How Lying Can Improve Your Sex Life

It started with a lie. Rather, it started with a dispute, which required a lie to win. We were kids. It was the 1980’s. It was in the playground at the elementary school down the street from our house. There was a cohort of neighborhood boys. We’d rummage around in the bushes that separated one back yard from the next, pretending we were in Vietnam, in the shit, combat soldiers fighting and dying and throwing grenades. My best friend across the street, his dad was a Vietnam vet. It seemed glorious in those days, the 1980’s. Other times we’d be out in the street, riding bicycles, trying to perform the stunts we’d seen in a movie about BMX biking. We played out many adventures in that neighborhood.

On one particular day, we were at the elementary school playground down the street. In those days the whole school yard, two residential blocks squared, were open to the street. No fences surrounding the large field, playground, and black top outside the school where we all used to play, and talk about which horror movies we’d been able to get our eyes on.

So on this day we set up in the playground–towers and bridges made out of big wooden lumber, like railroad ties, that gave you splinters, and steel bars that were scorching hot in summer, all over a pit of gravel. We were peasants in the late 1300’s. We were in the castle courtyard. The towers were our lookout posts, the outer gravel our moat. An army had amassed at the edge of the field. They were fixing to invade us. We took up our posts along the walls of the fortress, grimly regarding destiny summoning itself before us like a storm.

What my brethren didn’t know was that I was a mole. I had perceived that at best by defending our castle I would survive weary and beaten, inheriting a wasteland. By allowing the invaders to enter through a back gate, they would bless me with a piece of their bounty when they had annexed these lands to their very rich kingdom. And so, once the storm unleashed its fury, and my brethren were fighting, falling, and dying from the ramparts of the school yard fort, I snuck away to open the back door. And I was caught by my best friend’s little brother. In a panic and not to be found out, I pinned him to the ground and called the others to my side. I declared that he had opened the back door to the enemy.

Our grizzled company gathered around the two of us, me kneeling on him, he buried in the gravel under me, and I told them he had opened the back gate so that we would be slaughtered and he would be saved. I knew it was a lie. The first of its kind in my life. Blatant and self-preserving. The little brother cried that it wasn’t true. I felt a horrible sense of fraud in my blood. Shame and guilt looking at me through the eyes of all my friends standing above us. But I couldn’t come clean now. I had told the lie, I must see it through. So I insisted that I had caught him there, opening the back gate to the intruders, and the vile act made all the boys curse and kick at my friend’s little brother, and they told him to go be with the enemy hoards he was really working with. Tearfully he got up, and wandered off across the field, crying, making his way back up the street towards his house.

I felt the greatest sense of alleviation. Yes guilt too, but that was buried in comparison to the euphoria, like a sunny breeze, I felt at not being caught. It was a powerful feeling, redirecting ire like that. I was free and clear. Guilt and power at the same time, it was exhilarating.

So I tried it again, with my parents, after I had dumped all the sporting goods out on the floor and left them there in the basement, and they came home exhausted from work, just out of artery-clogging traffic, having to fire up a dinner for five, going to the freezer downstairs, and almost slipping on a baseball. When I got yelled at I said it was my brother. This time it didn’t work as well, and though I didn’t concede, we still both got punished.

And I tried it again with a school monitor. We’d been trying to break in through an unlocked door. It was summer and there was no school. But there was a guy there who, looking back, was probably in his 20’s, though then he was just another old and eternal being known as an “adult”, and when we all crowded around a door and pulled to see if it was open, like a jack-in-the-box he popped out, chased us, and grabbed me. He dragged me back into the school, into an office, and questioned me for names. I lied through my teeth, but he knew I was lying, and kept me there imprisoned until I told the truth. It was the 80’s. You could do that to kids back then. In fact, he already knew our names, he just didn’t tell me that. He waited till I said it. He forced me to tell the truth.

And so my lying days faded away, and I forgot about these stories, until recently.

A young man came to me and asked me for help. I first met him at a Covid post-apocalyptic biohazard themed party at a co-op off Mission St, when I was deep in the trenches of a Molly journey. After that, I’d see him around at a rave in an alley off Folsom, or up in a mansion jungle party in Twin Peaks. He seemed a little naive to me, but his girlfriend was really cool, and as a pair they were fun energy.

Then one misty morning, I ran into him bumming around on Haight St. It was early, so the street was deserted, but he was sitting outside a chained up storefront playing his guitar. Very cliche. I learned he and his girlfriend had just broken up, and now he needed a place to stay.

We have a guest room at our Convent where friends from out of town will come and crash on a certain weekend, or in some cases, we will let out the room for a few weeks when they don’t have a place to stay. In this case, he was willing to pay $1000–most of the money he had left–for a month’s stay while he scrambled to get his life back together.

I meanwhile had been fretting about my own circumstances, and though our trip to Burning Man was only going to cost $500 for the ticket and the camp, a lot of nickel and dime fees were coming up, and I myself was running short on money. That on top of the time I would be missing from work, and I was very concerned.

We pay our treasury through Paypal, and I told him to pay that. But he only used Venmo, so I told him he could forward the money to me through Venmo, and then I would pay our treasury. So he sent me $1000 on the day that I had to purchase both my Burning Man ticket and pay the camp fees. And once I had done that, I no longer had enough money in my checking account to forward his rent for the guest room. So I just pretended like he never sent the money.

And after all these years, I felt that feeling again. That exhilarating feeling of lying and getting away with it. That euphoric feeling of guilt supplanted by victory. It’s a rush. It’s fire. You should try it sometime. It’s adrenaline. It’s like when you are riding a motorcycle, going around a curve, and your wheel pops off a pebble and you lose control for just a second, and panic hits, but then you right yourself, and you are back to life, to safety, the danger behind you now, but the high remains. Low-key I kind of love it.

He came around our building a few times, furious. Our Convent has a big heavy old wooden door, like in a medieval castle, and he came up and rapped on the door knocker till one of the housemates who stay in the front hall answered. At first he demanded to let him in. As the housemate who answered didn’t recognize him, they sent him away. Later he came back and tried to reason with whoever answered the door this time, telling them to ask me, I would vouch for him. This time the housemate said they would ask me, and shut the door in his face. I was worried, but I flat out denied everything, and I got a spike of that high again.

He disappeared for awhile after that, then one morning I was heading out the front door to work and he was lying on the front steps. We made eye contact and he shouted at me, so I slammed the heavy wooden door in his face and snuck out the back courtyard, through the Center’s gate on Fillmore. I thought all this might end in that terrible feeling of being caught, like with the monitor at school that one day. I thought maybe I should come clean. He was wearing me down. Someone was going to learn soon. He was closing in on me.

Then one night we threw a show at our house. His ex-girlfriend came and I learned from her that she’d heard he’d moved back to his hometown, somewhere up by Olympia, Washington. I blew a sigh of relief. I was free and clear again. It was the most intoxicating feeling, like I’d taken a dose of MDMA or something. And that feeling right there caused me to tell her how hot I thought she was, and I spent a good portion of one of the DJ’s sets making out with her among the sweaty bodies.