Inhale.
Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.
A friend of mine, when he was 13 years old he heardabout "pegging." This is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the prostategland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac. He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out to buya carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket checkout counter, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has planned.
So my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.
Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt.
At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. Heslathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts.
Then, this kid, his mom yells it's suppertime. She says to come down, right now.
He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed.
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Prologue
At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. Never really looked. Not the first time they toured the house. Not when the inspector showed them through it. They'd measured rooms and told the movers where to set the couch and piano, hauled in everything they owned, and never really stopped to look at the living room floor. They pretend.
Then on the first morning they come downstairs, there it is, scratched in the white-oak
floor:
GET OUT
Some new owners pretend a friend has done it as a joke. Others are sure it's because they didn't tip the movers.
A couple of nights later, a baby starts to cry from inside the north wall of the master bedroom.
This is when they usually call. And this new owner on the phone is not whatour hero, Helen Hoover Boyle, needs this morning.
This stammering and whining.
What she needs is a new cup of coffee and a seven-letter word for "poultry." She needs to hear what's happening on the police scanner. Helen Boyle snaps her fingers until her secretary looks in from the outer office. Our hero wraps both hands around the mouthpiece and points the telephone receiver at the scanner, saying, "It's a code nine-eleven."
And her secretary, Mona, shrugs and says, "So?"
So she needs to look it up in the codebook.
And Mona says, "Relax. It's a shoplifter."
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Posted on Tuesday, October 22, 2013
with 3 comments
Chapter 1:
Where you're supposed to be is some big West Hills wedding reception in a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house. This is called scene setting: where everybody is, who's alive, who's dead. This is Evie Cottrell's big wedding reception moment. Evie is standing halfway down the big staircase in the manor house foyer, naked inside what'sleft of her wedding dress, still holding her rifle.
Me, I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs but only in a physical way. My mind is, I don't know where.Nobody's all-the-way dead yet, but let's just say the clock is ticking.
Not that anybody in this big drama is a real alive per-son, either. You can trace everything about Evie Cottrell's look back to some television commercial for an organic shampoo, except right now Evie's wedding dress is burned down to just the hoopskirt wires orbiting her hips and just the little wire skeletons of all the silk flowers that were in her hair. And Evie's blonde hair, her big, teased-up, backcombed rainbow in every shade of blonde blown up with hairspray, well, Evie's hair is burned off, too.The only other character here is Brandy Alexander, who's laid out, shotgunned, at the bottom of the staircase, bleeding to death.
What I tell myself is the gush of red pumping out of Brandy's bullet hole is less like blood than it's some sociopolitical tool. The thing about being cloned from all those shampoo commercials, well, that goes for me and Brandy Alexander, too. Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We're all such products.
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Chapter 1
TYLER GETS ME a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the
first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though,Tyler and I were best friends.
People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.
The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat,Tyler says "We really won't die."
With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun. Most of the
noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there's the tiny sonic boom a bullet makes
because it travels so fast. To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot
of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound.
You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand.
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