Yeah. Well, welcome to the market for literary fiction.
Your book has about a hundred days on the bookstore shelf before it's an official failure.
After that, the stores start returning the books to your publisher and prices start to fall. Books don't move. Books go to the shredder.
Your little chunk of your heart, the little first novel you wrote, your heart gets slashed 70 percent, and still nobody wants it.
Then you find yourself at the Gap trying on pastel knit shirts and squinting when you look in the mirror so you look almost good. Almost California. There's the movie deal to support-your hope is, now, that will save your book. Just because a big publisher is doing my first novel, that doesn't make me attractive. Lazy and stupid come to mind. When it comes to being attractive and fun to be around, I just can't compete. Stepping off the airplane in Los Angeles with my hair sprayed and wearing a salmon-colored polo shirt was not going to help.
Having the publicist at the big publishing house call everybody and tell them I was attractive and fun was only going to give people false hope.
The only thing worse than showing up at LAX ugly is showing up ugly but showing signs that you really tried to look good. You gave it your best effort but this is the best you could do. Your hair's cut and skin's tanned, your teeth are flossed and the hair in your nose is tweezed, but you still look ugly. You're wearing a 100 percent cotton casual knit shirt from the Gap. You gargled. You used eyedrops and deodorant, but you still come off the plane missing a few chromosomes.
That wasn't going to happen to me.
The idea was to make sure nobody thought I was even trying to look good. The idea was to wear the clothes I wore every day. To remove any risk of failed hairstyling, I'd shave my head.
This wasn't the first time I'd shaved my head. Most of the time I was writing Fight Club I had that blue, shaved-head look. Then, what can I say, my hair grew back. It was cold. I had hair when it came time to take my book-jacket photo, not that hair helped.
Even when they took my picture for the jacket, the photographer made it clear the pictures would turn out ugly, and it was not her fault.
So I left all the new colors of polo shirts including pumpkin, terra cotta, saffron, and celadon at the Gap, and I went and didn't read the directions on a tube of men's depilatory. I frosted my head with the stuff, and I started to hack at my scalp with a razor. The only thing worse you could do is get water mixed in the depilatory. So I ran hot water over my head.
Imagine your head slashed with razor cuts and then throwing lye on the cuts.
Tomorrow, I was going to Hollywood. That night, I couldn't get my head to stop bleeding. Little bits of toilet paper were stuck all over my swelled-up scalp. It was a sort of papier-mâché look, with my brains inside. I felt better when my head started to scab, but then the red parts were still swollen. The blue stubble of hair started pushing up from underneath scabs. The ingrown hairs made little whiteheads I had to squeeze.
It was: The Elephant Man goes to Hollywood.
The people at the airline hustled me onboard, fast, like a donor organ. When I reclined my seat back, my scabs stuck to the little paper headrest cover. After our touchdown, the flight attendant had to peel it off. This probably wasn't the peak experience of her day, either.
This is why I write.
The infected head thing just got worse. Everyone meeting me looked legendary, like all the guys were JFK Jr. All the women were Uma Thurman. At all the restaurants we went to, execs from Warner Brothers and Tri-Star would come over and talk about their latest project.
This is so why I write.
Nobody made the mistake of eye contact with me. They all talked about the latest buzz.
The producer for the Fight Club movie drove me around the Fox backlot. We saw where they filmed NYPD Blue. I said how I didn't watch television. This was not the best news to let slip.
We went to the Malibu Colony. We went to Venice Beach. The one place I wanted to go was the Getty Museum, but you have to book an appointment a month in advance.
So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn't funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it.
My head would just bleed and bleed. Whoever was lowest in the pecking order, I had to ride in their car. They showed me those concrete hand- and footprints, and they stood off to one side discussing the grosses for Twister and Mission: Impossible while I wandered around the same as the rest of the tourists with their heads bowed looking for Marilyn Monroe.
They drove me through Brentwood and Bel-Air and Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades.
They left me at the hotel where I had two hours before I had to be ready for dinner. There I was, and there was the mini-bar just asking to be violated, and there was a bathroom bigger than where I live. The bathroom was lined with mirror, and everywhere, there I was, all naked with the eruptions on my head finally draining clear liquid. The little hotel gin bottle in my hand. The gigantic bathtub kept filling and filling, but never got more than an inch deep.
All those years you write and write. You sit in the dark and say, someday. A book contract. A jacket photo. A book tour. A Hollywood movie. And someday you get them, and it's not how you planned.
Then you get the screenplay for your book in the mail, and it says: "Fight Club by Jim Uhls." He's the screenwriter. Way underneath that, in parentheses, it says: Based on the novel by you.
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version. Because even sitting in my puddle of warm Los Angeles water, I was already thinking what I'd tell my friends when they asked about this trip. I'd tell them all about my infection and Malibu and the bottomless bathtub, and they'd say:
You should write that down.
The Lip Enhancer
It was Ina who first told me about Brad's lips, and what he does with them. We'd met Brad this last summer, near Los Angeles, in San Pedro, on six acres of barren concrete with gang warfare, Crip and Blood territory staked out all around us. It was the set for a movie based on a book I'd written and could barely remember. Just before this, a neighborhood man had been tied to a bus stop bench here. The set crews found him, tied up, shot to death. The crew was building a rotting Victorian mansion for a million dollars.
All this buildup, this scene setting is so I don't look too stupid.
This will only look like it's about Brad Pitt.
It was one or two o'clock in the morning when Ina and I got there. At the production base camp, movie extras slept in dark lumps, curled up inside their cars. Waiting for their call. When we parked, a security guard explained how we'd have to walk unprotected for the last two blocks to the actual movie shooting location.
A pop, then another pop came from the dark neighborhood nearby.
Drive-by shootings, the guard told us. To get to the set, he said, we needed to keep our heads down and run. Just run, he said. Now.
So we ran.
According to Ina, what Brad does is lick his lips. A lot. According to Ina, this is probably not accidental. According to Ina, Brad has great lips.
Somewhere along the line my sister sent me a videotape of Oprah Winfrey, and there was Brad being interviewed, and Ina was pretty much right all over.
The first day we met Brad, he ran up with his shirt open, tanned and smiling, and said, "Thank you for the best fucking part of my whole fucking career!"
That's about all I remember.
That, and I wanted to have lips.
Big lips are everywhere. Fashion models, movie stars. Where I live in Oregon, in a house in the woods, you can ignore a lot of the world, but one day we got a mail-order catalogue and there inside was the Lip Enhancer.
For this movie, Brad had the caps knocked off his front teeth and chipped, snaggle-tooth caps glued on. He shaved his head. Between takes, the wardrobe people rubbed his clothes in the dust on the ground.
And he still looked so good Ina couldn't put two words together. Girls from the 'hood stood five deep at the barricades two blocks away and chanted his name.
I had to get me some of those lips.
According to the people at Facial Sculpting, Inc., you can get collagen lip injections, but they don't last. Full collagen lips will run you around $6,880 per year. Plus, collagen tends to move around inside, giving you lumpy lips. Plus, the injection process causes dark bruising and swelling that can last up to a week, with new collagen injections needed every month.
To be fair, I called five local cosmetic surgeons in Oregon, all of whom do lips, all of whom refused to even discuss the Lip Enhancer. Even when I agreed to pay a hundred-dollar consultation fee. Even when I got down and begged.
Oh, Dr. Linda Mueller, you know who you are.
The Lip Enhancer cost me $25, plus a couple bucks for shipping, plus the snide tone of the man who took my order. It's not really marketed to men. We're supposed to be above all that. Still, the Lip Enhancer is similar to a huge number of penis enlargement systems you can buy.
These are systems you can buy, and use, and write funny silly essays about and therefore tax-deduct; needless to say, several of those systems are now in the mail to me.
The key word is "suction." Like those penis systems, the Lip Enhancer uses gentle suction to distend your lips. Basically, it's a two-piece telescoping tube, sealed at one end. You place the open end of the tube against your lips, then pull the sealed end away from you, lengthening the tube. This creates the suction that pulls your lips inside the tube, giving you full, pouty lips in about two minutes.
In the instructions, the lovely young woman has her lips sucked so far into the clear tube that she looks like a kissing gourami fish.
Some people, it gives them a big hickey around their mouth. This is just like when you were a kid and you pressed a plastic glass around your mouth and chin and sucked all the air out until you had a huge dark bruise that looked like the five-o'clock shadow of Fred Flintstone or Homer Simpson.
You should not use the Lip Enhancer if you're a diabetic or have any blood disorder.
According to the catalogue, your new big full pouty lips will last about six hours.
This is how Cinderella must've felt.
There are similar suction systems to give you bigger, more perky nipples.
In the near future, you can imagine, every big evening will begin hours earlier with you getting sucked on by different appliances, each of them making some part of you bigger for a few hours. The whole evening would then be a race to get naked and accomplish some lovin' before your parts snapped back to their original size.
Yes, there's even a system for enlarging your testicles.
I was visitor number 921 to the Lip Enhancer website.
I was visitor number 500,000 to any of the penis enlargement sites.
Your first week with the Lip Enhancer, you have to condition your lips twice a day. This involves short, gentle sessions of getting your lips sucked. This is less exciting than it sounds.
Now, I've kissed thin lips, and I've kissed thick lips. Me, I have what you'd call combination lips, a large lower lip and pretty much no upper lip. Some cultures scar their faces with knives. Some flatten the heads of their babies with special cradle boards. Some distend their necks with wire coils. All these National Geographic images went through my mind as I sat in my car, my head tilted back at the recommended forty-five-degree angle, the Lip Enhancer tight around my mouth and my lips sucked into the tube. Beauty is a construct of the culture. A mutually agreed upon standard. Nobody used to look at George Washington, with his wooden teeth, in his powdered wig, and say, Fashion Victim.
After two minutes-the recommended maximum treatment time-I did not look like Brad. Trying to talk, I pronounced almost all my consonants as B's, the same vaguely racist way the character with the huge lips used to talk in the old Fat Albert cartoons on Saturday morning.
"Hey'b, Fab Alberb," I said to the rearview mirror. "How'b boub dees'b libs?"
My lips felt raw and swollen, as if I'd eaten barrels of salty popcorn.
I could see why none of the lovely models in the Lip Enhancer brochures ever smiled.
I hurried out of the car, still in the window of time before my lips would shrink back to nothing. Back to just the regular, ordinary me. I went to a writers' workshop, and my friend Tom asked, "Didn't you use to have a mustache?"
I tried licking them à la Brad on Oprah.
My friend Erin leaned close, squinted hard, and asked, "Have you had dental work done today?"
I remembered Brad in the dentist's chair, sitting through the whole pain of getting his caps switched, to glam down his look with new broken teeth. How one day he had to have good teeth, and the next day, breaks and chips. How every switch meant more time under the dentist. More pain.
It's funny, but you see yourself in a certain way, and any change is hard to understand. It's hard to say if I looked better or worse. To me it was creepy, like those ads in old comic books where you could send away for "nigger lips" and "Jew noses." A caricature of something. In this case, a caricature of beauty.
According to the package enclosures, you can wash the Lip Enhancer with soap and water. According to the website, it makes a great gift. So now it's washed and wrapped, and Ina's birthday is October 16.
Somewhere in the mail, in the backs of trucks or the bellies of airplanes, various other suction systems are still headed my way. Ten of thousands are headed for other people. Me, these people, we believe. Something will save us. Deliver us. Make us happy. And, sure, you could say this kind of special effect is okay for an actor. An actor is playing a role. Well, I would say, who isn't?
So this wasn't really about Brad.
It's about everybody.
Monkey Think, Monkey Do
This summer a young man pulled me aside in a bookstore and said he loved how in Fight Club I wrote about waiters tainting food. He asked me to sign a book and said he worked in a five-star restaurant where they monkey with celebrities' food all the time.
"Margaret Thatcher," he said, "has eaten my sperm." He held up one hand, fingers spread, and said, "At least five times."
Writing that book, I knew a movie projectionist who collected single frames from porno movies and made them into slides. When I talked to people about cutting these frames into G-rated family movies, one friend said, "Don't. People will read that, and they'll start doing it…"
Later, when they were shooting the Fight Club movie, some Hollywood big names told me the book hit home because they, themselves, had spliced porno into movies as angry teenage projectionists. People told me about blowing their noses into hamburgers at fast-food cooking jobs. They told me about changing the bottles of hair dye from box to box in the drugstore, blond to black, red to brown, and coming back to see angry, wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager. This was the decade of "transgressive novels," starting early with American Psycho and continuing with Trainspotting and Fight Club. These were novels about bored bad boys who'd try anything to feel alive. Everything people told me, I could roll it into a book and sell.
On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in the emergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight would be a struggle not to pop open that door. The air sucking out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, the screaming chaos and "Mayday! Mayday!" emergency landing, it was all so clear. That door, so begging to be opened.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard defines dread as the knowledge of what you must do to prove you're free, even if it will destroy you. His example is Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until God shows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, "Don't eat this." Now Adam is no longer free. There is one rule he can break, he must break, to prove his freedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we are forbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable.
Monkey think, monkey do.
According
to Kierkegaard, the person who allows the law to control his life, who says the possible isn't possible because it is illegal, is leading an inauthentic life.
In Portland, Oregon, someone is filling tennis balls with matchheads and taping them shut. They leave the balls on the street for anyone to find, and any kick or throw will make them explode. So far, a man's lost a foot; a dog, its head.
Now the graffiti taggers are using acid glass-etching creams to write on shop and car windows. At suburban Tigard High School, an unidentified teenage boy takes his shit and wipes it around the walls of the men's bathroom. The school knows him only as the "Una-Pooper." Nobody's supposed to talk about him because the school is afraid of copycats.
As Kierkegaard would say, every time we see what's possible, we make it happen. We make it inevitable. Until Stephen King wrote about high school losers killing their peer groups, school shootings were unknown. But did Carrie and Rage make it inevitable?
Millions of us paid money to watch the Empire State Building destroyed in Independence Day. Now the Department of Defense has enrolled the best Hollywood creative people to brainstorm terrorist scenarios, including director David Fincher, who made the Century City skyline fall down in Fight Club. We want to know every way we might be attacked. So we can be prepared.
Because of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, you can't mail a package without going to a post office clerk. Because of people dropping bowling balls onto freeways, we have fences enclosing highway overpasses.
All of this reaction, as if we can protect ourselves against everything.
This summer, Dale Shackleford, the man convicted of killing my father, said: Hey, the state could give him the death penalty, but he and his white-supremacist friends had built and buried several anthrax bombs around Spokane, Washington. If the state killed him, someday a backhoe would rupture a buried bomb and tens of thousands would die. Among themselves, the prosecution team started calling this kind of statement a "Shackle-Freudian lie."
Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories) Page 18
