For many years, my students’ favorite movie was The Usual Suspects. The film stars Kevin Spacey as a criminal with Phil Collins’ hair piece who spins one helluva yarn while being questioned by a slick Chazz Palminteri. Spacey uses physical details from the interrogation room to create a very elaborate lie about who is actually behind drug smuggling, hijacking, murder, and an explosion worthy to be in Michael Bay’s wet dream. My students loved The Usual Suspects because it gave them a hero they could look up to, a guy who could lie on the spot to The Man and get away scot-free with mad money, street cred, and a fairly melodramatic acting performance.
I’ve recently discovered where this impromptu brand of storytelling originates. My wife and I were driving with the kids down Agua Fria at the end of August. Downtown Santa Fe had received a bit of rain and the four of us marveled at the sight of real flowers lining the street and actually blooming in people’s front yards.
“Look! Morning Glories,” Poppy said and pointed to a chain link fence that had been transformed from ghetto to garden by the trumpet-like purple flowers.
“Same kind you cut down with that weed wacker of yours.” Lala shot me a sideways glance and then slowed the van so I could get a closer look at the beauty I had murdered in my quest for backyard dominance.
“Morning Glory is the name of my girlfriend,” London said from the straightjacket we call a car seat.
“Really, what does she look like?” Poppy asked, knowing her brother’s dating history was as dry as the desert she lived in.
London spotted the back of Lala’s head in front of him. “She has yellow hair and…” He noticed the color of the van’s hood and added, “blue eyes.”
“What is she like?”
“She likes sports just like me. She plays, um, um, mailbox catch.” His eyes were fixed on a cluster of letter canisters at the end of a shared driveway.
“That sounds dangerous,” Lala said with a grin.
“The mailboxes are very small,” he whispered, holding his fingers about four inches apart.
Poppy loved to see another kid lying in such an overt manner, and she didn’t want the harmless deceit to end. Happy to play the role of the interrogator, she peppered her brother with leading questions, hoping to stump him. “How old is she?”
We passed address numbers painted on Morning Glory’s mock-footballs. “Ah, well, she’s 14.”
“Wow. That’s old.” Poppy held out her jazz hands in an acting job as overblown as Spacey’s. “What do you guys do?”
“We take walks. Down this street. Right here.” I expected him to add, “where we share the coldest beer in town” because his finger landed on the whitewashed building housing Andy’s Liquorette.
“Where is she now?”
“In Hawaii,” he said. Poppy was wearing a surfing shirt. “Just for one day, though.” For some reason, London felt a one-day trip to the Aloha State would cover up for the fact that none of us had ever seen his half-pint hottie.
As we made our way to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame for dinner, a place where adults were probably concocting their own cock-and-bull stories over Lone Stars at the bar, I felt proud of my little apprentice liar and his attempt to weave a storytelling tapestry from stray threads found right before his eyes. Maybe someday this creativity would lead him to write his own epic novel or Hollywood screenplay or, if nothing else, he could lie his way out of a tight spot if, like other Wilders before him, he happened to land in an interrogation room.