7
“Big down here,” he said.
8
“All this junk, man. I gotta get rid of it.”
9
“Why? You gonna rent to that white man?”
10
“No,” I lied.
11
I’ve lied all my life. To my parents and teachers and 12
friends at school. I lied about being sick and not coming 13
in to work, about romantic conquests, my salary, my fa-14
ther’s job. I’ve lied about where I was last night and where 15
I was right then if I was on the phone and no one could 16
see me. I have lied and been called a liar and then lied 17
again to cover other falsehoods. Sometimes I pretend to 18
know things that I don’t know. Sometimes I lie to tell 19
people what I think they want to hear.
20
It’s not such a bad thing — lying. Sometimes it pro-21
tects people’s feelings or gives them confidence or just 22
makes them laugh.
23
But I never told a lie like that one-word fib to Ricky about 24
Anniston Bennet. Somehow I knew that I shouldn’t talk 25
about the little man who calls from Arabia about a base-26
ment sublet. I wanted to keep those cards close to my vest.
S 27
R 28
3rd Pass Pages
ManInMyBasemnt_HCtext3P.qxd 10/24/03 8:16 PM Page 52
Walter Mosley
1
“Damn, you got some old stuff down here,” Ricky was 2
saying.
3
“Junk.”
4
“Uh-uh, man. This is antique-quality shit.”
5
“Shit is right.”
6
“No, Charles. These old dolls and wood toys are valu-7
able. So’s the furniture, the trunk, probably the clothes in 8
the trunk, and maybe even these old paintings. You can’t 9
tell, man. These people out here spend five hundred dollars 10
on an old broked-down chair in a minute.” Ricky had lived 11
his teenage years in Brooklyn with his father. The way he 12
talked was different than the way most of my friends did.
