The Talented Mr. Face

Falsehood: Lack of accuracy or truth; falsity; deception.

I was idly thinking about lying when I was cleaning the kitchen yesterday. Not lying about cleaning the kitchen or planning some specific future lie -- I don't need to plan for that seeing that I'm an accomplished and creative liar who can lie at the drop of a hat -- but reminiscing over some Lies in my Past.

When I was still in college Herr Luber and a couple of friends joined me for a camping trip in the Red River Gorge State Park in KY. And by "camping trip" I mean "passing out in a tent after a night of drinking and drug use in the woods." I don't recall specifically if drinking alcohol was permitted in this particular state park but it's highly doubtful. It was probably a dry county. I remember nearly coming to blows with Herr Luber because I kept compulsively whistling Ted Nugent's "Dog Eat Dog." There's not much to the song even if I had known any of the words or the course of the tune beyond: "Cat Scratch Fever, Dog Eat Dog." Maybe the song was called "Cat Scratch Fever." All of his songs kind of sound the same. I think that the chorus was: "Dog, dog, dog eat dog" repeated ad infinitum, and that was all I whistled.


At some point we decided to play a game of Frisbee-by-Moonlight on the country road twisting through the park. It was quite thrilling to stand there, clueless, and have a Frisbee suddenly appear, traveling at a high velocity, right around teeth level. Inevitably, a cop or park ranger swung around the bend and stopped, got out of his cruiser. He had a flashlight with which he probed our sweating, reddish faces.

"Is that your beer?" he asked one of us, pointing at the cold, sweating beer can straddling the double yellow line. I can't remember who answered although the response is right out of the B-Man playbook. I might as well take credit for it.

"No."

I could hear someone down at the tents flinging drugs and drug paraphernalia and just smoked drug detritus into the woods.

The officer poked around for a while before leaving, warning us that: "We don't like to have any of that beer-drinking or pot-smoking going on here."

Being polite boys raised in the suburbs we didn't have much of a history of confronting the cops, so we wisely kept our mouths shut until the guy was out of sight. Then did we come up with some zingers. Stuff that we should have said but are lucky that we didn't.

Herr Luber suggested an aggressive stance, maybe jab the cop's chest with an index finger, and bark: "Yeah? Then what DO you like?" That was very popular. I thought that maybe we should suggest he go someplace else if he didn't want to drink or smoke pot, because that's what we were doing. "Yeah? I'd suggest you get back in your car and get moving because you are in the wrong place."

Wasn't it great to be able to look down at a beer can at my feet, miles from anyone else, in the back woods, in the middle of the night, reeking like a brewery, and say with a straight face that it wasn't mine? What a talent.


Do you think I fooled the cop? Do you think he thought: "Eh, maybe someone else left it here."

I don't think I fooled the cop.