the ganorf pit
how i became a professional liar
I thought about telling him about the Ganorf pit while we were tripping on acid. My now ex-boyfriend and I sat on the couch in my apartment, eating Annie’s mac and cheese with garlic powder and dried herbs, and watching Shameless. We were halfway through our trip and I had just finished crying about how he looked like a young Howard Stern, but hotter.
That’s when the Ganorfs crawled out of a filing cabinet in my head for the first time in years. I mean that literally. I was tripping and the inside of my head looked like the Brain Office in that one episode of Spongebob.
My older brother Jake first told me about the Ganorf pit when I was around five and he was nearing seventeen. “The Ganorfs are snarling creatures,” he explained, “that eat badly behaved children.” They were mean, scrappy, and they, lucky for me, miraculously lived in the triangular cavity created by the sectional and the wall in our living room. I was terrified, trembling in my Aristocats shirt.
Jake was perpetually stoned, always listening to Sublime and playing Grand Theft Auto (and I thought he was so cool). I doubt it even crossed his mind how he scared the absolute fuck out of me with this story.
I used to peer into the depths of the pit, looking for them, but all I’d find was the gray carpet and stray Kit-Kat wrappers that I’d throw back there when I didn’t want my mom to find them in the garbage. But what if the carpet split open? What if they clawed their way out from a hole to come for me while I curiously stuck my head in their home? A rabbit looking into the burrow of a red fox before meeting its demise.
I decided that if I didn’t look for them and I was really, really good and didn’t beg my brother to play Zelda: Ocarina of Time, they couldn’t get me. It didn’t quite work because I had bad impulse control and thought Princess Zelda was hot, so the Ganorfs remained a threat. Both of those things are still true, actually.
While I was scared of the Ganorfs, I was much more scared of the DVD case of The Exorcist. I didn’t even have to see the movie to be horrified by the little girl on the cover. After catching a glimpse of her, I couldn’t sleep for most of the night and once I did fall asleep, I woke up from a horrible nightmare at 3 AM which I heard at school is the witching hour. Eight year old me burst into my sisters’ room. The twins were fifteen and still awake, texting on their Envy phones, the ones that slid open with the full keypad that beeped every time they typed. They lovingly told me to go the fuck back to sleep. I laid awake that night and realized that no one was coming to save me. After a few nights of restlessness, I came to the conclusion that maybe I could rewrite the story. Maybe the Ganorfs could be my protectors. The Ganorfs went from a tale my brother created to make me behave to a safety blanket.
I like to think of this as the first time I practiced the art of lying to myself. I’d tell you that I come from a long line of storytellers, but that’d be a lie, too.
My mom is adopted and has little to no connection to her biological family. Like me, she’s the youngest of her siblings with hefty age gaps between them. It’s lonely to be tethered to so many people by such a thin thread. The familial isolation and adoption trauma weren’t the sole reasons she had a fucked up, sad childhood, but I’ve only heard about it in broken fragments. The edges are sharp and I haven’t been able to piece them together without slicing my fingers.
I don’t know when she discovered that lying to yourself can act like a pair of thick gloves, a way to handle shrapnel safely, but based on stories she told me, I think she figured it out around nine. When I was around the same age, she and I were taking a walk behind the historical society that was across the street from the puke green house we rented by the lake. We strolled through a manicured garden with flowers and buzzing bees, and a stray black cat that we called Midnight trailed behind us.
The story goes like this: she was outside of a pancake house, not to be confused with Waffle House, in Northern New York. It was on the way to my grandparent’s cottage. While she was waiting for her family, alone in the parking lot, a tall figure dressed in all black approached her. He wore a hood, so she couldn’t see his face, but he reached out a shaky hand. His fingers were twisted, spindly things. When he placed his hand on her shoulder, her entire body went cold—an unwanted touch that turns your bones to solid ice. Then, he disappeared. I wanted to ask her how long it took her to unfreeze, to defrost. I said nothing.
She told me that the Man in Black, as she calls him, followed her around her whole life. Different instances of him lurking, stalking about. According to the story, when I was born, she stopped seeing him. Her saving Grace, she called me. As we crossed the street to go home, the black cat following us, she told me not to tell anyone, but I was young, so I immediately told everyone in the locker room the next day at school. My best friend told me that my mom made it up. I said, “So?”
There are dozens of other stories like this that my mom has told my sisters and I. Never my brothers. But this one in particular stuck with all three of us. If we didn’t have the DSM-5, it probably would’ve become a folktale in our family.
Some March, many years later, my mom was texting me and I held down the text to forward it to my sister Shayla. Translate came up as an option. Yes, yes, I thought to myself. Please translate our mother’s manic nonsense.
Later that week, I picked Shayla up from her shift at the bar. She got in the car with a red solo cup filled with White Claw, a shot of vodka, and an assortment of citrus. We sat in her driveway and tried to decode the stories that Mom told us like they’ll suddenly give us the answer to what she’s been protecting herself from. We compare and contrast, and sew together the scraps of lies we’ve told ourselves about her, about our childhood, but we aren’t looking for answers. Just connection. We know the monster in the closet regardless of what name it goes by.
Shayla was slurring her words when she brought up the Man in Black. I should’ve expected this. He haunts us, too.
I told her that I assumed that Mom pulled the Man in Black from Johnny Cash, one of her favorite artists. We used to ride around in her astro van singing Delia’s Gone, a song that tells a story about a man who shoots his lover and goes to prison.
Shayla said, “It’s from a Stephen King novel, dumb ass.”
If I can create a story about the story to make the story more tolerable, am I a writer or a liar?
I think about writing all of her stories down, kind of like this, and maybe someday somebody will publish it. They’ll call it a searing portrait of mental illness. Reviewers and critics will dissect it, patch together the narrative for me.
I call it nonsense, I call it lying, but isn’t that what all stories are? Some version of the truth that might be closer to a lie, but really, does it matter if it acts as a lifeboat? In The Things They Carry, Tim O’Brien says, “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
I’m visiting my hometown and my eight year old nephew is hitting me with a pillow. It was cute, maybe even a little fun, the first ten times, but now I’m over it. I say, “Look, if you don’t stop, I’ll send the Ganorfs after you.” I watch his eyes widen and see my own. Then, he says with the confidence only kids have, “Ganorfs aren’t real, so they can’t do anything to me.”