Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

by Chuck Palahniuk

  And we’ll take the kid who picks his nose and eats it. And we’ll take the kid who smells like piss. We’ll take the leper and the left-handed Satanist and the AIDS-infected hemophiliac and the hermaphrodite and the pedophile. We’ll take drug addiction and we’ll take JPEGs of the world instead of the world, MP3s instead of music, and we’ll trade real life for sitting at a keyboard. We’ll spot you happiness and we’ll spot you humanity, and we’ll sacrifice mercy just so long as you keep Cannibal at bay.

  Because Marcia Sanders doesn’t begat anything her real boyfriend graduates and gets to go to Michigan State for an Accounting degree, because of all this Patty Watson makes a date to meet Cannibal on Friday night behind the Vocational Building and Linda Reynolds says she’ll get a crowbar. And they all agree to wear latex gloves.

  Because maybe they can all go back to playing games once Cannibal’s gone.

  WHY COYOTE NEVER HAD MONEY FOR PARKING

  It came to pass that Coyote and his wife had a baby. This was never who Coyote had wanted to be: a daddy. His long-term plan had been to find steady work as a rock star—the front man to wailing guitar anthems in stadium concerts, smoking weed with Jackass and falling asleep every night with his face wedged between the skinny flanks of Hyena—but now Coyote had obligations. Instead of sexy groupies, Coyote had a wife who didn’t believe in abortion.

  He’d bought a two-bedroom house in the Rainier Valley where their new baby never seemed to stop crying. Coyote didn’t need a paternity test to know the baby had inherited his set of pipes. His baby wasn’t a year old, and Coyote worried that it was already addicted to driving in cars. That didn’t bode well for the precious environment. The only way he could lull the baby to sleep was by strapping it into the backseat of his beater Dodge Dart and driving around Seattle at roughly the speed of a shopping cart pushed along a supermarket aisle. No faster than five miles per hour, tops. Like clockwork, the baby woke at midnight. Coyote’s wife nursed it, and he would carry it to the car. In their neighborhood nobody slept. Nobody worked, and nobody slept. All night Ox and Llama tipped back malt liquor, sitting on the front porch of the house next door. Mongoose and Chipmunk played endless games of pickup basketball under the streetlight at the corner. On some nights, gunshots spit through the dark. The sound track of the neighborhood was car stereos so loud they rattled the glass in house windows. Car alarms. Police sirens. None of that made Coyote feel any better about the prospect of someday sending his kid to the local schools.

  Somebody had ripped the radio out of his dashboard, and now Coyote was forced to sing if he wanted any music. Every night throbbed with amplified crap, and Coyote’s voice got so tired he couldn’t hear himself. Worse than the noise was how every addiction was sold curbside. You didn’t even need to leave your car. You didn’t even have to park. Driving around at five miles per hour, adding his screaming kid to the neighborhood mash-up, Coyote saw it all: Fox selling smack…Flamingo selling herself…Elephant shouting his order in the fast-food drive-thru. Rival gangbangers shotgunned each other from their cars without slowing down. “For a neighborhood where nobody works a job,” Coyote asked himself, “why is everybody in such a damned hurry?” Even lazy lowlife scum seemed pressured to multitask.

  On some late nights, traffic was bumper-to-bumper, every car steered by somebody craning his neck. They were commuters without jobs who never arrived at any workplace.

  Take Flamingo, for example. Wearing her minidress, swinging her pink-leather purse from a gold-metal chain leashed over one bony shoulder, Flamingo probably earned ten times more than Coyote, but she never paid tax on a cent of it. Coyote knew a thing or two about untamed animals. First, every animal wears a badge. This might be a bracelet braided by their kid or a neck tattoo, but it’s a hint about something secret they treasure. If you identify the badge and praise it—open sesame—you pick the lock on someone’s heart. You only needed to read the clues. You didn’t need college to teach you that, Coyote told himself. Hawking samples of dessert topping in too many supermarkets taught you what was important. His job with Llewellyn Foods wasn’t the kind that gave your brain a raging career hard-on.

  The second thing Coyote knew was that the essence of sexual attraction was availability. That was the appeal of pornography; a centerfold of Stork with her mouth open in a big oral sex O, her butt stuck toward the camera and her thong underwear fallen down around her high heels, she wasn’t going to reject you. If Flamingo slid her index finger deep into her mouth as perverts drove past, it was more than likely she’d love even a big loser like you. Flamingo’s Lycra miniskirt riding up asshole high appeared as a comforting reassurance—sexual hand-holding—to the lonely and shy. Every night the cars cruised around and around the block, and there was Flamingo: a sure thing. A safe bet.

  Not that Coyote wasn’t tempted, but it was his dick that got him stuck here in the first place: a jungle neighborhood, driving a beater car through a gridlock of perverts and junkies with a squalling kid strapped into the backseat.

  The only way Coyote ever cheated was by topping up his glass of wine, adding a little, drinking a little, and when his wife asked him how many glasses he’d drunk, Coyote would tell her, “Just this one.” For her part, his wife would drink half a glass of wine before stretching plastic wrap across what remained and placing it in the fridge for another day. Crazy as it sounded, Coyote’s wife actually did that.

  Rolling his car down a dark street, inching along in a gridlock of exhaust fumes with his baby asleep in the shadowy backseat, Coyote heard someone shout. “Five dollars,” the shout came from among the garbage cans on the sidewalk. It was Flamingo, she shouted, “I’ll treat you. Whatever you want, it’s free for five dollars!”

  How can it be free, Coyote asked himself, if it’s five dollars? He wished traffic would move. At the edge of his vision he could see Flamingo step to the curb. The neighborhood ran on this principle: Everything was free if you’d pay enough. Flamingo rapped her boney knuckles against the passenger-side window, leaning down and pointing a finger at the button of the lock. She rapped at the window with one hand while she yanked the door handle with her other. She shouted, “It’s free!” from so close that her purple lipstick smudged the glass, her lips like something lurid, like a fleshy purple doughnut sucking the algae from the inside of an aquarium. As loud as the baby ever screamed, Flamingo’s snaggletooth mouth screamed, “Daddy, I’m giving it away!”

  Her knocking left greasy knuckle prints. Her shouting misted the glass with her spit; the contents of her mouth sprayed only inches from his snoozing kid. The streetlights threw her looming shadow into the car, across the tiny sleeping face. Flamingo’s dirty breath fogged the glass and her purple fingernails wiped at the fog and smeared it into a mess with her fingerprints and lipstick. Coyote kept the car moving forward the whole time, streaking Flamingo’s purple lipstick, greasy finger-painting ghost the length of the curbside windows. A long, purple skid mark.

  Coyote shuddered to think what pestilence coated his car, and he drove home, telling himself how nothing but clear glass had saved his family from a monster. Coyote’s wife was still asleep as he tucked the baby into bed with her. He took a Kleenex out to where the car was parked at the curb, Ox and Llama eyeballing him from under their porch light. The mess was hard to see in the dark, but every time Coyote wiped his tissue came off with more purple. He tiptoed back into the house to get another tissue. He spat on it and wiped, mixing Flamingo’s DNA with his own, smearing his spit with hers. At dawn Coyote’s wife came out on the porch wearing her bathrobe and holding a cup of coffee and asked what he was doing. From the porch next door, Ox and Llama ogled her as if she were prey.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” Coyote snapped, irritated, for he’d been working all night. Not looking away from his task, he said, “I’m washing the fucking car.”

  “With Kleenex?” asked his wife. The sidewalk was littered with crumpled tissues, and she crouched in her bathrobe and began to gather them. �
��And diapers?” she asked. Among the discarded Kleenex were disposable diapers, each touched with a little purple. The purple blotches looked like hickeys or the lesions of some incurable sexually transmitted blood cancer.

  Coyote had spat and spat up gobs until his spitter felt bone-dry. His elbow hurt from his arm scrubbing back and forth, and his throat ached.

  While Turtle and Walrus brought out their chairs to play dominoes in the morning sunshine, Coyote took a quick shower and had to leave for work. “It’s not fair,” Coyote told himself, “everything that my neighbors touch they ruin.” And he began plotting his revenge.

  The next midnight, Coyote drove until his baby fell asleep, after that he kept driving until he found Flamingo. Without stopping, he drove along the gutter and leaned over to roll down the passenger-side window. Flamingo took the bait and strutted alongside his car, asking, “Are you a cop?”

  Coyote smiled and asked, “Do I look like a cop?” He kept the car rolling forward, forcing Flamingo to dodge around parking meters and fire hydrants in order to keep abreast of him. At his age Coyote should’ve been racing through life at top speed, but here he was barely in motion. At work he was a wage slave who demoed test products in supermarkets—stain remover, deodorant soap, yoghurt—smiling and begging strangers to try a taste or take a sniff. But tonight he was the consumer. Coyote called the shots.

  Flamingo said, “You want, I could teach you some techniques…” She said it like two words: Tech Neeks. She gave him a look that brought Coyote’s eyes to where his wedding ring gripped his steering wheel. Flamingo said, “Ten bucks, and you’ll make your lady squeal so loud folks will figure you’re beating her.”

  “Five bucks,” Coyote said.

  “Daddy, teaching is ten bucks,” Flamingo said, shaking her wig “No” and raking the strands with her purple nails. “What I learn you is going to save your marriage.” The way she pitched it, screwing Flamingo wasn’t adultery so much as it was a continuing education investment in pleasing his wife. Railing Flamingo wouldn’t be infidelity, it would be an endless gift that brought the mother of his baby more pleasure than a wardrobe of fur coats or a suitcase heavy with diamond rings.

  Tooling along, Coyote said, “Let me check the bank.” Steering with his knees, he leaned across the front seat and popped open the glove compartment where he collected spare change to pay for parking. Still trawling his car along, baiting Flamingo, Coyote picked out nickels and dimes, piling them in short stacks on the seat beside his thigh. He counted aloud, occasionally losing track of the total and starting over, really drawing out the suspense and wasting Flamingo’s time. He’d made her walk eight blocks in stiletto heels while he counted pennies, before he arrived at ten dollars.

  Coyote asked himself, why shouldn’t you be able to buy sex the way you’d buy a hamburger? Flamingo tried to charge him another three dollars for the condom, but she gave up when Coyote started counting pennies again.

  Flamingo’s face settled into his lap, her nylon wig bobbing between his belly and the steering wheel. Coyote wasn’t sure how a blow job would make him a better lover, but it seemed like a good first step. He gloated over the fact that he’d deliberately miscounted in the dark and shorted her thirty-seven cents.

  Coyote’s nuts drew up, as tight as a hairy fist, against the base of his dick. His hips bucked and humped like a playground dog’s. When it was too late for him to do anything except blow his load, his baby woke up and crapped her training pants. He came to the wail of her little screams and the smell of shit.

  But Flamingo was right. Filling her mouth more or less rescued Coyote’s marriage, but not because he learned anything. It was ironic. It was horrible, but Coyote never loved his little family more than he did the moment after he unloaded between Flamingo’s purple lips. As his dick fell soft, that same blood rushed straight from his nuts to make his heart swell. Cheating on his wife gave his heart an instant rock-hard erection. Even before Coyote caught his breath, as he pinched the milky condom off his dick and rolled down the driver’s window, he yearned to tell his wife how much he adored her. As he dropped the fat, dripping rubber into the street, his wife appeared to Coyote as the most beautiful, most noble wife in the world. Coyote told himself he didn’t deserve such a perfect wife.

  Coyote tried not to consider how the same spunk that had become his precious baby was what he now threw in the gutter. He tried not to think how Flamingo had once been somebody’s little Bundle of Joy. Flamingo was a sure thing, and Coyote didn’t want to ruin a good thing by overthinking it. Above all Coyote tried not to look in the rearview mirror just in case his baby might be awake and looking back. He’d only driven around for a couple hours, but going home he felt like Odysseus returning to Penelope after a voyage of twenty years.

  He’d never do this again, Coyote told himself. He seldom took a second bite of anything: a new flavor of peanut butter…a potato chip improved with a new texture for better mouth feel…the front seat of his car was littered with these one-bite samples individually packaged. It was the nature of his job.

  Infidelity, Coyote told himself, makes the heart grow fonder.

  At home, he took a hot shower. He gargled. When he slid into bed beside his wife he put his arms around her and whispered, “I love you so much.”

  She was awake, and she turned her head to kiss him. Coyote’s wife slid her hand inside the waistband of his shorts and fondled him. When he didn’t respond she kissed his chest. She kissed his belly. Their sex life hadn’t been all about making babies. They’d enjoyed anal and oral and costumes and dildos. They’d lived a rock-and-roll lifestyle, but when his wife started to put him into her mouth, Coyote told her, “Don’t.”

  “I just want to show how much I love you,” she said.

  Coyote said, “Not tonight, okay,” and he turned away from her. He couldn’t bear to see his wife doing for free what even Flamingo charged ten dollars for.

  It wasn’t fair, Coyote told himself. He lived more or less in harness, dragging his ass to Llewellyn Foods and drinking coffee to stay awake under fluorescent lights in strategy meetings with Rhinoceros and Aardvark. For that, he got the lofty privilege of paying half his salary in income taxes and property taxes. He forked out money for medical insurance while everyone else went to the emergency room and gave fake names. Their Seattle neighborhood was one big giveaway with free hypodermic needles, free dental clinics, free public housing. Food stamps. Government cheese. There wasn’t anything Coyote could afford to buy that everyone else wasn’t already getting for free. Free cell phones for the homeless. Free bus passes. When they weren’t shooting hoops, Mongoose and Chipmunk faked spinal cord injuries to get free parking in handicapped spaces. Flamingo charged her customers three dollars extra for condoms that she got from a county program at no cost. Most important of all, everyone around Coyote had free time.

  Coyote didn’t have the time to wipe his ass, he was so busy paying everyone’s bills. They had the leisure time to stage protest rallies and demand more entitlements. While Coyote ate a baloney sandwich at his desk, his whole neighborhood was appearing on the television news or being profiled by some bleeding-heart newspaper journalist. Seattle’s poor were so hungry that their biggest health issue was obesity.

  So Coyote carried his own weight plus everyone else’s.

  At Llewellyn Foods, in his office cubicle, one day the phone rang. It was Hamster from Human Resources. Without explanation, she asked, “How soon can you be in Orlando?” She said, “We have an incident taking shape.” A plane ticket was already waiting for him at SeaTac. If he hauled ass Coyote could make the next flight.

  Coyote rushed home early to pack, and he found his wife sitting on the neighbors’ porch. Plain as day, she was drinking a can of malt liquor with Llama and Ox, laughing like she wasn’t a wife and mother. After he got her around the wrist and dragged her home, Coyote asked, “What did those losers tell you?” He asked, “Did they bad-mouth me?” In truth, Coyote had been around to see Flamingo
a minimum of one night every week. Usually two or three. Hell, the gasoline cost more than the blow jobs. Even when his baby wasn’t crying, he’d strap it into the backseat and go for a slow drive. Flamingo had no value to him beyond the purple on his dick. She had no face other than that lipstick, but the lazy bastards in this neighborhood had nothing better to do than spy on him and spread gossip, and Coyote worried that word would filter back to his wife and she wouldn’t understand.

  “Ox told me that I was pretty,” she said. “Llama said that my husband is very lucky.”

  “Well,” Coyote countered, “maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.” He didn’t know that he was shouting.

  His wife looked wounded. She said, “Honey, they’re not so bad. You should hear their stories.”

  “I don’t need to hear anybody,” Coyote said. “I’ve got eyes!”

  Those animals were born liars, he said. They scammed Social Security and stole everybody’s mail so they could commit fraud. Llama had served time in prison, and Ox was worse. Coyote said how, night after night, he’d seen Ox hooking up with Flamingo for five-dollar blow jobs. Flamingo looked like a walking bag of crabs, and whatever plague she was incubating, Ox had to be infected. Here, Coyote was on a roll. He claimed Ox served time for raping Springbok. Llama, he said, was convicted for peddling kiddie porn. Everybody knew, Coyote said, that Flamingo went for no-charge abortions on almost a monthly basis; Flamingo probably had a standing appointment to get scraped. Coyote demanded to know how a self-proclaimed “decent” Catholic could socialize with ex-cons who were responsible for Flamingo’s long trail of dead babies? Coyote paused in his tirade, just a moment, to allow his wife to burst into tears and beg his forgiveness.

  Instead, she laughed. “Abortions?” she was laughing. “Flamingo wishes!”

  Coyote waited. He told himself not to slap her. He waited for her laughter to run out.