True Lies

Sometimes it seems my lot in life is to keep other people's stories straight for them.

I tend to listen when people talk. You're supposed to do this to be polite but, it also helps in evaluating people and figuring whether you can trust them or not. It's always good to know how far you can throw them if need be.

Take the "psychologist/therapist" from the Amy/Abby threads. She's always French (for what that is worth) but she's sometimes born and raised in France and sometimes born and raised in America. But always French. Her birthplace and country of upbringing change whenever she is stumped by something pertaining to American pop culture. She was, for example, unfamiliar with the Madeline series of books for girls of grammar school age about a girl growing up in a boarding school in Europe. Now, i only know about these books because over the years my nieces have discussed them. They're kinda big in Europe as well as here and have been made into TV shows and films. I would bet that little French girls read them as well as, I believe, much of the story is set in France.

Well, I guess she had her little French head buried in books about Freud and Nietzsche all that time. And, when the American gym class sport of dodgeball came up, she had no knowledge of it (despite having suddenly been born and raised in America) because she had led a sheltered life in expensive private schools where such activities were not pursued. Okey dokey. Whatever floats one's yacht, I always never say.

But, enough about her. If you can fathom a "psyhcologist/therapist" who has zero knowledge of serial killer Ted Bundy, you've been way over served your bubble tea.

This is about a liar I worked with whom I'll call Ricky Varnish. Varnish is not his real name but it's real close and I'm being cute here because he used to paint with me and, when I wasn't calling him "Preacher my ass!", I was telling him he should tell people his name was "Varnish" cause he liked to varnish the truth. I was being polite with that last comment. The guy was what we in the business call "a fucking liar".

Ricky was a con man. He liked to portray himself as a preacher. There seemed to be one of those on every crew I worked on. Usually they were recovering alcoholics/drug addicts who, as part of getting straight, had to find Jesus. (Good for anyone who does find Jesus in the bottom of a whiskey bottle or at the end of a crack pipe. Good luck to you! No, I can't loan you $20 but I'm VERY happy for you!) But, Ricky took the presentation one step further. He had his own church. Not many guys went that far.

I don't recall where it was. Why remember a place that doesn't exist? He talked about it all the time though 'cause if people hear something often enough, they are inclined to believe it. You know- like if you want people to believe you are French, for example, frequently mention that you are French and- Viola!- you are French!

What Ricky wasn't good at was reciting passages from the Bible. Leastways, he never did this around me. I'm not at all religious and I can easily be fooled by phony bible verses. I think that John 3:16 means "Kick it HERE!" I didn't much care about his full-of-baloney calling. I wasn't buying it and he wasn't trying to sell it to me. I don't think the guy ever hit me up for money though he was into most everyone else on the crew for $20 or more even though few believed he was the least bit Christian, much less a minister. He saved the sizzle on his cheeseburgers for people with more money than us painters. He solicited "donations" for "(his) church" from the tenants whose lease's we were painting. It's not unusual in the south for a guy to have a little store-front church and a full time job. I worked with a couple of Black dude's whom I didn't doubt really were preachers with their own church. One of them, Jerry, regularly regaled us with scripture. He even rebuked me in the name of Jesus once. I was his boss but I wasn't in charge of paying him. My job was to tell our boss that he couldn't paint for shit and our boss decided to pay him a very low wage. Jerry had managed to get hired without bothering to nail down what his pay would be. It probably says somewhere in the bible that you shouldn't do that but our little Ceasar of a boss rendered unto Jerry what you might pay a guy just starting out in the trade though Jerry had his sights set on Ferrerman money. That wasn't ever gonna happen. I hoped that Jerry hadn't painted his own church but, that might have been where his "seven years" of experience came from. The guy was slow...

Ricky didn't earn his money either but he had some talent as a painter. Mostly though, he was able to talk his way through a job. At our last job together, it took FIVE tries to fire him. He kept talking his way back to work. A foreman would fire him and the boss would listen to him, feel bad for him, and send him to another foreman.The lead foreman fired him twice before it took. And when he was finally fired- for eternity this time- he talked his way into a maintenence position at the church my company was doing a massive remodel for. He also talked their minister out of $500 he needed to get the lights turned on at his home so that his fiance who was dying of cancer could have heat and light to read the good book by...and he never showed again.

No doubt a crack dealer got that money. There was no fiance. Ricky was a crackhead. He was one of those that would binge and purge. He appeared normal compared to most that I've known- just goofy. Really goofy when you consider that during one of his purge periods he managed to blow $2000 in one night at a titty bar outside Dothan Alabama without even, um, getting blown, according to the fella's with him that night. Only an INSANE crackhead wastes money like that! You had to question his commitment to the drug. The two G's had probably come from donations he had received for the victims of a tornado that had hit a nearby Alabama town that year. Maybe some of those victims had only g-strings to wear...

You just never know. I like to err on the side of caution. From the safety of the internet people can be what they want to be. This side of a Nigerian Prince, who cares? But if I ever work with another painter who tells me he's a preacher, I'll tell him the Ricky Varnish story. I might then give him twenty bucks just to go away.