Lies, Whoppers and Tall Tales

It’s open season on George Santos. Yes, he lied. Yes, a lot of the lies were outrageous and absurd. And yes, some of the memes are hilarious.

At first glance.

Although I may have chuckled at a few of them, the overriding emotion for me is sadness.

When I was a junior in college, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment on campus with three other students. When one of them got pregnant and moved home, we found ourselves in need of a fourth roommate.

My work-study job was in the dean’s office at the School of Arts and Sciences where there was a student bulletin board. I tacked up an ad and within a couple of days, a fellow student named Paulette, also a junior, expressed an interest.

Tall with long auburn curls and a bubbly personality, Karen, Patty and I liked her immediately. She was studying to become an accountant and came from a small town south of Pittsburgh where she lived with her dad. Her mother had died when she was nine and although she felt some guilt about “abandoning” her father, the ninety-minute commute four days a week had become too much.

There was no Internet in 1983, so to make sure she wasn’t a serial killer, we asked to meet her dad. After a lovely lunch, we all agreed he was a caring sweet parent who only wanted the best for his daughter. Most importantly, he gave us a year’s rent up front.

Paulette was in.

Patty worked at a drug store near her mother’s house and only stayed in the apartment a couple of nights a week, choosing to crash at her mom’s after a late shift. So, it was Karen and I who came home several nights a week in that first month to find Paulette sweating in the kitchen over an elaborate dinner she’d cooked for us to eat together.

We enjoyed getting to know each other over beef bourguignon and Cornish game hen, often savoring a bottle of wine (also courtesy of Paulette) while we bonded over stories about difficult professors and childhood experiences. We learned Paulette’s mother had succumbed to cancer when she was in fourth grade and how it ultimately brought her closer to her father.

Shortly after she moved in, the conversations began to include flirty giggles about her new boyfriend, Carlos, a Brazilian fitness trainer. She propped up a photo of him on the nightstand next to her bed and regaled us with details of their dates to expensive restaurants.

I was a touch jealous, but Karen didn’t buy the boyfriend saga for one second and swore the photo was one Paulette had clipped from a magazine. “She’s OK looking,” she laughed, “but a buff Brazilian fitness instructor? No way.”

This was the seed for our suspicion that Paulette might not be the person we thought she was.

Not long after Paulette got into a relationship, the home-cooked meals were replaced with little gifts, thoughtful items like journals or jewelry with notes that said, “I thought of you when I saw this.” She stayed at the apartment less frequently, especially on the weekends, but always shared tales of exotic getaways with Carlos upon returning Monday.

Karen and I wanted to take her at her word, but questions asked out of natural curiosity, like “What are you up to today?” led to outrageous explanations. Like the one day she told us she was meeting with the president of a major accounting firm for lunch because he wanted her opinion on how to increase their profits.

After several of these whoppers, Karen morphed into Penelope PI and followed her into town one day where she ostensibly had an appointment with another Pittsburgh business dignitary. Lurking behind her in a black puffer coat, she did everything possible to avoid being found out but had an explanation at the ready just in case.

More than once, she trailed Paulette down Fifth Avenue and played voyeur, watching her disappear into Saks or Kaufman’s. Each time, determined to prove Paulette’s lie, she stood in the cold until our roommate emerged. Karen then followed her home and watched as Paulette placed the shopping bags in the trunk of her car before entering the building. The behavior was as regular as clockwork.

This was the first concrete proof we had that Paulette was a liar, but both of us felt sorry for her. Losing her mother at such a formative age couldn’t have been easy. Was it really that bad she wasn’t always one-hundred percent honest? We’re all entitled to embellish a little to feel better about ourselves, right?

We might have been sympathetic, but this didn’t prevent Karen from taunting her with questions she already knew the answer to, like asking how a meeting went when she’d already spied on her and knew she’d been shopping not strategizing about how to increase profits. It was just so hard to believe that someone our age could be telling tall tales like a four-year-old.

Once, after a hard day of exams, I opened the door to our apartment to find Paulette wearing an apron, decorating what appeared to be a cake she’d baked. “It’s my mother’s birthday today,” she explained. “I’ve baked her a cake every year since she died. Will you guys help me wish her happy birthday? It would mean a lot.” That night after eating Chinese takeout, we sang the birthday song to Paulette’s mother as she quietly cried.

In our teenage naivete and love of drama, we chose to ride the emotional seesaw Paulette brought into our home and it became fodder for great entertainment.

Despite the trinkets Paulette bestowed on us and the now-occasional homemade food, anyone who visited us heard about her make-believe boyfriend. We even created a game where Karen made a statement about her and our friends had to guess whether or not it was true. The losers had to do a shot.

We had lots of laughs at Paulette’s expense.

One day at my work study job, in a large stack of filing, I discovered Paulette’s drop out form from a class due to “withdrawal from the University.” In my 19-year-old glee, I rushed home to tell Karen.

“Let her stew for a bit,” she grinned. “She’ll mess up sooner or later.”

The following afternoon Paulette sat on the living room floor, surrounded by dozens of papers, manically punching numbers into an adding machine. Karen and I were trying to watch The Guiding Light and the tapping and whirring interfered with our ability to hear whether Reva and Josh were getting back together.

“What in the world are you doing?” Karen finally exploded.

“Oh, I’ve been doing an internship at US Steel,” she casually explained. “And they couldn’t figure out why their balance sheet didn’t balance, so my boss asked me to figure it out.” Paulette stayed focused on her task as she continued shuffling papers and performing mathematical operations at warp speed.

Karen and I rolled our eyes at each other. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up the charade, but Karen clearly enjoyed torturing her with ridiculous questions to evoke even bigger lies.

About six months into Paulette’s tenancy, we threw a huge party. Drunk, Karen invited a group into the bedroom to see the photo of Carlos. His handsome Latino face grinned at us through the glass as Karen held the frame while she sat on Paulette’s bed entertaining everyone with what we believed was a made-up love life.

“Take the picture out!” someone said. Karen obliged.

“Oh my God!” she roared. “It’s the photo that came with the frame!”

We all dissolved into fits of laughter. Now we had proof she’d made Carlos up.

Knowing unequivocally that Paulette was lying weakened Karen’s verve for the game, but even she wasn’t cruel enough to call her on the fake photo. Instead, on Monday when Paulette returned with a fresh story of travels with Carlos, she told her we knew she was no longer a student at Duquesne.

“Oh,” Paulette said without batting an eye, “I thought I’d told you. I transferred to Pitt. Their accounting program is so much better.”

Thwarted, and angry about it, Karen was now out for vengeance. Or at least the truth. What began as an innocent game of cat and mouse had somehow morphed into The Hunger Games.

I felt a little apprehensive about how everything might shake out so I asked a psychology professor with whom I was friendly what we should do. He said it sounded like she had some serious psychiatric issues and trying to break her façade could result in a psychotic break, so it was best to find a way to extricate ourselves from the roommate situation. What we thought was a gift of a year’s rent in advance meant we were stuck for another five months.

It was almost like Paulette knew the jig was closer to being up and not wanting to help the cause, she began staying at the apartment even less frequently. During one of her extended absences, she received a piece of mail from the University of Pittsburgh registrar’s office.

Karen had barely looked at the return address before she had the kettle going to steam it open. I vacillated, it being a felony and all, but curiosity won, and we opened the letter to discover she’d withdrawn from school. The reason listed was “due to mother’s death.”

By now, the spring semester was over. Paulette had been showing up when we weren’t home to pick up a piece of clothing or other personal item that we only found out about because she left a note. She hadn’t stayed the night in months.

After an evening at a party in the building, Karen and I arrived home to find every trace of Paulette gone. It was like she’d never been there. Our heads spun like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist. Had we hallucinated the entire time? Was anything she said real? We never saw or heard from her again and messages left on her father’s phone were not returned.

Maturing requires occasional assessment of our behavior and as I’ve thought about Paulette over the years, I have not felt any pride in how I treated her. Looking at the situation from my current vantage point, it’s clear she had some kind of mental illness, and this was in the days of P. O. – pre-Oprah where things like this were not discussed.

Regardless of the reason, she was not well. And I, as a stupid and immature college kid, did nothing to help her. In fact, my smart-ass questions, colluding with Karen and gossiping to anyone who’d listen just to get laughs only hurt her.

This is why I cannot rejoice with the rest of the world that George Santos is being publicly humiliated, despite Bowen Yang’s fabulous SNL cold open last week.

George Santos is not well mentally. Although technically, neither he nor Paulette are pathological liars, I am thankful he is no longer in a position to make laws for our country. My compassion for what drives him to behave this way is colored by my experiences with a 19-year-old girl who wanted, more than anything else, to fit in and be liked.

The bigger the lie, the deeper the self-loathing.

And that is not something I want to laugh at again.

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