The Wallet

I read about a study recently regarding stories and how retelling them can impact your memory, how every time you tell a story, the memory of that story is altered so that the next time you tell it, you remember the facts differently.  Tell a story enough times and you’ve literally changed the past, like a solo game of telephone.  It’s how two lifelong friends can have completely different recollections of the same event, like my friend Rich and my recalling Dave Righetti’s 1983 no-hitter for the Yankees against the Red Sox.  Rich, a Sox fan, says we were hanging out by the pool at my house in Berlin when we heard the news; I remember our being at the shore, at his relative’s cottage.  I vividly depict seeing his youngest cousin in diapers,  even though it isn’t possible (she’d have been around eight years old at the time).  It doesn’t matter.  We each have integrated the game into our psyche, filed it away, lock, stock, our own individual truth; and this has become our reality.

            It’s the same reason lawyers and the courts like to rely less on eyewitness testimony and more on hard, irrefutable-CSI-forensics.  It isn’t a lie if you don’t believe it’s a lie, which can make sifting the truth from the deceit all that much harder. 

            I am not writing about yesterday, which was mildly eventful I suppose (I found out our offer on a house was accepted and my son discovered his feet).  You need time to reflect, events to steep nostalgic, if you want to write anything worthwhile about them, and by then it's all fucked up.  Because you’ve told the same story so many times you have altered events, and now you can’t really trust what you think happened.  And if you’re mentally ill or a recovering addict full of shit, well, then accurate reporting simply isn't possible.

            

             Which brings me to...the wallet.

            

             Somewhere around 1996 I may or may not have stolen my friend Jason's wallet.  Here's the scene, as I remember it.  I have a truck, which I took from my brother when I was visiting back east, saying I'd make payments on it but never doing so, driving cross-country to San Francisco.  I believe this is the trip in which I pick up a hooker in Minneapolis.  And, no, she never sends me a Christmas Card.  I am really strung out.

             I sleep in the truck under the 101 freeway by the SF Bay or out by the 3rd Street music studio.  Jason gets in my truck somewhere in the Tenderloin on a warm spring day.  And when he gets out, I find his wallet on my truck floor.  Them's the facts.

            

             Now why Jason was in my truck beats fuckall out of me.  We didn't have cell phones in those days.  I must've run into him on the street, I guess.  I don't remember where he was living, and I'm sleeping in the back of a fucking truck (it had a camper shell) down by the river.  In this recollection, I have to just run into him at a traffic light, or he flags me down, and already we are on shaky logistical ground. 

            I didn't even know I had been accused of stealing his wallet until years and years after the fact.  Heard about it through the grapevine about seven years and gallons of hardcore narcotics pumped directly into my bloodstream later.  But, yeah, I sort of remember, sort of remember looking at the truck bed, seeing a wallet, checking to see if there was any money.  Maybe.  Or not.  What did I do with the wallet?  I don't know.  All I know is that I didn't steal the fucking thing!  

             Or did I?

             If I were not me, for one, I'd probably be happier, but for two, looking at this from a detached POV, knowing the weaselly prick I was, it would make sense I'd have stolen the wallet.  I mean, if I am on a jury, and you present evidence and testimony, put my skinny dope fiend self on the stand, I am convicting me.  It seems pretty clear.  Wallets don't just fall out of people's back pockets.  The more I think about it, the more fucked up my mind gets, because synapses have fired so many times, who the fuck knows.  I start remembering thinking Jason left the wallet because he cared about me, or that we are in LA when I pick him up, shit that simply isn't feasible.  

           Because by now you can't rely on your own recollections.  You are not an authority on the events that have transpired and have helped shape your own life. What you think you remember, you don't.   Never happened.  

           If you hooked me up to a lie detector machine right now and asked, "Did [I] steal Jason's wallet?"  I'd say no.  And I'd love to see what that machine said.

           

           I'm thinking about all this now because I am writing another memoir.  I want to start at the beginning, with my childhood, try to set the facts straight.  I have to remember my father, my mother, my brother.  I have to tell the truth about what happened.  It is non-fiction.  The fights, the violence, the anxiety, what turned me into me.  I am the writer.  I am the authority here.  And clearly I cannot be trusted.