The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story by David Crow

This book reminded me of Irvine Welsh’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, and even Rowdy: The Roddy Piper Story. This memoir is about a kid who grew up with a rather horrible father and mentally sick mother on or near Indian Reservations. Whenever you expose yourself to what I would call, a completely dysfunctional family story, whether in books or on Jerry Springer or Dr. Phil, you have to be careful, because you are the amalgamation of your influences whether in person or via media. I enjoy reading nonfiction books not only because I learn about the world and how it works, but the narrator voices are often rather gentle, kind, compassionate, and wise. You can tell they were raised by good people or at least were exposed to a lot of good people. It’s sort of therapeutic for me to hear that kind of voice after being raised in a family filled with shrieking, shrill, unkind, cruel, ignorant, and uninformed voices.

It’s almost comical how dysfunctional people are always externalizing and blaming others for their problems while healthy, robust people take responsibility for their actions. I mean, therapists are constantly telling patients to take responsibility for their actions to the point where it’s like too obvious now. I couldn’t help but hear the echoes of my mother in the author’s mother, completely devoid of the active voice and beholden with the passive voice. Even the author’s father is astute enough to notice that in prison, everyone talks in the passive voice, sort of a coping defense mechanism to distance yourself from the world you live in. Instead, of saying, I went to the market to grab some milk, they would say, the milk was grabbed at the market. They also simultaneously adopt a rather roundabout, beat-around-the-bush, obfuscating way of talking which leaves you completely befuddled and confused. You should check out a YouTube video of Miss Swan, a middle-aged “Pacific Asian” lady who never answers questions directly. This was my mother. “When is my doctor’s appointment Mom?” My mother, “Nobody listens to me. You have to let me know when your practice is done. We’re running out of milk.”

So the question is, why risk exposing yourself to a story about a severely dysfunctional family? First off, the story is compelling, at least for me, because it rings so true and familiar, but that’s of course the trap. The pay off is if the author teaches you something about his experience and triumphs in the end giving you the courage to face your demons and overcome your past. But here’s the problem. I wasn’t entirely convinced that he had truly learned his lessons or even acknowledged them. The book mostly covers his awful childhood, and it is filled with regaled stories about how he committed some of the most heinous and annoying pranks on mostly innocent victims. By the 14^th chapter I lost all faith and empathy for the author as he tells tales of throwing dangerous fireworks at passed out drunks and in one story, throws a huge tire down a hill into an intersection which crashes into two vehicles. It could have easily killed someone, and the author seems more concerned about not getting caught.

Meanwhile, the psychotic kid judges his father for believing it’s right to kill people if they disrespect you. Oh, okay, it’s not okay to kill people to protect your dignity, but it’s okay to kill someone by making them crash their car which would also kill all their loved ones onboard. What the fuck is wrong with this author? At least if you beat up someone for disrespecting you, he has a shot to beat you up too. Attacking innocent people from a distance is pure cowardice. His father simply beat the courage and character out of him, and all that is left is what seems to be this sniveling, geeky cowardly sociopath.

Chapter 16, it just gets worse and worse. The spineless shit, on orders from his father, locks his mother out of the house after she returns from the hospital in freezing weather. She could have frozen to death. Then his father tells him to make her life a living hell, so she’ll leave the family, and he complies, knowing full well by now that his mother is mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic. I read the entire book and was waiting for his mea culpa, his great epiphany, his lengthy and painful self-criticism and self-awareness, but all I got was that, oh, I think my father’s going to kill me and my sister, so I better shape up and lead a better life than him, and I felt sorry about abandoning my mother. That’s it? That’s it? It really feels like he’s shirking his responsibility in his past actions. Sure, he was a kid, but at a certain age, you become aware of right and wrong, and studies have shown babies are even born aware. He keeps on saying how hurting others made his hurt go away and it made him feel powerful and “invisible.” I kept wondering if he meant invincible. But he never has that aha moment where he goes, wow, this was all sick and twisted and sadistic and now I’m aware of it, I’m pretty disgusted at all the shit I pulled as a kid.

Probably because of the car wreck, Jerry Springer factor, I kept going. I know. It’s like you meet this hot mess of a woman, and there are red flags raining on you, but you just keep going, because you’re a dysfunctional fuck who hasn’t yet learned his lesson to move on and seek out healthy, well-adjusted people.

“When I pulled pranks, things got broken and sometimes people even got hurt, but stealing crossed a different line. Being called a thief felt terrible.” Okay, so hurting people doesn’t make you feel terrible. I’m pretty sure, this makes you out like a narcissistic sociopath.

The more I read, the more farcical it becomes. It’s quite obvious that his father is a pathological liar and coward. While he may have went to prison for beating up a man with a weapon, he sold out his friend by telling the authorities he only wanted to scare the man, and his friend got out of hand. And what tough guy has to bring along a friend to beat up some old, fat slob? So his father regales his son with stories of killing Japanese kamikazes aboard an aircraft carrier. Pretty sure, he was probably just a cook. He tells his son that he killed a man in a fight in the Navy and killed guys in San Quentin. Again, lies. What father would tell his son that shit? His father is nothing but a pathological liar with extremely low self-esteem. Near the end, possibly a spoiler, he aids and abets his father in burying a body. Has the statute of limitations expired here? Should someone be telling the police? He’s a grown man, and he never even called the police. I’m sorry, but I don’t care how many interns you mentored as a lobbyist, you helped your father bury a body that most likely was a murder victim. What in HELL is wrong with you? This dude is not enlightened. He just got kind of sick and tired of helping his demented father and vowed not to live his life like him, but he’s not enlightened, he’s just scared as usual of winding up like his father. That is not sufficient motivation to be a good person my friend. Sufficient motivation is worrying that you’ll hurt a lot of people, and they will suffer. That’s why you behave and become a nice person.

* * *

I’m reminded of a book I just read called, Monster of Florence, and how one of the Italian journalists covering the story of a serial killer asks a priest what evil is. The priest has a rather profound and philosophical answer in that evil is a sickness that is trying to be heard. It communicates through evil deeds. The funny thing about being the most social creature in the world is that we are one of the most talented and obsessive mimicking machines. Expose a kid just for a little bit to say a talented musician, and the kid spends the rest of his life trying to be a great musician. Expose a kid to an amazing athlete, and the kid wants to be an athlete. Expose the kid to a deranged sociopath, and you get where I’m going. It’s a classic double-edged sword. Our amazing ability to mimic others to fit in and become part of a powerful social group also makes us mimic rather horrible, antisocial people. Unfortunately, since we are so driven to be social by having most of our chemical rewards tied to social stimulation, becoming a horrible, antisocial person is not only a terrible thing for others exposed to that person but also for that person who is possibly forever doomed to be lacking friends and loved ones.

I like to think that my parents didn’t so much as do a horrible job of raising me as they did a great job preparing me for a tough, lonely life. They had been traumatized, and it only made sense to them, at least unconsciously, to prepare their children for the same environment they suffered. Why in hell would they do anything otherwise? Why coddle, coach, comfort, and get to know your children, make them feel dependent on social stimulation and support, when they grew up in an environment where relationships were destroyed by war, famine, and oppression? They needed to toughen up their children to endure the same traumas and depravations they suffered. Constant beratement, chaos, random rage, surprises, unpredictable mood swings, and all types of abuse would be a great way to prep children for a world of war, famine, and oppression. Your children would learn to be resilient, resourceful, sneaky, ambitious, and tough. Fortunately, my parents moved to America, and at that time, America was enjoying the greatest economic wealth and relative peace any nation ever experienced. Most of my friends’ parents were much more normal, loving, nurturing, and interactive with their kids.

However, this is all relative, because Americans too had suffered tremendously. While not the same extent as the Europeans or Russians, millions of American GI’s witnessed the horrors of destroyed Europe and Asia, much of which was committed by Allied Forces. They saw bombed out cities, starving civilians, countless dead or decaying or torn apart bodies, a veritable nightmare on Earth. Then they come back to pristine America barely touched by the greatest global war in all history, and understandably they either sheltered their children and tried to raise them in some bizarre bubble reality world separated from European and Asian devastation, or they mercilessly beat and badgered their kids to prepare them for the possibility of another world war or perhaps nuclear apocalypse. People give Baby Boomers a bum rap, but you have to understand the traumatized minds of their fathers and also some of the mothers who may have also served as nurses or theater support personnel. Stress makes all of nature’s parents incapable of nurturing and protecting their young and in some grotesque cases, attack or eat their young.

Then we had the Vietnam War, and although it was a smaller conflict that World War II, soldiers served shorter tours, that only meant more soldiers were cycled through the carnage of war. Perhaps worse, American soldiers were not revered by anyone as liberator and peace-makers but rather imperialist monsters. Many soldiers volunteered for World War II believing in our duty to defend our nation from Japan and save Europe, but few truly believed that Vietnam made any sense. You can then imagine them coming home, having and raising kids, and then imparting their learned brutality upon their children to toughen them up. The huge crime wave of the 70’s and 80’s were much the result of Baby Boomer males all entering young adulthood in combination with traumatized parents who abused them and toughened them up. I believe the 90’s mentality of being streetwise and street tough were due to Vietnam War vets raising their children n now to be tough and merciless, but there were far fewer of them. Now we see crime crashing, and quite frankly, a certain level of civility if not timidity in youth today. These are children of fathers who have never experienced the horrors of war to the extent of World War II and Vietnam War era men. Certainly, many of their fathers had served in the Middle East, but those wars were cakewalks compared to World War II or Vietnam. Yes, it’s easier being a nurturing, loving, coaching, and communicative father if you haven’t been traumatized.

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P1J7P71/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1