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."
What's coming is a million new reasons not to live your life. You can deny your possibility to succeed and blame it on something else. You can fight against everything-Margaret Thatcher, property owners, the urge to open that door mid-flight… 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 to circumstances 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 transgressive novel.
Movies like Thelma and Louise, books like The Monkey Wrench Gang, their audience is less likely to laugh and understand. For the time being, we get to pretend we're not our own worst enemy.
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.
We used to go there because it was near Good Samaritan Hospital.
We'd visit Alan until his pain medication put him to sleep, then Geoff and I would go drink beer. Geoff, grinding his beer bottle on roach after roach as they ran across our table.
We'd talk to the strippers. We talked to guys at other tables. We were young, young-ish, late twenties, and one night a waitress asked us, "If you're already watching dancers in a dive like this, what will you be doing when you're old men?"
At the next table was a doctor, an older man who explained a lot of things. He said how the stage was spotlighted with red and black lights because they hid the bruises and needle marks on the dancers. He showed how their fingernails, their hair and eyes told their childhood diseases. Their teeth and skin showed how well they ate. Their breath in your face, the smell of their sweat could tell you how they'd probably die.
In that bar, the floor, tables, the chairs, everything was sticky. Someone said Madonna went there a lot when she was in Portland filming Body of Evidence, but by then I'd quit going. By then Alan and his cancer were both dead.
It's a story I've told before, but I once promised to introduce a friend to Brad Pitt if she'd let me assist in dissecting some medical-school cadavers.
She'd failed premed three times already, but her father was a doctor so she just kept going back. She was my age now, middle-aged, the oldest premed in her class, and all night we dissected three cadavers so first-year students could examine them the next day.
Inside each body was a country I'd always heard about but never thought I'd visit. Here was the spleen and the heart and liver. Inside the head was the hypothalamus, the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's. Still, I was most amazed by what wasn't there. These yellow, shaved, and leathery bodies were so different from my friend who used her saws and knives. For the first time, I saw that maybe human beings are more than their bodies. That maybe there is a soul.
The night she met Brad, we walked out of soundstage 15 on the Fox lot. It was after midnight, and we walked through the dark standing New York sets used in a million productions since they were built for Barbra Streisand in Hello, Dolly! A taxi passed us with New York license plates. Steam rose from fake manhole covers. Now the sidewalks were full of people in winter coats, carrying shopping bags from Gumps and Bloomingdales. In another minute, someone waved to stop us from walking-us laughing and wearing shorts and T-shirts-into a Christmas episode of NYPD Blue.
We walked another way, past an open soundstage where spotlighted actors in blue surgical scrubs leaned over an operating table and pretended to save someone's life.
This other time, I was scrubbing the kitchen floor and pulled a muscle in my side. That's how it felt at first.
For the next three days, I'd go to the urinal and not pee, and by the time I left work and drove to the doctor's office, the pain had me duck-walking. By then, the doctor from the strip bar was my doctor. He felt my back and said, "You need to get to the hospital or you're going to lose this kidney."
A few days later, I called him from the bathtub, where I'm sitting in a puddle of piss and blood, drinking California champagne and popping Vicodins. On the phone, I tell him, "I passed my stone," and in my other hand is a nine-millimeter ball of tiny oxalic acid crystals, all of them razor-sharp.
The next day, I flew to Spokane and accepted an award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association for Fight Club.
The week after, on the day of my follow-up appointment, someone called to say the doctor was dead. A heart attack in the night, and he died alone, on the floor, next to his bed.
My fiberglass bathtub still has a blood-red ring around it.
The black and red lights. The standing sets. The embalmed cadavers. My doctor, my friend, dead on his bedroom floor. I want to believe they're all just stories now. Our physical bodies, I want to believe that they're all just props. That life, physical life, is an illusion.
And I do believe it, but only for a moment at a time.
It's funny, but the last time I saw my father alive was at my brother-in-law's funeral. He was young, my brother-in-law, young-ish, in his late forties, when he had the stroke. The church gave us a menu and said to choose two hymns, a psalm, and three prayers. It was like ordering a Chinese dinner.
My sister came out of the viewing room, from her private viewing of her husband's body, and she waved our mother inside, saying, "There's been a mistake."
This thing in the casket, drained and dressed and painted, looked nothing like Gerard. My sister said, "That's not him."
This last time I saw my father, he handed me a blue-striped tie and asked how to tie it. I told him to hold still. With his collar turned, I looped the tie around his neck and started tying it. I told him, "Look up."
It was the opposite of the moment when he'd shown me the trick of the rabbit running around the cave and he'd tied my first pair of shoes.
That was the first time in decades my family had gone to mass together.
While I'm writing this, my mother calls to say my grandfather's had a series of strokes. He's unable to swallow, and his lungs are filling with fluid. A friend, maybe my best friend, calls to say he has lung cancer. My grandfather's five hours away. My friend's across town. Me, I have work to do.
The waitress used to say, "What will you be doing when you're old men?"
I used to tell her, "I'll worry about that when I get there."
If I get there.
I'm writing this piece right on deadline.
My brother-in-law used to call this behavior "brinksmanship," the tendency to leave things until the last moment, to imbue them with more drama and stress and appear the hero by racing the clock.
"Where I was born," Georgia O'Keeffe used to say, "and where and how I have lived is unimportant."
She said, "It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of any interest."
I'm sorry if this all seems a little rushed and desperate.
It is.
Now I Remember…
Item: Twenty-seven boxes of Valentine's candy, cost $298.
Item: Fourteen talking robotic birds, cost $112.
As April 15 gets closer and closer, my tax preparer, Mary, keeps calling, asking, "What is this all about?"
Item: Two nights at the Carson Hilton in Carson, California, February 21, 2001.
Mary asks, why was I in Carson? The twenty-first is my birthday. What about this trip makes it a business deduction?
The Valentine's candy, the talking birds, the nights in the Carson Hilton, they make me so glad I keep receipts. Otherwise I'd have no idea. A year later, I have no memory about what these items represent.
That's why, the moment I saw Guy Pearce in Memento, I knew finally someone was telling my story. Here was a movie about the predominant art form of our time:
Note taking.
All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they're always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what's about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there's those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos-this century's equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive.
I'm not surprised that people like Memento. I'm surprised it didn't win every Academy Award and then destroy the entire consumer market for recordable compact discs, blank-page books, Dictaphones, DayTimers, and every other prop we use to keep track of our lives.
My filing system is my fetish. Before I left the Freightliner Corporation, I bought a wall of black steel four-drawer filing cabinets at the office-surplus price of five bucks each. Now, when the receipts pile up, the letters and contracts and whatnot, I close the blinds and put on a compact disc of rain sounds and file, file, file. I use hanging file folders and special color-coded plastic file labels. I am Guy Pearce without the low body fat and good looks. I'm organizing by date and nature of expense. I'm organizing story ideas and odd facts.
This summer, a woman in Palouse, Washington, told me how rapeseed can be grown as a food or a lubricant. There are two different varieties of the seed. Unfortunately, the lubricant type is poisonous. Because of this, every county in the nation must choose whether it will allow farmers to grow either the food or the lubricant variety of rapeseed. A few of the wrong type seeds in a county and people could die. She also told me how the people bankrolling the seeming-grassroots movement to tear down dams are really the American coal industry-not environmentalist fish-huggers and white-water rafters, but coal miners who resent hydroelectric power. She knows, she says, because she designs their websites.
Like the robotic birds, these are interesting facts, but what can I do with them?
I can file them. Someday, there will come a use for them. The way my father and grandfather lugged home lumber and wrecked cars, anything free or cheap with a potential future use, I now scribble down facts and figures and file them away for a future project.
Picture Andy Warhol's townhouse, crowded and stacked with kitsch, cookie jars and old magazines, and that's my mind. The files are an annex to my head.
Books are another annex. The books I write are my overflow retention system for stories I can no longer keep in my recent memory. The books I read are to gather facts for more stories. Right now I'm looking at a copy of the Phaedrus, a fictional conversation between Socrates and a young Athenian named Phaedrus.
Socrates is trying to convince the young man that speech is better than written communication, or any recorded communication including film. According to Socrates, the god Theuth in ancient Egypt invented numbers and calculation and gambling and geometry and astronomy… and Theuth invented writing. Then he presented his inventions to the great god-king Thamus, asking which of them should be presented to the Egyptian people.
Thamus ruled that writing was a pharmakon. Like the word «drug» it could be used for good or bad. It could cure or poison.
According to Thamus, writing would allow humans to extend their memories and share information. But, more important, writing would allow humans to rely too much on these external means of recording. Our own memories would wither and fail. Our notes and records would replace our minds.
Worse than that, written information can't teach, according to Thamus. You can't question it, and it can't defend itself when people misunderstand or misrepresent it. Written communication gives people what Thamus called "the false conceit of knowledge," a fake certainty that they understand something.
So, all those videotapes of your childhood, will they really give you a better understanding of yourself? Or will they just shore up whatever faulty memories you have? Can they replace your ability to sit down and ask your family questions? To learn from your grandparents.
If Thamus were here, I'd tell him that memory itself is a pharmakon.
Guy Pearce's happiness is based entirely on his past. He must complete something he can hardly remember. Something that he may even be misremembering because it's too painful.
Me and Guy, we're joined at the hip.
My two nights in Carson, California-looking at the credit-card receipt, I can remember them. Sort of. I was posing for a picture for GQ magazine. They'd originally wanted me to lie in a pile of rubber dildos, but we'd reached a compromise. It was the night of the Grammy Awards, so every decent hotel room in L.A. was taken. Another receipt shows it cost me seventy bucks in cab fare just to get to the photo shoot.
Now I remember.
The fashion stylist told me how her Chihuahua could suck its own penis. People loved her dog, until it ran to the center of every party and started honking its own wiener. This had cleared out more than a few parties at her house. The photographer told me horror stories about photographing Minnie Driver and Jennifer Lopez.
At a similar photo shoot for the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, the photographer tells me how his Chihuahua has "erectile retraction dysfunction." Whenever the little thing gets a boner, this guy-the Abercrombie photographer-has to reach in and make sure the dog's tiny foreskin isn't too tight.
Oh, now the memories come flooding back.
Now, day and night, foremost in my mind is the message: NEVER GET A CHIHUAHUA.
After the GQ photo shoot-where I wore expensive clothes and stood in a movie studio mock-up of an airplane bathroom-a movie producer took me to a beachfront hotel in Santa Monica. The hotel was big and expensive, with a posh bar that looked out at the sun setting over the ocean. It was an hour before the Grammys would start, and beautiful famous people were mingling in evening clothes, having dinner and drinks and calling for their limousines. The sunset, the people, me a little drunk and still wearing my GQ makeup, me so professionally art-directed, I'd died and gone to Hollywood heaven-until something dropped onto my plate.
A bobby pin.
I touched my hair and felt dozens of bobby pins, all of them worked halfway out of the hairsprayed mass of my hair. Here in front of music aristocracy, I was a drunken Olive Oyl, bristling with pins and dropping them every time I moved my head.
Funny, but without the receipts, I wouldn't have remembered any of it.
That's what I mean by pharmakon. Don't bother to write this down.
Consolation Prizes
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.
"Okay," he's saying. "Be that way. If you don't trust us, then to hell with you."
Another pack of letters arrive 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 hundreds of contests 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. 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 as a technical writer who worked 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 movie shoot, and every morning we ate at the same café 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 that."
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 pidgin words are coming out of Brad Pitt's mouth, forty feet high, in front of millions of people. My friend Jeff's trashed ghetto kitchen is re-created in a Hollywood soundstage. 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 four in 1943 when he hid under a bed as his parents fought and his twelve brothers and sisters ran into the woods. Then his mother was dead, and his father stomped around the house looking for him, calling for him, still carrying the shotgun.
My father remembers the boots stomping 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 Hempel 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 fifty-nine.
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, Holly Watson, 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 a 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. 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, in 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, these are the little stuff. Another friend, Jennifer, recently 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, videogames, toothbrushes, her heart breaks.
Consolation prizes.
A few nights before my father died, he and I talked long distance for three hours about a tree house 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 shit 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.
POSTSCRIPT: The day after Holly Watson called me with the news, my brother was due to arrive from South Africa. He was coming to handle some regular bank and tax details; instead, we drove to Idaho to help identify a body the police said might be our father. The body was found shot, next to the body of a woman, in a burned-down garage in the mountains outside Kendrick, Idaho. This was the summer of 1999. The summer the Fight Club movie came out. We went to our father's house in the mountains outside of Spokane, trying to track down some X-rays that showed the two vertebrae fused in Dad's back after a railroad accident left him disabled.
My father's place in the mountains was beautiful, hundreds of acres, wild turkeys and moose and deer everywhere. On the road up to the house, there was a new sign. It was next to a boulder that lay beside the road. It said, "Kismet Rock." We had no idea what the sign meant.
Before my brother and I could find the X-rays, the police called to say the body was Dad's. They'd used dental records we'd shipped to them earlier.
At the trial for the man who murdered him, Dale Shackleford, it came out that my father had answered a personals ad placed by a woman who's ex-husband had threatened to kill her and any man that he ever found her with. The heading of the personals ad was "Kismet." My father was one of five men who answered it. He was the one she chose.
According to Latah County detectives, Shackleford claimed I was harassing him, sending him copies of the Fight Club movie. This was in January 2000, when the only copies were Academy Award screening copies.
This was the dead woman found beside my father, the woman who placed the ad, Donna Fontaine. This was only their second or third date. She and my father had gone to her home to feed some animals before driving to my father's house where he was going to surprise her with the "Kismet Rock" sign. A sort of landmark named for their new relationship.
Her ex-husband was waiting and followed them up the driveway. According to the court's verdict, he killed them and set fire to their bodies in the garage. They'd known each other for less than two months.
Dale Shackleford is appealing his death sentence.