Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

So this wasn't really about Brad.

It's about everybody.

Monkey Think, Monkey Do

This summer a young man pulled me aside in a bookstore and said he loved how in Fight Club I wrote about waiters tainting food. He asked me to sign a book and said he worked in a five-star restaurant where they monkey with celebrities' food all the time.

"Margaret Thatcher," he said, "has eaten my sperm." He held up one hand, fingers spread, and said, "At least five times."

Writing that book, I knew a movie projectionist who collected single frames from porno movies and made them into slides. When I talked to people about cutting these frames into G-rated family movies, one friend said, "Don't. People will read that, and they'll start doing it…"

Later, when they were shooting the Fight Club movie, some Hollywood big names told me the book hit home because they, themselves, had spliced porno into movies as angry teenage projectionists. People told me about blowing their noses into hamburgers at fast-food cooking jobs. They told me about changing the bottles of hair dye from box to box in the drugstore, blond to black, red to brown, and coming back to see angry, wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager. This was the decade of "transgressive novels," starting early with American Psycho and continuing with Trainspotting and Fight Club. These were novels about bored bad boys who'd try anything to feel alive. Everything people told me, I could roll it into a book and sell.

On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in the emergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight would be a struggle not to pop open that door. The air sucking out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, the screaming chaos and "Mayday! Mayday!" emergency landing, it was all so clear. That door, so begging to be opened.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard defines dread as the knowledge of what you must do to prove you're free, even if it will destroy you. His example is Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until God shows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, "Don't eat this." Now Adam is no longer free. There is one rule he can break, he must break, to prove his freedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we are forbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable.

Monkey think, monkey do.

According to Kierkegaard, the person who allows the law to control his life, who says the possible isn't possible because it is illegal, is leading an inauthentic life.

In Portland, Oregon, someone is filling tennis balls with matchheads and taping them shut. They leave the balls on the street for anyone to find, and any kick or throw will make them explode. So far, a man's lost a foot; a dog, its head.

Now the graffiti taggers are using acid glass-etching creams to write on shop and car windows. At suburban Tigard High School, an unidentified teenage boy takes his shit and wipes it around the walls of the men's bathroom. The school knows him only as the "Una-Pooper." Nobody's supposed to talk about him because the school is afraid of copycats.

As Kierkegaard would say, every time we see what's possible, we make it happen. We make it inevitable. Until Stephen King wrote about high school losers killing their peer groups, school shootings were unknown. But did Carrie and Rage make it inevitable?

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.