Текст книги "Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)"

Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk

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Chuck Palahniuk
Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

For Mick and Chick and Chimp

Fact and Fiction: An Introduction

If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.

In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus. No, the dream is a big house, off alone somewhere. A penthouse, like Howard Hughes. Or a mountaintop castle, like William Randolph Hearst. Some lovely isolated nest where you can invite only the rabble you like. An environment you can control, free from conflict and pain. Where you rule.

Whether it's a ranch in Montana or basement apartment with ten thousand DVDs and high-speed Internet access, it never fails. We get there, and we're alone. And we're lonely.

After we're miserable enough-like the narrator in his Fight Club condo, or the narrator isolated by her own beautiful face in Invisible Monsters-we destroy our lovely nest and force ourselves back into the larger world. In so many ways, that's also how you write a novel. You plan and research. You spend time alone, building this lovely world where you control, control, control everything. You let the telephone ring. The emails pile up. You stay in your story world until you destroy it. Then you come back to be with other people.

If your story world sells well enough, you get to go on book tour. Do interviews. Really be with people. A lot of people. People, until you're sick of people. Until you crave the idea of escaping, getting away to a…

To another lovely story world.

And so it goes. Alone. Together. Alone. Together.

Chances are, if you're reading this, you know this cycle. Reading a book is not a group activity. Not like going to a movie or a concert. This is the lonely end of the spectrum.

Every story in this book is about being with other people. Me being with people. Or people being together.

For the castle builders, it's about flying a stone flag so grand it attracts people with the same dream.

For the combine-demolition folks, it's about finding a way to get together, a social structure with rules and goals and roles for people to fill while they rebuild their community by crashing farm equipment.

For Marilyn Manson, it's about a kid from the Midwest who can't swim, suddenly moved to Florida, where social life is lived in the ocean. Here, that kid is still trying to connect with people.

These are all nonfiction stories and essays I wrote between novels. In my own cycle, it goes: Fact. Fiction. Fact. Fiction.

The one drawback to writing is the being alone. The writing part. The lonely-garret part. In people's imagination, that's the difference between a writer and a journalist. The journalist, the newspaper reporter, is always rushing, hunting, meeting people, digging up facts. Cooking a story. The journalist writes surrounded by people, and always on deadline. Crowded and hurried. Exciting and fun.

The journalist writes to connect you to the larger world. A conduit.

But a writer writer is different. Anybody who writes fiction is-people imagine-alone. Maybe because fiction seems to connect you to only the voice of one other person. Maybe because reading is something we do alone. It's a pastime that seems to split us away from others.

The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.

What's funny is, you'd be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world.

It's hard to call any of my novels "fiction."

Most of the reason I write is because once a week it brought me together with other people. This was in a workshop taught by a published writer-Tom Spanbauer-around his kitchen table on Thursday nights. At the time, most of my friendships were based on proximity: neighbors or coworkers. Those people you know only because, well, you're stuck sitting next to them every day.

The funniest person I know, Ina Gebert, calls coworkers your "air family."

The problem with proximity friends is, they move away. They quit or get fired.

It wasn't until a writing workshop that I discovered the idea of friendships based on a shared passion. Writing. Or theater. Or music. Some shared vision. A mutual quest that would keep you together with other people who valued this vague, intangible skill you valued. These are friendships that outlast jobs and evictions. This steady, regular Thursday-night gabfest was the only incentive to keep me writing during the years when writing didn't pay a dime. Tom and Suzy and Monica and Steven and Bill and Cory and Rick. We fought and praised each other. And it was enough.

My pet theory about Fight Club's success is that the story presented a structure for people to be together. People want to see new ways for connecting. Look at books like How to Make an American Quilt and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and The Joy Luck Club. These are all books that present a structure-making a quilt or playing mah-jongg-that allows people to be together and share their stories. All these books are short stories bound together by a shared activity. Of course, they're all women's stories. We don't see a lot of new models for male social interaction. There's sports. Barn raisings. That's about it.

And now there's fight clubs. For better or worse.

Before I started writing Fight Club, I worked as a volunteer at a charity hospice. My job was to drive people to appointments and support-group meetings. There, they'd sit around with other people in a church basement, comparing symptoms and doing New Age exercises. Those meetings were uncomfortable because no matter how I tried to hide, people always assumed I had the disease they had. There was no discreet way to say I was just observing, a tourist waiting to take my charge back to the hospice. So I started telling myself a story about a guy who haunted terminal illness support groups to feel better about his own pointless life.

In so many ways, these places-support groups, twelve-step recovery groups, demolition derbies-they've come to serve the role that organized religion used to. We used to go to church to reveal the worst aspects of ourselves, our sins. To tell our stories. To be recognized. To be forgiven. And to be redeemed, accepted back into our community. This ritual was our way to stay connected to people, and to resolve our anxiety before it could take us so far from humanity that we would be lost.

In these places I found the truest stories. In support groups. In hospitals. Anywhere people had nothing left to lose, that's where they told the most truth.

While writing Invisible Monsters, I'd call telephone sex numbers and ask people to tell me their dirtiest stories. You can just call and say: "Hey, everybody, I'm looking for hot brother-sister incest stories, let's hear yours!" or "Tell me about your dirtiest, filthiest cross-dressing fantasy!" and you'll be taking notes for hours. Because it's only sound, it's like an obscene radio show. Some people are terrible actors, but some will break your heart.

On one call, a kid talked about being blackmailed into having sex with a policeman who threatened to have his parents charged with abuse and neglect. The policeman gave the kid gonorrhea, and the parents he was trying to save… they threw him out to live on the street. Telling his story, near the end the kid started to cry. If he was lying, it was a magnificent performance. A tiny one-on-one piece of theater. If it was a story, it was still a great story.

So of course I used it in the book.

The world is made of people telling stories. Look at the stock market. Look at fashion. And any long story, any novel, is just a combination of short stories.

While researching my fourth book, Choke, I sat in on sex-addict talk therapy sessions, twice each week for six months. Wednesday and Friday nights.

In so many ways, these rap sessions weren't much different than the Thursday-night writers' workshop I attended. Both groups were just people telling their stories. The sexaholics might've been a little less concerned about "craft," but they still told their stories of anonymous bathroom sex and prostitutes with enough skill to get a good reaction from their audience. Many of these people had talked in meetings for so many years that hearing them, you heard a great soliloquy. A brilliant actor playing him– or herself. A one-person monologue that showed an instinct for slowly revealing key information, creating dramatic tension, setting up payoffs and completely enrolling the listener.

For Choke, I also sat with Alzheimer's patients as a volunteer. My role was just to ask them about the old photographs each patient kept in a box in their closet, to try and spur their memory. It was a job the nursing staff didn't have time to do. And, again, it was about telling stories. One subplot of Choke came together as, day by day, each patient would look at the same photo, but tell a different story about it. One day, the beautiful bare-breasted woman would be their wife. The next day, she was some woman they met in Mexico while serving in the navy. The next day, the woman was an old friend from work. What struck me is… they had to create a story to explain who she was. Even if they'd forgotten, they'd never admit it. A faulty well-told story was always better than admitting they didn't recognize this woman.

Telephone sex lines, illness support groups, twelve-step groups, all these places are schools for learning how to tell a story effectively. Out loud. To people. Not just to look for ideas, but how to perform.

We live our lives according to stories. About being Irish or being black. About working hard or shooting heroin. Being male or female. And we spend our lives looking for evidence-facts and proof-that support our story. As a writer, you just recognize that part of human nature. Each time you create a character, you look at the world as that character, looking for the details that make that reality the one true reality.

Like a lawyer arguing a case in a courtroom, you become an advocate who wants the reader to accept the truth of your character's worldview. You want to give the reader a break from their own life. From their own life story.

This is how I create a character. I tend to give each character an education and a skill set that limits how they see the world. A house cleaner sees the world as an endless series of stains to remove. A fashion model sees the world as a series of rivals for public attention. A failed medical student sees nothing but the moles and twitches that might be the early signs of a terminal illness.

During this same period when I started writing, friends and I started a weekly tradition we called "Game Night." Every Sunday evening we'd meet to play party games, like charades. Some nights we'd never start the game. All we needed was the excuse, and sometimes a structure, to be together. If I was stuck in my writing, looking for a new way to develop a theme, I'd do what I'd later call "crowd seeding." I'd throw out a topic of conversation, maybe tell a quick funny story and prompt people to tell their own versions.

Writing Survivor, I'd bring up the topic of cleaning hints, and people would provide them for hours. For Choke, it was coded security announcements. For Diary, I told stories about what I'd found, or left, sealed inside the walls of houses I'd worked on. Hearing my handful of stories, my friends told theirs. And their guests told their stories. And within one evening, I had enough for a book.

In this way, even the lonely act of writing becomes an excuse to be around people. In turn, the people fuel the storytelling.

Alone. Together. Fact. Fiction. It's a cycle.

Comedy. Tragedy. Light. Dark. They define each other.

It works, but only if you don't get stuck too long in any one place.

Testy Festy

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 a 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 ass and eats it out. The blonde masturbates him with a handful of chocolate pudding. Another couple take the stage and the man licks pudding out of the woman's shaved pussy. A girl with a brown ponytail in a halter top sucks off a kid with an uncut dick.

This is while the crowd sings "You've Lost That Loving Feeling."

As the girl leaves the stage, one of her girlfriends shouts, "You sucked him, you little bitch!"

The crowd is packed in, smoking cigars, drinking Rainier Beer, drinking Schmidt's and Miller, eating deep-fried bull gonads dipped in ranch dressing. You smell sweat, and when somebody farts, the chocolate pudding doesn't look like pudding anymore.

This is the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival just getting started.

This is some fifteen 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 and point at the drag queens strutting in miniskirts, and at the fifteen thousand 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 frigging 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 onstage hook their legs over the railings and pump their shaved pussies 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 thirteen 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 finger her.

The crowd chants, "Beaver! Beaver! Beaver!"

A blonde with short hair and a ring through her labia 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 shepherd up on stage. She leans back, pumping her hips as she holds the dog's mouth between her legs.

A couple in buckskin costumes climb the stage and strip. They copulate in a lot of different positions while the crowd chants, "Fuck her! Fuck her! Fuck her!"

A blond college girl balances with both feet up on the stage railing and slowly lowers her shaved pussy onto the smiling face 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 thongs ($5.95) buy hand-carved dildos called "Montana Wood Peckers" ($15.00). On the outdoor stage, under the big Montana sun, with the traffic and trains honking, a wood pecker disappears into a nude woman.

The line of souvenir shoppers edges past a barrel full of walking sticks, each stick a yard long, leathery brown, and sticky to the touch. A good-sized woman waiting to buy a T-shirt says, "Those are dried bull dicks." She says how you can get the penises from butcher shops or slaughterhouses, then stretch and dry them. You finish them like furniture, with a light sanding and many coats of varnish.

A naked man standing behind her in line, his whole body just as brown and leathery as the walking sticks, he asks if the woman has ever actually made one of the sticks.

The good-sized woman blushes and says, "Hell no. I'm too embarrassed to ask the butcher for a bull dick…"

And the leathery man says, "A butcher'd probably think you'd use it on yourself."

And everyone standing in line-the woman included-laughs and laughs.

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 Contest" 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 on stage 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 porta-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.

On a dirt track running down one edge of the property, motorcycles race in a "Ball Biting" contest. Sitting on the back of each bike, a woman must snap her teeth on a hanging bull testicle and tear off a mouthful as her male driver races over the course.

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 regular girls from White Fish, with regular jobs and everything."

One says, "Did you hear that 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."

Where Meat Comes From

It takes a couple hours before you notice what's wrong with everyone.

It's their ears. It's as if you've landed on some planet where almost everybody's ears are mangled and crushed, melted and shrunken. It's not the first thing you notice about people, but after you notice it, it's the only thing you see.

"To most wrestlers, cauliflower ear is like a tattoo," says Justin Petersen. "It's like a status symbol. It's kind of looked on with pride in the community. It means you've put in the time."

"That's just from getting in there and brawling, getting in there and getting your ears rubbed a lot," says William R. Groves. "What happens is, as you rub and rub and rub, the abrasion, the cartilage separates from the skin, and in that separation, blood and fluid fills it up. After a while, it drains out, but the calcium will solidify on the cartilage. A lot of wrestlers see it as a kind of badge of wrestling, a necessary badge of wrestling."

Sean Harrington says, "It's like a stalactite or something. Slowly blood trickles in there and hardens. It gets injured again, and a little more blood trickles in and hardens, and slowly it's unrecognizable anymore. Some guys definitely feel that way, that it's a badge of courage, a badge of honor."

"I think it's very much a badge of honor," says Sara Levin. "You know somebody's a wrestler. It's another one of those things that makes someone else an equal to you. And a bond. Part of the grind. The ears. It's just part of the game. It's the nature of the sport, like scars, battle wounds."

Petersen says, "I had one teammate who, before he'd go to bed, he'd sit there and punch his ear for ten minutes. He wanted cauliflower ear so bad."

"I've drained mine a lot," says Joe Calavitta. "I got syringes, and when they blew up, I kept draining them. They fill up. They fill up with blood. As long as you keep draining them before the blood hardens, you can keep it down, pretty much. You can get it done by a doctor, but you'd have to go in all the time, so you just get your own syringes and do it."

Petersen, Groves, Harrington, and Calavitta, they're amateur wrestlers.

Levin is the Men's Event Coordinator for USA Wrestling, the national governing body for amateur wrestling.

What happens on this page isn't wrestling, it's writing. At best, this is a postcard from a hot, dry weekend in Waterloo, Iowa. Where meat comes from. From the North Regional Olympic Trials, the first step, where for twenty dollars any man can compete for a chance on the U.S. Olympic Wrestling Team.

The Nationals are over, so are the other regionals. This is the last chance to qualify for the finals.

These men, some are here to wrestle other high school «Junior» level wrestlers now that the regular season is over.

For some of these men, who range in age from seventeen to forty-one, this will be their last shot at the Olympics. As Levin says, "You're going to see the end of a lot of careers here."

Everybody here will tell you about amateur wrestling.

It's the ultimate sport, they'll tell you. It's the oldest sport. It's the purest sport. The toughest sport.

It's a sport under attack from men and women alike.

It's a dying sport.

It's a cult. It's a club. It's a drug. It's a fraternity. It's a family.

For all of these people, amateur wrestling is a misunderstood sport.

"Track and field, you run from here to there. Basketball, you put the ball in the hoop," says three-time world champion Kevin Jackson. "Wrestling has two different styles, as well as folkstyle and collegiate styles of wrestling, which gives you so many rules that the general public cannot follow it."

"You don't have the cheerleaders running around, confetti falling from the ceiling, and Jack Nicholson in the bleachers," says former college and army team wrestler Butch Wingett. "You might have a bunch of grizzled old guys who might be farmers or were maybe laid off from the John Deere plant."

"I think that wrestlers are misjudged a lot," says Lee Pritts, who wrestles freestyle at 54 kilograms. "It's actually a classy sport. And a lot of times it's kinda considered barbaric. Wrestling gets a lot of bad publicity."

"Right now, people just don't understand the sport," says Jackson, "and if you don't understand something or know who might compete in it, you won't watch."

"People don't give the sport its respect because they're, like, 'Oh, it's just two guys rolling around, and I think that's wrong," says three-time NCAA wrestler Tyrone Davis, who wrestles Greco-Roman at 130 kilograms. "It's more than just two guys rolling around. Basically, wrestling's like life. You got a lot of decisions out there. The mat is your life."

When you fly into Waterloo, Iowa, the city looks exactly like the map on its website, flat and cut with freeways. At the Young Arena, near the dry, empty downtown, all day before weigh-ins, wrestlers stop in to ask if there's a sauna in town. Where's the scale? The Young Arena is where elderly people go on weekdays to walk around and around the air-conditioned indoor track.

Wrestlers will lose up to a pound a minute during a seven-minute match. The training stories they tell include running in-flight "laps," back and forth in jetliners, despite the crew's protests. Then doing chin-ups in the jetliner's galley area. An old trick for high school wrestlers is to ask to go to the bathroom during every class, and then doing chin-ups on the toilet stall walls, letting the sharp edge along the top cut calluses into their hands. They talk about running up and down the bleachers, past angry fans during basketball games, in order to make their competitive weight the next day.

In 1998, Wingett says, three college wrestlers died of dehydration trying to cut weight while taking the supplement Creatine.

"I don't think there's any more grueling or tougher sport to train in," says Kevin Jackson. "By going through that, it's a humbling experience. You do get beat in the practice room. You do get fatigued running the track or running the stadium stairs."

Wingett talks about long runs in the middle of summer where three wrestlers take turns, two chasing a pickup truck that the third drives with the windows rolled up and the heater cranked.

"You get it down to a system," says Justin Petersen, who at seventeen years old has had his nose broken more than fifteen times. "You think: 'I can have this carton of milk, I can have this bagel, and I will have sweated it off by this time of the day, at which time I can have this sip of water and still make weight. You have it down exact."

Lee Pritts and Mark Strickland, a 76-kilogram freestyle wrestler with «Strick» tattooed on his arm, have brought their own stationary bikes into town and are sweating off the weight in room 232 of the Hartland Inn. A third friend, Nick Feldman, is here for moral support and to massage them when their bodies get so dehydrated that their muscles cramp.

Feldman, a former college wrestler who drove down from Mitchell, South Dakota, says, "Wrestling's like a club where once you get in, you can't get out."

"You see the other athletes in the schools, the basketball players and the football players, they'll talk about how 'wrestling's not that tough, but then they join the team, and they quit within the week," says Sean Harrington, who's been training at Colorado Springs for the past six months in order to compete in freestyle at 76 kilograms.

He says, "We always have such pride in the fact that we work harder than everybody else, and we get no recognition to speak of. I mean, there's no fans here. Most of them are parents. It's not a popular sport."

"When I was in college I cried a lot just because it was so hard, and I was never very good," says Ken Bigley, twenty-four, who started wrestling in first grade and now coaches at Ohio State University. "I asked myself a lot of times why I did it. One analogy I like to use is it's like a drug. You get addicted to it. Sometimes you know-you know it's not good for you, especially emotionally, some of those tough practices or bad competitions, but you just keep coming back for it. If I didn't need it, I wouldn't be here. You don't make money off it. You don't get any glory off it. It's just searching for the high, I guess."

Sean Harrington says, "I've been wrestling so long that I don't remember what pain was like before wrestling."

Says Lee Pritts, twenty-six, a coach at the University of Missouri, "It's kind of weird. You get in the shower after a tournament and your face is usually banged up from wrestling all day, and the water running over it gives you a little burn, but if you take a week off you miss it. You miss the pain. After a week off, you're ready to go back because you miss the pain."

The pain is maybe one reason why the stands are almost empty.

Amateur wrestling isn't easy to watch. It can be a flesh-and-blood demolition derby.

During the first minute of his first match last Christmas, Sean Harrington broke his wrist.

Keith Wilson's injuries include his shoulder, elbow, knee, his right ankle, and a herniated disk between C5 and C6 of his spine. Seven surgeries, total.

At home in a jar full of alcohol, junior-level wrestler Mike Engelmann from Spencer, Iowa, keeps a translucent sliver of cartilage that surgeons removed from the meniscus of his knee. It's his good-luck charm. He's been stitched up nine times.

About his nose, Ken Bigley says, "Sometimes it's pointing left. Sometimes it's pointing right."

A medic in an orange "Sports Injury Center" T-shirt says, "Ringworm is unbelievably common among these guys."

One of the oldest rules, he says, is that wrestlers have to get down and wipe up their own blood with a spray bottle of bleach.

"His grandparents will say all the time, 'This is nuts, " says software engineer David Rodrigues, here with his seventeen-year-old son, Chris, a four-time Georgia State champion who placed fifth in the world in the Youth Games in Moscow last year.

"There's been the injuries," he says, listing them off. "Hyperextended knee, hyperextended elbow, he had a slight tear in a back muscle, a broken hand, broken finger, broken toe, sprained knee, but we've seen worse. We've seen kids carried out on stretchers. Broken collarbones, broken arm, broken leg, broken neck. God forbid, we had a kid in Georgia whose neck was broken. Those are the kind of injuries you pray that never happen, but at the same token we all understand that's the nature of the sport."

"And my broken tooth," his son, Chris, says.

And David Rodrigues says, "His tooth broke off and it was in the kid's head, sticking out of the kid's head."

About Chris's mother, David Rodrigues says, "My wife will only go to a couple tournaments a year. She'll go to State and she'll go to Nationals, but she won't go to a lot because she's afraid of injuries. She doesn't want to be there when one happens."

Chris's front teeth are bonded now.

In a few more days, Chris Rodrigues will break his jaw in the Junior World Team Trials.

Justin Petersen says, "There's a picture of me after the state tournament my sophomore year. I had hit someone's knee with my face so one side of my face was all swollen, and the other side of my face I had mat burn. It's nasty. It seeps and scabs and the scabs keep breaking every time you move your facial muscles. And my nose, I'd broken that again, so I had a cotton ball up my nose. And I'd sprained my shoulder again, so I had a big ice pack up to my shoulder. I'd just finished wrestling my last match and someone took a picture of me."

Timothy O'Rourke, who's wrestling today for the first time in nineteen years, is here without his wife. "She doesn't want to see me get hurt," he says. "Rolling around with the big boys… She's afraid she's going to see me get hurt, so she stayed at the hotel."