Lessons From Lucy

by Dave Barry

  But this doesn’t matter in the Virgin Islands, because you’re not there to get anywhere. You’re there to relax and enjoy the natural beauty and consume a rum drink called a “painkiller” that can be used as either a refreshing beverage or an industrial solvent.

  The boat we chartered was a catamaran25 named Good Vibrations. Rest assured that we did not operate it. No charter company on Earth would be stupid enough to entrust a valuable vessel to the likes of us. We had a two-person professional crew. The captain was a native of Guyana named Don Fung Fook. That is his actual name, and in addition to being a superb sailor, he is a cool guy with a great sense of humor. This is fortunate, because if you think it’s possible to be drinking painkillers on a boat named Good Vibrations and not be amused to the point of snot emission at least eight times per hour by the fact that your captain is named Don Fung Fook, then you frankly know nothing about life at sea.

  The chef/social director was a native of Germany named Petra Hess who has lived, worked and partied in the sailing world most of her adult life. She is a wonderful person to have with you on a cruise. She seems to know everybody in the Caribbean, and she is an expert social director. On New Year’s Eve, she took us and Captain Fung Fook to a party at a restaurant on Virgin Gorda called Chez Bamboo, where Petra, an enthusiastic dancer, had us all gyrating like insane people on a dance floor next to a projection screen—set up near the DJ to provide a sophisticated visual backdrop—that kept flashing the words CHEEZ BAMBOO. Every time I saw this I came close to falling down. It was the most fun New Year’s Eve I ever had, and I don’t even remember half of it.

  Anyway, Petra, in addition to her other talents, is a marvelous, professionally trained chef. It is not easy to create meals in the cramped confines of a sailboat kitchen.26 In previous sailing trips to the Virgin Islands, we attempted to prepare our own food, and by the second day we were on a diet consisting almost exclusively of Oreos. But Petra somehow created delicious, sophisticated, varied meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner, day after day. At every meal we gorged ourselves, moaning with pleasure and heaping praise on her. She was always asking us what we’d like to eat next, and we were always saying, “You’re the culinary genius, Petra! Whatever you make, we’re going to love it!”

  Which brings us to the scallops.

  I am not a fan of scallops. Scallops, along with clams, oysters and mussels, belong to a biological class of organisms known, technically, as Phlegms of the Sea. My feeling is, Mother Nature puts these repulsive slimy things inside shells on the ocean floor specifically to prevent us from eating them. Whereas she puts pigs, for example, in accessible locations such as Iowa, where they can easily be converted into delicious pork products such as “rinds.”

  Perhaps you think I am being overly squeamish about scallops. Well, perhaps this is because you are unfamiliar with an article from the March 28, 2013, issue of The Atlantic by Alexis C. Madrigal titled “Did You Know Scallops Have *Eyes*? Me Neither, but Look.”

  Yes! Scallops have eyes! In fact they have many eyes. According to the Atlantic article, a biologist named Sonke Johnsen has studied scallop eyes and has found them to be surprisingly complex. The article quotes this passage about the structure of the scallop eyeball from Sonke’s book The Optics of Life: A Biologist’s Guide to Light in Nature:

  Why the eye needs two retinas, why it uses a mirror, and why what is essentially a glorified clam needs fifty to one hundred good eyes are open questions that another of my former students, Dan Speiser, took on. My favorite experiment of his involved showing scallops movies of food (in the form of particles moving on a computer screen). The scallops, held in little seats, would open their shells to feed if the particles were big enough and not moving too fast . . .

  So to summarize what we have learned:

  1. Scallops are not merely disgusting wads of mucus: they are disgusting wads of mucus that can see.

  2. They can sit in seats and watch movies.

  3. This may explain the popularity of the Transformers franchise.

  OK, that last point is conjecture on my part. But the first two are scientific facts, and I believe they prove my thesis, which is that we, as humans, have no business putting these things in our mouths. I have long felt this way, but I keep my feelings to myself. I understand that there are individuals who actually like scallops, just as there are individuals who like recreational enemas, or communism, or the song “Copacabana.” I feel sorry for these individuals, but I make no effort to correct them.

  So I kept my mouth shut when, one evening toward the end of our week aboard Good Vibrations, Petra announced that she was going to make us scallops for dinner. She was excited about this. She said that she had managed to procure some exceptionally good scallops.

  Now, to me, the concept of an “exceptionally good scallop” is like the concept of an “exceptionally fun prostate exam.” But as I say, I kept my mouth shut. As we sat down for dinner at the table out on the back deck of Good Vibrations, I was counting on my family and my wife’s cousin’s family to shoulder the burden of eating the scallops. Afterward I would join the chorus of voices telling Petra how delicious they were.

  Remember the scene in The Godfather Part II when Michael Corleone—who is with a group of mobsters in Havana attending a show starring a performer known as “Superman” because of his spectacularly large male endowment27—overhears his brother Fredo, who claimed he didn’t know Johnny Ola, telling another mobster that he (Fredo) had previously been taken to this same show by Ola, and in that moment Michael realizes that Fredo has secretly been helping Ola’s associate Hyman Roth, who wants to destroy the Corleone family and tried to have Michael whacked? Remember the look of shock and hurt in Michael’s eyes when he realizes that his own flesh and blood has betrayed him?

  Well, that is exactly how I felt that night when—after Petra set a large steaming platter of scallops on the table—I began to realize that my family was not going to eat them.

  OK, that is not entirely true. My wife ate a few. My cousin-in-law Ron Ungerman bravely stepped up and ate maybe six. But the rest of our party, including my own daughter—my own daughter!—totally betrayed me by not eating any. Meanwhile, Petra kept coming out to check on how we were doing. We kept saying, “Great! Yum!”

  But there’s an old saying in the culinary world: “The platter does not lie.” And our platter still had a lot of scallops on it. In fact it seemed to have more scallops than it started out with, as if the scallops were reproducing, right there in the melted butter. And if you don’t think that cooked scallops can reproduce, may I remind you that you didn’t even know that scallops have eyeballs.

  We were getting desperate. We were hiding scallops under our salads and side dishes, but there wasn’t enough room, because we had eaten almost all of our salads and side dishes. Time was running out. Soon Petra would discover that most of us hadn’t touched the entrée she had worked so hard on and was so proud of. We were doomed.

  Remember Rambo: First Blood Part II, in which John Rambo is parachuted into the jungles of Vietnam, where, without regard for his own safety and generally naked to the waist, he manages, against impossible odds, armed with only a knife and a bow and arrow, plus later a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an attack helicopter, to rescue a group of American POWs and single-handedly wipe out roughly 80 percent of the Vietnamese armed forces?

  Well, that example of selfless courage is very similar to what happened aboard Good Vibrations that evening, when my cousin-in-law Ron—who could have simply told Petra, truthfully, that he ate a bunch of scallops, thus throwing the rest of us under the catamaran—heroically piled a large mound of uneaten scallops on his plate and, at great personal risk of being seen, snuck around to the side of the boat and heaved them overboard.

  We cannot know for certain what happened next underwater. Perhaps there were live scallops on the seabed beneath us; perhaps, with their numerous eyeballs, they saw our discarded scallops drifting down toward them. Perhaps
they were traumatized by this sight. (“My God, is that Gary? THEY KILLED GARY!!”)

  But this is speculation. What we do know is that just as Ron came skulking back from the side of the boat, empty plate in hand, looking extremely guilty, a figure emerged from inside the boat. Fortunately, it was Captain Fung Fook. He took in the scene with the eyes of an experienced mariner and immediately grasped what was going on. Seconds later, as Ron was hastily sliding back into his seat at the table, Petra emerged. She surveyed the now-scallop-free table, and beamed as we showered her with praise and thanks for the fantastic dinner.

  Captain Fung Fook just smiled.

  So here is my point: we were not honest with Petra. Essentially we lied to her. But it was one of those lies you tell not to help yourself, but to avoid hurting somebody else’s feelings. It’s like when your wife asks you if you like her haircut. It doesn’t matter if you like her haircut: YOU LIKE HER HAIRCUT.

  It’s also OK to lie to your wife if she asks you if you were checking out another woman. There are four reasons for this:

  1. You don’t want to hurt your wife’s feelings.

  2. You are not seriously interested in the other woman, because you love your wife, but your nervous system forces you to look at the other woman anyway because millions of years of evolution have turned you into a disgusting pig.

  3. Your wife knows you’re lying anyway.

  4. Your wife routinely checks out other men, although you are unaware of this because she uses a secret, utterly undetectable biological ability women have developed—scientists think it involves a combination of estrogen, infrared light and sonar—that enables a woman to accurately assess a man’s eye color and package size to the cubic centimeter at night at a range of up to sixty yards without ever looking in his direction.

  Another legitimate reason to lie is if you’re a parent. Say you’re watching football on TV, and during a commercial six-year-old Billy asks you what Viagra is. You can’t give a truthful answer to this question. For one thing, you have no child named Billy. For another, age six is way too early for a child to be dealing with the concept of erectile dysfunction. The responsible course is to tell the child an innocent lie, such as “I don’t know,” or “Shut up, I’m watching football,” or “Ask your mother.”

  Likewise if your children ask you if you ever did drugs, you should not answer: “You would not believe what you can see if you stare into a candle flame for three hours!” The correct answer, even if at that very moment you are rolling a joint, is: “No.” (Also correct: “Ask your mother.”)

  Another scenario where it’s OK to lie is when two couples who know each other but are not close friends bump into each other at, say, the movies. After some painfully perfunctory small talk, when it’s clear nobody has anything left to say, it’s traditional for the women to say, sometimes simultaneously, with sincerely feigned enthusiasm: “Let’s definitely get together soon! We always say we’re going to, but this time let’s really do it!” It’s OK to tell this flagrant lie because it’s way less awkward than the truth, which is: “We have exhausted our supply of mutually interesting conversation topics in under three minutes, so there’s no need for us to speak again for a minimum of two years.”

  Also, if a person asks you if you think he or she is an idiot, it’s best to answer no, even if you do, in fact, think the person is an idiot.

  Also, if somebody texts you something meant to entertain you, it’s OK to text back “LOL” even if you are actually OMA (Only Mildly Amused).

  Also, if somebody gives you a gift, you should declare that you’re delighted, even if you’re not. The only exception is when a husband gives his spouse something that he clearly bought for himself. For example, I had a newspaper colleague whose big Christmas gift to his wife one year was a chain saw. I’m not suggesting here that no woman would want a chain saw; I’m sure there are plenty of women who would cherish receiving a chain saw. But my colleague’s spouse was not one of them. She did not pretend to be delighted. My colleague was lucky she didn’t use her gift to dismember him.

  I could go on, but you see my point: there are some situations when lying is better than not lying. In most of these situations, the primary reason for the lie is not to benefit you, but to avoid hurting the feelings of somebody else. Otherwise, it’s almost always better to be honest with people—better for them, and better for you.

  So the Lesson from Lucy for this chapter is:

  Don’t Lie Unless You Have a Really Good Reason, Which You Probably Don’t.

  There are two main reasons why you shouldn’t lie to benefit yourself:

  1. It’s wrong.

  2. It’s stupid.

  It’s wrong because even if a lie helps you, it deceives somebody else, and it undermines the trust that holds us all together. If we can’t trust each other, we can’t work with each other, learn from each other, enjoy each other, love each other. Lying makes the world a dodgier, crappier place.

  Most of us know this, but a lot of us lie anyway. We figure our lies are OK, because we’re not really bad people, and besides, we’re clever, so the people we’re lying to won’t know. Which may be true in the short run. But if you keep lying, which is an easy habit to get in to, you will become a dodgier, crappier person—untrustworthy, furtive, unsure of who you are, afraid of being exposed. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. If you lie a lot, no matter how clever you think you are, people will figure you out. That’s why lying, in addition to being wrong, is stupid: you lose whatever advantage you thought you’d gain from the deception, AND people know you’re a liar. This is especially true if you habitually lie to impress people. Nothing is less impressive than a person who is obviously trying to impress.

  People really dislike being lied to. In my experience, they’re likely to forgive you for doing something wrong if you admit it; they’re far less forgiving if you do something wrong and lie about it. This is one reason why Washington, DC, is wildly unpopular. There is no American institution more monumentally incompetent than the federal government, yet if we are to believe the people in charge of it—I’m talking about both parties—they, personally, have never made a single mistake. Of course my point is that we don’t believe them; we despise and ridicule them, clever as they believe they are.

  So don’t be like our political leadership. Be like Lucy. As the saying goes, if you mess up, fess up. Whenever you can, tell the truth. And do not be afraid to say these words:

  I was wrong.

  I made a mistake.

  I’m sorry.

  I apologize.

  I’m not saying people will always forgive you. But at least they’ll know, and you’ll know, that you didn’t lie to them.

  As with the other Lessons from Lucy, I’ve been pondering whether I need to do a better job of applying this one to my own life. I like to think I’m a pretty honest person. Granted, over the course of my journalism career I wrote thousands of newspaper columns filled with lies, but except for the truly humor-impaired, I think most of my readers knew I was kidding.

  In my personal life I try to tell the truth. I think this is one benefit of growing older. Children, even though they’re supposed to be more innocent, lie all the time—to impress, to avoid blame or just for the fun of it. As we age, most of us, unless we are destined to join our nation’s leadership class, discover the drawbacks to lying, and learn that, if nothing else, it’s just easier to tell the truth.

  So I think I’ve learned this lesson pretty well, although I can do better. I’m pretty honest, but I’m still, out of arrogance and stubbornness, too slow to admit when I’m wrong, and too reluctant to apologize. I need to work on that. In fact I’ll start now, with this apology:

  Petra, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for lying to you that night at dinner. It seemed like the right thing to do. I still think maybe it was, at the time, but now I’ve blown it by revealing what happened in this book. I hope that, since time has passed, and since you know how much my family loves
you, you will find this story amusing. But if you don’t: I am genuinely sorry. You are a great cruise director and a fantastic chef. We will definitely cruise with you again. And next time, I will try the scallops.

  OK, that last sentence is a lie.

  * * *

  24 Technically, this is called “keelhauling.”

  25 Technically, a catamaran is “a kind of boat.”

  26 Technically called a “scupper.”

  27 Technically calleWell, that is exactly d a “yardarm.”

  EPILOGUE

  I’m skeptical about self-help books. Over the decades, on book tours and at book events, I’ve encountered many self-help authors, and a remarkably high percentage of them did not strike me as competent, good or even necessarily sane human beings.

  Years ago, on a local-TV morning show in a midmarket city, I saw a self-help author go in front of the camera and tell the viewers, in a calm, confident, authoritative tone, exactly how they needed to change their lives to become happier, better people. Minutes later, in the greenroom, this author flew into a nasty, screaming, eyes-bulging, water-bottle-throwing rage at his publicist—you would have thought she murdered his entire family and ate his cat—because one of his local radio interviews had been canceled.

  According to book publicists I’ve talked to, incidents like this are not uncommon. I’m not saying that all self-help-book authors are hypocritical assholes interested only in helping their own selves. But enough of them are that it’s a joke in the publishing world.

  So as I say, I’m skeptical about self-help books.

  And here I’ve gone and written one.

  In my defense, I intended this to also be a funny book about dogs and people and life in general, and I hope it is. But it’s also self-help-y, and—I cannot deny it—maybe even a little preachy in places. So let me stress here that I do not consider myself a wise person or an authority on anything except maybe the lyrics to Beach Boys car songs from 1963. I certainly do not consider myself qualified to tell you how to live your life. I decided to write Lessons from Lucy because I thought, as a guy getting up in years, that my own life could be happier, and that maybe I could learn something useful about happiness from my aging but consistently joyful dog.