Essays, Emails ...

by Palahniuk, Chuck

  The Valentines 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 Palm Pilots 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 your message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there’s those digital cameras so we can all e-mail 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 binds 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 hydro-electric power. She knows 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 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 importantly, 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 it and misrepresent it. Written communication gives people what Thamus called “the false conceit of knowledge,” a fake certainty that they understand something.

  So, all those video tapes 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 lay 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 LA 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.

  Oh, now the memories come flooding back.

  After the 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 make up, 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 the 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.

  Cruising Altitude

  Somewhere north-northeast above Los Angeles, I’m getting sore, so I ask Tracy if she will let up for a minute. This is another lifetime ago.

  With a big hank of white spit looped between my knob and her lower lip, her whole face hot and flushed from choking, still holding my sore dog in her fist, Tracy settles my back on her heels and says how in the Kama Sutra it tells you to make your lips really red by wiping them with sweat from the testicles of a white stallion.

  “For real,” she says.

  Now there’s a weird taste in my mouth and I look hard at her lips, her lips and my dog the same purple color. I say, “You don’t do that stuff, do you?”

  The door handle rattles and we both look, fast, to make sure it’s locked.

  Nothing’s worse than when a little kid opens the door. What’s next worse is when some man throws open the door and doesn’t understand. Even if you’re alone, when a kid opens the door, you have to, fast, cross your legs. Pretend it’s an accident. An adult guy might slam the door, might yell, “Lock it next time, ya moron,” but he’s still the only one blushing.

  After that, what’s worse, Tracy says, is being a woman the Kama Sutra would call an elephant woman. Especially if you’re with what they call a hare man.
<
br />   The she says, “I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.”

  Let’s just say that even if somebody didn’t believe the accident story, I would never get convicted of more than a lousy misdemeanor.

  The wrong person opens the door, and you are in their nightmares all week.

  Your best defense is, unless somebody is on the make, no matter who opens the door and sees you sitting there, they always assume it’s their mistake. Their fault.

  I always did. I used to walk in on women or men riding the toilet on airplanes, trains or Greyhound buses or in those little single-seat unisex restaurant bathrooms. I’d open the door to see some stranger sitting there, some blonde all blue eyes and teeth with a ring through her navel and wearing high heels, with her G-string stretched down between her knees and the rest of her clothes and bra folded on the little counter next to the sink. Every time this happens I would always wonder, why the hell don’t people bother to lock the door?

  As if this ever happens by accident.

  Nothing on the circuit happens by accident. It could be, on the train somewhere between home and work, you’ll open a bathroom door to find some brunette, with her hair pinned up and only her long earrings trembling down alongside her smooth white neck, and she’s just sitting inside with the bottom half of her clothes on the floor. Her blouse open with nothing inside but her hands cupped under each breast, her fingernails, her lips, her nipples are all the same cross between brown and red. Her legs as smooth white as her neck, smooth as a car you could drive 200 miles an hour, and her hair the same brunette all over, and she licks her lips.

  You slam the door and say, “Sorry.”

  And from somewhere deep inside, she says, “Don’t be.”

  And she still doesn’t lock the door. The little sign still saying: Vacant.

  How this happens is, I used to fly round-trip to Los Angeles when I was still in the medical program at UCLA. Six times I opened the door on the same yoga redhead naked from the waist down with her skinny legs pulled up cross-legged on the toilet seat, filing her nails with the scratch pad of a matchbook, as if she’s trying to catch herself on fire, wearing just a silky blouse knotted over her breasts, and six times she looks down at her freckled pink self with the road-crew orange rug around it, then her eyes the same gray as tin metal look up at me, slow, and every time says, “If you don’t mind,” she says, “I’m in here.”

  Six times I slam the door in her face.

  All I can think to say is, “Don’t you speak English?”

  Six times.

  This all takes less than a minute. There isn’t time to think.

  But still it happens more and more often.

  Some other trip, maybe cruising altitude between Los Angeles and Seattle, you’ll open the door on some surfer blond with both of his tanned hands wrapped around a purple dog between his legs, and Mr. Kewl shakes the stringy hairs off his eyes, points his dog, squeezed shiny wet inside a glossy rubber, he points this straight at you and says, “Hey, man, make the time—”

  It gets to be, every time you go to the bathroom, the little sign says Vacant, but it’s always somebody.

  Another woman, two knuckles deep and disappearing into herself.

  A different man, his four inches dancing between his thumb and forefinger, primed and ready to cough up the little white soldiers.

  You begin to wonder, just what do they mean by Vacant.

  Even in an empty bathroom, you find the smell of spermicidal foam. The paper towels are always used up. You’ll see the print of a bare foot on the bathroom mirror, six feet up, near the top of the mirror, the little arched print of a woman’s foot, the five round spots left by her toes, and you’d wonder, what happened here?

  You’ll see a smear of lipstick on the wall, down almost to the floor, and you can only imagine what was going on. There’s the dried white stripes from the last pullout moment when somebody’s dog tossed his white soldiers against the plastic wall.

  Some flights the walls will still be wet to the touch, the mirror fogged. The carpet sticky. The sink drain is sucked full, choked with every color of little curled hair. On the bathroom counter, next to the sink, is the perfect round outline in contraceptive jelly, of where somebody set her diaphragm. Some flights, there are two or three different sizes of perfect round outlines.

  These are the domestic legs of longer flights, transpacific or flights over the pole. Ten- to 16-hour flights. Direct flights, Los Angeles to Paris. Or from anywhere to Sydney.

  My Los Angeles trip number seven, the yoga redhead whips her skirt off the floor and hurries out after me. Still zipping herself up in the back, she trails me all the way to my seat and sits next to me, saying, “If your goal is to hurt my feelings, you could give lessons.”

  She’s got this shining soap opera kind of hairdo, only now her blouse is buttoned with a big floppy bow in the front and everything, pinned down with a big brooch.

  You say it again, “Sorry.”

  This is westbound, somewhere to the north-northwest of Atlanta.

  “Listen,” she says, “I work just too hard to take this kind of shit. You hear me?”

  You say, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m on the road three weeks out of every month,” she says. “I’m paying for a house I never see, soccer camp for my kids. Just the cost of my dad’s nursing home is incredible. Don’t I deserve something? I’m not bad-looking. The least you can do is not shut the door in my face.

  This is really what she says.

  She ducks down to put her face between me and the magazine. I’m pretending to read. “Don’t make like you don’t know,” she says. “It’s not like the circuit is anything secret.”

  So I say, “What circuit?”

  And she puts a hand over her mouth and sits back.

  She says, “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. I just thought—” and reaches up to push the little red stewardess button.

  A flight attendant comes strolling past, and the redhead orders two double bourbons.

  I say, “I hope you’re planning to drink them both.”

  And she says, “Actually, they’re both for you.”

  This would be my first trip on the circuit.

  “Don’t let’s fight,” she says and gives me her cool white hand. “I’m Tracy.”

  A better place this could have happened is a Lockheed Tristar 500 with its strip mall of large bathrooms isolated in the rear of the tourist-class cabin. Spacious. Soundproof. Behind everybody’s back where they can’t see who comes and goes.

  Compared to that, you have to wonder what kind of animal designed the Boeing 747-400 where it seems every bathroom opens onto a seat. For any real discretion, you have to trek to the back to the toilets in the back of the rear tourist cabin. Forget the single lower-level sidewall bathroom in business class unless you want everybody to know what you’ve got going.

  It’s simple.

  If you’re a guy, how it works is you sit in the bathroom with your Uncle Charlie whipped out, you know, the big red panda, and you work him up to parade attention, you know, the full upright position, and then you just wait in your little plastic room and hope for the best.

  Think of it as fishing.

  If you’re Catholic, it’s the same feeling as sitting in a confessional. The waiting, the release, the redemption.

  Think of it as catch-and-release fishing. What people call “sport fishing.”

  The other way it works is, you just open doors until you find something you like. It’s the same as the old game show where whatever door you choose, that’s the prize you take home. It’s the same as the lady and the tiger.

  Behind some doors, it’s somebody expensive back from first class for some slumming, a little cabin-class rough trade. Less chance she’ll meet anybody she knows. Behind other doors, you’ll get some aged beef with his brown tie thrown back over one shoulder, his hairy knees spread against the wall on each side, petting his leathery dead snake and the he says, “Sorry bud, no
thing personal.”

  Those times, you’ll be too grossed out even to say, “As if.”

  Or, “In your dreams, buddy.”

  Still, the reward rate is just great enough to keep you pushing your luck.

  The tiny space, the toilet, 200 strangers just a few inches away, it’s so exciting. The lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you’re double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. You’ll be amazed at how fast the time flies.

  So, it’s not the great American West or the race to the South Pole or being the first man to walk on the moon. It’s a different kind of space exploration.

  It’s the last frontier to conquer—other people, strangers, the jungle of their arms and legs, hair and skin, the smells and moans that is everybody you haven’t done. The great unknowns. The last forest to devastate. Here’s everything you’ve only imagined.

  You’re Chris Columbus sailing over the horizon.

  You’re the first caveman to risk eating an oyster. Maybe this particular oyster isn’t new, but it’s new to you.

  Suspend in the nowhere, in the halfway 14 hours between Heathrow and Jo’burg, you can have 10 true-life adventures. Twelve if the movie’s bad. More if the flight’s full, less if there’s turbulence. More if you don’t mind a guy’s mouth doing the job, less if you return to your seat during meal service.

  What’s not so great about that first time, when I’m drunk and first getting bounced on by the readhead, by Tracy, what happens is we hit an air pocket. Me gripping the toilet seat, I drop with the place, but Tracy’s blasted off, champagne popping off me with the rubber still inside, hitting the plastic ceiling with her hair. My trigger goes the same instant, and my gob’s suspended in the air, weightless hanging white soldiers in the midway between her still against the ceiling and me still on the can. Then slam, we come back together, her and the rubber, me and my gob, planted back down on me, reassembled pop beads-style, all 100-plus pounds of her.

  After those kinds of good times, it’s a wonder I’m not wearing a truss.