A Story Tellers Story

Trying to sort out how someone like me landed here with you

I think storytelling hinges as much on who's telling it as it does on the tale itself. Are you a character in it or simply a narrator?

Did you know that con-artist is literally a synonym for storyteller? I just read that in my thesaurus app after I had decided to write this and I cannot tell you how amused I am by that. I suppose I was meant to write this one.

About storytelling:

“Oral storytelling is telling a story through voice and gestures. The oral tradition can take many forms, including epic poems, chants, rhymes, songs, and more”

-something I copied and pasted from National Geographic

While that's all well and good, they missed the part where oral storytelling can be used to misdirect, pretend, hide and outright lie. All of those positive qualities can be weaponized for other purposes. That's where I come in.

Before I could be a storyteller, I first had to be a liar. Something I was (and still am) incredibly effective at doing. I once got a ride home from a cop when I was actually the person he was looking for. He started out suspicious of me but by the time I was done I was solidifying my permanent removal from his suspect list by guilting and pressuring him into giving me a ride.

I did stuff like that a lot.

However, cons like that weren't actually the origin, were they? I had to learn that skill somewhere.

If I'm free to self analyze, which I recognize as universally annoying, I'm going to go back to my earliest memories and guess at my development even before then.

I think that my earliest stories were from when I learned how to endear adults to me as a means of getting them to take care of me. Even in my earliest memories I knew how to identify what they liked and to mimic that because it would get them to look after me. While this playing a character survival trick was completely ineffective on my mom, it worked on our neighbors very well.

Before I was even in kindergarten I was already responsible for things like feeding myself in my own house like a scavenger. However, the people who lived around us would make me meals. All it took was random hugs and saying “wow” a lot. That eventually morphed into interacting with any adult who had something I wanted as if they were my parent. I wouldn't call them mom or dad but I'd act just like I was their child and some instinctive part of their brains caused them to look out for me. My earliest lies (stories) were me pretending to be everyone's son.

Now that we have my best guess at the foundation, it's time to start getting the frame of the house together. This is where we get into learned behavior. Let's talk about the 80’s and 90’s Projects. My nature may have been adaptability, but this skill set is purely nurture.

Male Hood culture is a storytelling culture. I'm not unique amongst the men on those streets. All day and every night we were out there in groups and crowds chopping it up with each other while in a constant competition for top spot. There, where hyper-1masculinity determines your success or failure, you learn how to spin your own tale. You become adept at making yourself bigger than life and doing so in a way that's engaging rather than alienating.

You'll tell a story about a guy you beat up once and that'll be it. Just the fight. I'd tell the same story and work in how his girl was watching me the entire time. A detail that's completely impossible to verify yet adds weight to my goal of social elevation. Hood story telling surrounds indisputable facts with bullshit details. Knowing how much to use is the art form. Too little and it has no impact but adding too much leaves you open for one of the listeners to raise themselves up through tearing you down.

It's the best schooling you could imagine. An audience who is simultaneously interested in the story while looking for an opportunity to discredit you at the same time. Everyone should have at least a few adversarial friends.

But that's not where my project ends. Oh no no no. Now that we've covered a survival based foundation and the socially motivated structure built on top of that, we now have to decorate the house. We gotta put our stuff in it.

This is where we cover that acting is just a form of storytelling. It's not enough to simply have the right words. You need the inflections, the body language, the tone and ability to mirror and mimic. The best way to learn this is when your story, the character you're playing, has real life consequences. Where bad things happen whenever you fail to be convincing and tell a good story.

I was maybe 15 years old when a CPD detective approached the group I stood in. Getting our attention, he asked if anyone there knew me. He actually said my legal name. Thankfully no one standing there with me knew my real name. He got nothing but shaking heads and shrugging shoulders. He then stood there and accurately described what I looked like as if he were literally just looking at me and describing what I looked like.

“He's a fucking rapist, ain't he?” I interrupted with a drawl accent so slight you could hardly even say you noticed it.

“Excuse me?” the detective was baffled by my outburst

“You ain't walking around by yourself lookin’ for a killer, so he must be a fucking rapist.” Cockiness while intentionally getting things wrong goes a long way, “Get on down to 17th where them creeps stalk college girls”

He literally just stood there shocked.

“Go on, fuck off 5.0, go police somewhere else”

And you know what? He actually did. I told a story, created an entire arrogant and guiltless character, in just a couple of sentences. I didn't speak to the police that way, that wasn't who I was, I wasn't that kind of tough, but this character was like that. A character who's completely unafraid of being arrested and was so blatantly in his face that he couldn't see the truth right in front of him.

Stories can trump facts and even reality.

Myths are more real than the people they're based on.

If you tell the story right.

So everything I learned was from playing characters and then turning what that kid did into a tale others talk about. Part of being me in a neighborhood where someone like me shouldn't be able to thrive, was creating my own legend. The fact that I didn't intellectually understand what I was doing at the time didn't change that I was doing it.

However, when written words become the only option, you can't utilize these things in such a direct way. Therefore I had to find where to work it in. Where to use slang and blunt terms to mimic tone, figure out where to use hard words to demonstrate posture. Lots of consonants helps. They hit instead of flow. I can “share information with you” or I can “talk to the side of your neck”. Body language without a body.

But there was still the writing words problem in front of me.

As someone who never got passed the 9th grade and learned to read and write as an adult, this became a significant hurdle to where I am now. I believe there's some cliche joke that ends, “practice, practice, practice”. The problem was that I had zero interest in doing so. That said, my time in prison had other plans.

One day, a letter slid under my door from my someday wife. I needed help reading it but was absolutely determined to respond. In the beginning I needed a lot of assistance in order to stay in touch with this girl who was crazy enough to write to me while I was locked up, but as time passed, that support became less and less necessary.

Literally hundreds of letters later, I was largely where I am now. Learning words and punctuation and everything else from my genius Mrs. I would just try to copy what I saw her doing in her letters to me. I imagined her words as if she were speaking and remember once thinking, “I bet commas are where she takes a breath or pauses”.

As best as I can figure it, that's my journey. That's why I'm a storyteller and not an author. At least, it's what makes sense to me now looking back. I had to learn how to spin things first to survive, then to fit in, and ultimately to win the heart of the woman I love. I did it all with stories. Ones I invented in order to act out to the ones I spun to exalt what I had already done. There were no plans, only results.

I never thought I'd be writing something like this, but maybe even the story telling itself is a story if it's told right.