Essays, Emails ...

by Palahniuk, Chuck

  A funny, pretty, charming monster.

  The movie is another story. In the movie (starring Billy Crudup and Samantha Morton, directed by Alison Maclean, screenplay by Elizabeth Cuthrell), the narrator sits eating children’s breakfast cereal out of the box while his girlfriend shows him how to shoot up. Later, she saves him from an overdose.

  In the book, the narrator backs a woman behind an air conditioner, opens her pants and puts his hands inside. In the movie, it’s Morton who pulls Crudup aside, opens her own pants and puts his hands where she wants them.

  In the movie, the narrator only errs by accident. He’s the big doe-eyed victim, abandoned by Morton twice: first when she leaves him for another man, then when she commits suicide.

  He weeps intensely after accidentally killing a litter of baby rabbits. His only action, when he punches Samantha Morton in the stomach, seems almost accidental and occurs only after she dances around him, screaming obscenities.

  Through all this, Crudup cowers. He pulls his head down into his shoulders and sits with his hands squeezed together between his legs in the classic body language of a man wishing he had a vagina.

  In the book, when he sees a shirtless man and gets an erection, we’re shocked. It’s the last response we’d expect. The character is suddenly deeper than we can ever understand. A realistic person.

  In the movie, he’s bossed around by female nurses, he’s seduced by Morton, he’s finally redeemed by a crippled Holly Hunter. The fact that a shirtless man makes him spring a boner, well, what’s another emasculation after all that?

  This isn’t the book. This is the new and improved, loveable, huggable, highly marketable Jesus’ Son. Now, it’s what the movie industry calls a “date flick.”

  Do not go expecting to see Jack Hotel, the book’s big male character with his shining helmet of blond hair and his olive-green suit. Don’t go expecting to see the Greek bellydancer, or the horny newlywed bride, or the dwarf; all the other women the narrator sleeps with. They’re all written out.

  What’s here is a nice monogamous love story between two attractive junkies.

  People who know Denis Johnson say he likes the movie and was very cooperative in the production. Maybe this is why they cast him as the man who wanders into the hospital with a knife stuck up to the hilt in his eye. A knife stuck in him by a woman.

  If only to see Denis Johnson, yes, you should see this movie.

  Beyond that, just relax. In the first scene, the narrator admits he has a gun tucked in his pants, but says he’s too afraid to use it.

  Still, you’ll want to shout: Come on, Billy, take a chance. Whip out your gun. Do it. Do something.

  LA Times Memoir

  Another waiter has just served me another free meal because I’m “that guy.” I’m the guy who wrote that book. The Fight Club book. Because there’s a scene in the book where a loyal waiter, a member of the fight club cult, serves the narrator free food. Where now in the movie, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter get free food.

  Then a magazine editor, another magazine editor, calls me, angry and ranting because he wants to send a writer to the underground fight club in his area.

  “It’s cool, man,” he says from New York. “You can tell me where. We won’t screw it up.”

  I tell him there’s no such place. There’s no secret society of clubs where guys bash each other and gripe about their empty lives, their hollow careers, their absent fathers. Fight clubs are make-believe. You can’t go there. I made them up.

  “OK,” he’s saying. “Be that way. If you don’t trust us, then to hell with you.” Another pack of letters arrives care of my publisher, from young men telling me they’ve gone to fight clubs in New Jersey and London and Spokane. Telling me about their fathers. In today’s mail are wristwatches, lapel pins and coffee mugs, prizes from the sweepstakes my father enters my siblings and me in every winter.

  Parts of Fight Club have always been true. It’s less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives. I do have insomnia and wander with no sleep for weeks, like Jack. Angry waiters I know mess with food. They shave their heads. My friend Alice makes soap. My friend Mike cuts single frames of smut into family features. Every guy I know feels let down by his father. Even my father feels let down by his father.

  But now, more and more, what little was fiction is becoming reality. The night before I mailed the manuscript to an agent in 1995, when it was just a couple hundred sheets of paper, a friend joked that she wanted to meet Brad Pitt.

  I joked that I wanted to leave my job working on diesel trucks all day. Now those pages are a movie starring Pitt and Norton and Bonham Carter, directed by David Fincher. Now I’m unemployed. Twentieth Century Fox let me bring some friends down to the shoot last summer, and every morning we ate at the same cafe in Santa Monica. Every breakfast, we got the same waiter, Charlie, with his movie-star looks and thick hair, until the last morning we were in town. That morning, Charlie walked out of the kitchen with his head shaved. Charlie was in the movie. My friends who’d been anarchist waiters with shaved heads were now being served eggs by a real waiter who was an actor who was playing a fake anarchist waiter with a shaved head.

  It’s that same feeling when you get between two mirrors in the barber shop and you can see your reflection of your reflection of your reflection going off into infinity.

  Now waiters are refusing my money. Editors are grousing. Guys take me aside at bookstore events and beg to know where the local club meets.

  Women ask, quiet and serious, “Is there a club like this for women?”

  A late-night fight club where you can tag some stranger in the crowd and then slug it out until one of you drops. These young women say, “Yeah, I really, really need to go to something like this.”

  A German friend of mine, Carston, learned to speak English in only funny outdated clichés. For him, every party was an “all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza.”

  Now Carston’s clumsy pigeon words are coming out of Pitt’s mouth, 40 feet high, in front of millions of people. My friend Jeff’s trashed ghetto kitchen is re-created in a Hollywood sound stage. The night I went to save my friend Kevin from a Xanax overdose is now Brad rushing to save Helena.

  Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.

  The story is no longer my story. It’s David Fincher’s. The set for Edward Norton’s yuppie condo is a re-creation of an apartment from David’s past. Edward wrote and rewrote his own lines. Brad chipped his teeth and shaved his head. My boss thinks the story is about how he struggles to please his demanding boss. My father thought the story was about his absent father, my grandfather, who killed his wife and himself with a shotgun.

  My father was 4 in 1943 when he hid under a bed as his parents fought, and his 12 brothers and sisters ran into the woods. Then his mother was dead, and his father stamped around the house looking for him, calling for him, still carrying the shotgun.

  My father remembers the boots stamping past the bed and the barrel of the shotgun trailing along near the floor. Then he remembers pouring buckets of sawdust on the bodies, to protect them from wasps and flies.

  The book, and now the movie, is a product of all these people. And, with everything added to it, the Fight Club story becomes stronger, cleaner, not just the record of one life, but of a generation. Not just of a generation, but of men.

  The book is the product of Nora Ephron and Thom Jones and Mark Richard and Joan Didion, Amy Hemple and Bret Ellis and Denis Johnson, because those are the people I read.

  * * *

  And now most of my old friends, Jeff and Carston and Alice are moved away, gone, married, dead, graduated, back in school, raising children. This summer, someone murdered my father in the mountains of Idaho and burned his body down to a few pounds of bone. The police say they have no real suspects. He was 59.

  The news came on a Friday morning, through my publicist who’d been called by the Latah
County sheriff’s office, who’d found me through my publisher on the Internet. The poor publicist called me and said, “This might be some kind of sick joke, but you need to call a detective in Moscow, Idaho.”

  Now here I sit with a table full of food, and you’d think free bento and free fish would taste great, but that’s not always the case.

  I still wander at night.

  All that’s left is a book, and now a movie, a funny, exciting movie. A wild, excellent movie full of dangerous, scary ideas. What for other people will be a whiplash carnival ride, for my friends and me, is a nostalgic scrapbook. A reminder. Amazing, reassuring proof that our anger, our disappointment, our striving and resentment unite us with each other, and now with the world.

  What’s left is proof we can create reality.

  Frieda, the woman who shaved Brad’s head, promised me the hair for my Christmas cards, but then she forgot, so I trimmed a friend’s golden retriever. Another woman, a friend of my father, calls me, frantic. She’s sure the white supremacists killed him, and she wants to “go under deep cover” into their world around Hayden Lake and Butler Lake, Idaho. She wants me to go along and “act as backup.” To “cover her.”

  So my adventures continue. I will go into the Idaho panhandle. Or I will sit at home like the police want, take Zoloft and wait for them to call.

  Or, I don’t know.

  My father was a sweepstakes junkie, and every week small prizes still arrive in the mail. Wristwatches, coffee mugs, golf towels, calendars—never the big prizes, the cars or boats, this is the little stuff. Another friend, Jennifer, just lost her father to cancer, and she gets the same kind of little prizes from contests he entered her in months ago. Necklaces, soup mix, taco sauce and every time one arrives—video games, toothbrushes—her heart breaks.

  Consolation prizes.

  A few nights before my father died, he and I talked long-distance for three hours about a treehouse he’d built my brother and me. We talked about a batch of chickens I’m raising, how to build them a coop, and if the laying box for each hen should have a wire mesh floor.

  And he said, no. A chicken would not poop in its nest.

  We talked about the weather, how cold it was at night. He said how in the woods where he lived, the wild turkeys had just hatched their chicks, and he told me how each tom turkey would open its wings at dusk and gather in all its young. Because they were too large for the hen to protect. To keep them warm.

  I told him no male animal could ever be that nurturing.

  Now my father’s dead, and my hens have their nests.

  And now it seems that both he and I were wrong.

  American Goth

  It’s almost midnight in Marilyn Manson’s attic. The attic is at the top of a spiral staircase where the skeleton of a seven-foot-tall man, the bones black with age, crouches with his human skull replaced by a ram’s skull. He’s the altar piece from an old Satanic church in Britain, Manson says. Next to the skeleton is the artificial leg a man pulled off himself and gave to Manson after a concert. Manson is at the end of 10 years’ work. It’s a new start. The alpha and the omega for this man who’s worked to become the most despised, the most frightening artist in music. As a coping method. A defense mechanism. Or just out of boredom.

  The walls are red, and as Manson sits on the black carpet, shuffling tarot cards, he says, “It’s hard to read yourself.”

  Somewhere, he says, he’s got the skeleton of a seven-year-old Chinese boy, disassembled and sealed in plastic bags.

  “I think I might make a chandelier out of it,” he says.

  Somewhere is the bottle of absinthe he drinks despite the fear of brain damage.

  Here in the attic are his paintings and the working manuscript for his novel. He brings out the designs for a new deck of tarot cards. It’s him on almost every card. Manson as the Emperor, sitting in a wheelchair with prosthetic legs, clutching a rifle, with the American flag hung upside-down behind him. Manson as the headless Fool, stepping off a cliff with grainy images of Jackie O in her pink suit and a JFK campaign poster in the background.

  “It was a matter of re-interpreting the tarot,” he says. “I replaced the swords with guns. And justice is weighing the Bible against the Brain.”

  He says, “Because each card has so many different symbols, there is a real magic, ritual element to it. When you shuffle, you’re supposed to transfer your energy to the cards. It sounds kind of hokey. It’s not something I do all the time. I like the symbolism much more than the trying to rely on divination.

  “I think a reasonable question would be, ‘What’s next?’” he says, about to deal the cards and begin his reading. “More specific, ‘What’s my next step?’”

  Manson deals his first card: The Hierophant. “The first card that you put down,” Manson says, looking at the upside-down card, “this represents wisdom and forethought, and the fact that I just dealt it upside-down could mean the opposite—like a lack. I could be naïve about something. This card is, right now, my direct influence.”

  The reading takes place shortly after Rose McGowan’s left the house they share in the Hollywood Hills—after Manson and McGowan played with their Boston terriers, Bug and Fester, and examined a catalog with the Halloween costumes she wants to order for the dogs.

  Her car and driver are outside, waiting. She’s catching a red-eye flight to Canada where she’s making a movie with Alan Alda. In the kitchen, a monitor shows views from the different security cameras, and McGowan talks about how different Alan Alda looks, how big his nose is. Manson tells her how, as men grow older, their nose and ears and scrotums keep growing. His mom, a nurse, told him about old men whose balls hung halfway down their legs.

  Manson and McGowan kiss goodbye.

  “Thanks a lot,” she says. “Now when I work with Alan Alda, I’ll be wondering how big his scrotum is.”

  In the attic, Manson deals his second card: The Justice. “This could be referring to my judgment,” he says, “my ability to discern, possibly with friendships or business dealings. Right now I feel a little naïve or unsure about either friendships or business dealings, which does particularly apply to certain circumstances between me and my record company. So that makes every bit of sense.”

  The day before, in the offices of his record label on Santa Monica Boulevard, Manson sits on a black leather sofa, wearing black leather pants, and whenever he shifts, the leather-on-leather makes a deep, growl sound, amazingly similar to his voice.

  “I tried to swim when I was a kid, but I could never deal with the water in my nose. I have a fear of water. I don’t like the ocean. There’s something too infinite about it that I find dangerous.”

  The walls are dark blue and there are no lights on. Manson sits in the dark with the air conditioning blasting, drinking cola and wearing sunglasses.

  “I love pranking people and causing traumas in their life,” he says. “I love to get an answering machine where I can just really go to town. It’ll say, ‘Sue and Jim aren’t home. Please leave a message,’ and I’ll start in: ‘Jim, you’ve got to level with her about this. I can’t live a lie anymore. I love you.’ And I just can’t imagine what kind of fucking trauma this causes, because you know—even if you’re not guilty—you know you sound guilty if you try and get your way in a relationship. You always sound guilty.”

  At home, in the attic of his five-story house, drinking a glass of red wine, Manson deals his third card: The Fool.

  “The third card is to represent my goals,” he says. “The Fool is about to walk off of a cliff, and it’s a good card. It represents embarking on a journey, or taking a big step forward. That could represent the campaign of the record coming out or going on tour now.”

  He says, “I have a fear of crowded rooms. I don’t like being around a lot of people, but I feel very comfortable on stage in front of thousands of people. I think it’s a way of dealing with that.”

  His voice is so deep and soft, it disappears behind the rush of the
air conditioning.

  “I am very shy, strangely enough,” he says, “and that’s the irony of being an exhibitionist, being up in front of people. I’m really very shy.

  “I like to sing alone, too. The least amount of people are involved whenever I’m singing. When I’m recording, sometimes I’ll make them hit ‘record’ and leave the room.”

  About touring, he says, “The threat of death makes it all worth living, makes it all exciting. That’s the ultimate relief of boredom. Being right in the middle of it all. I thought, ‘I know that I’m going to have to take things to such an extreme to get my points across that I’m going to start at the bottom and make myself the most despised person. I’m going to represent everything that you’re against and you can’t say anything to hurt me, to make me feel any worse. I only have up to go.’

  “I think that was the most rewarding thing, to feel like there’s nothing you can do to hurt me. Aside from killing me. Because I represent the bottom. I’m the worst that it gets, so you can’t say that I did something that makes me look bad because I’m telling you right now that I’m all of it.

  “If you don’t like my music, I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter to me. If you don’t like what I look like, if you don’t like what I have to say, it’s all part of what I’m asking for. You’re giving me just what I want.”

  Manson deals his fourth card: Death. “The fourth card is your distant past,” he says. “And the Death card most represents transition, and it’s part of what has got you to this, how you are right now. This makes a good deal of sense, regarding the fact that I’ve just gone through such a grand transition that’s taken place over the course of the last 10 years.”

  Sitting in the dark blue room at his record label, he says, “I think that my mom has in some ways that Munchausen Syndrome, when people try and convince you that you’re ill so they can hang on to you longer. Because when I was young, my mom used to always tell me I was allergic to different things that I’m not allergic to. She used to tell me I’m allergic to eggs and fabric softener and all kinds of weird things.”