PAT WALTERS: I don't really know where Tim is, so we're just gonna try ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today we're talking about truth and facts.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Facts of the matter.

ROBERT: So recently, our producer Pat Walters and I, we were trying to get in touch with a guy, Tim Kreider.

PAT: Hello, Tim? Nope. Not there. I think if we just shout very loudly ...

ROBERT: Out the window ...

ROBERT: We wanted to talk to Tim because Tim is—not only is he a wonderful writer.

JAD: And before that a cartoonist ...

ROBERT: He has this essay which kind of gets to the heart of a very different kind of truth than we've tackled so far, and that is, can you truly know somebody, even after everything you thought you knew ...

JAD: Turns out to be wrong?

PAT: Hello, Tim?

TIM KREIDER: Yes.

PAT: [gasps] There you are. You sound great, too.

JAD: We should say, this is a story not about Tim, but about his friend, who he names Skelly, just to protect his identity.

PAT: So let's—let's try, if it's okay with you, if we could maybe just talk about Skelly as if we were just kind of hanging out at a bar, even though you're in a tiny booth ...

TIM KREIDER: [laughs] If I had a beer in this tiny room that would be easier.

PAT: Tell us how you met this guy.

TIM KREIDER: He was part of a group of friends I made when I was working a post-collegiate job going door-to-door for the environment, to knock on doors with clipboards and get people to donate.

ROBERT: Like vacuum salesman, knock-knock kind of thing?

TIM KREIDER: Yeah, you're dropped off by a van in a suburban neighborhood, and I can still faintly feel the dread of—of having to knock on your first door of the night, which was always the worst. But, you know, like—like being in the army, it was a bonding experience.

ROBERT: Especially because the knocking on the door stuff was just really, you know, a few hours a day.

TIM KREIDER: Then there's going out to the bars afterwards, which became as much a part of the job for us as anything else.

ROBERT: And one of those nights out drinking with friends, he got to talking with Skelly.

PAT: What'd he look like, by the way?

TIM KREIDER: You know I, I—he forbade me ever to draw him. I used to put my friends in my cartoons all the time, and I did that once to him and he interdicted me from doing that again.

ROBERT: So you don't want to draw him on the radio?

TIM KREIDER: [laughs]

PAT: No, he's about to.

ROBERT: Oh, he's about to. Okay, I'm sorry.

TIM KREIDER: He had this great mop of curly hair, glasses that were literally held together by duct tape. The overall effect was warmth and intelligence.

ROBERT: But from the beginning, he says, basic facts about this guy were a little hard to pin down.

TIM KREIDER: It wasn't really clear at first whether he belonged to our camp, the hippy-ish young people, or whether he was someone slightly older whose first life hadn't worked out. As it turned out, he was the latter. He had been a practicing lawyer and he had quit being a lawyer for reasons that remain unknown to me. I mean, I'm not sure it was entirely voluntary quitting.

ROBERT: But Tim says, at the time, he liked the guy.

TIM KREIDER: Yeah.

ROBERT: For one thing, women seemed to like him.

TIM KREIDER: They were charmed by him. Right away, all my girlfriends always liked him.

ROBERT: And beyond that ...

TIM KREIDER: You know, he and I were two of the readers in the group. We each always had a book with us.

ROBERT: So they began to swap books and as they got to be good friends, Skelly even showed him his writing.

TIM KREIDER: I still have it somewhere. In longhand, even. Beautiful longhand. He was clearly a sort of kindred spirit.

ROBERT: But then some questions popped up. One day, Skelly told Tim ...

TIM KREIDER: That he had written a novel, and that it had been accepted for publication.

ROBERT: Tim was like, "Wow!"

TIM KREIDER: I was excited for him.

PAT: You probably thought that, "You got published. That's amazing. I want to do that."

TIM KREIDER: Yeah. So, you know, I kept bugging him about, "Well, when's your book coming out?"

ROBERT: Skelly would say, "Well, you know, in a few months." And then the few months would pass, and Skelly would say, "Well, they just pushed it back. It's coming."

TIM KREIDER: And, you know, we had a close little group of friends, and, like all people on Earth, we talked about each other behind each other's backs, and maybe someone else sort of clued me in, like, "Tim, there's no book." I mean, maybe he wrote a book, but it's not being published.

ROBERT: Initially, Tim thought, "Well, hmm, there's probably some truth to it."

TIM KREIDER: You know, even if the truth was only the kind of truth that's contained in dreams.

ROBERT: But then there were other stories.

TIM KREIDER: One of his stories was about having been married briefly in France and having a daughter over there. And there was a time, at least one time, when he was on vacation from the environmental canvass, and he supposedly was gonna be in France, visiting his daughter who lived with her maternal grandparents there, and our boss saw him walking on Charles Street in Baltimore during that time. Obviously he was not in France.

JAD: And they were never like, "Uh, dude, someone saw you in Baltimore. Were you really in France?"

TIM KREIDER: No. We didn't say that. And, you know, I—I've met, I mean I've spent—I've logged a lot of time hanging out in bars, and you do meet pathological liars in that line of work. And, and, you know, I'm always duly impressed by their stories when I first hear them, until they pile up, and they're always able to one-up your story. You know, they've always met someone more famous than you. Something more tragic has always happened to them. And then they start to seem creepy and repellent. And all I can say is he didn't feel that way.

ROBERT: He just seemed like a really good guy who happened to lie more than most. In any case, after they left the canvassing job, they both stayed in Baltimore, and they stayed close.

TIM KREIDER: We frequently ended up crashing on the same floors together, closed down the bars together every night.

ROBERT: They'd take road trips together, blasting classic rock.

TIM KREIDER: He loved Led Zeppelin. [laughs]

ROBERT: And after a while, those stories ...

TIM KREIDER: Like, "I've published a novel," or, "I have a daughter in France," we didn't hear that stuff anymore. Our—our theory is that he did not expect that we would end up being friends for the next 20 years and he would have to maintain these stories, and, you know, we liked the guy so much that it would have been unthinkably mean-spirited to bring this stuff up. So we just sort of pretended we'd never heard it.

ROBERT: And he says they kept themselves from asking too many questions. Like, they knew he had a job at the opera house, you know, fundraising, but he was always broke, always hitting them up for money, and he was—he was—they wondered, why was he always house-sitting and spending the night at the library?

TIM KREIDER: You just never knew. You did have to— [laughs] you did have to triangulate from the few facts available. And, you know, in a way, it was fun. It was fun to speculate about and fun to tease him about—only behind his back, of course.

ROBERT: For example, Tim told us about one time he and his friend Nick were up at their cabin near the Chesapeake Bay ...

TIM KREIDER: Which is about an hour outside Baltimore, and we had had a lovely afternoon eating oysters, drinking beers overlooking the bay. And we're supposed to drive to a train station about 20 minutes, half an hour away to pick Skelly up. He's gonna take the train up there and join us. And so we break away from our pleasant set-up on the water, and we drive down to the train station to pick him up. The train comes and goes. He's not on it. And we're both a little peeved at having been torn away from our afternoon to come get him, only to be stood up at the train station. So my friend checks his cellphone to see if maybe there's a message, and indeed there is. And the message goes like this: "Hey guys, this is Skelly. I missed the train!" First of all, there's the background noises of what is clearly a bar—glasses clinking, the TV on. Unmistakably, the Mt Royal Tavern, a lowly dive near ...

PAT: How did you know it was the Mt Royal? How did you know that?

TIM KREIDER: We just knew. [laughs] And he says, "So I'm really sorry about this, but I was in a meeting that ran a little longer than I expected, and, [belches]. I tried to catch it, but I was, like, three minutes too late, but I checked, and there's another train at 7:20, gets in 7:45. I'll definitely be on that one. So hopefully y'all get this message and be there to meet me. Uh, okay, again, sorry about that. Hope I'll see you soon." And then there's 30 or 45 seconds of him fumbling to figure out how to hang up this borrowed cellphone.

ROBERT: [laughs]

TIM KREIDER: Throughout which we can hear the sounds of the bar clearly in the background. And I listened to this message, and I just smiled and shook my head and handed it speechlessly to my friend Nick.

ROBERT: Do you have any sense of what's—when you're not being told something, do you have any feeling for what you're not being told, or do you just think it's just silly details?

TIM KREIDER: No, you know, I don't—he was just a very secretive guy. And we got the sense that—I mean, he told me once, you know, "The less people know about you, the better off you are." I mean, we weren't supposed to know for a long time that he lived at home with his mother, you know, which is not unheard of, but an embarrassing thing when you're a grown man. And it became really obvious that he did, because if you called his house sometimes, you got his mother. And he had a complex cover story about how, oh, well, if the phone rang enough times at his house, it was forwarded to his mother's to pick up, which, you know, I had never heard of that. I didn't know the phone company offered that service. So, you know, we knew the deal, but we weren't gonna challenge him on it, because it so clearly was something he was embarrassed about and eager to conceal. I think he probably saw himself and was worried that others would see him as—as, you know, marginal or pathetic or loser-ish, and, you know, we didn't see him that way. We loved the guy. He was just one of us. You know, there are conditions that come with every friendship. People are weird, and most of the people who are really worth being friends with are weird, and you learn to accept that there are unspoken rules in certain friendships.

ROBERT: Until the day comes when the rules don't apply anymore. Fast forward a few years, Tim has moved to New York, Skelly still is in Baltimore with his—well, his mother had died, but he was living in the same house.

TIM KREIDER: I still saw him pretty often. He'd take the train up and we'd get some beers and some chicken wings.

ROBERT: And one day ...

TIM KREIDER: I got a phone call from a friend of mine, and he sounded very badly shaken.

ROBERT: Tim's friend said that he'd been worried about Skelly ...

TIM KREIDER: Because he hadn't heard from him for a while, and then he called work, and it turned out he hadn't been there and he knew something was wrong. So he went to his house, and, you know, I think he was able to get the door open enough to see inside, and he called in for him and he heard nothing and he forced his way in and found him.

ROBERT: Lying on the floor.

TIM KREIDER: Dead. The coroner ruled that that death was drug-related. So I went back to Baltimore right away, because I assumed there would be a memorial service and so on, and for a couple of days nothing happened at all, because he had kept his life so thoroughly compartmentalized that no one knew how to get in touch with his family, although at the last minute, the day before his funeral, we got in touch with his extended family, and they were able to send some people up.

ROBERT: Just before they arrived, it occurred to Tim, "Well, maybe we should go through his house."

TIM KREIDER: You know, and just clean up and, you know, find out if there's anything there that we should, you know, disappear before his family shows up. And we were talking to the guy who first found him, and he said, "Yeah, well, here's the thing."

ROBERT: He told them, "You guys, you can go back into that house, but I'm—I'm not going back in there."

TIM KREIDER: He had warned us, but as soon as we stepped in, it was still shocking. And terrible.

PAT: What did you see when you walked in?

TIM KREIDER: There are aspects about that that I will never tell you or anyone else, but suffice to say that as soon as you walked in, you could tell that someone had ceased living like a human being. I mean, there were heaps of things. Heaps. He'd stopped throwing things out. There wasn't electricity. There wasn't working plumbing.

ROBERT: Really, no plumbing?

PAT: At all?

TIM KREIDER: No. No, I don't think so. And words are gonna fail me here. I mean, the simplest way to say it would be to say it was clearly a place where an insane person had lived, or someone who was mentally ill had lived. I don't know if that's what to call it, because most people who are mentally ill don't know to conceal their mental illness. He was just a very gentle, decent, kind-hearted guy, but something horrible had happened. But on some level, he had understood that—I mean, it was a secret that he was keeping, and he kept it locked inside that house. And I think we were all appalled to realize that something had been so drastically wrong with him all this time, and the single most upsetting aspect of it was imagining how utterly alone he must have felt himself to be.

PAT: Did you ever have moments of feeling guilt, like I should have—I should have gotten into that place? I shouldn't have ...?

TIM KREIDER: No, the—I don't think there is anything that anyone could have done for him. I mean, he—he had so clearly determined not to let people into that chamber of his life. And the other thing is that he was so convincing in his dissembling. I mean, we really didn't think there was anything seriously wrong.

PAT: Yeah.

TIM KREIDER: He was his best and most decent and sanest self when he was in our company.

PAT: But you didn't know so much about him.

TIM KREIDER: Mm-hmm.

PAT: And I guess I just, in light of that, I wonder what it means to—to know someone, or who exactly it was that you think you knew.

TIM KREIDER: Yeah. Well, you know, the only person I knew of who ever got mad at him for telling what they would call lies were women. I mean, he was a guy, so he was not above trying to impress girls and, you know, the things he was trying to impress them with were his novel, his storied history, and often when they found out that those things were not, strictly speaking, true, they felt lied to and betrayed. And none of his friends ever felt that way, and I always felt that—perhaps this is patronizing or nasty of me—but I always felt that what those girls were really mad about was that they believed him. They'd fallen for it.

PAT: But in a sense you and your friends fell for something too.

TIM KREIDER: Well, I don't know, I mean, what I would say we fell for was the thousands of hours we spent in that guy's company, which seems to me like a more direct and reliable form of knowing than hearing facts, either made up or real. I mean, there was a day when Skelly and I drove up to my cabin to check on the place because there had been a blizzard, and there was a grove of bamboo trees there, and the weight of all the snow had bent them over the driveway so that they formed a kind of continuous arch. And we parked and we walked down through that arcade and we would tug on every bamboo tree, and it would shake the snow off, and it would suddenly spring up into the air, and it would fling its load of snow 50 feet into the sky. We did that with every tree, walking all the way down the driveway, and it was so beautiful and so much fun that we cracked up like boys.

TIM KREIDER: And I'm the only one who remembers that now. That was a moment that only he and I were there for and he's gone. He shared that with me and nobody else ever will. You're imagining it because I've described it to you, but that's not the same thing, and if you don't know someone by having experiences like that and memories like that with them, then I would submit that you cannot ever know anybody at all.

ROBERT: Thanks to producer Pat Walters and to Tim Kreider, whose book, which includes this story, is called We Learn Nothing.

[TIM KREIDER: Hi there. This is Tim Kreider. I've been asked to call and leave a voicemail recording your credits. Here they are. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Andy Mills, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole. With help from Matt Kielty, Daisy Rosario and Nadia Wilson. Special thanks to Rebecca Katz, Gene Guilman, or possibly Gene Gulleman, and Paul Hillmer. That's it, if that works okay for you guys. Bye bye.]

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