What we want is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, no? Or at least as much of it as a lie can reveal.
My middle name, for example, has attracted attention since my first day of school at Our Lady of the Divided Nuns Roman Catholic Prep School and Wine Cellar.
By then, I’d already had five years in which to become confused. Laurence Larry Lanc. Same thing, only different. Which one was I? The answer to that depended on what day it was, who I was with, what clothes I wore, what I ate for lunch. Mythical kids who tossed marbles on the dusty sidewalk around the corner from Murray’s Grocery called me Hairy Larry, not so much because it rhymed, which kids always like to do, but because I was already growing hair on my chest. It had something to do with eating burnt toast, I think. At least, that’s what my mother told me whenever she burned the toast.
On the first day of school ... Divided Nuns making a habit of themselves ... both my father and mother escorted me into the classroom. That alone was enough to cause a sensation. But then my father had to go and say, “‘Bye, Lanc, be a good boy.” Little did he know he had condemned me to a life of crime. Before I sat down I could hear the tittering.
“Lanc! Lanc the Plank! Lanc Stank!”
“Lanc the Wank!” (An epithet I could never let pass without inflicting a black eye, usually on myself.)
Where in God’s tattered creation did that name come from?
Let me tell you.
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