Essays, Emails ...

by Palahniuk, Chuck

My watch says we have about 40 minutes till my next client.

  The fog is gone, Mister Jones, and the shape just in front of you is Marilyn Monroe in a tight satin dress. Golden and smiling, her eyes half closed, her head tilted back. She stands in a field of tiny flowers and lifts her arms, and as you step closer her dress slips to the ground.

  I say, have at her. I say, she’s all yours.

  Massive Attack

  “If everybody jumped off a cliff,” my father used to say, “would you?” This was a few years ago. It was the summer a wild cougar killed a jogger in Sacramento. The summer my doctor wouldn’t give me anabolic steroids.

  A local supermarket used to offer this special deal: if you bought fifty bucks worth of receipts, you could buy a dozen eggs for a dime, so my best friends, Ed and Bill, used to stand in the parking lot asking people for their receipts. Ed and Bill, they ate blocks of frozen egg white, 10-pound blocks they got at a bakery supply house, egg albumin being the most easily assimilated protein. Ed and Bill used to make these road trips to San Diego, then cross the border on foot at Tijuana to buy their steroids, their Dianabol, and smuggle it back. This must’ve been the summer the DEA had other priorities.

  Ed and Bill are not their real names.

  We were road-tripping down through California, and we stopped in Sacramento to visit some friends. At this point the cougar was still running wild. This was the countryside, but not. The wilderness platted into 2.5-acre mini estates. Somewhere was a female cougar with cubs, squeezed in among the soccer moms and swimming pools. This was less of a vacation than a pilgrimage from one Gold’s Gym franchise to the next along the west coast. On the road, we bought water-packed tuna and ate it dry, tossing the empty cans in the back seat. We washed it down with diet soda and farted the length of Interstate 5.

  Ed and Bill shot the pre-loaded syringes of D-ball, and I did everything else. Arginine, Ornithine, Smilax, DHEA, saw palmetto, selenium, chromium, free-range New Zealand sheep testicle, Vanadyl, orchid extract... At the gym, while my friends bench-pressed three times their weight, pumping up, shredding their clothes from the inside, I’d hover around their giant elbows. “You know,” I’d say, “I think I’m putting on real size with this yohimbe bark tincture.”

  Yeah, that summer.

  The only reason they let me hover was for contrast. It’s the old strategy of choosing ugly bridesmaids so the bride looks better. Mirrors are only the methadone of body-building. You need an audience. There’s that old joke: “How many bodybuilders does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Three: one to screw in the bulb and two to say, “Really, dude, you look massive!” Yeah, that joke. That’s not really a joke.

  The Sacramento people we visited, on our way home from Mexico, we stopped by their house again, and they pulled us inside and locked the doors. They were throwing a barbecue for some friends who’d been away at a men’s retreat. On this retreat, somebody explained, each man was sent out into the desert to wander until he had a revelation. Now while the tiki torches flickered and the propane barbecue smoked, one man stood clutching some kind of shriveled baseball bat. It was the desiccated skeleton of a cactus he’d found on his quest, but it was more. “I realized,” he said, “that this cactus skeleton was me. This was my manhood, abrasive and hard on the outside, but brittle and hollow.” Everybody else around the deck closed their eyes and nodded. Except my friends, who turned the other way with their jaws clenched to keep from laughing. Their huge arms folded across their chests, they elbowed each other and wanted to walk up the road to see some historical rock. The hostess stopped us at the gate and said, “Don’t! Just don’t.” Clutching her wine cooler and looking into the darkness beyond the steam of the whirlpool and the light of the tiki torches, she said a cougar had been prowling around.

  The cougar had been right up next to their deck, and she showed us in the shrubs, a scattering of short, coarse, blond hair. That year, everywhere we drove, that whole trip, there were already fences and property lines and names on everything. Ed juiced and lifted for a couple more years until he blew out his knees. Bill, until he ruptured a disk in his back.

  It wasn’t until last year when my father died, my doctor finally came across. I lost weight and kept losing weight until he whipped out a prescription and said, “Let’s try you on 30 days of Anadrol.”

  So I jumped off the cliff, too.

  People squinted at me and asked what was different. My arms got a little bigger around, but not that much. More than the size, the feeling was enough. Anadrol is an anabolic steroid, a synthetic derivative of te tosterone. Possible side effects include: testicular atrophy, impotence, chronic priapism, increased or decreased libido, insomnia, and hair loss. One hundred tablets cost eleven-hundred bucks. Insurance does not cover it. But the feeling. Your eyes are popped open and alert. The way women look so good when they’re pregnant, glowing and soft, and so much more female, Anadrol makes you look and feel that much more male. The raging priapism part, that was the first couple weeks. You are nothing but the real estate between your legs. It’s the same as those old illustrations in Alice in Wonderland where she’s eaten the cake marked “eat me” and grown until her arm sticks out the front door. Except it’s not your arm that sticks out, and wearing bicycle pants is totally out of the question.

  About the third week, the priapism subsided or seemed to spread to my entire body. Weightlifting gets better then sex. A workout becomes an orgy. You’re having orgasms, cramping, hot, rushing orgasms in your delts, your quads, your lats and traps. You forget about that lazy old penis. Who needs it? In a way it’s a peace, an escape from sex. A vacation from libido. You might see a hot woman ant think, “Grrrrrrr,” but your next egg white omelet or set of squats are a lot more attractive.

  I didn’t go into this stupid. This is a kind of weird aside, but a friend in medical schoolmate me a deal that if I introduced her to Brad Pitt, she’d sneak me in to help her dissect some cadavers. She met Brad, and I spent a long night helping her disassemble dead bodies so first-year pre-med students could study them. Our third cadaver was a 60-year-old physician. He had the muscle mass and definition of a man in his twenties, but when we opened his chest, his heart was almost the size of his head. I held his chest open and my friend poured in Formalin until his lungs floated. My friend looked at his freaking big heart, and his equally freaky big dick, and she told me: testosterone. Self administered for years. She showed me the coiled little wires and the pacemaker buried in his chest and told me he had a history of heart attacks.

  About this time, a bodybuilder magazine ran an occasional little feature in its back pages, a catch-up profile about a star bodybuilder from the 1980s. Back then, these stars posed and gave interviews swearing they were blessed with great genetics and determination, they just worked hard and ate well, they never used steroids. They swore. In the update features, these same guys were pale and doughy, battling health problems from diabetes to cancer. And they admitted they had been using steroids.

  I knew all this, and I still jumped off the cliff.

  My father was dead, Ed and Bill were a mess, and I was fast losing faith in tangible shit. Here I’d written a story, a make-believe book, and it was making me more money than any real work I’d ever done. I had about a 30-day window of free time between my book obligations and the opening of the Fight Club movie. Here was a 30-day experiment, an updated Jack London adventure in a little brown bottle. My friends didn’t stop me. They only told me to eat enough protein to make the

  investment worthwhile. Still, I didn’t buy the 10-pound blocks of egg white. I never filled my fridge with rows and rows of foil-wrapped boneless, skinless chicken breasts and baked potatoes the way Ed and Bill used to. I just took the little white pills and worked out and one day in the shower, I noticed my nuts were disappearing.

  Okay, I’m sorry. I promised a lot of friends I wouldn’t go here, but this was the turning point. When the old goose eggs shrink to ping-pong balls, then to marbles, then your doctor asks i
f you want a refill on your Anadrol script, it’s easy to say no. Here you are looking great, bright and alert, pumped and ripped you’re looking more like a man than you ever have, but you’re less of a man where it counts. Besides, the appeal of being a freaky, massive pile of muscle had already started to wane. Sure, at first it would be fun, like owning a rambling Victorian mansion, but after the first couple weeks the constant maintenance would eat up my life. I could never wander very far from a gym. I’d be eating egg protein every hour. All this and the whole project would still collapse some day.

  I jumped off the cliff because it was an adventure.

  And for 30 days I felt complete. But just until the tiny white pills ran out. Temporarily permanent. Complete and independent of everything. Everything except the Anadrol. The woman in Sacramento, hosting that barbecue all those years ago, she’d said, “Those friends of yours, they’re crazy.” Beside the swimming pool, the man cradled the brittle cactus skeleton of his masculinity, the woman still stared at her clumps of bleached “cougar fur.” Pumped and huge in their tanktops, Ed and Bill disappeared, lumbering down the road. Out in the dark was the cougar. Or other cougars.

  Ed used to wear a T-shirt that said, “Fuck Moderation.”

  The hostess said, “Why do men have to do such stupid things?”

  “As long as America has a frontier,” Thomas Jefferson used to say, “there will be a place for America’s misfits and adventurers.”

  Now Ed and Bill are fat eyesores, but that summer, really dude, they were massive. A good pump, my father, the Anadrol, all that’s left is the intangible story. The legend. And okay, that thing about frontiers, maybe it wasn’t Thomas Jefferson, but you get the idea.

  There will be cougars outside. It’s such a chick thing to think life should just go on forever.

  Origami Lips

  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 we arrived, a neighborhood man had been tied to a bus-stop bench there. The set crew found him tied up, shot to death. The crew was building a rotting Victorian mansion for a million dollars.

  All this build-up, 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 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 video tape of Oprah Winfrey interviewing Brad, 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-toothed 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 International Facial Sculpting, 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 $100 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 purchase.

  These are devices you can buy, and use, and write 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 origami fish. It gives some people 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 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 will then be a race to get naked and accomplish some lovin’ before your parts snap back to their original sizes. 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-suction 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 dated thin lips, and I’ve dated 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 45-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 Bs, 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 mod
els 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 my writer’s workshop, and my friend Tom asked, “Didn’t you used 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 16th.

  Somewhere in the mail, in the backs of trucks or the bellies of airplanes, various other suction systems are still headed my way. Tens 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 still OK 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.

  Brinksmanship

  In this one bar, you couldn’t set your beer bottle on the table or cockroaches would climb up the label and drown themselves.

  Anytime you set down a beer, you’d have a dead cockroach in your next mouthful. There were Filipino strippers who came out between their sets to shoot pool in string bikinis. For five dollars, they’d pull a plastic chair into the shadows between stacked cases of beer and lap dance you.