Truth or consequences

The dreaded polygraph begins....

*Now have always considered myself to be a rather decent person. I have never robbed a bank, killed my neighbor or set cats on fire, and if anyone were to be asked about my ethics I would probably earn an A-minus. None of this matters when you are strapped into a big, leather and wood chair that resembles Ol’ Sparky in the movie The Green Mile with bands and sensors hooked to various areas of your body. Instantly your blood pressure rises and as the polygraph examiner stoically tells you not to think about all the little things you have done in your life that is exactly what you think about. There was the quarter I stole from the collection plate in Sunday School at age six, the lipstick I shoplifted from the neighborhood drug store at age eleven, and the four hundred and six pencils, paperclips and personal copies I have unthinkingly pilfered from my employers over the past thirty years all began to tumble through my brain. That’s just how it is; someone tells you not to think about a purple elephant and immediately you envision a two hundred pound, toe-dancing, lavender pachyderm in your mind. No way around it.

It occurred to me after it was all over that the polygraph examiner probably knows and expects you to think about all your transgressions. It’s part of having a conscience and that is really what they are looking for. So when he throws questions out such as: have you ever had sex with an animal? Or have you ever consciously caused bodily harm to another person? He probably already knows the answers and would only be shocked if the needle leapt off the page. At the time that is not apparent, though, and my mind was racing. Does he mean a literal animal or does he mean the crazy idiot I dated briefly last year? It was not a fun experience and caused me a lot of soul searching but I doubt the polygraph examiner cared about that. He just kept jotting down little notes and nodding and making mmm-mmm sounds while the needle kept moving along.

An interesting point about a polygraph, at least the polygraph they administered in my case, was that they asked five basic questions, each one of them in a hundred different ways. Do you use, produce or sell drugs? Are you a thief? Do you abuse kids or enjoy kinky sex? Are you a bully? Are you whacko? (Whacko is a legitimate medical term I picked up from one of the psychologists at the jail, and I trusted that he would know ). They have so many ways of asking the same five questions it is really amazing, and you don’t realize they are asking those same five questions until the whole thing is over.

I happened to go to a private art college about a mile or so from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965-66, just the time when all the anti-war, love, peace and drugs-for-all culture was at its peak. It was extremely interesting to me and I watched with amazement all the sit-ins, lay-downs, marches, fights and such, while reading the underground newspapers with an insatiable appetite. I even watched in horror as a young girl, under the influence of a very good LSD trip, tried to fly off one of the quad buildings and ended up by killing herself - something I have never gotten out of my mind’s eye to this day.

I attended a few parties where the air was so thick with the sweet smell of burning hemp it almost gagged you, and I watched students dancing in merry abandon after consuming some innocent looking homemade brownies, all the while thinking to myself that my Ozzie & Harriet parents would be aghast if they knew the world I was experiencing. I had been brought up differently. I loved and respected my country and would never protest a war, I got my high from surfing and did not need drugs, while rules and laws were there for the good of mankind and were never to be broken. Challenged, perhaps, but never blatantly broken. My parents had no idea what was going on around me in my safe, private little art school.
I have never, in spite of all my experiences before and since, ever tried drugs. Not even marijuana. In fact, I never have even tried a cigarette. It had nothing to do with being a good girl or respecting the laws. It was because I just wasn’t interested. I had a lot of fun just being me, and the goofy things my friends and I did (like running through the old graveyard above the college at midnight) were plenty exciting enough to keep my adrenalin up and pumping. I didn’t particularly care about what was “cool” and it seemed to me that the kids who kept themselves high spent most of their time staring at their fingers or flopping around on the grass. I had better things to do.

The point I am getting to is that the polygraph examiner must have asked me the drugs question a gazillion ways and times, each time enunciating the question a bit more carefully, as if I had not heard him correctly. Finally, after trying to catch me in a fib about my assumed drug use, he paused and asked me: “Do you mean to tell me you went to college up at Berkeley in 1966 and you have never tried a drug?”

I think I shrugged and gave him my best look of annoyance, “Does the machine say I am lying?” I asked.

The polygraph examiner made one of those sounds like he had an avocado seed stuck in his throat and marked something on the exam strip, “No!” he mumbled, and then went on. Whether or not he was convinced I had never tried an illegal drug is still unknown to me. He must have, though, because he passed me on the polygraph. Of course, it’s possible he just assumed I was a pathological liar.

stay tuned.....