Текст книги "Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)"

Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Dear Mr. Levin,

In college, we had to read about people shown pictures of gum disease. These were photographs of rotten gums and crooked, stained teeth, and the idea was to see how these images would affect the way people cared for their own teeth.

One group was shown mouths only a little rotten. The second group was shown moderately rotten gums. The third group was shown horrible blackened mouths, the gums peeled down, soft and bleeding, the teeth turned brown or missing.

The first study group, they took care of their teeth the same as they always had. The second group, they brushed and flossed a little more. The third group, they just gave up. They stopped brushing and flossing and just waited for their teeth to turn black.

This effect the study called "narcotization."

When the problem looks too big, when we're shown too much reality, we tend to shut down. We become resigned. We fail to take any action because disaster seems so inevitable. We're trapped. This is narcotization.

In a culture where people get too scared to face gum disease, how do you get them to face anything? Pollution? Equal rights? And how do you prompt them to fight?

This is what you, Mr. Ira Levin, do so very well. In a word, you charm people.

Your books, they're not so much horror stories as cautionary fables. You write a smart, updated version of the kind of folksy legends that cultures have always used-like nursery rhymes and stained-glass windows-to teach some basic idea to people. Your books, including Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Sliver, take some of the thorniest issues in our culture and charm us into facing the problem. As recreation. You turn this kind of therapy into fun. On our lunch breaks, waiting for a bus, lying in bed, you have us face these Big Issues, and fighting them.

What's creepy is, these are issues the American public is years away from confronting, but in each one-in each book-you ready us for a battle you seem to see coming. And, so far, you're always right.

In Rosemary's Baby, published in 1967, the battle is over a woman's right to control her own body. The right to good health care. And the right to choose an abortion. She's controlled by her religion, by her husband, by her male best friend, by her male obstetrician.

All this you got people to read-to pay money to read-years before the feminist health-care movement. The Boston Women's Health Cooperative. Our Bodies, Ourselves. And consciousness-raising groups where women would sit around with a speculum and flashlight and look at changes in each other's cervix.

You showed women exactly how not to be. What not to do. Do not just sit around your apartment sewing cushions for the window seats and not asking questions. Take some responsibility. If you get date-raped by the Devil, don't think twice about terminating that pregnancy. And, yes, it's silly. The Devil… And the fact he has a big, BIG erection. And Rosemary is tied down, spread-eagled by Jackie Kennedy, aboard a yacht during a storm at sea. What would Carl Jung make of all that? Nevertheless, that's what lets us inside. We can pretend this is all a fantasy. It's not real, abortion isn't a real issue. We can feel Rosemary's joy, her terror and rage.

Did you anticipate that now, in a creepy echo thirty years later, backlash against abortion rights gives the fetus a legal right to be born in many states? In courtrooms, women have become "gestation hosts" or "gestation carriers," forced by legal action to carry and give birth to children they don't want. Fetuses have become symbols for antiabortion foes to rally around. The way Rosemary's neighbors rallied around her baby in its black-draped crib.

Another funny, creepy part is-our body doesn't know this isn't real. We're so wrapped up in this story, we get a cathartic experience. A horrible adventure by proxy. Like Rosemary, we're smarter now. We're not going to make this same mistake. Nope. No more bossy doctors. No more sleazy husbands. No more getting drunk and being knocked up by the Devil.

And just in case, let's make abortion an okay, legal option. Case closed.

Mr. Levin, your skill to tell an important, threatening story through a metaphor, maybe it comes from your experience writing for television's "golden age," shows like Lights Out and The United States Steel Hour. This was television in the 1950s and early 60s, when most issues had to be masked or disguised to avoid offending a conservative audience and the even more conservative sponsors of a program. In a time before "transgressive fiction," such as The Monkey Wrench Gang, American Psycho, and Trainspotting, where a writer could stand on a soap box and shout about a social issue, your writing career started in this era, in the most public form of writing, when the mask, the metaphor, the disguise was everything.

Good theater and social commentary had to mix well with commercials for soap and cigarettes.

What's important is, it worked. And it still works. The fable lifts an issue free from its specific time and makes it important to people for years to come. The metaphor even becomes the issue, injecting it with humor, and giving people a new freedom to laugh at what had scared them before. Your best example of this is The Stepford Wives.

Published in 1972, the book shows a woman with a family and an embryonic career as a professional photographer. She's just moved out of the city, into the countryside town of Stepford. There, all the wives seem devoted to nothing except serving their husbands and families. They're all physical, big-breasted, pretty ideals. They clean and cook. And, well, that's it. Reading the book, we follow Joanna Eberhart and her two friends as, one by one, they give up their personal ambitions and resign themselves to cooking and cleaning.

The creepy part is, the Stepford husbands are killing their wives. Working as a group, the men are replacing the women with lovely, efficient robots that do everything asked of them.

The even creepier part is, you wrote this more than a decade before the rest of American culture noticed the men's «backlash» against women's liberation. It wasn't until the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Backlash, by Susan Faludi, that someone besides you acknowledged the idea that men might organize and fight to keep women in traditionally female roles.

And, yes, Backlash is an excellent book, and it makes its case by describing how male fashion designers dress women, and how antiabortion people dismiss women as just the vehicles for an unborn fetus, but the message there is so… strident. There's no charm here. Ms. Faludi points out a problem and piles on the evidence, but when the book is done, she leaves us with no feeling of resolution. No freedom. No personal transformation.

Worse-like in so much transgressive fiction, where the author gets to blatantly rant about problems-narcotization sets in. The message gets so blatant and relentless that people stop hearing it.

But in Stepford Wives, wow, we laugh with Bobbie and Joanna. We laugh a lot, all through the first half of the book. Then Charmaine disappears. Then poor Bobbie. Then Joanna. The horror cycle is complete. We've seen what happens when you play dumb and deny reality until it's too late. Now, all those nice homemakers rolling pie crust in clean, sunny kitchens, we see them as tainted, as manipulated and shaped. As Stepford wives.

Your silly, crazy robot metaphor, it's so… over the top. Crazy as it looks, it's replaced all the tired dogmatic rant about housework as demeaning, blah, blah, blah. Your Disney-female-robot-sex-slave-hausfrau metaphor is even better than your big-dick-Devil-date-rape metaphor.

You leave us with just the clear message: housework = death. A simple, memorable, modern fable. Do not let anyone make you into a Stepford wife. Develop your own career beyond being a wife.

In each book, you create a metaphor that allows us to face a Big Issue without being so confronted we give up hope and retreat. First, you charm us with humor, then you scare us with a worst-case scenario. You show us someone who gets trapped, who refuses to recognize and deal with the danger until it's too late.

You might not agree, but even in Sliver, published in 1991, the main character fails to wise up until it's too late.

Ten years before the rest of the world tuned into "reality television" and webcams hidden in tanning salons, locker rooms and public toilets, again you predict the battle over privacy in the face of new broadcast and video technology. In Sliver, Kay Norris moves into a lovely apartment on the twentieth floor of a narrow «sliver» building in Manhattan. She falls in love with a younger man, another resident of the building, not knowing he owns the building. And he's wired every apartment with hidden cameras that allow him to watch the residents as entertainment.

The darker secret of the "horror high-rise" is that as people discover their phones are bugged and their apartments are being spied on, the young building owner murders them. He even records the murders and keeps the tapes.

Like Rosemary Woodhouse and Joanna Eberhart, Kay thinks her apartment is a great new beginning. Despite fellow residents dying all around her, she clings to her denial and distracts herself with her love affair. In an interesting evolution from Rosemary (who had no career) through Joanna (who snapped a few pictures), Kay Norris is consumed by her job as a book editor. She's never been married. And she isn't destroyed by the reality she failed to recognize.

But only because her cat saves her-hardly her own doing.

Ten years before states realized they had no laws that forbid someone from carrying a camera in a suitcase, then standing in a crowd and filming up the bottom of women's skirts, a decade ago, you tried to warn us. This was possible. Technology had outdistanced law, and this was going to happen. Then you created a fable to get our attention and inoculate us against the fear by creating a metaphor, a character that models the wrong behavior.

Was it Plato who made his arguments by telling a story with an obvious flaw, and allowing the listener to realize the error? Whoever it was, that method gives the reader the moment of realization, the emotional moment of "ah-hah!" And teaching experts say that, unless we have that moment of chaos, followed by the emotional release of realization, nothing will be remembered. In this way you, Mr. Ira Levin, force us to remember the mistakes made by your characters.

Oh, Mr. Ira Levin, how do you do it? You show us the future. Then you help us deal with that scary new world. You take us, fast, straight through a worst-case scenario and let us live it.

In the therapy called "flooding," a psychologist will force a patient to endure an exaggerated scenario of his or her worst fear. To overload the emotions. A person afraid of spiders might be locked in a room filled with spiders. A person afraid of snakes might be forced to handle snakes. The idea is that contact and familiarity will dull the terror the patient has for something they've been too afraid to explore. The actual experience, the reality of what snakes feel like and how they act, it destroys the fear by contradicting the patient's expectation.

Is that it, Mr. Levin? Is that what you're up to?

Or is what you do just consolation? Showing us the worst so our lives look better by comparison. No matter how controlling our doctor seems, at least we're not giving birth to a devil baby. No matter how boring the suburbs feel, at least we're not dead and replaced by a robot.

Your fellow writer Stephen King once said that horror novels give us a chance to rehearse our deaths. The horror writer is like a Welsh "sin eater," who absorbs the faults of a culture and diffuses them, leaving the reader with less fear of dying. You, Mr. Levin, are almost the opposite. In big, funny, scary ways, you acknowledge our faults. The problems we're too afraid to recognize.

And by writing, you give us less to fear about living.

That's very, VERY creepy, Mr. Levin. But not creepy-bad. It's creepy-nice. Creepy-great.

Escort

My first day as an escort, my first «date» had only one leg. He'd gone to a gay bathhouse, to get warm, he told me. Maybe for sex. And he'd fallen asleep in the steam room, too close to the heating element. He'd been unconscious for hours, until someone found him. Until the meat of his left thigh was completely and thoroughly cooked.

He couldn't walk, but his mother was coming from Wisconsin to see him, and the hospice needed someone to cart the two of them around to visit the local tourist sights. Go shopping downtown. See the beach. Multnomah Falls. This was all you could do as a volunteer if you weren't a nurse or a cook or doctor.

You were an escort, and this was the place where young people with no insurance went to die. The hospice name, I don't even remember. It wasn't on any signs anywhere, and they asked you to be discreet coming and going because the neighbors didn't know what was going on in the enormous old house on their street, a street with its share of crack houses and drive-by shootings, still nobody wanted to live next door to this: four people dying in the living room, two in the dining room. At least two people lay dying in each upstairs bedroom, and there were a lot of bedrooms. At least half these people had AIDS, but the house didn't discriminate. You could come here and die of anything.

The reason I was there was my job. This meant lying on my back on a creeper with a two-hundred-pound class-8 diesel truck driveline lying on my chest and running down between my legs as far as my feet. My job is I had to roll under trucks as they crept down an assembly line, and I installed these drivelines. Twenty-six drivelines every eight hours. Working fast as each truck moved along, pulling me into the huge blazing-hot paint ovens just a few feet down the line.

My degree in journalism couldn't get me more than five dollars an hour. Other guys in the shop had the same degree, and we joked how liberal arts degrees should include welding skills so you'd at least pick up the extra two bucks an hour our shop paid grunts who could weld. Someone invited me to their church, and I was desperate enough to go, and at the church they had a potted ficus they called a Giving Tree, decorated with paper ornaments, each ornament printed with a good deed you could choose.

My ornament said: Take a hospice patient on a date.

That was their word, "date." And there was a phone number.

I took the man with one leg, then him and his mother, all over the area, to scenic viewpoints, to museums, his wheelchair folded up in the back of my fifteen-year-old Mercury Bobcat. His mother smoking, silent. Her son was thirty years old, and she had two weeks of vacation. At night, I'd take her back to her TravelLodge next to the freeway, and she'd smoke, sitting on the hood of my car, talking about her son already in the past tense. He could play the piano, she said. In school, he earned a degree in music, but ended up demonstrating electric organs in shopping-mall stores.

These were conversations after we had no emotions left.

I was twenty-five years old, and the next day I was back under trucks with maybe three or four hours sleep. Only now my own problems didn't seem very bad. Just looking at my hands and feet, marveling at the weight I could lift, the way I could shout against the pneumatic roar of the shop, my whole life felt like a miracle instead of a mistake.

In two weeks the mother was gone home. In another three months, her son was gone. Dead, gone. I drove people with cancer to see the ocean for their last time. I drove people with AIDS to the top of Mount Hood so they could see the whole world while there was still time.

I sat bedside while the nurse told me what to look for at the moment of death, the gasping and unconscious struggle of someone drowning in their sleep as renal failure filled their lungs with water. The monitor would beep every five or ten seconds as it injected morphine into the patient. The patient's eyes would roll back, bulging and entirely white. You held their cold hand for hours, until another escort came to the rescue, or until it didn't matter.

The mother in Wisconsin sent me an afghan she'd crocheted, purple and red. Another mother or grandmother I'd escorted sent me an afghan in blue, green, and white. Another came in red, white, and black. Granny squares, zigzag patterns. They piled up at one end of the couch until my housemates asked if we could store them in the attic.

Just before he'd died, the woman's son, the man with one leg, just before he'd lost consciousness, he'd begged me to go into his old apartment. There was a closet full of sex toys. Magazines. Dildos. Leatherwear. It was nothing he wanted his mother to find, so I promised to throw it all out.

So I went there, to the little studio apartment, sealed and stale after months empty. Like a crypt, I'd say, but that's not the right word. It sounds too dramatic. Like cheesy organ music. But in fact, just sad.

The sex toys and anal whatnots were just sadder. Orphaned. That's not the right word either, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

The afghans are still boxed and in my attic. Every Christmas a housemate will go look for ornaments and find the afghans, red and black, green and purple, each one a dead person, a son or daughter or grandchild, and whoever finds them will ask if we can use them on our beds or give them to Goodwill.

And every Christmas I'll say no. I can't say what scares me more, throwing away all these dead children or sleeping with them.

Don't ask me why, I tell people. I refuse to even talk about it. That was all ten years ago. I sold the Bobcat in 1989. I quit being an escort.

Maybe because after the man with one leg, after he died, after his sex toys were all garbage-bagged, after they were buried in the Dumpster, after the apartment windows were open and the smell of leather and latex and shit was gone, the apartment looked good. The sofa bed was a tasteful mauve, the walls and carpet, cream. The little kitchen had butcher-block countertops. The bathroom was all white and clean.

I sat there in the tasteful silence. I could've lived there.

Anyone could've lived there.

Almost California

The infection on my shaved head is finally starting to heal when I get the package in the mail today.

Here's the screenplay based on my first novel, Fight Club.

It's from 20th Century Fox. The agent in New York said this would happen. It's not like I wasn't warned. I was even a little part of the process. I went down to Los Angeles and sat through two days of story conferences where we jerked the plot around. The people at 20th Century Fox got me a room at the Century Plaza. We drove through the studio backlot. They pointed out Arnold Schwarzenegger. My hotel room had a giant whirlpool tub, and I sat in the middle of it and waited most of an hour for it to fill enough that I could turn on the bubble jets. In my hand was my little bottle of mini-bar gin.

The infection on my head was from the day before I was going to Hollywood. I was getting flown to LAX, so what I did is run down to the Gap and try to buy a pumpkin-colored polo shirt. The idea was to look Southern Californian.

The infection was from not reading the directions on a tube of men's depilatory. This is like Nair or Neet, but extra-strong, for black men to shave their faces with.

Right on the tube of Magic brand men's depilatory, it says in all caps: DO NOT USE WITH A RAZOR. This is even underlined. The infection was not the fault of the package designers at Magic. Fast-forward to me sitting in my Century Plaza whirlpool tub. Water rushes in, but the tub is so big that even after half an hour, I'm just sitting there with my gin and my shaved head with my butt in a little puddle of warm water. The walls of the tub are marble, chilled to ice-cold by the air conditioning. The little almond soaps are already packed in my suitcase.

The check from the movie option is already in my bank account.

The bathroom is lined with huge mirrors and indirect lighting, so I can see myself from every angle, naked and wallowing in an inch of water with my drink getting warm. This is everything I wanted to make real. The whole time you're writing, some less-than-Zen little polyp of your brain wants to be flying first-class to LAX. You want to pose for book-jacket photos. You want for there to be a media escort standing at the gate when you get off the plane, and you want to be chauffeured, not delivered, but chauffeured from dazzling interview to glittering book-signing event.

This is the dream. Admit it. Probably, you'd be more shallow than that. Probably, you'd want to be trading toenail secrets with Demi Moore in the green room just before you go onstage as a guest on the David Letterman show.

Yeah. Well, welcome to the market for literary fiction.

Your book has about a hundred days on the bookstore shelf before it's an official failure.

After that, the stores start returning the books to your publisher and prices start to fall. Books don't move. Books go to the shredder.

Your little chunk of your heart, the little first novel you wrote, your heart gets slashed 70 percent, and still nobody wants it.

Then you find yourself at the Gap trying on pastel knit shirts and squinting when you look in the mirror so you look almost good. Almost California. There's the movie deal to support-your hope is, now, that will save your book. Just because a big publisher is doing my first novel, that doesn't make me attractive. Lazy and stupid come to mind. When it comes to being attractive and fun to be around, I just can't compete. Stepping off the airplane in Los Angeles with my hair sprayed and wearing a salmon-colored polo shirt was not going to help.

Having the publicist at the big publishing house call everybody and tell them I was attractive and fun was only going to give people false hope.

The only thing worse than showing up at LAX ugly is showing up ugly but showing signs that you really tried to look good. You gave it your best effort but this is the best you could do. Your hair's cut and skin's tanned, your teeth are flossed and the hair in your nose is tweezed, but you still look ugly. You're wearing a 100 percent cotton casual knit shirt from the Gap. You gargled. You used eyedrops and deodorant, but you still come off the plane missing a few chromosomes.

That wasn't going to happen to me.

The idea was to make sure nobody thought I was even trying to look good. The idea was to wear the clothes I wore every day. To remove any risk of failed hairstyling, I'd shave my head.

This wasn't the first time I'd shaved my head. Most of the time I was writing Fight Club I had that blue, shaved-head look. Then, what can I say, my hair grew back. It was cold. I had hair when it came time to take my book-jacket photo, not that hair helped.

Even when they took my picture for the jacket, the photographer made it clear the pictures would turn out ugly, and it was not her fault.

So I left all the new colors of polo shirts including pumpkin, terra cotta, saffron, and celadon at the Gap, and I went and didn't read the directions on a tube of men's depilatory. I frosted my head with the stuff, and I started to hack at my scalp with a razor. The only thing worse you could do is get water mixed in the depilatory. So I ran hot water over my head.

Imagine your head slashed with razor cuts and then throwing lye on the cuts.

Tomorrow, I was going to Hollywood. That night, I couldn't get my head to stop bleeding. Little bits of toilet paper were stuck all over my swelled-up scalp. It was a sort of papier-mâché look, with my brains inside. I felt better when my head started to scab, but then the red parts were still swollen. The blue stubble of hair started pushing up from underneath scabs. The ingrown hairs made little whiteheads I had to squeeze.

It was: The Elephant Man goes to Hollywood.

The people at the airline hustled me onboard, fast, like a donor organ. When I reclined my seat back, my scabs stuck to the little paper headrest cover. After our touchdown, the flight attendant had to peel it off. This probably wasn't the peak experience of her day, either.

This is why I write.

The infected head thing just got worse. Everyone meeting me looked legendary, like all the guys were JFK Jr. All the women were Uma Thurman. At all the restaurants we went to, execs from Warner Brothers and Tri-Star would come over and talk about their latest project.

This is so why I write.

Nobody made the mistake of eye contact with me. They all talked about the latest buzz.

The producer for the Fight Club movie drove me around the Fox backlot. We saw where they filmed NYPD Blue. I said how I didn't watch television. This was not the best news to let slip.

We went to the Malibu Colony. We went to Venice Beach. The one place I wanted to go was the Getty Museum, but you have to book an appointment a month in advance.

So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn't funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it.

My head would just bleed and bleed. Whoever was lowest in the pecking order, I had to ride in their car. They showed me those concrete hand– and footprints, and they stood off to one side discussing the grosses for Twister and Mission: Impossible while I wandered around the same as the rest of the tourists with their heads bowed looking for Marilyn Monroe.

They drove me through Brentwood and Bel-Air and Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades.

They left me at the hotel where I had two hours before I had to be ready for dinner. There I was, and there was the mini-bar just asking to be violated, and there was a bathroom bigger than where I live. The bathroom was lined with mirror, and everywhere, there I was, all naked with the eruptions on my head finally draining clear liquid. The little hotel gin bottle in my hand. The gigantic bathtub kept filling and filling, but never got more than an inch deep.

All those years you write and write. You sit in the dark and say, someday. A book contract. A jacket photo. A book tour. A Hollywood movie. And someday you get them, and it's not how you planned.

Then you get the screenplay for your book in the mail, and it says: "Fight Club by Jim Uhls." He's the screenwriter. Way underneath that, in parentheses, it says: Based on the novel by you.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version. Because even sitting in my puddle of warm Los Angeles water, I was already thinking what I'd tell my friends when they asked about this trip. I'd tell them all about my infection and Malibu and the bottomless bathtub, and they'd say:

You should write that down.