Being a good liar can be a curse. My high school friend Jeff wasn't exactly a compulsive liar, he just lied all the time because he got a little thrill each time he got away with it, which he mostly did. The first time I saw him lie, as far as I know, it was for no discernible purpose. We were teenagers and we were riding our bikes back to my house one night. There was no moon and it was hard to see, and Jeff banged his knee on a car fender. When we got home, there was a thin stream of blood running down his leg. My mother asked him what happened, and he said, "I had some swelling in my knee, which turned out to be some sort of rare infection, and the doctor who treated me said it might drain like this from time to time." My mother smiled, wished him well, and walked back into the kitchen.

            "Why did you say that?!" I said. He just shrugged.

            But that's when I began to notice that he always had some outrageous story to tell. "I held my own in a pick-up game with three NBA players." "I got to drive a Formula 1 race car around the Indy 500 track when my family lived in the Midwest." "I was an extra in a western movie with Jack Palance." Fantastic lies, some verifiable and some not, all designed to create a grandiose biography, larger and more impressive than the boring suburban lives he and I shared that consisted of nothing more exotic than school, teen club at the community center, Friday nights with girlfriends at IHOP.

            But he kept it up into adulthood, and he eventually lied himself into a successful career. After a summer internship with a headhunting firm that served the telecommunications industry, he came to know which employers bothered to verify resume claims and which did not. He once bragged to me about his falsified employment history – the sales and marketing position at IBM, the teams of programmers he supervised, the product launches he managed. When he told me that he was making six figures in a job both he and I knew he was wholly unqualified for, I believed him because I knew how skillful he was at this game, even though with Jeff, it was impossible to tell what was true. I could certainly imagine him avoiding discovery through a deft combination of glad-handing, bluster, and the mastery of industry jargon. The telecommunications economy was awash in cash, and he could have easily landed atop a card house of stature and reputation having ridden a wave of unlimited dollars put up by bored rich kids who fancied themselves venture capitalists. Whenever Jeff's name came up in conversation, my brother, who knew him and didn't like him very much, would ask, "So, how is the King of Sweden."

            I wasn't jealous of his bullshit career, that corporate world was not for me, but I'll admit I did envy – to a point - the overactive romantic and sexual life he was able to create through his fabrications. Armed with a few expensive suits, a leased BMW, and several connections at fancy restaurants, he wooed never less than three women at a time with tales of his international travel (Israel, Thailand, South Africa, all lies), his Ivy League and art school education (lies), and the entrepreneurial ventures he bought and sold, not just in telecomm, but also in art importing, publishing, and urban design (lies, lies, and lies). When any of these women discovered he was two-timing them, he crafted an exculpatory web of falsehoods that would leave the aggrieved girlfriend feeling sorry for him, which would lead to frenzied break-up sex and an ongoing friendship. In these instances, he tearfully trotted out tales of childhood trauma, sex and love addiction, recent deaths in the family – and he could cry on demand – and never had to stand to account for anything. He juggled so many current and former girlfriends, not to mention the ones in the wings he was always cultivating, that he had no time for male friends or work colleagues or any relationships that didn’t involve manipulating his next conquest into bed. At one point, I realized that I was his only friend, and I hung on for the entertainment value, just to see what he would do next. He could be fun to be around, but there were times when it was difficult to be his friend, because whenever he said something, my first thought was, "That could be true." I tried not to take him, or our friendship, too seriously.

             But then he got sick. One late afternoon, he passed out in the men's room at work. He told me later that he thought it might be AIDS because he hadn't been particularly careful with his multiple partners, and he had recently been losing a lot of weight. I immediately thought he was lying about the seriousness of his situation to make it sound more tragic than it was, but later, I felt a little guilty when it turned out he was really sick. After a series of tests, he was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer that had metastasized, and was given months to live, maybe a year if he was lucky. The cancer was too advanced and widespread for chemotherapy, so he went back to his apartment after a short stay in the hospital, but when he became too weak to care for himself, he landed back in the hospital's hospice facilities on the fifth floor.

            People from his work visited at first, but they drifted away because either they were not particularly close, or they were resentful of his inexplicable career and were secretly happy to be done with him. He couldn't call most of the women in his life because the insanely convoluted and contradictory tangle of lies that maintained those relationships had begun to fray. At one point, he confided to me that he was resigned to dying alone, as both his parents were deceased and he had no family to speak of, although I couldn't be sure if that was true. I would visit, sometimes, but I was the only one, and soon, even I came less and less frequently.

            The last time I visited Jeff, I stood out of sight by the door to his room and listened while he regaled three nurses with his usual litany – the exotic travel, the high-flying corporate success, and all the rest of it. I wondered if they knew he was making it all up, and because he was dying, decided it didn't really matter anyway and they would let him have his fun. When he described the boating accident that never happened that took the wife and daughter he never had, I walked away without letting him know I had been there. Let him die as he lived, ingratiating himself to anyone who would listen in the hopes of a meager dose of connection, esteem, and compassion.

Alan Brickman works with nonprofit organizations on strategic planning and program evaluation. Raised in New York, educated in Massachusetts, he now lives in New Orleans with his 17-year old border collie Jasper, and neither of them can imagine living anywhere else. Alan's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Heist, Variety Pack, SPANK the CARP, Evening Street Press, Sisyphus Magazine, and Random Sample Review, among others. He can be reached at alanbrickman13@gmail.com