Pants on fire

To be a reporter is to tell The Truth. All. The. Time. It's a worthy, earnest, and dull trade. The endless prim and proper of professional goodie-goodiness.

Makes me want to lie. But of course, I would be pilloried in a world where a reporter's truth has become a hysterical imperative. Only a handful can lie and be lauded for it. Like the late Hunter S. Thompson, who made it all up and became a journalistic hero.

"This seems like a good place to bring up the issue of the real vs. fantasy in Hunter’s pieces," writes one-time Rolling Stone editor-type Robert Love as he recalls efforts to turn screed onto genius. "In his 1974 Playboy interview, Hunter said: 'Unlike Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese, I almost never try to reconstruct a story. They're both much better reporters than I am, but then, I don't think of myself as a reporter.' Hunter called himself a doctor of journalism, but his specialty was something quite different, 'part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention and wilder rhetoric,' as Tom Wolfe rightly called it. In my own experience, the dividing line between fact and fancy rarely blurred, and we didn't always use italics or some other typographical device to indicate the lurch into the fabulous. But if there were living, identifiable humans in a scene, we took certain steps. (And sometimes it wasn't obvious. He did, after all, talk football with Nixon for an hour and a half in New Hampshire in 1968, and he knew Jackie Onassis; but he totally made up the fact that Senator Edmund Muskie had overdosed on the hallucinogen ibogaine during the 1972 primaries.) Hunter was close friends with many prominent Democrats, veterans of the 10 or more presidential campaigns he covered, so when in doubt, we'd call the press secretary. 'People will believe almost any twisted kind of story about politicians or Washington,' he once said, and he was right."

Love may believe the fact-fiction line was obvious, but sometimes the real was deleted altogether by editors. Thompson once scribbled to his copy boss: "But what the fuck am I suppose to think when I see that YOU have very shrewdly cut (dropped, deleted, excised (sp?) 'edited out') the only two pages I’ve sent that have anything to do with real events that occurred on either the DAY or the NIGHT of November 3 at Clinton headquarters in Little Rock (see attached/below Pages 26 & 27 -- which I wrote and & planned & intended to be my LEAD INTO Election Day/Night...."

And here: "Fact-checking Hunter Thompson was one of the sketchiest occupations ever created in the publishing world. For the first-timer, it was a trip through a journalistic fun house, where you didn't know what was real and what wasn't. You knew you had better learn enough about the subject at hand to know when the riff began and reality ended. Hunter was a stickler for numbers, for details like gross weight and model numbers, for lyrics and caliber, and there was no faking it.

"In 1982, Hunter was on assignment to cover the Palm Beach divorce trial of Roxanne and Pete Pulitzer, and he decided early on he wanted to call the piece 'A Dog Took My Place.' When I phoned the magazine's libel attorney, Victor Kovner, to tell him, I heard only a sharp intake of breath, and then Victor's sonorous $300-an-hour-best-legal-advice basso profundo voice. 'Great title. Too bad you can't use it.'" Bestiality's not a smart bet in court.

"After he calmed down, Hunter had written a new set piece, a 30-paragraph digression to justify keeping the title. In the new insert, he meets a surly bartender in the middle of the day and the man, enraged by the excesses of the rich and powerful in Palm Beach, lunges over the bar at Hunter, grabs him, and begins screaming about the Pulitzers and their like: 'I look at this scum,' he screams, 'and I look at the way they live and I see all those shit-eating grins on their faces and I feel like a dog took my place.'

"This was a classic Thompson melee, a violent confrontation conducted over a counter of some sort that separates the authority from HST and produces truth for the reader, vindication for Doc, and abject humiliation for the poor sot who threatened him. In the encounter, Hunter then slaps the man, grabs him by the flesh of his cheek, douses him with mace, and threatens to rip his nuts off. Then Hunter squeezes off the final insult. 'You must be a lawyer.... What's your name? I work for the IRS.'

"Necessity, in this case, was the mother of some fine gonzo writing." Er, "gonzo." That would mean "lies."

Or take the journalism of the fabulously famous fiction writer, the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote profiles of villains for a newspaper in the 1930s, from Billy the Kid to the Tichborne Claimant. And included some big fat lies.

They led to great acclaim.

"I should define as baroque that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities and which borders on its own parody," Borges wrote in a later introduction to the collected stories of "A Universal History of Infamy."

"The very title of these pages flaunts their baroque character. To curb them would amount to destroying them.... They are the irresponsible game of a shy young man who dared not write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and distorting (without any esthetic justification whatsoever) the tales of others."

I am not worthy of such great heights of fabrication.

And so instead, I lie in conversation. Just little lies. Goofy, obvious things. They burble out before I can stop them.

Asked once whether I get my shirts dry cleaned, I said no -- that I'd just grabbed this out of the laundry basket. It was instantly exposed as a lie -- the shirt was new, so finely pressed no human hand could have ironed out the creases or so sharpened its angles. My interlocutor didn't call me on it -- she let it go.

They always do.