Free As I Die Lying by Scott Nicholson Page A

fails me and I have better things to do. Then I
could fake the ending and we could all go on with our lives. But
this is a book and you expect me to tell everything just as it
really happened, despite all that bullshit about voices in my
head.
    Think about it a moment.
    In writing, you’re supposed to avoid clichés
like the plague or else make them obvious like you knew it all
along. Wink wink.
    But the first time I go and kill somebody, I
reach for that convenient excuse of being squirrel-shit nutty. And,
even today, I’m not sure whether I really killed my father or if I
just freaked out because Mother did it. Maybe it doesn’t make any
difference now. It’s not like Mister Milktoast wrote this book, or
Little Hitler. Fuck them. My name’s on the cover and that’s that. I
am the author.
    And if I’m not, they better put my name on
the royalty checks anyway.
    So, back to 1989 and forget that other stuff.
Let’s get real.
    I was the kind of teenager that, if I were in
high school today, everyone would worry about my walking in on a
bad hair day and shooting up the place. The kids at school viewed
me as an alien freak, the greasy-haired, wild-eyed boy who clung to
the corners. They whispered behind my back about what had happened
to my father or sometimes taunted me to my face, especially
Brickman, the school thug. My fantasies never moved to mass murder,
though. That seems so impersonal. Besides, I had poetry.
    Others had sports, student government, clubs,
or band instruments to consume their time and energy. I dawdled
between the covers of books, fixed in two-dimensional fantasies
whose protagonists traveled where I could only go by proxy, who
dared to have lives that seemed far more real than mine. Kurt
Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, John Steinbeck, anybody but Faulkner.
I prefer my liars to do it honestly, though I could never manage
the trick.
    Home life was increasingly torturous and I
avoided our apartment whenever I could. Mother was drinking nonstop
by then, downing huge tumblers of strong brown bourbon, slowing
only to replenish the ice. The misty-eyed mirth of her early
experiments with liquid escape had progressed rapidly into a
constant haze that was punctuated ever more frequently by fits of
anxiety and despair. She was in the final stages of decay, as if
the flesh would have given up if not for the preserving quality of
the alcohol. Father had taught both of us well, only he’d given us
different lessons.
    On my rare visits, she became clingy and wept
openly. I tried to soothe her and coax her out of the bottle, but
she was beyond reach. The horrors of the past were too real, still
too fresh because she treasured the memories even as she
obliterated them with drink. She collected and savored them just as
she had once done the ceramic cats that lined her windowsill. Those
knick-knacks now gathered dust while her new hobby of slow
self-destruction filled the shelves of her life.
    I had quit sleeping there three months
before, when she had started crawling into bed with me again. She
was only seeking comfort, needing a man in her life, a replacement.
There was something blasphemous in that mockery of family
closeness, even though the physical contact was limited. What was
most horrible was the flicker of arousal I had felt. I tried to
tell myself it was a lie, an illusion, but I could never trust
myself to stay there again. I didn’t even want to think of my
babymaker tilling that fallow soil.
    I spent the nights in the old Plymouth
Valiant I had bought with money earned from my summer job bagging
groceries at the Food Fair. I had a constant crick in my neck, my
breath stank, and my clothes grew crisp from continuous wear. My
grades suffered and many times I was on the verge of running away,
to start an untainted life in a far city, free of everything but
the chains of memory and the people in my head. What kept me in
Ottaqua was the hope that I could rescue my mother from her black
pit of despair. As if I