One day when I was eight, I walked up to the drug store on the corner of 54th Street and Penn Avenue. A guy named Pete owned the store, and when he wasn’t looking, I experimented with crime. I would stand at the rack of comic books, and glance furtively to my right at the rack of candy bars. I would pretend to be looking over the comic books, as if trying to decide if I would buy the new Batman or the new Superman. When Pete looked away, I would snitch a Baby Ruth bar and cram it down my pants.
On the way home, as I walked down the hill to Newton Avenue, I would peel back the red and white wrapper, exposing that bumpy confection. Maybe it was because the candy bar was stolen, the honeyed fruit of an unearned reward, but it always tasted sweeter, richer than the ones I bought. And I would relish the Baby Ruth bar all the way down the hill, reveling in the fact that I had committed the perfect crime.
In school, on television, at home, and at church various authority figures were busily trying to teach me, and other kids, that crime did not pay. “There is no such thing as a perfect crime,” they said. “You will get caught. And if you don’t get caught, some day your conscience will make you feel so guilty that you’ll turn yourself in,” they said. These adult authorities assured us kids that everyone operated this way, but their statements jarred with my experience. By the way, this is not someday, and this is not my confession of being a thief.
I thought about dishonesty hard one day, on the way to the drug store; I knew that there was such a thing as the perfect crime, because I had committed several of them. I never felt guilty about it either. So I came to the conclusion that one of two things was true. Either something was seriously wrong with me, or the adults in my life were lying.
From what I could tell, I was like other kids: young, impulsive, full of energy, and, generally, out for a good time. Stealing was fun — there was fear, an adrenaline rush, a heightened sense of awareness, and the reward of the “goods” each and every time I got away clean. I decided that there was nothing wrong with me. So I started to look more closely at what adults were telling me.
At school they said, “The policeman is your friend.” This was the mid-sixties, and every single night the news brought images of cops beating the living snot out black people who were marching for equality. The cops also beat long-haired college kids who were exercising their First Amendment Rights. When the cops weren’t beating people on the news, they were tossing tear gas into crowds and turning loose mean looking German Shepherds.
And then there was Santa Claus; he had turned out to be completely bogus. A complete and utter fraud with a phony beard and gin on his breath. The Easter Bunny, likewise, was a lie the adults perpetuated without a thought. The Tooth Fairy was, in actuality, my mom, and it just didn’t seem reasonable that she spent her nights traveling all over the world replacing teeth with quarters. Don’t get me wrong, my mom was strange enough to do just that, but I knew she loved her sleep too much, and she was always home in the mornings fixing breakfast when I woke up. A radius of six blocks seemed reasonable, as it would give her time to do the quarter-for-a-tooth switch and still get a good night’s rest. The problem was that I knew kids who believed in the tooth fairy and lived farther away than six blocks.
The "tooth fairy" is perhaps the diciest lie adults tell their kids, because it requires a deception on an intimate level. The adult must stoop down to slowly, carefully remove a small tooth from under the pillow upon which an innocent child lies her head. And then it requires the same insanely careful stealth to place money where the tooth recently lay. Surely the adult holds his breath the entire time. Surely the adult keeps her eyes on the closed eyes of her child, while praying the child's eyes remain closed and carefree. And then there's that weird lesson the child learns that body parts are actually worth money.
By the time I was eight-years-old, I learned one of the most life-shaping lessons we learn — adults lie, and they seem to think it’s all right. After all, when confronted with the truth about Santa Claus, adults always toss it off as inconsequential. Something humorous and harmless, except that the kid knows about the one, two, or three years she pretended to still believe in Santa so all those presents under the tree would continue to flow.
Worse yet, I realized that adults had been lying to me the entire span of my eight years. They started, it would seem, the moment I slipped out of my mom all pink and gooey. Whenever I cried, they told me things would be all right, but, let’s face it, we live in a world that at its core is dishonest, unfair, chaotic, and mean. "Things" aren't all right and I seriously doubt they will ever be all right.
Lying leads to cheating and cheating leads to stealing. We learn that lesson at a very young age. We can trace it back, through generations, and, ultimately, reach the conclusion that Adam and Eve must have been dishonest. If they did, indeed, exist. When it comes to Adam and Eve there is plenty of room to figure they were made from the same wispy smoke that was used to create Santa Claus.
Kids grasp the truth if it’s expressed to them in words they understand. Even so, we continue to teach our children to be dishonest in a myriad of ways, and the result is we never tell other people who we really are. We continue to lie, cheat, and steal; all the while telling ourselves that we are honest, God-fearing folk. What a twisted web we weave…
