The Guinea Pig Diaries (8 page)

I try to understand Blanton’s point about compassion. To most of us, honesty often means cruelty. But to Blanton, honesty and compassion are in sync. It’s an intriguing way to look at the world, but I just don’t buy it in the case of the widower poet. Screw Blanton. (By the way: I broke Radical Honesty and changed the identifying details of the old-man story so as not to humiliate him. Also, I’ve messed a bit with the timeline of events to simplify things. Sorry.)

To compensate for my wimpiness, I decide to toughen up. Which is probably the exact wrong thing to do. Today I’m getting a haircut, and my barber is telling me he doesn’t want his
wife to get pregnant because she’ll get too fat (a bit of Radical Honesty of his own), and I say, “You know, I’m tired. I have a cold. I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to read.”

“Okay,” he says, wielding his scissors, “go ahead and read.”

Later, I do the same thing with my in-laws when they’re yapping on about preschools. “I’m bored,” I announce. “I’ll be back later.” And with that, I leave the living room.

I tell Blanton, hoping for his approval. Did anything come of it? he asks. Any discussions and insights? Hmm.

He’s right. If you’re going to be a schmuck, at least you should find some redeeming quality in it. Blanton’s a master of this. One of his tricks is to say things with such glee and enthusiasm, it’s hard to get too pissed. “You may be a petty asshole,” he says, “but at least you’re not a secret petty asshole.” Then he’ll laugh.

I have yet to learn that trick myself. Consider how I handled this scene at a diner a couple of blocks from my apartment.

“Everything okay?” asked our server, an Asian man with tattoos.

“Yeah, except for the coffee. I always have to order espresso here, because the espresso tastes like regular coffee. The regular coffee here is terrible. Can’t you guys make stronger coffee?”

The waiter said no and walked away. My friend looked at me. “I’m embarrassed for you,” he said. “And I’m embarrassed to be around you.”

“I know. Me, too.” I felt like a Hollywood producer who parks in handicapped spots. I ask Blanton what I should have done.

“You should have said, ’This coffee tastes like shit!’” he says, cackling.

•   •   •

I will say this: One of the best parts of Radical Honesty is that I’m saving a whole lot of time. It’s a cut-to-the-chase way to live. At work, I’ve been waiting for my boss to reply to a memo for ten days. So I write him: “
I’m annoyed that you didn’t respond to our memo earlier. But at the same time, I’m relieved, because then if we don’t nail one of the things you want, we can blame any delays on your lack of response
.”

Pressing
SEND
makes me nervous—but the e-mail works. My boss responds: “
I will endeavor to respond by tomorrow. Been gone from N.Y. for two weeks
.” It is borderline apologetic. I can push my power with my boss further than I thought.

Later, a friend of a friend wants to meet for a meal. I tell him I don’t like leaving my house. “
I agree to meet some people for lunch because I fear hurting their feelings if I don’t. And in this terrifying age where everyone has a blog, I don’t want to offend people, because then they’d write on their blogs what an asshole I am, and it would turn up in every Google search for the rest of my life
.”

He writes back: “
Normally, I don’t really like meeting editors anyway. Makes me ill to think about it, because I’m afraid of coming off like the idiot that, deep down, I suspect I am
.”

That’s one thing I’ve noticed: when I am radically honest, people become radically honest themselves. I feel my resentment fade away. I like this guy. We have a good meeting.

In fact, all my relationships can take a whole lot more truth than I expected. Consider this one: For years, I’ve had a chronic problem where I refer to my wife, Julie, by my sister’s name, Beryl. I always catch myself midway through and pretend it didn’t happen. I’ve never confessed to Julie. Why should I? It either means that I’m sexually attracted to my sister, which is not good, or that I think of my wife as my sister, also not good.

But today, in the kitchen, when I have my standard mental sister-wife mix-up, I decide to tell Julie about it.

“That’s strange,” she says.

We talk about it. I feel unburdened, closer to my wife now that we share this quirky, slightly disturbing knowledge. I realize that by keeping it secret, I had given it way too much weight. I hope she feels the same way.

I call up Blanton one last time, to get his honest opinion about how I’ve done.

“I’m finishing my experiment,” I say.

“You going to start lying again?” he asks.

“Hell yeah.”

“Oh, shit. It didn’t work.”

“But I’m going to lie less than I did before.”

I tell him about my confession to Julie that I sometimes want to call her Beryl. “No big deal,” says Blanton. “People in other cultures have sex with their sisters all the time.”

I bring up the episode about telling the editor from Rachael Ray’s magazine that I tried to look down her shirt, but he sounds disappointed. “Did you tell your wife?” he asks. “That’s the good part.”

I confess I didn’t tell Julie about the cleavage incident, but I did tell my wife that I was bored and didn’t want to hear the end of her story about fixing her computer. Blanton asks how she responded.

“She said, ‘Fuck you.’”

“That’s good!” Blanton says. “I like that. That’s communicating.”

CODA

Here’s my radically honest opinion of my piece on Radical Honesty: I like some parts—especially the outrageous quotes from Blanton. And I think the intro works—though, frankly, I borrowed the idea (okay, swiped it) from Blanton himself. His book has a section called “The Truth About Why I Am Writing This Book,” where he says “I want to become famous. . . . I want to get rich. . . . I want to be like Jesus.”

But overall, my attempts at Radical Honesty could have been more hard-core. If I’d removed my filter in every single situation—instead of 90 percent of the time—I probably would have gotten beaten up, fired, and divorced. Then Blanton could never accuse me of “a superficial dipshit job.” Then again, I might not have lived to write this piece.

I will say this: When you write an essay about Radical Honesty, you’re asking for trouble. This came out in
Esquire
in 2007. Most of the feedback was positive (that’s the truth), but I also got plenty of e-mails that said I suck. Or more precisely, I “
suuuuuck
.” And my friends wrote me notes with subject lines like “
Try standing up straight once in a while
.”

I had to do some apologizing post-piece, as you might imagine. I apologized to the woman whose cleavage I checked out. And to Julie’s parents. And to the poor
Esquire
intern who transcribed the tapes—not just because of Brad Blanton’s obscenities, but because I forgot to turn off my tape recorder when I went to pee. Three times. Sorry again, Meryl.

I knew I’d have to apologize. Since I’m laying it all out there, I’ll confess that my motive for doing the experiment wasn’t 100 percent pure. There was a devious aspect to Radical Honesty that attracted me. Here was a way to confront people without repercussions. Or with fewer repercussions, anyway. I could defend
myself by saying, “Hey, I’m just doing my job, people. It’s the project.” Then say sorry later.

I got to tell my mom that I hate the smoked turkey she serves at her holiday party. I got to tell some old college acquaintances of Julie’s that no, I’m afraid I
do
not
want to have a playdate
with them, since I rarely get to see my closest friends.

I still practice Radical Honesty—though only in certain situations. Call it Sustainable Radical Honesty. I’m especially fond of Radical Honesty about my own flaws and mistakes. I love the liberating feeling. No desperate scrambles to come up with excuses. No searching my memory banks to figure out what I told Peter versus Paul. It’s all out there. Yeah, I screwed up.

I’ve also learned my relationships can tolerate a lot more Radical Honesty than I thought. If I just don’t feel up to having lunch with a friend, I don’t say my grandfather’s in town for a special visit and I have to go on the Circle Line. I just say the truth. I don’t feel like it. I’ve got three kids hopped up on high-fructose corn syrup and I need to take a nap.

But Radical Honesty about other people’s flaws—that I can’t do. I’m still a pathological white liar. Blanton thinks it’s false compassion. I think it can be real compassion—especially if your wife asks you about her necklace on the way to the party, long after she can change it.

And after experiments with rationality and civility (see chapters 5 and 6), I’ve come to appreciate the filter between the brain and mouth. Words can be dangerous. Once they’re out in the atmosphere, they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. You say out loud that your wife’s friend is boring, then next time you see her, you perceive her as more boring.

Another confession: Since the article came out, the Radical Honesty concept has seeped out into the culture a bit more—and it kind of annoys me. A minor character on the Fox cop drama
Lie to Me
is a Radical Honesty practitioner. When I first saw the show, I said, where’s my credit? Where’s my cut? Like I came up with the concept or something. Deluded, greedy bastard I am.

The Radical Honesty meme also caught on with single men, oddly enough. I met a Wall Street banker who said that, after reading the article, he and his friends had started using Radical Honesty as a pickup line. They’d go up to a woman in a bar and say, “I’m trying this new thing called Radical Honesty. And the honest truth is, I find you very attractive and would like to go home with you.”

Nine times out of ten they’d get slapped in the face. But there was that one time . . .

And finally, regardless of what my editor thinks, I’m pretty convinced we’ll all soon live in a radically honest world, for better or worse. It’s going to be hard to keep secrets when every second of your life is Twittered and satellite-photographed and captured by tiny cameras. The truth will out.

Me as Noah Taylor.

Noah Taylor as Noah Taylor.

In my real life, I’ve had just the tiniest taste of what it’s like to be famous. Three instances come to mind:

1. The book festival in Texas where I met my one and only rabid fan—a man who took off his sweater to reveal passages of my book scrawled on his T-shirt in Magic Marker. (Later, Israeli writer Etgar Keret would tell me that one of his fans got a chest tattoo of his book’s cover, which made me feel small and inadequate.)

2. The time my mother-in-law called in a tizzy and said,
“You’re a clue
in the
New York Times
crossword puzzle!” This was a dream come true. A bona fide mark of fame.

“It’s forty-eight down,” she said.

I grabbed the
Times
and opened to the puzzle. The clue was “Reads the encyclopedia from A to Z.”

The answer was N-E-R-D.

Huh. Nerd. I would have preferred my actual name, but it was something. Just to be certain, I e-mailed the crossword editor, Will Shortz—whom I had once met at a crossword puzzle tournament—and asked if maybe I was the nerd in question; he said I wasn’t consciously the inspiration, but that I might have
been an unconscious factor.
Might have been an unconscious factor.
That’s something, right? Good enough for me!