Essays, Emails ...

by Palahniuk, Chuck

  When I reach for the paper, I say, “Just show me.” I say, “I’m sure I’ve seen worse.”

  He lifts the paper, and my first reaction is how my Dad would hate the way they’d wasted a good sheet of plywood, cutting it into an angled, irregular shape to carry his burned body. The body is face down, the legs burned down to stumps. The skin is gone and the muscle is burned black, the muscle sheathes ruptured with red showing underneath. My second reaction is how much it looks like barbecued chicken, crusted black with sauce under the crust.

  A year before this, my sister’s husband had died young, of a stroke while they worked in the garden. At the mortuary, she went into the viewing room, alone. A moment later, she stuck her head out the doorway and whispered, “It’s not him. They’ve made a mistake.” My Mom went in, and the two of them circled the open coffin, squinting and looking, trying to decide. Alive, Gerard had been so funny and bossy and active. It felt silly to cry over this object.

  Long story short, I’d worked in hospitals. I’d been a crime reporter. I know a dead body is not the person. Looking at the barbecued mess that had been my father, all the drama evaporated.

  Still, did I want the man who did this to die?

  In court, it came out that Shackleford had a life-long history of physically abusing women and children. He’d lived most of his life in mental hospitals and jails. The woman Shackleford had shot point-blank in the neck was his ex-wife. She’d gone into the prison system to teach legal skills, and taught him to be a para-legal. Using these skills he’d learned from his victim, he’d already filed an appeal to his murder convictions.

  He told the court that he and a group of white supremacists had built and buried anthrax bombs in the Spokane area, and if the state killed him those bombs would eventually explode, killing thousands.

  He told the police that I was harassing him, sending him things in the mail at a time when I didn’t even know his name.

  The prosecution team started calling his kind of grandiose yarn a “Shackle-Freudian” lie.

  But still, did I want this man to die?

  A friend of mine told me Karl Marx’ theory that in order to commit a crime, you must make your victim your enemy. You justify crime after crime by making more people your enemy until you’re left alone. You’re isolated in a world you’ve decided is entirely against you. At that point, Marx said, the only way to bring the criminal back into humanity is to capture and punish him. His punishment becomes his redemption. It’s an act of kindness.

  Another friend, a Buddhist, said how every life requires the death of so many other things. Plants, animals, other people. This is life. Life is death. We can only hope to make the best use of the lives we live at the cost of so many others. He said, a terrible person should not be allowed to continue taking the lives of any other living things.

  With all this on my mind, I finished the final re-write on Lullaby and sent it back to New York by next-day FedEx on September 10th, 2001.

  What had started out as a dark, funny book about witchcraft became a story about the constant power struggle that is life. The struggle between generations. Between people and animals. Between men and women. Rich and poor. Individuals and corporations. Between cultures.

  On a trivial level, the book is about my neighborhood’s struggle to deal with a local woman who opens every window and blasts every sunny day with her record collection. Bagpipes, Chinese opera, you name it. Noise pollution. After some days and weeks of her blaring noise, I could’ve killed her. It got impossible to work at home. So I traveled, writing on the road.

  A month later, the State of Idaho sentenced Dale Shackleford to die.

  While I was on book tour, my neighbor packed her huge stereo and million records and disappeared.

  I wrote the court, asking if I could witness the execution.

  There, but for the grace of God, go I.

  Navy Submarine

  You go to sea tired. After all the business of scraping and painting the hull, loading provisions, replacing equipment and stocking parts, after you take an advance on your pay and maybe prepay your rent for the three months you won’t be home, after you settle your affairs, you leave “sell” orders with your broker, you say goodbye to your family at the gate of King’s Bay Naval Base, you maybe shave your head because it’s a long time until you see a barber, after all that rushing around the first few days at sea are quiet.

  Inside “the people can,” or “locked in the tube” as submariners call their patrol, it’s a culture of quiet. In the exercise area the free weights are coated in thick black rubber. Between the weight plates of the Universal equipments are red rubber pads. Officers and crew wear tennis shoes, and holding almost everything—from plumbing to the running treadmill, anywhere metal meets metal—are rubber isolators to prevent rattling or drumming. The chairs have a thick rubber cap on each leg. Off watch, you listen to music on headset stereos. The USS Louisiana (SSBN 743) is coated to deaden enemy sonar and stay hidden, but any loud, sharp noise might be heard by someone listening within 25 miles.

  “When you go to the bathroom,” says the Louisiana’s Supply Officer, Lieutenant Patrick Smith, “you need to lower the seat in case the ship makes a funny role. A slamming lid could give us away.”

  “They don’t all go at once,” says the Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander Pete Hanlon, as he describes what happens if the ship changes depth with toilet seats left open. “You’ll be on the bridge and hear WANG! then WANG! then WANG!, one after another, and you’ll see the captain getting tighter and tighter.”

  At any point, a third of the crew may be asleep. During a patrol the only overhead light in each bunkroom is a small red fluorescent light near the curtained doorway. Almost all you hear is the rush of air in the ventilation system. Each crew bunk area holds nine berths, triple-decker, in a U-shape facing the doorway. Each berth, called a “rack,” has a six-inch-thick foam mattress that may or may not be dented by your alternate on the submarine’s other crews. Two crews alternate taking the Louisiana on patrol, the Gold Crew and the Blue Crew. If the guy who sleeps in your rack while you’re in port weighs 250 pounds and leaves a dent, says Gold Crew Mess Management Specialist Andrew Montroy, then you stuff towels under it. Each berth lifts to reveal a four-inch-deep storage space you call a “coffin locker.” Heavy burgundy curtains close each bunk off from the rest. At the head of each mattress is a reading light and a panel with an outlet and controls for a stereo headset similar to headsets used on passenger airliners. You have four different types of music from a system that plays compact disks brought on board by crews. You have volume and balance controls. You have an air vent. Also at the head of each rack is an oxygen mask.

  “The biggest fear we have on board is fire,” says Lt. Smith. “The reason for that is smoke.”

  In a fire, in narrow passageways full of smoke and without lights, in the pitch darkness, you’ll pull the breathing mask and canvas flash-hood over your face, and you’ll feel the floor for your next breath. On the floor are dark, abrasive patches, square patches and triangular patches. You’ll Braille the floor with your feet until you find a patch. A rectangular patch means an air port you can hook into directly overhead. Triangular patches point to air ports on the wall. You’ll plug into the port, take a breath, shout “air” and then move down the passageway to the next port for your next breath. An outlet coming off the mask lets another crewman hook up to you and breathe. And outlet coming off the mask lets another crewman hook up to you and breathe as you breathe, You shout “air” so nobody is alarmed by the loud hiss of air as you disconnect from a port.

  To make the Louisiana a home, Lt. Smith brings whole-bean Gevalia coffee, a coffee grinder and an espresso machine. Other crewman bring their own towels, they bring photos to tape on the underside of the bunk above theirs. Montroy brings his thirty favorite compact disks. They bring videotapes of life at home. One crewman brings a Scooby Doo pillow case. A lot bring their own quilts or blankets.

 
; “I call it my security blanket,” says Gold Crew Storekeeper First Class Greg Stone, who also writes a diary he can read to his wife later, while she reads hers to him.

  You go into the water with only the air that’s in the submarine. This same air is cleaned with heated amine that bonds to the carbon dioxide and removes it. To generate new oxygen, you use 1050 amps of electricity to split molecules of demineralized seawater. The carbon dioxide and the hydrogen are centered into the surrounding ocean. You use 3000 pounds of hydraulic pressure to compress onboard garbage into 60-pound, steel-wrapped canisters, about 400 for each patrol, that you jettison.

  You can’t drink alcohol, and you can smoke only in the area near the 12-cylinfer Fairbanks-Morris diesel auxiliary engine, called “The Rock Crusher.” The diesel engine acts as backup to the nuclear power plant, the “Pot-Belly Stove.”

  If you’re a crewman, you sleep as little as six feet away from the 24 Trident missiles that fill the center third of the ship, stored in tubes that run from the bilge up through all four decks. Outside the bunkrooms, the missile tubes are painted shades of orange, lighter orange towards the bow and darker toward the stern, to help crewmen with their depth perception in the 100-foot-long compartment. Mounted near a missile tube is an equipment locker full of video movies and candy for sale by the Rec Club.

  You’re surrounded by colored pipes and valves. Purple means refrigerant. Blue, fresh water. Green, seawater. Orange, hydraulic fluid. Brown , carbon dioxide. White, steam. Tan, low-pressure air.

  According to Hanlon, Smith and Gold Crew Chief of the Boat Ken Biller, depth perception is not a problem despite the fact that you’ll never focus your eyes farther than the length of the center missile compartment. According to a crewman drinking coffee on the mess deck, your first day back in the sunshine you squint and wear sunglasses, and the Navy recommends you not drive a car for your first two days ashore because of possible problems with depth perception.

  Mounted on a couple missile tubes are brass plaques to mark the time and place a missile was test fired. In tube number five, a plaque marks the DASO Launch on Dec. 18, 1997, at 1500 hours. Blue Crew fired their missile. The Navy annually tests its missile systems and related equipment from selected submarines.

  “Once in a while,” Gold Crew Lt. Smith says, referring to the test firing of the Tridents, “a boat is lucky enough to shoot a missile.” Gold Crew has never fired one.

  There are no windows or portholes or cameras mounted outside the hull. Except for the sonar, you are blind in the event you’re ever attacked by a... “...by a giant squid!” Lt. Smith says, completing the thought with raised eyebrows. “So far, that hasn’t happened.” On the sonar, deep underwater, you can listen to the calls of whales and dolphins and porpoise. The clicking racket made by schools of shrimp. These are all noises the crew calls “biologicals.”

  You can go to sea with 720 pounds of coffee, 150 gallons of boxed milk, 900 dozen large eggs, 6000 pounds of flour, 1200 pounds of sugar, 700 pounds of butter, 3500 pounds of potatoes. This is all packed in “Food Modules,” lockers measuring five by five by six-and-a-half feet tall, filled in warehouses ashore and lowered into the ship through a hatch. You go with 600 movie videos, 12 torpedoes, 150 crewmen and 15 officers and 165 “Halfway Boxes.”

  Before departure, the family of each man on board gives Chief of the Boat Ken Biller a shoebox-sized package, and on the night that marks the halfway point in the patrol, called “Halfway Night,” Biller distributes the boxes. Smith’s wife sends photos and beef jerky and a toy motorcycle to remind him of his own cycle on shore. Greg Stone gets a pillow case printed with a photograph of his wife, Kelley. Biller’s wife sends pictures of his dog and his gun collection.

  Also on Halfway Night, you can bid for an officer as they’re auctioned off. The money goes to the Rec Fund, and the auctioned officers work the next watch for the winning bidders. Another Halfway Night tradition is auctioning pies. Each winning bidder gets to call the man of his choice to a chair in front of the whole crew and smack the guy with a pie.

  Everybody on board calls Supply Officer Smith “Chop” because the gold insignia on his collar that are supposed to look like oak leaves look more like pork chops. Chief of the Boat Biller is called COB. Executive Officer Hanlon is called “XO.” A member of the original crew, like Mess Management Specialist Lonnie Becker, is a “Plank Owner.” You don’t watch a movie, you “burn a flick.” A door is a “hatch.” A hat, a “cover.” A missile, a “Boomer.” In the new and politically corrected Navy, the dark blue coveralls crewmen wear while on patrol are no longer called “Poopie Suits.” Crewmen who serve on the mess deck are no longer “Mess Cranks.” Ravioli isn’t “Pillows of Death.” Creamed chipped beef on toast isn’t “Shit on a Shingle.” Not officially. But still, you hear it.

  Hamburgers and cheeseburgers are still “Sliders.” Patties of chicken meat are still “Chicken Wheels.” Bunks are “racks” because of the racks that held hammocks on sailing ships. A bathroom is still a “head,” named after the holes in the bow of those ships. Two holes for the crew, one for the officers, cut in the heaving wave-washed deck above the keel. As XO Hanlon says, “Those guys, they didn’t need toilet paper.”

  Another landmark night during patrol is “Jefe Cafe.” Pronounced hef-AY, and Spanish for “Boss’s Cafe,” on this night the officers cook for the crew. They turn off the lights on the mess deck and wait on the crewmen with chemical glow sticks on the tables instead of candles. There’s even a maitre d’.

  For religion, there are “Lay Leaders,” crewmen who can lead Protestant or Catholic services. At Christmas, sailors string lights in their bunkrooms and put up small folding foil trees. They decorate the officers’ dining room, the Ward Room, with snow flakes and garlands.

  When you go to sea aboard the USS Louisiana, this is your life. Crewmen live on an 18-hour cycle. Six hours per watch. Six hours sleep. And six hours off watch when you can relax, exercise and study PC-based correspondence courses toward an associate’s degree. Every week or so, you sleep an eight-hour “Equalizer.” The average age of crewmen is 27 to 29. From your bunkroom, you go to the head in your shorts or a towel. Otherwise, most sailors wear their coveralls.

  Officers live on a 24-hour cycle. You do not salute officers while out at sea and on patrol.

  “After we’re locked in the tube,” says Lt. Smith, “this is our family, and that’s the way we treat them.”

  Smith points out the framed Pledge of Service on the Mess Deck wall and says, “A guy can have a great day, but if he comes through here to eat and the service is lousy, the food is lousy, the plates aren’t hot, if we don’t provide him with that at-home atmosphere, we can ruin his whole day.”

  Your last few days on patrol, everybody gets “Channel Fever.” You don’t want to sleep. You just want to get home. At this point, there are always movies going, with pizza and snacks out around the clock.

  On shore, the wives and significant others are raffling off the “First Kiss.” All the money from the pies and auctions and raffles goes toward the Crew Party to celebrate coming home.

  And the day the USS Louisiana arrives homes, the families will be on the pier with signs and banners. The Commanding Officer is always the first ashore, to greet the Commodore, but after that...

  The winner of the raffle is announced and that man and that woman, in front of everyone, they kiss. And everyone else cheers.

  The Backlash Backlash Movie

  Sorry guys, but what comes around goes around. After, oh, a lifetime of movies where women are cast as “the girlfriend,” movies where they are undressed quickly by horny male hands, then flop around motel rooms in their underwear; movies where they stand on the sidelines and wince and squirm and get thrown out the door only partially dressed and stand begging in the cold for more clothes; movies where women are shot by men, screamed at, introduced to drugs, and saved by men, well, here’s the inevitable.

  The backlash backlash movie.

  Je
sus’ Son has the same name as the book, a collection of short stories by Denis Johnson, but if you know the book, you’ll notice some things missing in the movie.

  Risk. Balance. Balls.

  In the book, the narrator stays balanced between being attractive and being horrible. The reader is always drawn in by his sensitivity and then instantly repelled by a momentary blurb of truth, one terrible slip where we see behind the narrator’s big brown eyes. In the book, in the abortion clinic, when the narrator is told that his girlfriend is resting, that she’s not dead, he responds, “I kind of wish she was.”

  In the book, the narrator holds a woman face down on the floor with a gun pressed to her head while she begs and pleads for her children asleep in the next room. The narrator fantasizes about forcing an old woman into an oven until her face bursts into flames. He fantasizes about raping a Mennonite woman in her bathroom, but only if he can wear a mask. He picks fights over pocket change. He dances or dates or does a different woman in almost every story. He almost chokes an effeminate old man he meets in a public library. He steals Social Security checks. He lies to his girlfriend, telling her he’s had a vasectomy so her unborn baby has to be somebody else’s child.

  The point is, he does things, terrible things—offensive things, and the reader is always being seduced by his sweet insights and vulnerability and then being shocked into realizing that when you love an addict, you love a part-time monster.