Lie, Memory

Introduction

This post is about the failings of memory, and the frailty of humans when they spin fictions they confuse for fact.  I’ll recount here a seriously inaccurate anecdote that I almost published as true history in a recent blog post, “What Are Fathers For?”  My idea here is to examine the precise way my memory failed me there—why did it lie?  And, to the extent that the defects in our recollection are not arbitrary, what greater truths might lie beneath them?

Speak, Memory

Memory is a tricky thing, even for (perhaps especially for) those who consider themselves to be gifted in recalling their personal history.  The title of this post is a play on Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, which was—oddly enough—his second stab at autobiography.  He’d originally written, in English, about his Russian years, in a book called Conclusive Evidence.  Years later, in the process of translating this autobiography into Russian (by which time he was back in touch with family members who could help him fact-check) he discovered (and fixed) a number of errors.  In fact, he found enough errors that he decided to greatly revise the original English version, which he then re-published as Speak, Memory.

Nabokov was very scrupulous about not allowing approximations or embellishments to adorn his own memories ; he declares, “what I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation, I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth.”  But of course it is impossible that every image, every pristine detail, of his autobiography could be documented or verified.  If it could have, he wouldn’t have needed to rework Conclusive Evidence.  It is clear to me that Nabokov had the purest intent in accurately representing his life story, but then don’t we all?

What’s more, when we tell our own stories, there’s a pitfall perhaps greater than the limitations of memory:  we also have our imaginations, which embellish and sometimes flat-out fictionalize things, often unconsciously.  Perhaps the only autobiography with a really accurate title is Lemony Snicket:  The Unauthorized Autobiography. 

A better story

As I’ve explored before, in “Unintentional Fiction in Bike Race Stories,” sometimes (intentionally or not) we embellish a supposedly true story simply to improve it.  My retelling, in that post, of Bernard Hinault’s victory in Liege-Bastogne-Liege creates a gripping battle of wills between Hinault and his team director that, alas, didn’t really happen.  Similarly, my “Team Time Trial” story for dailypeloton has Cal Poly, my UCSB college bike team’s arch nemesis, starting their race right after us, which is a great way of building suspense—but turns out to have been completely wrong.  Cal Poly actually started their race right before us (as a photo revealed years after my article ran).  I initially remembered the start order correctly, but when I fact-checked my story, all four of my teammates remembered it in the same incorrect way, which improved the story—so I was all too happy to second-guess my own memory and adjust my article accordingly.

But a better story is not the only reason our imaginations compromise the integrity of our memories.  For one thing, true stories sometimes get better when misremembered details are corrected.  And then there’s the troubling non-useful fiction of mistaking somebody else’s memory for your own. 

There’s a scene in my short story “Before the Fall” where a kid, Mick, based closely on my brother Max, pretends to get hit by a car—and not just any car, but my mom’s car with her driving, in front of scores of witnesses.  That really happened, and though I labeled it fiction (so I could freely embellish the context of the incident), it sticks very close to the memory Max and I share about it.  The funny thing is, our other brothers, Geoff and Bryan, also remember it, almost exactly how we do, and can tell the story in the same great detail—and yet neither of them was actually there.  That’s the only glitch in their account:  they erroneously speak of it as a first-hand experience.  They’ve heard, and told, the story so many times they think it’s their own. 

Since the fake-car-accident story isn’t at all improved by the false notion that Geoff and Bryan were witness to it, we can’t chalk this up to artistic embellishment.  This type of mnemonic inaccuracy happens, I think, for three reasons:

1. Memory doesn’t like gaps and our brains often want to fill them in, rather than admit  we’ve forgotten something important.  So we may “remember” things we didn’t experience.
2. The act of going through a story in your mind is so similar to remembering something, the two acts can merge.  In other words, memory tells a story just like a person does and these narratives aren’t terribly different … so we may conflate them.
3. When a story illustrates a truth you hold dear, it can start to become your story—so when that story is somebody’s memory, it can become your memory.  So it was with the fake-car-accident:  more so than most of the people who actually witnessed it, Geoff and Bryan understand Max’s modus operandi and motivation in staging it, and—having witnessed his countless dress rehearsals with our neighbor’s parked car that summer—can picture the whole thing perfectly, perhaps with greater clarity than the actual eyewitnesses.  So it was hard for them to believe they only heard about it, and they naturally came to believe they saw it with their own eyes.

My recent fable

Three Saturdays ago I’d finished writing my “What Are Fathers For?” essay and was getting ready to post it.  All that was left was to fact-check an anecdote concerning my brother Bryan.  I almost didn’t bother since he’s a hard guy to reach and I was pretty sure I had everything right anyway.  There were just a couple of details in my account I wanted to confirm.  Here’s what I’d written: 

        Bryan, though not a great student, was unusually resourceful.  Once, during a road trip with our mom, when he was 15, we took a family vacation trip, driving to California and camping along the way.  That year we took two cars, and my brothers and I fought over who got to ride in Dad’s car, because he drove faster.  So one day I was in the car with Bryan and my mom, and we broke down in the middle of the desert somewhere in Utah or Nevada.  Our dad was at least a hundred miles ahead and oblivious to our plight.  Nobody else came along to help either; I’m pretty sure we were on Highway 50, the so-called Loneliest Road in America.
        The problem was, the car, a terribly underpowered 1978 Volkswagen Dasher diesel, kept overheating.  Bryan somehow sussed out that the engine fan, which is supposed to automatically turn on when needed, wasn’t.  So he selected a dashboard switch—the one for the rear window defogger, which he figured wouldn’t be needed for awhile—and hardwired it to the fan, so my mom could turn the fan on manually.  After that, the car ran like a top for the whole rest of the trip.  How did Bryan figure this out?  Where had he learned about cars and electronics?  Beats me.  He sure didn’t learn it from our dad (who could have easily done all this himself, but didn’t have time to teach anyone such things).

I recalled the story over the phone to Bryan to make sure I had it right.  I thought he might correct a minor detail—e.g., “Dude, we were on I-70, not 50”—but to my surprise he started laughing.  What was so funny?  Had it actually been Max in the car with Bryan, while I was up ahead with Geoff, and I only heard about the amazing repair? 

No, far worse than that.  “Dude,” Bryan said, “there’s one very important flaw in your story.  I didn’t fix the car.  Dad did.  He came back and rescued us.  There’s no way I was smart enough to do that and besides, Dad had all the tools in his car!” 

I was astonished.  I protested, “But Dad was way off ahead!  I distinctly remember being broken down on the side of the road in complete despair with no way to reach him!”  Bryan replied, “Yeah, that’s right, but he finally came back and saved the day.”

Not only was I embarrassed, and deeply disappointed in my faculties of memory, but I now had a problem on my hands:  that anecdote was to have played an important part in my blog post.  It was supposed to illustrate how a little benign neglect on a father’s part can teach a kid to be resourceful and solve his own problems.  The story doesn’t work at all when the kids are helpless and useless and just stand there on the side of the road wringing their hands.  (This is the problem with fact-checking too late into a composition.)

I needed a backup anecdote, to replace the false one.  My initial candidate was the story of how, on a different camping trip up in Canada with just my mom and Bryan, I managed to lock our keys in the car.  I was in a panic until Bryan coolly said, “Let me see your Swiss army knife.”  In a jiffy he unscrewed the clear plastic cowling over the car’s turn signal and produced a spare key that had been cleverly stashed there.  The only problem with this story, which this time matched Bryan’s recollection perfectly, is that it was our dad who had cleverly stashed this key.  Didn’t I have a great story illustrating my brother’s ingenuity?  Did all roads really lead to Dad?

The paragraph I finally cobbled together to put in my blog post was probably more useful (though less entertaining, as fact tends to be) than the original car repair story.  But long after I finished writing, I had this question lingering in my mind:  how had I remembered that so wrong?  Should I now distrust my memory, and in doing so reshape my entire impression of my father?  Am I just as ungrateful as I accused my daughter of being in that blog post?

A theory of embellished memory

It’s not as bad as it looks.  First of all, Bryan really was pretty good with electronics and cars.  It’s a fact that he built a keypad ignition for his ’67 Dodge Coronet and that it actually worked, at least a few times (before bursting into flames).  And I remember him rebuilding the carburetor for that car.  So his own humility notwithstanding, it’s not such a stretch to think he could have wired the engine fan to the defroster switch in our mom’s car.

Meanwhile, it’s kind of remarkable that our dad did come back for us, because his tendency to get way, way ahead of us was totally nonsensical to begin with.  (After all, it wasn’t a race to California; we were all camping together each night.)  So at what point did Dad realize we had a problem?  Did he just have some Spidey-sense, or what?  (Interestingly, my mom doesn’t remember anything about him coming back to save us.  When I asked her about it, she couldn’t remember who fixed the car that day.)

This instance of defective memory could easily be lumped in with the team time trial start order or Hinault’s battle of wills with his director:  obviously it’s a better story if the teenager comes up with the ingenious repair.  But I don’t think that’s what skewed my memory, for one reason:  long before this was a story, it was just a memory.  I don’t think many of us are tempted to embellish private recollections just to make them more exciting; that’s what daydreaming and fantasy are for.  I think I tweaked this memory simply to make it happier.  Manipulating memory in this way is, arguably, a softer kind of deception that probably happens all the time.  It’s a close relative to looking at the bright side of things.

No, there’s nothing particularly unhappy about my brother not being a teen prodigy of the automotive realm.  But there’s something unhappy about having to wait around in anguish, stranded in the desert, wondering if our dad will ever come back.  By having Bryan fix the car himself, I not only glorified him, but—more importantly—found a way to let my dad off the hook.  After all, many cultures have much harsher methods than mere neglect for turning their boys into men.  This was a simple case of necessity being the mother of invention!  It was time for Bryan to be pushed out of the nest so he could fly!  Some have greatness thrust upon them!  (Et cetera.)  So the feeling of fear and helplessness we’d had, standing there in the road, gets truncated in memory, and upstaged by the happy story of a big brother making good.

Abetting this pain-avoidance technique is a phenomenon that Malcolm Gladwell refers to (in The Tipping Point) as the “fundamental attribution error”—the tendency to ascribe behavior to fundamental character traits rather than to situation and circumstance.  Because I was irked at my dad (even before the car problem) for always racing off ahead—and, moreover, for not being around enough in general—I was less inclined to remember him as the one who saved the day.  I remembered his absence, not his return, because, well, so often he was absent.

A final thought:  perhaps my skewed memory is partly because, as I mentioned in that same post, my dad’s giant intellect could be an obstacle to our relationship, because he was so often too busy off doing great things to pay much attention to me.  For him to do something really ingenious doesn’t inspire remembrance, because there’s a whiff of despair in it—just another example of my fear that he was too good for me.  How much more tempting it is to elevate my brother in memory, because this was the same guy who wasn’t above occasionally collaborating with me, his kid brother, as he did with my Russian picture book.  “Imagine!” my memory says.  “This genius kid, who figured out how to rewire a car’s controls at age 15, wasn’t above spending countless hours building me a Cyrillic character set on the computer, all so I could type in Russian for a school assignment!”

Memory, then, can be seen not just as our personal history, but as the history of how we feel about the people in our lives.  Even a flawed recollection might represent, if not the Truth about our people, at least a truth about how we perceive them. 

Exploiting Our Children's Brains

Introduction

Some big news recently:  Snapchat (which is like Instagram but with a “this-message-will-explode-in-ten-seconds” kind of ephemerality to it) refused a $3 billion buyout from Facebook.  This, despite Snapchat never having made any money.  The reason, of course, is that this novel technology is worth far, far more than $3 billion simply because teens love it.  As we all now know, the world revolves around teens.  (They’ve known this for generations, of course, but we grownups—always a bit slow on the uptake—have only just realized it.)

I don’t have $3 billion to throw around and yet I’d like to personally benefit from the teens, and I’ll bet you would, too.  What do I envy most about the younger generation?  Frankly, it’s their sponge-like ability to memorize stuff.  In this post I substantiate this “sponge” claim, examine what realms of vicarious memory I stand to get the most out of, and provide some ideas as to how to exploit children’s agile young minds.

Are children’s brains overrated?

I’m no expert on child development or the human brain, but—this being just a blog—I don’t have to be.  I would characterize a child’s brain as a miracle of raw processing and storage power, but without a lick of sense.  It’s widely known that a very small child transplanted to a foreign land can easily learn the new language while keeping intact his native tongue.  This is impressive considering that young adults can spend four years majoring in a foreign language in college without attaining nearly the same fluency.  And yet, even my own kids—whom I refuse to believe are below average in intellect—will laugh at even my coarsest efforts at physical comedy.

Not all kids’ brains work the same, of course.  At the risk of over-generalizing, I’ll say that you could divide kids into two rough categories:  1) those who apply their razor-sharp intellects to the task of how to become cool, and 2) those (like my pre-teen daughter) who do pointless eggheaded things like memorizing a bazillion digits of Pi.  I’m glad my kid is the second kind, because for one thing, I don’t want her to get any dates, and for another, in being un-cool she can better relate to her father, who has never been cool and never will.  (As Anthony Bourdain has pointed out, “the essence of cool is not giving a [damn],” and parents bloody well better give a damn, and even if you used to be cool, like he was, “there is nothing cool about ‘used to be cool.’”)

So the best I can do is try to turn my daughters’ willingness to memorize vast troves of information into something I can tap into.  The problem is, kids don’t tend to memorize the kinds of information an adult might want quick access to.  They tend to memorize information that is useless.

Useless crap I memorized as a kid

One bit of information I wish my young self had committed to memory:  did I not bother trying to be cool because I realized that cool was probably an innate thing that I simply didn’t and couldn’t have, or did I not even register, until it was far, far too late, that there was even a such thing as cool?

No matter.  I applied my mind to memorizing all kinds of things, often without conscious effort.  For example, at age ten, my memory acquired all the lyrics to all the songs in Pink Floyd’s double-album “The Wall.”  Not only all the lyrics, but all the background noises and utterances (to the extent I could make them out).  All the tunes, the helicopter noises, the background TV snippets … probably terabytes worth of artifacts from that album.  Oh, and tons of other music as well, including music I didn’t even like.  To this day I’ll get songs from Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” album stuck in my head.  It’s a curse, especially considering that there’s no room left in my brain to store new information.

That wasn’t all, of course.  Back in ’77, when I heard my brother Geoff listing off all the cast members of “Star Wars,” I naturally committed them to memory myself, no questions asked.  I’m not just talking about Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford.  I’m talking about Anthony Daniels (who played C3P0) and Kenny Baker (who played R2D2).  Never mind that these weren’t actors who went on to have actual careers, where it might have been useful to recognize their names.  (Kenny Baker went on to play a character called “Bruce Foreskin” in the direct-to-video “Boobs in the Wood,” and no, I did not make that up, and no, I have not watched it.)  Carrie Fisher probably doesn’t remember much about her roles in the “Star Wars” movies, having been an adult when she acted in them, but I remember a ridiculous number of her lines (“Get this big walking carpet out of my way,” “Fine … if money is what you want, then money is what you’ll get,” “You came over in that thing?  You’re braver than I thought,” etc.).

I didn’t learn a bazillion digits of Pi because, though I didn’t know what cool was, I knew what a dork was and felt I’d already presented several of the risk factors.  Peers were more judgmental back then, I think.  In contrast, my daughters boldly pursue whatever they like.  (Paradoxically, this probably makes them cooler than I was.  It’s complicated.)

Can kids be ordered to memorize things?

It’s tempting to say that kids cannot be ordered to memorize things.  For example, I have been trying to teach my kids a set of “family best practices,” like saying “thank you” after a meal, but they almost never comply.  I think this is an authority issue.  After dining at friends’ houses, my daughters do remember to say thank you (unless their hosts are lying to me).

Teachers do seem to have enough authority to command kids to memorize stuff.  I still have bits of dialogue rattling around in my head from junior high French class, when I was made to memorize my side of several rote conversations.  These snippets pop up almost whenever I choose what to eat—“Je voudrai avoir un bifteck frites … et une salade, bien entendu!”—and whenever I’m running late—“Zut!  Il est déjà cinq heures!”—with this last utterance continuing to cause me much confusion, every time, because “cinq heures” is 5:00 a.m., and surely these French kids weren’t waiting for a bus at 5 a.m., so why did our textbook say that?  Perhaps the most egregiously useless thing a teacher made me memorize was the entire list of prepositions in the English language, in alphabetical order.  That list survived in my memory for at least a decade; probably I removed it through sheer will.

(Not that I memorized everything I was assigned.  I refused to learn the many parts and functions of the female reproductive system in Health class.  My reasoning was that I don’t even possess any of these organs, though truth be told I was only a little better at learning off the male parts.  I did, however, remember the single most important lesson from Health class, which we kids summarized as “Remember the rule:  protect your tool,” along with like a dozen cruder variations.)

Likewise, my kids are given all kinds of things to memorize for school, and they dutifully comply.  They haven’t yet learned to instantly forget everything five minutes after the test.  For example, my younger daughter was commanded to memorize a really, really awful rap song about the parts of speech, and as she practiced it, my older daughter chimed in, still remembering the song from when she had to memorize it three years before.  (This is why I didn’t let my kids see my own, child-inappropriate “parts of speech” rap:  for fear that they’d instantly memorize it, start singing it on the playground, and get us in trouble.)

A few nights ago my older daughter announced that she had most of the Periodic Table of the Elements memorized; this came on the heels of her little sister memorizing, for school, a poem about an exploding turkey.  Of course my younger daughter had gotten a really late start on her homework and had to memorize three stanzas of the poem in like five minutes, and though she was totally panicked (in fact, perhaps because she was totally panicked) she pulled it off.  This pair of memorization episodes is what got me thinking that I really need to capitalize on this childish parlor trick.  If kids can memorize this much stuff with no greater a carrot than decent grades or their own whims, then I—the holder of dessert and video privileges—should be able to get in on this action.

What should we make our kids memorize?

Oddly enough, even though I curse myself daily for my inability to shunt things into memory like I used to, it wasn’t easy to come up with something for my kids to memorize for my benefit.  The most obvious things adults struggle to remember are passwords, but for obvious reasons I don’t want to entrust my kids with those.  I could assign my kids memorization tasks like remembering the birthdays of my dozen nieces and nephews, but I’ve decided not to, for a couple reasons.  First, since there is a tangible consequence of a failure of memory here (these are kids, after all), I don’t want to take the risk.  Second, it really does seem that the most amazing feats of memory involve pieces of information that are linked:  a poem, a song, or a list. 

I thought about assigning one of my kids to memorize the table of civil twilight start and end times for this area, because those tell me how early in the morning or how late in the evening I can go for bike rides on any given day.  It would be so handy to be able to yell across the house, “Hey Alexa, what time is civil twilight tomorrow morning?  And when are you going to practice your piano?”  The problem is, the civil twilight table comprises 730 data points.  Sure, I could have Alexa memorize the start and end times for the first day of each month, and the average “drift” for that month, to be able calculate this information for any given date, but it’s a non-linear thing and would end up being more of a math problem than a memorization stunt.  Besides, I have a handy printed chart for this, just like I have my nieces’ and nephews’ birthdays in my computer calendar.

I finally got my inspiration after joining a work-related conference call.  This was a high-attendance bi-weekly training thing where a roll call is required, so operators field each incoming call, asking for each attendee’s name, with spelling.  As often happens, the operator had difficulty with my name, even though I spelled it out:  “Dana—that’s Delta Alpha November Alpha.”  She said, “What?  Bana?”  I think this is because I have a girl’s name.  Perhaps she thought it was more plausible that there was a word she didn’t know, belta, and a name she hadn’t heard before, Bana, than that a man could possibly go by “Dana.”  It seems like I go through this issue almost every time I join this conference call.  Maybe the operators are screwing with me.

Anyway, my own struggles notwithstanding, the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (aka NATO phonetic alphabet), is a very handy thing to know for spelling things out over the phone.  For one thing, it’s faster than thinking up words on the fly.  For another, it’s less ambiguous (e.g., if I said “D as in dog,” the operator might think I said “B as in bog”).  And most of all, the NATO phonetic alphabet gives your speech an air of military authority—it sounds official.  What seems cooler to you:  “A as in apple, L as in lion, B as in boy, E as in elephant, R as in rabbit, T as in tennis,” or “Alpha—Lima—Bravo—Echo—Romeo—Tango”?

Naturally, you’ve already spotted the flaws with this scheme:  it’s not such a lot to memorize, and I’ve apparently already memorized it anyway.  It’s not like I’m going to pause my phone conversation to yell across the house, “Hey Lindsay, what’s the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet word for Y as in, uh, yellow?”  So this memorization task falls short of my dream of using my kids as portable voice-activated almanacs.  On the other hand, having any influence at all over what my kids memorize is a nice win as a parent, particularly as they reach their tween and teen years.  Getting them to memorize something slightly useful, for their own edification, is enough for me.

Getting them to do it

I mentioned above how teachers, in commanding children, seem to have more authority than I do.  I also alluded earlier to powers of persuasion I myself might have due to my control over dessert and videos.  Gosh, that was sloppy blogging.  In fact I would never bribe my kids with dessert or videos because that would set a dangerous precedent.  Any intelligent kid would realize, Hey, I could do this cool thing I’m already inclined to do, but since this thing would also please my parent, I should hold out for some kind of reward!  (Believe me, my kids have tried this, but I always refuse, telling them “I will not negotiate with terrorists.”)

So instead, I talked to my wife, in my younger daughter Lindsay’s presence, about how cool the NATO phonetic alphabet is, and then I threw Lindsay a bone by mentioning the game Battleship, which (like many children) she unaccountably enjoys (despite its being completely pointless).  When I was a kid, the play console was very spare and we called out simple letter and number coordinates (e.g., “G-4!”).  Now the console looks all badass, with pictures of military technology like targeting systems, and simulated rivets, etc., and the x-axis is labeled with Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. instead of A, B, and C.  So the kids call out “Bravo-7!” instead of just “B-7!”  I told Lindsay this was probably to help prevent confusion, such as B not being confused for D.  (This probably has less to do with it than the modern hardcore military aura the game tries to create.)  Then I asked her how many of the letter names she could remember.

By afternoon, she and Alexa were talking about this phonetic alphabet, and though I never made good on my plan to print out the list and leave it lying around, I didn’t need to.  At dinner the next night I asked Lindsay how much of the phonetic alphabet she could recite.  I figured that after Oscar, which is where Battleship leaves off, she’d fizzle out, but she didn’t.  She needed hints on about ten of the letters, but she eventually got them.  Then Alexa rattled off the entire list like an old pro.  Mission accomplished!

Unintentional Fiction in Bike Race Stories

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I’m trying to learn how to write fiction.  I’ve dabbled in it but I’m more comfortable with essays.  And yet, recently I discovered that for years I’ve been telling a story about the French cycling champion Bernard Hinault that I only thought was true—I’d unknowingly fictionalized an account of one of his victories.  Does this count as fiction?  Probably not.  But this got me thinking about the fictions we unintentionally create all the time.  This post explores the different reasons why, and methods by which, we  create “unintentional fiction.”

What, you’re not that interested in reading about the act of fiction?  Well, in the following post I explore this topic through bike racing stories, so you might enjoy it anyway.

Would you rather read actual fiction than read about fiction?  Well then, here are some links to albertnet short stories:

The Phantom Solace

Rejection Affects Health

Guide to Managing Millennials

Poolside

Before the Fall

Hinault wins Liège-Bastogne-Liège

Here is the story I have been telling for over twenty years about Hinault winning the 1980 Liège-Bastogne- Liège bike race—the oldest of the classics:

That fake autobiography, “Hinault by Hinault,” got it all wrong.  It was your typical blather about Hinault wanting so badly to win this race for France, since only three Frenchman had won it in its 100+ year history, so he pushed through with unflagging motivation even though the weather was terrible, snow and sleet, etc.  But in his actual autobiography, “Memories of the Peloton,” Hinault told the real story, which is that he didn’t even want to start the race.  He tells his coach, Cyrille Guimard, “This is bullshit, I’m not racing in these conditions.”  Guimard says, “Just start the race, and when you’ve shown your face you can drop out.”  Hinault asks for a jacket.  Guimard says, “No, start without it, and I’ll give it to you later.”  So Hinault starts.  Ten kilometers in he drops back to the team car and says, “Okay Cyrille, give me my jacket, I’m riding back to the hotel.”  Guimard says, “No, just stay in a bit longer until more of the others have quit.  You don’t want to look bad.”  Several more times Hinault is denied his jacket until Guimard finally says, “I’m not giving you your jacket until you finish.  So you might as well race.”  Furious, and wanting to stay warm, Hinault drops the hammer and obliterates the field, ultimately winning by almost ten minutes.  After the race he finds Guimard, who says, “Well, now are you glad you raced?”  Hinault snaps back, “Fuck off.  Give me my jacket.”

It’s a great story—but largely untrue.  As I discovered when I reread “Memories of the Peloton” recently, my memory of this tale has proven seriously defective.  Yes, Hinault won by almost ten minutes, and Guimard and a jacket were involved, but the real story is quite different.  Hinault lined up with everybody without complaint, and “everyone was wearing a cape or a windcheater.”  Hinault continues:

I was riding with a hand up to my face to keep the snow out of my eyes and came very close to retiring.  I told [teammate] Guilloux that it was impossible to carry on and I was all for getting back to our hotel, but he persuaded me to carry on to the feeding-station and pack it in if it was still snowing then.  [At the feeding station, 100 km from the finish] there was a bit of rain and it was cold but the weather looked more stable.  Cyrille Guimard told me to remove my racing cape because the real race was about to start.  My cape was made of a waxed fabric and I was very warm inside it, but I took it off as instructed….  I decided that the only thing to do was ride as hard as I could to keep myself warm….  [After dropping everybody, I was] like a kind of snowbound Tom Thumb protected only by his balaclava, but heading for a heart-warming victory in Liège.

My account was scarcely better than the one I’d remembered from “Hinault by Hinault” (which is out of print so I can’t even check up on how well I’ve remembered it).  In my story, Hinault had railed against authority, but in truth he did as he was told.

How could I have remembered this so wrong?  Well, the idea of Hinault as a rebel is entirely valid.  Later in “Memories of the Peloton” he writes, “The atmosphere at Renault had been cloudy since 1980.  Cyrille always wanted his own way:  the rider had only to pedal and keep his mouth shut.  He gave orders but no explanations.  In my case, it all went in one ear and out of the other.  I tended to do whatever seemed right to me and, as time went by, I found his attitude less and less acceptable.  He treated us like naughty children and it had to stop.”  So he ultimately fell out with Guimard, and went on to start his own team.

Through faulty memory, I took matters of truth—Hinault’s pugnacious spirit and his support of riders’ rights (revolutionary at that time)—and illustrated them concisely through a dramatic narrative, which is exactly what fiction should do.  The only trouble was, I wasn’t aware of my own fictionalizing and presented my fanciful account as fact.

Perhaps the “Hinault by Hinault” writer, far short of the manipulative propagandist I had taken him for, was similarly misled by his own faulty memory.  Perhaps he couldn’t imagine a non-nationalistic motive for Hinault to persevere in such conditions.  (I doubt, though, that Hinault was actually very nationalistic; in his book he reports that, even after his famous rift with Greg LeMond in 1986, “We agreed that, in the world championship, neither of us would work if the other got away.”  This is significant because at the world championship, riders race are supposed for their countries, not for their trade teams, and not for their friends.)

Here’s a photo of Hinault, racing the Niwot time trial in the 1986 Coors Classic:

I thought my brother Geoff had taken this photo, but he couldn’t have because he’s in it (on the right, no shirt, high white socks, cast on his wrist).

Gauchos win national TTT championship

Some years ago, I wrote a story for the Daily Peloton about the 1990 National Collegiate Cycling Championships, where the UC Santa Barbara team I was on won the team time trial.  It had been over a decade since the race when I wrote my story, and I had to rely heavily on memory.  I seemed to recall that only one team started their race after we did, and that was CU Boulder.  We’d beaten all the other teams, and had only to watch them come in to know that we’d won.  But looking back, I wasn’t sure about CU having raced last:  I also remembered  having been really nervous about the Cal Poly team from San Luis Obispo, who had won the collegiate national TTT the year before. 

I didn’t want to get this detail wrong, so I asked three of my former UCSB teammates how they remembered the race.  Without any prompting or leading questions from me, all three of them recalled, very assuredly, that it was Cal Poly who was the last team on the road.  Figuring that three matching accounts couldn’t be wrong, I wrote up my story accordingly:

Ah, the torment! Cal Poly still had four riders together, and they looked a lot faster than we’d felt coming up the home stretch. We looked at the clock. Then at Cal Poly. Clock. Poly. Clock. And then a shocking thing happened: their paceline broke in two. Several seconds went by before the front two noticed. A huge gap opened, fifty meters. The gap never closed. Their third guy finally crossed the line but was six seconds too late. Such a close margin—and suddenly, doubt set in. Could Steve’s [timing] number have been inaccurate? Or approximate? Trevor grilled him. Are you absolutely positively sure? Steve was. No doubt whatsoever. We’d won. Gold.

Pretty specific description, eh?  Well, I had the benefit of a photo my brother snapped of Cal Poly’s finish.  Once I found that photo, I vividly remembered how the Cal Poly paceline had fallen apart at the end.  I remembered this as clearly as if I’d seen it with my own eyes—but actually I hadn’t.  I came across another photo years after my Daily Peloton story was published:

Zoom in.  See the dude in the background on the far left with the red and white helmet?  That’s me.  To my left you can just make out my teammate Trevor.  Our other teammates are obscured by the guys who have just released the Cal Poly riders (in the green and white).  Sure enough, Cal Poly went before we did.  The last team on the road was indeed CU Boulder, as I’d originally remembered.  Dang it!

So why did three of my teammates all remember it wrong?  It’s hard to say, but one explanation comes immediately to mind:  it’s a lot better story if Cal Poly goes last.  That sets up the gut-wrenching suspense at the end.  More likely than not, my teammates had simply remembered things how they’d wanted to.  Unintentional fiction.

How much time is involved in creating such fiction?  If you’d asked my teammates and me about this race a week, a month, or six months after it happened, we’d surely have remembered it right.  But a decade later, such details have faded, and the brain fills them back in as well as it can—which in this case meant that accuracy succumbed to drama.

Mount Evans and the Stelvio

Memory is not the only culprit when it comes to such inaccuracy.  There’s also our fallible interpretation of real-time events.  With simple matters (e.g., is that traffic light red or green?) we do just fine, but with more complicated matters our interpretations are best-effort.  When we make sense of unfolding events, we’re really telling a story to ourselves about what we are seeing.  We do this automatically whenever we imagine another person’s perspective; researchers call this  “theory of mind.”  (One test for autism demonstrates that severely autistic children cannot employ a theory of mind, while the rest of us take it for granted.)

As an example of inaccurate interpretation of events, I offer a tale of the 1986 Mount Evans hill climb.  Just after the halfway point of the race, the peloton exploded and I found myself in the company of just two other riders:  my teammate Peter Stubenrauch and our friend (and rival) John Cotton.  Pete was the best climber of the three, and normally John was much stronger than I.  On this day, though, we seemed well matched and climbed together for many miles.  I was having the best race of my life, despite a bizarre mechanical problem:  my front hub, a wacky Dura-Ace AX, had these big plastic dust caps and one of them was catching on the fork tip and grinding against the rotating hub.  This made an intermittent but relentless noise, somewhere between a whine and a shriek.  Eventually Pete rode up next to me and asked what the hell the noise was.

Mount Evans is a really long race—27 miles, climbing almost 7,000 feet—so our pace allowed for some light conversation, and after discussing the hub a bit Pete and I somehow got on the topic of my new aero brake levers (among the first type to have unexposed cable housing).  At about this time John was suddenly dropped, and by the finish Pete and I had taken something like five minutes out of him.  A little while after the race, John came over and congratulated us:  “You guys really did some good teamwork there.  I overheard you discussing tactics but I couldn’t make out what you were saying.  Then you timed your attack and counterattack to perfection.  What can I say … there was nothing I could do!”

We of course had no idea what he was talking about.  There had been no tactics in that race except to pace ourselves carefully.  The only thing we’d talked about was my bike.  John imagined that we beaten him through teamwork—which must have been preferable to admitting that he was just slower that day.

A more recent example:  the Giro d’Italia, which just wrapped up last weekend.  I watched the penultimate stage twice:  once on Saturday morning via a live Internet feed, and again that evening on TV.  The morning coverage was from Eurosport so the announcers were David Harmon and the veteran cycling champion Sean Kelly.  As the racers tackled the brutal Stelvio pass, Kelly talked about how this late in a grand tour, on a course this difficult, often the tactics cease to be that important:  either the racers have it in their legs or they don’t.  The evening coverage was from Universal Sports so the announcers were Steve Schlanger and the former American pro Todd Gogulski.  Schlanger made a predictable comment about this being a “chess game on wheels” or some such thing.  Gogulski agreed, citing the importance of teamwork and tactics in the race.

I had to laugh.  These announcers seemed to be saying opposite things.  Who was right and who was wrong?  Well, it’s complicated.  Tactics certainly were in play.  For example, Christian Vande Velde dropped back from a breakaway to help his teammate, Ryder Hesjedal, who was in contention for the overall Giro d’Italia victory.  Damiano Cunego should have done the same for his leader, Michele Scarponi, but unaccountably didn’t.  Overall race leader Joaquim Rodriguez needed to attack Hesjedal but waited too long (setting himself up to lose the Giro in the last stage the following day).  Was it tactics that ultimately determined the outcome?  Probably not—to Kelly’s point, many riders just didn’t have the legs to carry out tactical moves.  (If this was a poker game, former Giro champ Ivan Basso couldn’t even afford the ante.) 

There was no single “accurate” way to narrate that race.  No two racers had the same experience, and announcers can only speculate on each racer’s story.  Perhaps we’ll know cycling has truly come of age in America when we have talk shows where sports pundits argue onscreen for hours at a time about this stuff.

The Stelvio and the Mini Zinger

Unintentional fiction also results when, aware that others are telling themselves stories about us, we try to control or influence those stories.  On the Stelvio, Vande Velde led the group of overall contenders kilometer after kilometer, grinding out a grueling pace designed to paralyze and shrink the group, and yet he wore a perfect poker face.  Looking at him, you’d be tempted to think this was easy for him—but it obviously wasn’t.  After he finally completed his job and dropped from the lead group, he lost over seven minutes in just a few kilometers.

It’s a good bet Vande Velde was deliberately looking as unfazed as possible so he could psych out his opponents.  Even though they were behind him, their team directors, following the race in their cars, had access to the same video feed we viewers did, and could talk to their racers via radios.  If Vande Velde showed how much he was suffering, he might have given comfort, however indirectly, to the enemy.  (Hesjedal, meanwhile, looked like he was really suffering, but then he always does—so his mask of suffering told his opponents nothing.  Maybe his lack of poker face, given with his routinely tireless performances, carries out a mind game of its own.)

In my own humble races I sometimes told misleading stories through my actions.  In the 1985 Red Zinger Mini Classic, an 8- or 9-day stage race, I got in several breakaways with my friend Peter, who won every stage.  Being much stronger, and a way better sprinter, he was content to do most of the work in the breakaway.  But in the criteriums I was always sure to take my pulls as we went through the start/finish stretch, where there was a higher concentration of spectators.  Here I am on a back-stretch, preparing to once again get Pete’s wheel:

Meanwhile, Pete would often let me beat him in the primes, because he know I wanted to get the sprint leader jersey away from another kid whom neither of us liked.  Pete made it look close:  I’d throw my bike at the line and just barely win the prime.

What were we up to?  Well, I led through the start/finish area because I wanted to glean all the glory I could from a race I wasn’t capable of winning.  Meanwhile, I wanted to make the race look good by seeming to give Pete a run for his money.  He must have also had the race’s image in mind when he pretended to almost win the primes:  if the spectators had known how totally dominant he was, they’d probably have gotten bored.  Not that we thought all this through or discussed it, of course.  We just followed our impulses.

After one of these criteriums, a spectator took me aside.  He was a grown-up and spoke with authority:  “Look, you can beat this guy, but you have to be smart about it!  You can’t be dragging him around the course all the time—he’s taking advantage of you!  You’re almost as fast in the sprint—if you just conserved your energy for the end I’ll bet you could beat him!”  I could have told the guy it was all smoke and mirrors, but I didn’t.  I just mumbled something noncommittal.  I wasn’t telling any stories, per se:  just trying to influence the ones people told to themselves and each other.

Unintentional fiction vs. artifice

The chief difference between unintentional fiction and real fiction is artifice:  that is, intent.  The true fiction writer is aiming for a specific effect, conveying a certain idea, and has at his or her disposal anything imagination can conjure.  The essayist, biographer, or journalist must stick to the facts.  And yet, the truths the essayist conveys are still a matter of insight and intent.  Choices are made, a perspective is advanced, and best-effort interpretations still abound.  Fiction, in its various guises, has us all surrounded.

Perhaps what feels so “honest” and forthright about “Memories of the Peloton” is Hinault’s apparent absence of artifice.  He’s a retired bike champ, not a writer.  The translator, in his preface, suggests “that Hinault dictated his memoirs into a tape recorder and then had them transcribed exactly as he had spoken them.  The result was original and created a very immediate impression of the man and his character, but it lacked the logical structure you are entitled to expect in a book.”  Indeed, Hinault breezes from one topic to another, and one passage that has really stuck with me concerns the training rides he did with local riders during his late teens: 

We used to set off on Thursday afternoons … and ride 100 or 120 kilometres.  We used to amuse ourselves by sprinting for all the signs.  We’d go to a grocer’s to buy yoghurt and sometimes the grocer would lend us little spoons.

I absolutely love that those little spoons made it into the book.  Perhaps this shows how important those early, carefree training rides were to him.  The 1979 Tour de France, which Hinault won, isn’t even mentioned.

Fiction - The Wheel

Introduction

My assignment for my fiction class the other week was to go to a place that’s really familiar and try to see it with fresh eyes that illuminate it somehow as you translate it to the page. I had a hard time with this because I got sick. I worked from home all week, too achy and snotty to weather Bart and its crush of humanity, and barely left the house. Finally I found some inspiration from the chain reaction of memories that a familiar object can summon, and and came up with what follows, minus the graphics.

Remember, this is fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead or anywhere in between, is purely coincidental, etc. A final point: there’s a way to show, all at once, thumbnails of the pictures in a blog post. Don’t do that. Scroll gradually down as you read. You’ll see why.

The Wheel

You go first. Nice, $500. But your head is not really in the game, so you’re having trouble deciding what letter to guess. If you really wanted to win you’d look up the statistical frequency of each letter of the alphabet. But you don’t feel like it. You need a consonant. You sit back and look around the room for inspiration. The heater duct sure stands out. It’s a monster, ten inches in diameter, unfinished aluminum, running exposed along the wall up near the ceiling. The old duct, a flat, narrow, compact thing, certainly looked better, but it was a bottleneck that prevented any warm air from reaching the bedrooms upstairs, so you had mold growing on the ceiling and walls every winter. For loads more money you could have enclosed this new duct somehow, but the furnace and ducting and asbestos abatement were pricey enough to begin with. But worth every penny—for the first time in this house, you have heat. Blessed, hallowed, heartwarming heat. You try H. Yes! There’s an H. You’ve got $500!

Your online opponent takes his turn and wins $450 with N.

You spin. It lands on $800. Sweet! Maybe you’ll try D as in Desk. Your desk is a real honey: over six feet wide, with locking drawers, and those extra pull-out shelf thingies for when rest of desk surface is hopelessly buried in paper, which it usually is, especially when you do the books and have a stunningly depressing pile of receipts. They don’t make desks this solid anymore. The drawers even have dovetail joints. You bought this desk like fifteen years ago for $80 from Uhuru Furniture in Oakland; it had looked completely awful, its shiny varnish all clouded and scratched. Seeing that surface, you couldn’t help but think of your neighbor’s garage door window, back in your hometown, which was similarly cloudy and scratched and, worse, had the word “MERRY” on it. One December your neighbors had painted “MERRY CHRISTMAS” across their garage door windows. “CHRISTMAS” came right off the good glass window. What they hadn’t realized was that the other window was cheap plastic and when they tried to remove “MERRY,” they just scored and scratched the plastic and the word wouldn’t come off. They didn’t feel like shelling out for a new window so year-round they had that scuffed-up “MERRY” eyesore. With this memory so distinctly etched in your brain, you almost didn’t buy the desk, did you? Too depressing. But your wife conjured up a loaner belt sander somehow and completely refinished the desk, using olive oil instead of varnish. It still looks great. What a find! What a desk! Dang it, no D. No $800.

Your opponent’s spin lands on $600, and he guesses R. Nope, no R!

You spin. D’oh, only $300. Your room feels claustrophobic because of all the junk piled in it, particularly the mound of ski gear. It’s normally kept in a big plastic tub, but somebody has borrowed the tub. Amazing how much stuff you have for skiing when you don’t even go that often. There have to be twice as many pairs of gloves and mittens than people in your family. What a waste. And there are your faithful old wool mittens that your ex-stepmother hand-knitted, still going strong like twenty years after she left your dad. Man, what a shame. How many women are there in this country who still know how to knit, and are frugal enough to bother doing it? She was like his soul-mate! Anyway, skiing is excessively expensive. Last time you went, didn’t you find a pair of perfectly decent ski pants stuffed into the restroom trash can? You were irritable because you were roasting in there, in all your ski gear, and had been hemorrhaging money all morning, and you figured some yuppie must have found some more flattering new ski pants in the ski shop, bought them on the spot, and just couldn't get rid of his old ones fast enough. I know how you feel. Aren’t a lot of these reckless spendthrifts the same people who are all “woe-is-me” when a bubble bursts and the job market crashes and they go broke? But now it’s time to focus. You need a consonant. M for mittens. Yes, there’s an M! Too bad you only got $300 for it.

Your opponent spins and hits BANKRUPT. Pwned!

Your computer printer suddenly winks at you with its multicolor display, as if reminding you to turn it off when not in use. What wakes it up from Sleep like that? How much power is drawn keeping it at the ready? Should you turn it off to save energy, or keep it on so your wife’s occasional print job from upstairs—that’s right, it’s an über-cool wireless printer!—doesn’t sputter and die? You should have known the low price of this printer was too good to be true—all those features, its gorgeous shiny finish, the crisp photo prints—but of course it’s a scam. The printer is a thirsty little bastard, isn’t it? It really goes through the ink, and only accepts real Canon cartridges, and you feel like you’ll go broke replacing them all the time. First time’s free, kid. P for Printer. D’oh! No P.

Your opponent spins and lands on “Lose A Turn.” You are inordinately pleased by this.

You decide to buy a vowel. There’s got to be an E, it’s the most common letter of the alphabet. Yep, there’s an E!

You’ve got to clear some more space on this desk, you must be going crazy. Now you’re looking at the SmileSafe KIDS emergency card you’ve found there. “What to do if your child is missing: 1) Call local law enforcement; 2) Show this image to authorities; 3) Call the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. This image is accessible through June 2012.” Now, you might feel guilty if you throw this card away, in case you’re possibly reducing your child’s safety in some small way. But there are so many reasons just to chuck it. First of all, this card is obviously stupid. What are the odds you won’t have a recent photo of your kid to show the authorities? True, no photos exist of your own childhood, but that’s because film and developing cost money back then, whereas now you take dozens of pictures a day because it’s all free, if you don’t count the cost of your camera (face cracked but it still works), and that damn printer ink. And think about it: if somebody abducts your kid, you won’t be calling some hotline, you’ll be bringing in the cops, the FBI, the National Guard, and you’ll probably be confined to a padded cell. Then there’s the matter of your kid’s crappy school photo on the card. Why doesn’t the photographer take more than one picture, especially if the kid has deliberately ruined his first attempt? The school picture is a big enough rip-off when the photographer gets a good shot, don’t you think? It must be a tradition for kids, ruining their school pictures and thus wasting their parents’ money. You have to agree. At that age you were afraid of accidentally smiling and thus looking like a wuss; plus you were ashamed of your buck teeth. Same with your brothers, one of whom got the bright idea that if you keep your lips together and puff air into your upper lip, it’s impossible to accidentally smile. So you all looked like chipmunks in your school photos. A generation later, your daughter is no better. She has managed to obscure her upper lip entirely so it looks like she doesn’t have one. She told you—defiantly, almost proudly—that she refused to smile for the photo because you refused to pay $3 extra for a prettier backdrop. What a scam! On principle you refused. It costs those thieving bastards nothing extra to use a better backdrop; the admittedly ugly default grey-marble one was doubtless calculated to extort even the most stingy parent into forking over the additional $3. Well screw them, you said. You don’t negotiate with terrorists. B for Backdrop. Dang it! No B!

Your opponent spins and gets $5,000! Fortunately for you, his guess—L—is a bust.

You spin. $900! Life is good. Your computer monitor, a flat panel Samsung, is gorgeous. You almost can’t look at it, though, without thinking about its cost, especially under the circumstances. The old monitor had been perfectly good but you wrecked it, in the stupidest possible way. Before leaving on vacation, you hid the old monitor. You were afraid of burglaries. When you got back from vacation and while putting back the laptop and monitor you discovered a new port where you could plug speakers right into the monitor. How cool! Except that wasn’t what the port was for, it was for some stupid Soundbar thing (sold separately) and when you plugged your speakers into it, you fried you monitor. Pfffft. Your impulse was to punish yourself for your stupidity by going without an external monitor for some period of time, like serving a sentence, and for that very reason you decided to go the other direction and buy an even cooler monitor than the one you had so stupidly destroyed. Hence this kickass Samsung. Yes! There’s an S! you have $900 more! You’ve got $1,450!

Your opponent spins and lands on $800. He guesses T and he’s right.

He announces he’d like to solve the puzzle. Oh my god, it’s so obvious! Why didn’t you solve it when it was still your turn?

He wins, you lose. You get nothing. Of course, he didn’t actually get anything either. It’s just a game, after all.

dana albert blog