And That's Why I Walk With a Limp

Sometimes after dinner at the Kappa house, we play the game Two Truths and a Lie, where one person gives three personal facts and the others have to guess which isn't true. I always tell three lies. Yesterday it went like this: my great-grandfather was one of the first combantants ever to win the Medal of Honor for stopping a German advance in the trenches of Marione in WWI, my mother carried the Olympic torch for the 1996 Olympics, running a little over a mile just outside of Spokane, and the first time I met my ex-girlfriend's parents while eating at Bordino's I accidentally lit her father on fire. They picked the pyrotechnic story. I said no, the story about my mom was the lie. Then I had to describe how I set the father on fire.

Most lies I make up on the go. People ask me questions I don't have the answer to and I start talking. Usually after the second or third sentence I know where I'm going, but sometimes those first two sentences are enough to sink the lie. I had a blind date to my fraternity's formal my freshman year. One of the upperclassmen asked me how long my date and I had been together. I said six months before she had a chance to respond. I spent the weekend creating fictions about our relationship, including setting her dad on fire and getting in a clown car wreck. I finished the story about the clown car by saying, "And that's why I walk with a limp." He told me he always wanted to ask about my walk, but didn't know if it'd embarrass me.

I tell lies all the time. Here, especially. I combine events and change characters and I never get dialogue right. You can't, because real life is boring, and often it doesn't make the point you want it to make. At our last chapter meeting, I was asked to tell a story about formal to get everyone excited. I talked about how last year, Aaron, one of my brothers, and I took two girls from a different school that we had only met once. It was a weekend long double date, and a lot of fun. Look at me. Look how much cooler I was two years later. That could be you someday.

In the end, we waved goodbye to the girls as they got in their car, then we high fived, and never spoke to the girls again. I told this story to emphasize how formal was really all about your brothers.

But it was a lie. Half truth, really. I haven't spoken to my date again; we had a great time, but I'm trying to focus on my career right now. However, last summer when I was in Ireland I met up with Aaron's date. I was studying and she was on a tour. We went to the King's Head pub in Galway to talk. This was the same night that I was pulled aside by a stag party (Irish bachelor party) and harrassed. We made friends quickly, and after talking about American television shows they asked me to come back to their rented penthouse and snort cocaine. At the time I was an office in my fratnerity, and we have by-laws against that sort of thing, so I had to turn it down.

That story is actually the truth.