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Shitty Bluff | Aug 16 2000

The first lie I remember telling, though certainly not the first lie I ever told, concerned shit. Specifically, the shit in my pants as I told it. What’s most interesting here is not the lie itself, although that too is interesting, but how the lie relates to my success later in life at poker.

Let us begin with the lie. A lie, I have just this moment realized, must always have, for lack of a better term, a liee: a person to whom one lies. Nietzsche observed that the most common lies are those we tell ourselves. Assuming this to be true, which I for one do, it would appear that we often play both roles – liar and liee – a seemingly impossible trick. How do we manage it? I don’t know, let me think a minute.

Okay, I’m done thinking. The trick is no trick at all, for we never truly believe ourselves. Yes, we ACT as if we believe ourselves, but the truth is, we don’t; we’re lying, and deep down we know it.

The key phase is “deep down.” In my newly invented model of a person, there’s a “deep down” and there’s a “not so deep down,” the former being considerably less deep down than Freud’s “unconscious,” which in my newly invented model is known as “very deep down.” Since I can do nothing else, I will ignore the “very deep down” and speak instead of the “deep down.”

For example, right now I can’t obtain a phone. I have this new studio apartment in Williamsburg for which I am paying a sizable rent, but the phone company has been unable to give me a telephone connection. It has been six weeks now, and last week the phone workers went on strike, so it could very well be another six weeks or more before I have this thing that I absolutely must have to do my work. While I wait for a phone, I am living with my girlfriend Susi, who I am slowly driving crazy, and her brother William, who I am slowly driving crazy. Why do I mention this? I mention this to tell you what I did when I discovered that the phone company was on strike and would likely be on strike for many weeks to come: I took a nap. Although it was one o’clock in the afternoon, and although I had a ton of important work to do, I took a nap and slept for something like four hours, sleeping as badly as I have ever slept. When I woke, unrefreshed and barely able to move, I made a decision. My decision was this: Since I am at the mercy of this monolith that cares not a whit for me or my problems, I am going to “make the best of the situation” by “accepting my lot” and “moving on.” Whenever people ask me how I’m dealing with this, I say that I am “making the best of the situation” by “accepting my lot” and “moving on.” More importantly, I repeat these words in my own head whenever the thought begins to occur that I am experiencing a MAJOR DEPRESSION brought on by the UTTER HELPLESSNESS I feel in the face of this SPIRIT-CRUSHING monolith. In other words, I lie to myself. Deep down, I am depressed and enraged, while not so deep down, I am the life of the party, blithely typing one lie-related anecdote after another.

That was a long semi-digression. In fact this whole “deep down” thing has been one long semi-digression. I seem to be in some sort of semi-digression mood. Could it be that I don’t want to tell the story I sat down to tell? That could be, for the story I sat down to tell is yet another in a series of embarrassing stories, all of which I am obliged to tell because I promised myself that I would tell them.

So, fine. The liee was my father. I was much older than I would like to admit, perhaps seven. This is why I say that this not the first lie I ever told, but rather the first lie I REMEMBER telling. Without question, I must have told hundreds if not thousands of lies before this one; however, for better or worse, this is first one I can actually recall, and for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Okay, the liee was my father and I was seven and I had, as you may recall, shit in my pants. How the shit got there is difficult to explain. Many years past the usual age, I would sometimes have “accidents” of this type. No doubt there were reasons for this, and if I ever develop an online journal/report about discipline, I promise to explore them with you. For the present discussion, however, you need only know that this was a known phenomenon: Michael and his occasional “accidents.” Which explains my father’s behavior on noticing an unpleasant odor as I walked though the room in which he sat watching a football game.

”Son,” he said, “did you crap in your pants again?” “No,” I said, feinting incredulity.

Actually, this isn’t true, I don’t think; I don’t think I feinted incredulity at all. Rather I looked at him and calmly said, “No,” believing the low-key approach more convincing. Yes, this is what I did, I’m almost sure of it. In any case, my father didn’t believe me, and for several good reasons: 1. At seven (or however old I was) I was already a known liar, having been nailed for lies large and small, none of which I am able to remember. 2. My father knew about my problem. 3. The smell.

Would a jury of my seven-year-old peers have convicted me? I do not believe so, for there could have been, as unlikely as this seems, another explanation for the smell. Understandably, my father was less generous. “Don’t lie to me,” he said, firmer now. “Did you or didn’t you crap in your pants?”

Here I had a choice: I could admit the lie, for which I would be punished, or I could persist in the lie, for which, if caught, I would be punished more. Being a child, I chose to persist. “No, Dad,” I said, “I didn’t.”

A brief digression here about poker. A surprising number of poker players employ the same unsophisticated tactic as the seven-year-old me. That is, realizing that their bluff is likely to be called, they refuse to fold the hand and instead increase their bets, hoping to scare away their opponents. It is a approach that rarely works.

My father looked at me with real anger, as he was not a man who enjoyed being lied to.

Desperate now, for I knew I was in for a beating, I did the only thing I could think of: I offered to pull down my pants. I even began to do so, unbuckling my belt and starting in on the pants themselves.

”That won’t be necessary,” said my father, and it took all my strength not to cry from relief. Well, maybe it didn’t take all my strength not to cry from relief, I don’t really remember. But I sure as hell remember my father saying “That won’t be necessary.”

Until a few days ago, which is when I realized how relevant this story is to CROWBAR, I was certain that I had succeeded in bluffing my father. But then another interpretation occurred to me, and for these past few days I have gone back and forth between the two, believing one, then the other. The second interpretation, which may have already have occurred to you, is this: my father took pity on me. When I began writing, I still couldn’t make up mind which was true, and I was half-hoping to come to a conclusion in the process of writing. Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened. In fact, I’ve moved even further from deciding, largely because a third interpretation has arisen which I now consider more likely than either of the others: he wanted to watch his game.

Whatever the truth, I have always traced my “inner poker player” to this incident, although in a surprising way. You see, for me this has never been a story of how to WIN at poker but rather how to LOSE. The skilled poker player bluffs as little as necessary to maintain his reputation as a player who’s willing to bluff. Which isn’t to say that he bluffs to get caught. No, he bluffs to “steal” SELECTIVE hands, and is inevitably caught now and then – not a great thing but not an entirely bad thing since it helps later when he has a good hand and wants his opponents to suspect him of bluffing. This contradicts the mythology of poker as presented in stupid films. In stupid films, successful poker players are outrageous bluffers who offer to pull down their pants right and left. This is stupid and wrong and would only work in a world in which no one had ever seen any of these stupid films; a world, moreover, in which people rarely if ever lied.

A world we cannot imagine.