you may now listen to this chapter free on YouTube: I Know You Are Lying
I have no idea what I am doing here. Am I creating a document of my experience or an expose of my son’s fatal decline? Is my writing healing me, but at what cost?
My girlfriend said to me a few nights ago, “It’s his story too.” She was responding to one of my recordings of this book.
What I know about addicts, regardless of my son’s current affliction, is this: they lie. A person who is “using” will look directly at their loved ones and lie. Always lies. My son has fallen into his own snare or tall tales. In some universe he imagines that his people are not talking about him, corroborating the evidence, as well as support. I could just list out the crazy stories but that won’t really get us any further down the stream.
Okay, just one.
A few weeks ago he negotiated the Air BNB escape with the TA doctor and his guardians. The very next day he bolted to Dallas. The mysterious divergence occurred without a note or notice to his mom. By 2 pm she was losing her shit all over everyone’s texts. He was just gone. No information can be a dark thing for catastrophic thinking. He texted her back, “I panicked and drove to Dallas.”
“Proof of life,” she texted to the talky therapist and me.
I left my direct texts with my son silent and waited for him to give a smoke signal from Dallas or a direct request from him. He texted me Sunday, about being back for a “meeting of the board” on Monday morning. H e had to drive back from Dallas. He met me for lunch that next afternoon.
“How was the meeting?”
“I haven’t been there yet?”
“Oh, does your mom know where you are?”
“Meeting at 1700 .”
Here’s the story he gave me over the course of lunch. He’d gone to Dallas to stay with two women he’d met before he left town. “They are both childhood trauma therapists and their lesbians.”
“What do they want with you?”
“I don’t know. It was wild, man. Fun. I don’t know why I came back.”
“Why did you come back?”
“Seriously, I’m regretting it more every minute.”
“I thought you guys had a plan about an Air BNB and some path forward for you.”
“Yeah, well, I might’ve just fucked that up.”
“Is that your goal?”
“What?” His manic energy was peaking. “It was paradise. I couldn’t believe it. So good. Two women. I slept so well.”
And over the course of the next day or so, the story changed a few times. His mom and her husband got a slightly altered story, but same basic details.
“The girls are pissed that I told you about them,” he said.
“Why would that make them angry?”
“I don’t know man. But I had to shut that shit down. I can’t tell you anything else about them.”
He’d said one of them had a TikTok post that had gotten over 2 million views. And they were loaded in Dallas, doing therapy for children. And somehow open to having a volatile young man in between them in bed. Hmm.
As I checked in with his talky therapist directly, I was as concerned about my ex-wife’s inattention as I was about my son. “It was his hairstylist. She invited him to go to Dallas for the weekend with her roommate.”
“So, not lesbian nuclear scientists?”
“Not that I’m aware of. He met her a few weeks ago, getting his hair cut.”
That explains how he didn’t need money for gas. They went in “their car.” And, I can understand how “I’m going out of town with a new woman, my hairdresser,” wouldn’t play so well with his guardians. So he made up a big lie. And then began to cover his tracks with “They’ve asked me not to talk about them at all.” It was because he couldn’t keep the lies straight.
And just last week, he bolted to Dallas again. I got a call from my ex-wife’s husband. He was distraught but also pragmatically invested in solving my son’s malfunction.
“He’s not in Dallas,” I said.
“What?”
“There are no girls in Dallas,” I said. “It’s his hairdresser. I’m sure he’s still in town.”
Later in the conversation, we go back to details. “Next time you have him on the phone, have him drop a location PIN, that will show you where he is.”
“That’s a great idea.”
“And I’d piss-test him before allowing any of these plans to go forward.”
“Yes, I said the same thing.”
Back from the 2nd Dallas run, we had dinner last week.
“I’m trying to understand what you get from doing these batshit crazy things? Going adverse? There’s something in it for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want a reaction. Even massive disappointment is a charging event. Ramps up the dopamine. There’s something you are getting from acting out crazy shit.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“I get it. I think I was addicted to my own depressive darkness at one point when I was living with the alcoholic. I got some deep pain from the failures occurring before me. I was just trying to stay alive, on the planet, I was severely depressed.”
“I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.”
“I understand, but you do get something out of these *bolts* to Dallas.”
And it was at that moment, I kept to the lie of Dallas. Just as I’m lying in some way to you and myself here. This entire thing is not going well. Sure, my son seems settled in his new negotiated release. What is the lie I am keeping by not confronting the Dallas lesbian story? How does keeping him close (in an attachment parenting way) and yet not addressing the lie… how does that help? How does any of this help?
Oh right.
It’s not about the alcoholic. It’s not about my son. This is not his story, at the moment. And somehow, I’ve bought into the lie. I know it’s a lie. I know my son needs to be drug tested and admitted into “treatment” of some sort. I also know, my health is more important to me and my survival.
Coming face to face with my son’s demon in Dallas, when I attempted a rescue/release for him, was enough to fire up all of my own support team requests. I met with my psychiatrist, my Al-Anon sponsor, and renewed my own self-awareness. It would be easy to lean into the chaos around my son’s misfires and reloading. Today, he’s on a new plan, with his mom and her husband trying to extricate themselves from his monitoring while extracting him from their already emotionally tumultuous home. They are free of his spiraling sleepless nights, his defiance, and he will be guided by his new TA therapist.
It’s as if my ex-wife has given him over to a new program. A new lead for his treatment program. She and her husband were exhausted. They couldn’t hold it together for much longer. So he’s sleeping, at this moment (if I can imagine that) in his “bed only” AIR BNB across town.
“It’s in a shitty neighborhood,” he said yesterday. “But I know about those. Feels comfortable.”
“Yeah, at least now you can take a shower past 9:30 pm.”
“Fuck that guy, man. He’s impossible to live with. There are rules about everything. A note on the AC about 72 degrees. And they have a fucking window unit in their master bedroom. I’m on the top fucking floor.”
“But you’re out, right?”
“Yeah . I just need a desk and a chair.”
“I can help with that.”
And I wait. I’ll keep the lies between us about lesbians and shootouts and how much money he was making at the peak of his business until his held-up at gunpoint landed him back at my house and changed us all.
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