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Lie | Mar 05 2002

Beginning from when I was six, I worked every Sunday at my father’s pharmacy. This arrangement lasted just a few years, because my father’s pharmacy failed. Later he bought another pharmacy, and that one failed too. I believe he bought four pharmacies in all, all of which failed.

One of my jobs at my father’s pharmacy was to dust all the empty prescription bottles, the glass ones. My father had hundreds and hundreds of these bottles, in various sizes, arranged in rows under the counter where he prepared prescriptions.

Another job I had (I just remembered this) was counting pills for prescriptions. It was illegal for me to do this—you have to be a pharmacist to count pills—so I couldn’t do it when other people were around. Looking back, I see that this was the pharmacy equivalent of sitting in my father’s lap and steering his car as he drove.

The counting of pills involved a special plastic pill-counting tray. It was blue and had an alley on one side into which you slid the counted pills. Since you weren’t allowed to touch pills with your fingers, you glided the pills with an implement much like a butter knife. The alley had a clear plastic flap that closed over it. After you finished counting the pills, you shut the flap and poured the pills into the appropriate bottle or vial. My father let me do the pouring, but I wasn’t allowed to type the label. That’s where he drew the line. You have to be a pharmacist to type a label.

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My father’s pharmacy had a back room with a cot where my father liked to sleep in the afternoon. Another one of my jobs was to wake the man every half-hour and have him tell me to wake him in another half-hour. With the exception of these periodic attempts to wake my father, I wasn’t permitted in the back room.

One day, though, while dusting empty prescription bottles, I said something to my father that compelled him to take me to the back room and shut the door behind us. I don’t remember what I said, but it must have been pretty interesting, because as soon as we got to the back room, my father sat me on the cot and told me the craziest thing. He said that sometimes he and mother want to be close, as close as they can be, and so what happens is that he puts his penis inside her vagina, because that’s as close as they can be, and then some stuff that isn’t pee comes out of his penis and goes into my mother, and somehow this stuff finds an egg and helps make it into a baby.

My father asked me if I understood, and I said that I had, and then we went back to what we were doing right before my father decided to tell me this.

Naturally I knew my father was lying. I may have been only six, but I wasn’t so easily fooled. The question, though, was why my father had lied to me. Or more to the point, what was his lie meant to conceal?