Essays, Emails ...

by Palahniuk, Chuck

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Collection of Essays, Short Stories, E-mails

  Edited by Paul Poroshin

  Monkey Think, Monkey Do

  This summer a young man pulled 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. They told me about changing the bottles of hair dye from box to box in the drug store, blonde into black et cetera, and coming back to see angry wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager. This was the decade of “transgressional 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 sell.

  On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in the emergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight was a struggle not to pop that door open. The air sucked out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, the screaming chaos and “Mayday, Mayday!” emergency landing, it was all so clear. The door, so begging to be opened.

  The Danish philosopher, Soren 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. Thee 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 just because it’s illegal, is leading the inauthentic life.

  In Portland, Oregon, where I live, someone is filling tennis balls with hundreds of match heads 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 Tigard High School, a teenage boy takes his shit and wipes it around the walls of the men’s bathrooms. The school knows him only as “The Una-Pooper.” Nobody’s supposed to talk about him because they’re 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, the man who made the Century City skyline collapse 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, reactive. As if we can protect ourselves against everything.

  This summer 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.

  What’s coming is a million new reasons not to live your life. You can deny your possibility to success and blame it on something else. You can fight against everything—Margaret Thatcher, property owners, the urge to open that door mid-flight, God... everything you pretend keeps you down. You can live Kierkegaard’s inauthentic life. Or you can make what Kierkegaard called your Leap of Faith, where you stop living as a reaction and start living as a force for what you say should be. What’s coming is a million new reasons to go ahead.

  What’s going out is the cathartic transgressional novel, now that we have someone to hate more than each other.

  Extreme Behavior

  A pretty blonde tilts her cowboy hat farther back on her head. This is so she can deep throat a cowboy without her hat brim hitting him in the gut.

  This is on stage, in a crowded bar. Both of them are naked and smeared with chocolate pudding and whipped cream. This, they call the “Co-Ed Body Painting Contest.” The stage is red carpet. The lights, fluorescent. The crowd chants, “We want head! We want head!”

  The cowboy sprays whipped cream in the crack of the blonde’s butt and eats. The blonde masturbates him with a handful of chocolate pudding. Another couple takes the stage and the man licks pudding out of the woman’s shaved crotch. A girl with a brown ponytail in a halter top sucks off a guy with an uncut dick.

  This is while the crowd sings, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”

  The crowd is packed in, smoking cigars, drinking Rainier Beer, drinking Schmidt’s and Miller, eating deep-fried bull gonads dipped in ranch dressing. This is the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival just getting started. This is some 15 miles south of Missoula, Montana, where this same weekend drag queens from a dozen states meet to crown their Empress. This is why hundreds of Christians have come into town to sit on street corners in lawn chairs, pointing at the drag queens strutting in mini-skirts and the 15,000 leather bikers roaring through town on choppers. The Christians point and shout, “Demon! I can see you demon! You are not hiding!”

  For just this one weekend, the first weekend in September, Missoula is the center of the friggin’ universe.

  At the Rock Creek Lodge, people climb the “Stairway to Heaven,” the outdoor stage, all weekend to do, well... you name it.

  A stone’s throw to the east, trucks go by on Interstate 90, blowing their air horns as the girls on stage hook their legs over the railings and pump their crotches in the air. Half a stone’s throw to the west, the Burlington Northern freight trains slow to get a better look and blow their sirens.

  “I built the stage with 14 steps,” says festival founder Rod Jackson. “It could always be a gallows.” Except that it’s painted red, the stage looks like a gallows.

  During the women’s wet T-shirt contest, the stage surrounded by bikers and college kids and yuppies and truckers, skinny cowboys and rednecks, a blonde in clunky high heels hooks one leg over the stage railing and squats low on her other leg so the crowd can reach up and play with her.

  The crowd chants, “Beaver! Beaver! Beaver!”

  A blonde with short hair grabs the garden hose from the wet T-shirt organizer. She douches with the hose and squats at the edge of the stage, spraying the crowd. Two brunettes suck each other’s wet breasts and French kiss. Another woman leads a German Shepard up on stage. She leans back, pumping her hips as she holds the dog’s mouth between her legs.

  A blonde college girl balances with both feet up on the stage railing and slowly lowers her crotch onto the smiling faces of the contest organizer, Gary “The
Hoser ,” while the crowd sings, “London Bridge is Falling Down.”

  In the souvenir shop, naked sunburned people stand in line to buy souvenir T-shirts ($11.95). Men in black Testicle Festival G-strings ($5.95) buy hand-carved dildos called “Montana Wood Peckers” ($15). On the outdoor stage, under the big Montana sun, with the traffic and trains honking, a woman uses a wood pecker on herself.

  Every time a woman squats on stage, a forest of arms comes up, each hand holding an orange disposable camera, and the click of shutters is thick as crickets.

  A disposable camera costs $15.99 here.

  During the “Men’s Bare Chest Contests” the crowd chants “Dick and balls! Dick and balls!” as the drunk bikers and cowboys and college kids from Montana State stand in line to strip onstage and swing their parts over the crowd. A Brad Pitt look-alike pumps his erection in the air. A woman reaches between his legs from behind and masturbates him until he turns suddenly, slapping her in the face with his hard-on. The woman grabs hold and drags him off the stage.

  The old men sit on logs, drinking beer and throwing rocks at the fiberglass port-potties where the women pee. The men pee anywhere. By now the parking lot is paved with crushed beer cans.

  Inside the Rock Creek Lodge, women crawl under a life-sized statue of a bull to kiss its scrotum for good luck.

  Away from the main crowd, a trail of men leads back into the field of camp trailers and tents where two women are getting dressed. The two describe themselves as “just a couple of regular girls from White Fish, with regular jobs and everything.” One says, “Did you hear the applause? We won. We definitely won.” A drunk young guy says, “So, what do you win?” And the girl says, “There’s no prize or anything, but we’re the definite winners.”

  Escort

  My first day as an escort, my first “date” had only one leg. He’d gone to a gay bathhouse, to get warm, he told me. Maybe for sex. And he’d fallen asleep in the steam room, too close to the heating element. He’d been unconscious for hours until some one found him. Until the meat of his left thigh was completely and thoroughly cooked.

  He couldn’t walk, but his mother was coming from Wisconsin to see him, and the hospice needed someone to cart the two of them around to visit the local tourist sights. Go shopping downtown. See the beach. Multnomah Falls. This was all you could do as a volunteer if you weren’t a nurse or a cook or doctor.

  You were an escort, and this was the place where young people with no insurance went to die. The hospice name, I don’t even remember. It wasn’t on any signs anywhere, and they asked you to be discreet coming and going because the neighbors didn’t know what was going on in the enormous old house on their street, a street with its share of crack houses and drive-by shootings, still nobody wanted to live next door to this: four people dying in the living room, two in the dining room. At least two people lay dying in each upstairs bedroom and there were a lot of bedrooms. At least half these people had AIDS, but the house didn’t discriminate. You could come here and die of anything.

  The reason I was there was my job. This meant laying on my back on a creeper with a 200-pound class 8 diesel truck driveline laying on my chest and running down between my legs as far as my feet. My job is I had to roll under trucks as they crept down an assembly line, and I installed these drivelines. Twenty-six drivelines every eight hours. Working fast as each truck moved along, pulling me into the huge blazing hot paint ovens just a few feet down the line.

  My degree in Journalism couldn’t get me more than five dollars an hour. Other guys in the shop had the same degree, and we joked how liberal arts degrees should include welding skills so you’d at least pick up the extra two bucks an hour our shop paid grunts who could weld. Someone invited me to their church, and I was desperate enough to go, and at the church they had a potted ficus they called a Giving Tree, decorated with paper ornaments, each ornament printed with a good deed you could choose. My ornament said: Take a hospice patient on a date.

  That was their word, “date.” And there was a phone number.

  I took the man with one leg, then him and his mother, all over the area, to scenic viewpoints, to museums, his wheel chair folded up in the back of my fifteen-year-old Mercury Bobcat. His mother smoking, silent. Her son was thirty years old, and she had two weeks of vacation. At night, I’d take her back to her TravelLodge next to the freeway, and she’d smoke, sitting on the hood of my car, talking about her son already in the past tense. He could play the piano, she said. In school, he earned a degree in music, but ended up demonstrating electric organs in shopping mall stores.

  These were conversations after we had no emotions left.

  I was twenty-five years old, and the next day I was back under trucks with maybe three or four hours sleep. Only now my own problems didn’t seem very bad. Just looking at my hands and feet, marveling at the weight I could lift, the way I could shout against the pneumatic roar of the shop, my whole life felt like a miracle instead of a mistake.

  In two weeks, the mother was gone home. In another three months, her son was gone. Dead, gone.

  I drove people with cancer to see the ocean for their last time. I drove people with AIDS to the top of Mount Hood so they could see the whole world while there was still time.

  I sat bedside while the nurse told me what to look for at the moment of death, the gasping and unconscious struggle of someone drowning in their sleep as renal failure filled their lungs with water. The monitor would beep every five or ten seconds as it injected morphine into the patient. The patient’s eyes would roll back, bulging and entirely white. You held their cold hand for hours, until another escort came to the rescue or until it didn’t matter.

  The mother in Wisconsin sent me an afghan she’d crocheted, purple and red. Another mother or grandmother I’d escorted sent me an afghan in blue, green and white. Another came in red, white and black. Granny squares, zigzag patterns. They piled up at one end of the couch until my housemates asked if we could store them in the attic.

  Just before he’d died, the woman’s son, the man with one leg, just before he’d lost consciousness, he’d begged me to go into his old apartment. There was a closet full of sex toys. Magazines. Dildos. Leather wear. It was nothing he wanted his mother to find so I promised to throw it all out. So I went there, to the little studio apartment sealed and stale after months empty. Like a crypt, I’d say, but that’s not the right word. It sounds too dramatic. Like cheesy organ music. But in fact, just sad. The sex toys and anal whatnots were just sadder. Orphaned. That’s not the right word either, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

  The afghans are still boxed and in my attic. Every Christmas a housemate will go look for ornaments and find the afghans, red and black, green and purple, each one a dead person, a son or daughter or grandchild, and whoever finds them will ask if we can use them on our beds or give them to Goodwill. And every Christmas, I’ll say, No. I can’t say what scares me more, throwing away all these dead children or sleeping with them.

  Don’t ask me why, I tell people. I refuse to even talk about it. That was all ten years ago. I sold the Bobcat in 1989. I quit being an escort. Maybe because after the man with one leg, after he died, after his sex toys were all garbage bagged, after they were buried in the Dumpster, after the apartment windows were open and the smell of leather and latex and shit was gone, the apartment looked good. The sofa-bed was a tasteful mauve, the walls and carpet, cream. The little kitchen had butcher block counter tops. The bathroom was all white and clean.

  I sat there in the tasteful silence. I could’ve lived there.

  Anyone could’ve lived there.

  Freak Speak: The Story Behind Lullaby

  The medical examiner kept the photo covered with a sheet of paper, and he said, “I’ll pull the paper back very slowly.”

  He said, “Tell me to stop when you’ve seen enough.”

  In 1999, the examiner said, my father had been at the top of an outdoor stairway when someone shot him. The bullet en
tered through his abdomen, bursting the diaphragm as it traveled up into the chest cavity where it collapsed both lungs. This is all evidence stated in court, bits of forensic detail put together after-the-fact by the detectives. After the shot, he dragged himself—or someone dragged him—inside the apartment at the top of the stairway. He lay on the floor next to the woman he’d just taken to a country fair. He must’ve died within a few minutes, the police say, because he was not killed by a gunshot to the back of the neck. What the police called “execution style.” The way the woman was.

  In December 2000, a jury in Moscow, Idaho found Dale Shackleford guilty of both murders. As part of victim’s rights law, the court asked me to make a statement about the extent of my suffering caused by this crime.

  As part of that statement, I had to decide: was I for or against the death sentence.

  This is the story behind the story in Lullaby. The months I talked to people and read and wrote, trying to decide where I stood on capital punishment.

  According to the prosecution, Shackleford returned to the scene of the murders several times, trying to start a fire big enough to mask the evidence. It was only when he broke a window to give the fire some air that the building burned. As the second-floor apartment fell into the first floor, a mattress fell on my father’s body, shielding it so only the legs burned to nothing.

  The photo under the sheet of white paper is what was left under that mattress.

  The lack of soot or smoke in the throats of both victims proves they didn’t burn alive. Another test, for increased carbon monoxide in their blood, would be conclusive, but I didn’t ask about it. You want to quit while you’re still ahead.

  The medical examiners showing me the evidence after the trial is over. I’ve given my statement in court and been cross-examined. Just the two of us looking at the sheet of white paper, we’re in a back office with no windows. The rooms crowded with shelves full of books and bulging file folders. The medical examiner says few families ever want to see more than the first half-inch of an arson victim photo. He slides the paper aside until a sliver of photo shows, very slow, the way you can only see the sun move when it’s either rising or setting on the horizon, and he says, “Tell me when to stop, and I’ll stop.”