Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

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.