the lying starts. You, for example. Maybe you started off writing your book with the noblest of intentions, wanting to get across something real and significant. Maybe you were holding something in your mind — some sacred value or belief — and thinking to yourself: This, this is what I want most to articulate. This is the most important thing. This is what the world must know. Maybe you actually meant to do good.
And what if this same thing happened to you? All of a sudden, you get sidelined. All of a sudden, you need to get the Adam’s apple exactly right — something totally stupid and insignificant and beside the point. You let it distract you from your noble purpose. Suddenly people in the story are doing and saying things you never meant for them to do or say — and you’re letting it happen, because it’s fun. It’s interesting. And maybe it’s simpler, too. Maybe it’s just simpler to say, “This bad guy, this innate criminal? His mom died, by the way. Yeah, so, poor old Danger Man, he’s had it pretty rough. Anyway, next chapter . . .” Rather than to sit down with the actual person whose actual life events you’re cherry-picking and take the time to peel back his flesh and deal with all the ugly underneath. I get it, Adam. You couldn’t bring yourself to break the skin. Who wants to face the mess below the surface, right?
And so you make stuff up. You get sucked into your own bullshit. You want to see where it’s all going. You let the story take you instead of you taking it in the direction you originally mapped out. The direction that your noble purpose dictates.
The noble purpose gets lost. And maybe, before you know it, you’re screwing over everyone who has ever meant anything to you, without even realizing it. You are changing them, interpreting them, riffing on them, without even asking their permission. Your family, your girlfriends. A bunch of guys you used to be tight with. From any objective standpoint, you’re producing what amounts to a kind of slander. But you can’t even see that anymore. You’re too busy trying to get the Adam’s apple right.
The question is, are you, therefore, an asshole?
Or, let’s put it in metaphysical terms. Is this a sin?
I put it this way because that’s the feeling it gives me — a feeling like I’ve sinned. Not the kind of sin I would have reproached myself for in my evangelical days — when, let’s face it, anything that didn’t serve the greater glory of God was suspect. I’m talking about a deeper, guiltier, Catholic kind of sin. A sort of trespassing.
The truth is, I was as every bit as surprised today, writing about you telling me I had a virgin/virgin complex, as I was when you said it, if you said it, twenty years ago.
In fact I think I’m maybe more surprised today.
And now I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do: cite my father’s parish priest, Father Augustine Waugh, as an authority.
“God love you,” remarked Father Waugh one Monday as I tore the cling-wrap from the Chinet plate of peanut-butter squares he’d set down, “you can’t leave the church, son.”
It was my first week back in town, and the Father had asked if I would be helping my poor disabled dad get to mass next Sunday. Rather than point out that even at his most sprightly Gord rarely made a point of rushing out to Sunday service, I took a bit of pleasure in painting myself as an apostate.
“Haven’t been to mass since high school,” I told him. Since my mother’s death, to be precise. “I’m afraid I left the church behind me long ago, Father.”
And that’s when he hit me with his Hotel California-ism.
“God love you,” he tittered. “You can’t leave the church, son.”
Son. I almost laughed down into his four-years-younger-than-me face.
“Yeah, well,” I said around a square. They were pure sugar, festooned with multicoloured marshmallows, and the sight of them, accompanied by my immediate desire to inhale the plateful, made me feel about seven years old. I turned to put the kettle on before Gord could yell at me to get the Father his tea. “It would seem you can.”
“Nope!” countered Waugh, settling down at the kitchen table. I glanced over at his placid face. Here, too, was faith. Not the raucous, shudder-and-squeal faith of Jimmy Swaggart, but the complacent, immovable dogma of the Catholic