father, about his bed-wedding. He'd have been furious with me, Philip said. I guess she thought I'd outgrow it, and I did when she died. His bed-wedding and her silence gradually developed into a private conversation, something only they shared. When his mother died, this conversation abruptly came to an end. And so, Philip began to improvise another version of their exchange. He told lies that would make a mess, and then hoped that his listener would say nothing, becoming,

like his mother, a partner, in a secret world. Philip's lying was not an attack upon intimacy, though it sometimes had that effect. It was his way of keeping the closeness he had known, his way of holding on to his mother. So we finally found a podcast that speaks to you, pure bliss. It's so good that when you finish the final episode, it leaves a hole in your heart and your schedule. What now?

Personally is here for you. It's a collection of true stories that explore what it means to be, well, human. The best part, there are six incredible seasons to dive into, with more on the way. Personally, get lost in someone else's life. Available now, wherever you personally get your podcasts. When I was a kid, around third grade, I moved schools. So I was the new kid at school, and, you know, there's all the kind of social anxiety that comes along with that, which was enhanced by the fact that the school was, there was like a new kind of socioeconomic level there that I wasn't quite accustomed to.

And everybody had, like, kind of, you know, fancy lunchboxes and food roll-ups and candy bars and stuff. And I had just like a paper bag with, you know, an apple and a peanut butter chili sandwich. And we'd give a box of raisins in our lunch. Like my dad tried to just basically have us not have sweets. And I remember him very specifically trying to convince me how cool the box of raisins was because after you eat the raisins, you can turn the box into a whistle. I was like, that's not going to help me in third grade telling everybody about my awesome raisin box whistle. So I didn't have cool snacks, but everybody else did.

And then what would happen also is people would trade them. You know, there would be this brisk kind of economy in the cafeteria of, like, people saying, like, oh, my God, I'm so bored with my awesome chunky. Like, how about I trade you for your fritos? And this was a rather kind of well-functioning economy because, you know, everybody sort of got what they wanted. But I couldn't because I might, you know, brazen box. The other thing that my dad would put in my lunch was a can of sardines. This is like a real cana sardine.

Was that as a dessert, or was that like as a kind of... I think that was the entree. Uh-huh, okay. But the canisardines had zero currency in the snack trading room. And so I couldn't get what I wanted. So then what happened was at a certain point, I started telling everybody that my mom was this incredible baker. And she could bake a cake like nobody's ever seen. And she bakes a cake at the end of the year for everybody in my class.

And, like, you can't believe it, this cake that's coming. And what I can do is I can let you in on a special opportunity, which is if you give me some snacks, like, say, those Cheetos, now, I can just put you down for a share of this cake later. So you'll get, you know, it's like a deposit on this wonderful cake. So you were selling cake futures? It was like a Ponzi scheme made out of cake, like an imaginary cake. And the idea, for whatever reason, totally caught on. People love this idea. And so all of a sudden, I could get whatever on.

I could get, like, hostess, you know, I could get ding-dongs, nutty-hoos, flaky flicks. I was setting the terms. You know, be like, oh, okay, these watermelon jolly rancher, I don't even want that. Like, that isn't even worth any of my cake. And I had, like, actually had a ledger. And I would record the transactions. You know, people would come and say, I'm going to get, what do I get for these Doritos?

And then I'd be like, oh, you get like, you know, half of a layer of this cake. And then I got a little bit fancy, too fancy, by allowing people, if they had really good snacks, to customize. So then all of a sudden to be like, oh, this layer is red velvet and this one's angel food. And, you know, I mean, then it became insane. Oh, so it was, like, all different cakes to different people. Right. And who was I to, like, dash that dream once I had created it, you know? It was a beautiful vision that we all shared.

And then as the story grew, and the cake grew, I realized, oh, my God, I'm in too deep. It was like people had already, people were already into me for like 14 bags of Doritos. Like, imaginary, like, if you would look in the ledger, you would see that it is describing, like, a 300-foot-tall cake that is impossible, right? There's no, it would never exist this cake. So, you know, I was nervous about it, right? Because, you know, eventually this day of reckoning was going to come. And the whole thing sort of came undone because there was this guy Spencer at my school who, he was like another kind of smart math kid.

And then he was the first one that sort of started pointing out to people like, oh, man, this cake would defy the laws of gravity or whatever. He looks at the numbers and realizes this cake is a sham. And he starts trying to tell people that first nobody wants to believe it, right? because people have to believe, they have to keep believing in the cake. Because they're doubling down. Yeah, they're doubling down, you know.

They're like, nobody wants to. The minute you're not believing the cake, you realize all that you've lost. You know, your chunkies are long gone. They're never coming back. And so he kind of starts spreading the word, and he's like, hey, I know this cake isn't real. And I start panicking, right?

Because I don't want to let go of his vision. Because if they find out what I've done, they'll turn on me. And so I double down, right? And then I say, no, I can prove it to you. I'm going to bring a sample of this cake. I'm going to go home. My mom's going to provide an early preview of the cake to come.

It would be kind of like a model home of like the real estate that you were eventually going to be selling. Yeah, exactly. I put it out on one of the tables in the cafeteria and we could have a viewing. And then I would forestall doom for a little while longer. So I went home, and my mom's not there, and my dad's not there, but I figure, like, well, how hard can it be? You know, I don't have to, just a whole cake, and it's just a piece of cake. I see my mother do it all the time. And so I'll just, like, make this cake before she gets home, and I'll, like, hide the cake in my closet, and then I'll sneak it to school.

But I don't know if you've ever made a cake, but, like, it's baking, it's chemistry. Like, stuff happens to happen right, and I didn't know how to do it, and I was eight, and I got, I went, overboard. I'm like, I'm going to put some, some, like, Nestle quick powder in here. That'll make a chocolatey and, like, oh, what about some strawberries? And it was horrible, and it was a mess and was, like, burning in the oven. Like, parts of it had, like, bubbled over. But, you know, like, a cake material, a thing materialized out of that oven. Did it look like cake? No, no. It did not. It all looked like a cake. You know, it looked like it looked like a

brisket. So then I managed to clean up the kitchen, and then I, like, put this thing in a shoe box. And so then the next morning, I walked to school carrying this box, and everybody's kind of gathered around. It's like a moment of, you know, it's a little bit of a, it's a real moment of truth. And Spencer tries the cake, and there's kind of a quiet there as everybody nervously awaits the result. of this cake tasting. And then Spencer spits it out, acknowledges what is, you know,

plain for all to see that it is a disgusting, you know, brisket cake. But the interesting thing was that, it wasn't that they didn't believe that my mother was going to make the cake. They did. They just thought that what they would, the revelation was that, oh, my God, your mother is a terrible baker and is going to bring us this horrible

giant cake, and it's going to be disgusting, and we don't want this cake. And then I had this choice where I could sort of come clean and admit that I had made this horrible thing and there never was a cake. Or I could allow my mother to be a terrible baker and let that be the story, which of course is what I did. I mean, no eight-year-old was going to just come clean for no reason, right? But that kind of sacrifices what mothers are for. You know, they're meant to take the fall for you and protect you. And in fact, in the end, this only sort of advanced my cause

as the year went on, because then everybody sort of felt bad for me. I was like, oh, God, this, you know, no wonder he's always trying to get our chunkeys and Cheetos because his mother can't bake a cake to save her life. And I became a charity case, and they would just offer me, you know, their extra cookie or whatever. So, you know, by throwing my mother under the bus, I wound up getting, you know, all the snacks that I wanted. I'm in your house right now, and I can't find an angel food cake pan. Everything is just so disorganized. Why are you making a cake in my house?

I'm celebrating. Is that a crime? What are you celebrating? This doesn't have to be a reason. It's just a gray, rainy day outside. Nothing to do but eat cake, that's what I say. Nothing to do but eat cake in my house. Oh, hang on.

That's the bell. Hey. Howard? Who? Who? Who is that? This is a plumber. That's my plumber.

That's my friend, Barry. He's a plumber. He knows how to plum. Why is there a plumber in my house? Your passport got stuck in the toilet, and I thought maybe I should call. Again, Howard. You shouldn't keep it so close to the bathroom. I keep, Howard, I keep my passport in a locked drawer.

Please get misplaced. You're not very organized. I can't even find a proper angel's food cake pan here. Howard, why do you always flush my passport down the toilet? They're going to stop giving me replacement ones. You make it like it's my fault that you have a passport stuck in your toilet. I came into his house. I was mind of my own business. I wanted to make a cake.

Oh, my God. Barry, get a bucket. No, brookie. No. No. No! No! Yeah.

What was that? What? The radio was on. I was just listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I'd catch a show. You know what, Howard? Come down to the studio. You want me to come to the studio?

Yes, I would. You're inviting me? In fact, there's actually a lot of leftover birthday cake from this party that happened earlier today. And, you know, so you can come down here and eat it with Bruce. Well, I actually did have a few things planned, but if I'm needed in this way, I guess I can move some things around my planner. How much cake are we talking about here? A lot, Howard. I can't be expecting to the entire cake.

Of course not. Where do you keep your Tupperware? You're so disorganized. Here, Bruce, this. Let's get some cake. Get some cake. No, no, not. Come at this.

Okay, Howard. Hey, man. I brought along cake bibs and party hats for Brucey and me. And I... What, well, what is that machine? It's called a polygraph machine. Do you know what that is? Of course, I'm not a polygraph machine.

Oh, do you? Yes. What is it? It's the fine out of polygraphy. I know it. A polygraph is commonly known as a lie detector. I borrowed it from the set of that new CBC television show. So you think you can lie.

So you think you can lie. They never get away with it. Okay. Well, I brought it into the studio because I wanted you to see how much you've come to rely on lying. Howard P. Colchin-Chackwitz is not, nor has he ever been a liar. My mama raised me. Okay, fine. Howard, sit down, get comfortable.

I'm just going to... If you insist, I think this is completely childish. Please stop squirming. I'm just going to strap you in. I can't move my arms. Why do my arms have to be strapped down to the... We're going to monitor your heart rate, your blood flow. We're going to do a pre-test just so we can get a baseline.

Okay? I'm just going to ask you some simple questions. What is your name? Howard P. Coltrane Chakowitz. Howard Chackowitz. And how old are you? 37. 39.

41. 44. God. You can't even tell the truth during a pre-test. I'm just sensitive about my age. I'm nervous. I like lying. All right, here we go.

How did my passport get stuck in the toilet? It was in there when I got to your place. I was on the commode. Reading a New Yorker. People. Teen Beat. Oh, I threw your passport of the toilet. Why?

That's all I want to know, Howard. Okay, fine. All right. It's because you're always going away. You know, I miss you. Damn. All right. All right, fine.

I cut out your face and I replaced it with Bruce's because I thought it would be cute for my dog to have a passport. But then you called while I was going. working on it and then I guess when I heard your voice I felt so much shame I got scared you'd be angry I just felt bad I got bored of working on it so I flushed down the toilet are you happy I just want you to be proud of me for once oh you know what I really don't like this why did it just buzz you you do like this hmm a little I do You know, I just like getting a little attention and, you know, spending some time with you.

Hey, look at that. Just no buzz. Well, I guess I was actually telling the truth that time. You see? You see that telling the truth isn't so hard, right? Yeah, I guess not. Well, well, thanks, John. I guess that's...

Well, you know, that's all I really wanted. I don't always act like it, but I do appreciate you caring about me, and you have my back. Well, okay. Well, thanks, Hal. I know it seems like I'm about to get you sometimes, but, you know, I care about you, too. Hey, the cord on this. Your dog is chewed right through the polygraph's electrical cord. That's why it isn't buzzing.

Look, who was trying to get his daddy out of a jam, eh? What a good boy! What a good boy! You don't care about me at all. Those are all lies. When do we get the cake from me and Brucey? There's no cake, Howard. Do we go get some at the cafeteria? You owe me cake anyway, and you're such a stupid idiot. Okay, that's it. Howard, I'm done.

Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Come back. Bye. Unstrap me. Bruce, bite through the straps. Bruce, come back. No? Don't go to... No.

Don't go to... No. On wiretap, today, you heard Howard Chackwitz, Joshua Bearman, and Stephen, Gross, author of The Examined Life. Wiretap is produced by Mirabirdwin Tonic, Crystal Duhame, and me, Jonathan Goldstein.