GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #721: TMI

 There aren't a lot of cool things about being me, but there are a few, and they're pretty solid. One of my favorite things about me is something I share with Chuck Palahniuk.

A while back I wrote about meeting him for the first time (I've seen him twice). He told a story, which I'm not going to go into again, about how people view him as someone they can tell their weirdest and dirtiest and sickest secrets. He supposes it's because he wrote "Guts." If he could write a story like that, there's no way he's going to judge these other people.

It's tempting to say that people are the same way with me because I wrote something like Dong of Frankenstein, but it's honestly been this way all my life. Perhaps it's the way I conduct myself? Or maybe I just have a trusting face? Whatever it is, people will tell me the weirdest things about themselves. The dirtiest things. The sickest things. And I won't ever tell anyone else. I won't even mine it for writing material, although a lot of times I wish I could. People will confess things to me that they would never, under any circumstances, tell anyone else. Sometimes not even their spouses. Often times they're 100% sober.

It's an oddball gift, and I'm here for it. I'd give examples but, well, you know. It's stuff like this that makes this whole existence thing worthwhile at times.

A REVIEW OF CHUCK PALANIUK'S CONSIDER THIS

 [I ordinarily don't repost my Goodreads reviews, but I think this one would interest a great deal of people. And so I'm not just doing this once today, I will do so again shortly. I have two more reviews to write this morning before I head out into the world for my meds and comic books. Here's the first one.]

I bought this expecting an autobiography. And it is, indeed, that. It is also an excellent book on writing for people who are just starting out. I'd put it right up there with Tom Piccirilli's Welcome to Hell. One problem: he's a minimalist, and his writing advice is mostly for writers who want to be minimalists. I believe less is better, and sometimes it's the things that are left unsaid during the process that turn out to be the most important. But I'm not a minimalist. Regardless, there is some great advice for beginners in here. "What's your gun?" is a great question for struggling writers to think about. "Did you put a clock in?" is another. Great stuff.

What I really enjoyed, though, are the parts that most authors who do books on writing, from Stephen King to Richard Laymon, don't tell you about the profession. Like, taking your author photo, for example. Because it is kind of important for readers to know what you look like. Personally, and I think Palahniuk would agree with me, the writer should be invisible. You should never know you're actually reading a book, contrary to all logical sense. The moment the author is discovered, suspension of disbelief is gone. But people care. They want to see the monster who wrote Diary and Lullaby. And Dong of Frankenstein, for that matter, I guess. (It should be noted that his author photo for this book shows him with a shaved head and a face covered in tattoos. I really hoped he'd gotten those tattoos for real. He's a weird dude, and I wouldn't put it past him. Alas, in the book he said they were temporary tats. Ah well.) My favorites are the postcards from the tour sections. The white mice story is flat out insane, and what the perpetrators said on their protest signs is absolutely mortifying. I would not have taken that as well as Palahniuk did. And I love his story about the guy who worked at the sex shop with the Polaroids.

Confession time. I've met Palahniuk twice. Once in Skokie as he was doing his Haunted tour. The second was in Naperville when he said he was on tour for his new collection of short stories, but he was really there to promote issue one of Fight Club 2. (Irvine Welsh was also there and did a reading.) That second experience was amazing. Palahniuk threw bags of candy into the crowd, and one of them nailed me in the stomach and nearly bowled me over. And the autographed limbs he discusses in this book? I got one of those, too. It bounced off the hand of a guy two rows in front of me, and I snatched it as it rebounded back to me. Incidentally, Palahniuk has one of the most elaborate autographs I've ever seen, right up there with Stephen King. As compared to, say, Brian Azzarello who signs with a legible A followed by a straight line that may end in an O. Possibly.

That was an amazing experience. I still have my beachball somewhere. But that first time bordered on profound. There, as he does in the book, he talks about how the last guy in line is a wild card. You never know what they're going to say. The Polaroid guy, for example, was the last guy in line. Palahniuk also told us that people see him as a confessor because if he could write a story like "Guts," then he's not going to judge you for anything.

I was the last guy in line for the Skokie event. I had time to read the entirety of Survivor, and I still had a lot of time before I got to meet the man himself. Knowing that I was the last guy in line, I decided I had to say something to him. Something he'd never heard before. But what? Nothing could beat the Polaroid guy, right? But I had that time, and I did remember something about a book signing I'd attended a couple of years previous.

So I got up to the man himself, who stood at a lectern where he signed books. I had all of them that were out at the time (except Choke, which I couldn't find in my collection for some reason). I introduced myself and as he started signing that first book (Fight Club, I think), I told him that I believed it was my solemn duty, as the last guy in line, to confess something to him.

I asked him, "Have you ever seen the Kevin Smith film, Mallrats?"

He said he hasn't.

"Have you at least heard of the concept of stinkpalming?"

I saw a change come over his face. While he still signed, he didn't look me in the eye. He kept looking down like he was getting ready to take mental notes.

"I once went to a signing at a Borders, and it was Oliver North promoting his new fictional war book. I don't like him. If he'd only rolled on Mr. I-Don't-Recall, I think our country would have been in a better place. So at first I had no interest in meeting him. But then I realized that I could stinkpalm him."

If you're unfamiliar, stinkpalming is when you put your right hand in your butt on a hot sweaty day and just let the smell bury itself into your flesh. Then you shake the hand of your enemy, and it will sink into his skin, too. And it doesn't wash off for days. For days, his hand will smell like your butt. Sure, yours will, too, but as Brody said, "It's a small price for the smiting of an enemy." So I told Palahniuk that's what I did to Ollie North.

Then, pausing his pen over the last book in the pile, Haunted, he asked me, in the mildest possible voice I have ever heard, "You didn't stinkpalm me, did you?"

I assured him that I liked him a lot, and I would never do that to him. An almost imperceptible relief came over his face as he signed the last book and rubber stamped it. The stamp proclaimed that this was his Shit and Roses Tour.

I thanked him and left and years later read this book. I'm kinda disappointed I didn't make the cut. Ah well. This long and rambling review is just to advise you that if you were my student, I would have you read this book and consider this.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #185: THREE THINGS ABOUT ME

Some of you know that I've been out of work for more than a month. I was recently hired at a new place, and the HR department asked me for three interesting facts about me so they could email them out to the others. I thought that would be easy because I've led a crazy, weird, interesting life.


And then I realized that just about all of it is NSFW.


I probably shouldn't tell them about the time I had sex with a burn victim and she shit all over me. Or maybe the time I became Future Booze Jesus and predicted that an asshole I knew would never get herpes, unfortunately. Or maybe the time I serenaded a blow up doll during a karaoke show to Elvis's "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You." Or about the time that pancreatitis almost killed me. Or the time I beat a DUI. Or any of the books I published that got me fired from my last square job, like DONG OF FRANKENSTEIN or POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS.


I've done a lot of crazy, fucked up shit in my life. Most of it people would find interesting. HR departments tend to find that shit reprehensible. They find it offenses to fire people for.


Maybe I should have told them about the time I almost got my throat slit for nothing. Or maybe I should have brought attention to THE COCAINE! BROS. Or to the time I had a gun pulled on me. Or to the time a woman almost raped me.


Maybe I should talk about how I was severely beaten as a child by a man who got a Section 8 discharge from Vietnam. Do you realize how difficult that is? In Vietnam almost everything went.


Or how about the time my step-mom and father negotiated with a stripper over the price of a lap dance for me?


Or how about the time I lost my virginity? Nah, I won't do that. I promised the person who set that up that I would never tell a soul. He's dead now, but I would not betray that trust even now.


I've had a fucked up life. It's fucking weird, but I'm kinda grateful for it. My biggest rule for life is to never be boring. I've got so many fucked up stories to tell it's actually amazing.


It was a struggle, but here are the things I came up with for HR:


1. I won an honorable mention award from the State of Illinois journalism competition for writing comic book reviews.


2. I once chased down the mayor of Chicago like a dog because a friend of mine (and publisher, Nick Day) wanted a photo with him.


3. I once got slapped in the face with a bag of candy by Chuck Palahniuk, author of FIGHT CLUB. (He also nailed me with a plastic severed arm with his signature on it, but I felt it was inappropriate to mention that in a company email.)


It did the trick. One of my coworkers loves C2E2 and was impressed by my comic book coverage. Another coworker thought it was awesome that Palahniuk nailed me in such a fashion.


I might have been hired in the right place. I give it a 90% chance. I think I'm going to be good for the next 10 years. I never make it to the 10 year mark, so I figure I'll be fired about a half-month before I get there, I'm prepared for some good times.


Goodnight, fuckers.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #176: AUTHOR PHOTOS

You know, I truly love some author photos. When I was a kid I told myself that every author photo of mine would be me holding a stuffed dolphin like a gun. Maybe I'll still do that. For now this is what I have:

I think it's pretty cool. I'm drinking in it, so it's a good depiction of me. It's kind of old, and I've gotten a bit fat, but Chuck Palahniuk always said to take your author photos when you're young, so . . . By the way this picture is also on my business card. I'm proud of it.


You know who has great author photos? People in the bizarro anti-genre. I love those folks, and I'm glad that I'm in that group. But when I think about truly outstanding author photos? I'm mostly thinking about Joe Hill's for THE FIREMAN.

Most authors published by the big boys want their photos to look like they're thoughtful or important. Joe Hill just looks like he's having a lot of fun. He's just being him, not the pretentious fuck that most of the rest of us are trying for.


Here's another great author photo from Hunter S. Thompson's KINGDOM OF FEAR:

Who the fuck does that? Someone who just wants to be himself, of course. Don't be plain, fellow writers. Let your freak flag fly, as they say. The author photo is, and I know I'll get some weird glances from this, an art. Just like the author bio. Let's not be boring, eh? Let's strive for excellence, as Outlaw Vern would say.

Outlaw Vern's author photo

ARE YOU THERE, SATAN? IT'S ME, MADISON: A review of DAMNED

That’s how every chapter of Chuck Palahniuk’s new masterpiece begins. Madison, more commonly known as Maddy, is the fat thirteen-year-old daughter of two Hollywood bigwigs, but due to an overdose of marijuana (at least, that’s the story at first), she is now dead. She wakes up in a dingy cage in Hell, where the currency is candy and all of the sperm, shit, and fingernail clippings from earth drain off to form awful "natural" bodies.



The cover copy describes this book as Dante’s INFERNO by way of THE BREAKFAST CLUB. True enough, except they forgot to add, “as written by Judy Blume.” The genius in DAMNED is Palahniuk’s depiction of Hell, from the Dandruff Desert to the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions.  It is just about the grossest place you can imagine. Even worse, when you get damned, you have to spend the rest of eternity doing one of two things: either you do Internet porn forever or you become a telemarketer who calls the living solely when they’re having dinner.


Not to say Palahniuk has nothing to offer about the land of the living. In flashbacks, we learn about Maddy’s life of privilege, about her “former beatniks, former hippies, former Rastas, former anarchists” parents, everything from how her mom likes to fuck with the maids in their homes across the world by locking them into bathrooms via remote access to how her dad insists on living a nudist lifestyle in order to make sure she doesn’t grow up to become a pervert. A reader must wonder, is this the way Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie live their lives?


The novel isn’t without its flaws. For instance, for a book about the afterlife, an awful lot of it is about Maddy when she was alive. When she was abandoned at a Swiss boarding school over Christmas break (not that her parents would ever celebrate Christmas). When she tried seducing her adopted brother, Goran. When she learned about a horrible thing called the French kissing game. It’s all very interesting stuff, but most of a novel shouldn’t be told in flashback. (Pay attention, Anne Rice.)


Also, the beginning of the book is kind of hard to get through. There’s a lot of rambling from Maddy with very little actually going on in the story. It picks up after the first few chapters, but that’s no way to start a novel, no matter how brief the chapters may be. Readers unfamiliar with Palahniuk’s work might not slog through it to get to the good stuff.


And lastly, when things finally start happening, big things (like Maddy facing off against Hitler, Caligula, and other historic figures, including Baal), tend to get skimmed over, almost as if they’re incidental.


In anyone else’s hands, DAMNED would have failed. But Palahniuk knows what he’s doing, and he pulls it off with flair and style. The scene where Maddy and her punk friend, Archer, face off against the demon, Psezpolnica, is worth the price of admission alone.


DAMNED
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: Doubleday
247 pages
$24.95

MEETING AUTHORS #2: CHUCK PALAHNIUK, CONFESSOR

It takes a lot for me to call in to work pretending to be sick in order to meet an author, but when I found out a few years ago that Chuck Palahniuk was going to be signing at the Barnes and Noble up in Skokie, I had no choice. I called in to the library, told my boss I was bedridden, and I started making my way out to Skokie with every one of Palahniuk’s books that I could find (except I wasn’t able to find my copy of CHOKE) in addition to the issue of PLAYBOY in which his short story, “Guts,” appeared.

When I entered the store, I was given a sheet of paper with a number on it: 269. Not bad at all, or so I thought at the time. This is not an uncommon practice, and considering how popular Palahniuk is, 269 did not sound too outrageous.

I was directed to where the signing was to take place, and I was slightly amused to find that he’d been situated near the kids section. What really surprised me, however, was that Palahniuk was already there. I glanced at my watch to make sure it hadn’t stopped, but sure enough, the author was early.

For those who have never been to a signing, the author is NEVER early. In fact, very few of them are on time. The signing had not started, of course, but there was Palahniuk, meeting his fans, letting them take pictures and everything.

I had heard many wonderful stories about Palahniuk’s signings—-anyone who has ever been to one says it’s like a show—-and I would not be disappointed. He started out by answering questions, mostly about what was going to be filmed next. At the time, CHOKE had just finished photography, and he told us that all of his other work had been optioned. He also talked about his next book, RANT, and that is when the gift giving began. He literally showered the audience with presents, starting with giant rubber rats followed by gelatinous eyeballs and hearts. I tried desperately to catch something, but my arms simply weren’t long enough, and I was too far back.



Then, it was story-time. He told us he planned on reading “Guts”—-to which my heart thrilled, as I had heard that at many such readings, people became so nauseous that they fainted—-but he changed his mind and read to us a then-unpublished story, straight from the manuscript. It has since seen print (I believe in ESQUIRE), but it was a real treat for his fans. Just before he started reading the story, he passed out scented roses, enough so that everyone—-including me—-received one. He did this so “it will smell just like your grandmother’s bathroom in here,” he said. Never let it be said that Palahniuk isn’t a giving, caring writer when it comes to his fans.

After this, he started talking about how signings are always interesting to him because his readers tend to look upon him as a confessor, especially after “Guts” was published. He thought this might be because if he had written something so grotesque, then whatever his fans had to say would not be judged by him. He told a number of such confessions to us, but my favorite was when he told the story of the man who came in with a Hefty bag full of Polaroid photos. This gentleman started flipping these pictures out on the table as if he were dealing a hand of poker, and as Palahniuk looked at them, he realized they were a bunch of old people . . . naked and apparently sleeping.

No, according to the fan, these people were dead. This fellow worked at a porn shop, in which a customer could sample the wares before purchasing them by going into a private booth to view them. Part of this man’s job was to check the booths at the end of each shift, and every once in a while, he would find that an elderly customer had died while masturbating.

Before calling for an ambulance, he would grab the Polaroid camera they used to take pictures of banned customers, and he would pose the bodies and take a few “candid” shots.

Palahniuk went on to mention that as a promotion for one of his previous books, he went around the country throwing out plastic severed hands to the audience. He bought them in bulk and shipped them out to the bookstores he was going to be at the following week. It turned out that his agent also represented another writer who was following the same route. What had this other writer written about? His experience in the wilderness, when a boulder had fallen on his arm and the only way he survived was by cutting off his own hand and hiking back to civilization. The managers at the bookstores receiving the severed hands thought it was a horribly sick joke, but as it turns out, the writer in question thought it was kind of funny.

Now, it was finally time for the signing to begin. They asked for numbers 1-50 to line up in order, and the waiting began. I found a comfortable corner and started reading one of his books that I hadn’t yet read: SURVIVOR. Let me tell you, by the time I walked out of that Barnes and Noble, I was finished with the whole thing. It’s not a long read, but the fact that it took so long for the signing was a bit crazy. (It is also now my favorite of his work. If you haven’t read it, you should. You’ll learn a lot about the world, and maybe, if you’re lucky, even yourself.)



An hour passed before they called the next group, so I decided to investigate. I looked down into the kids section to see that he was spending quite a bit of time with each fan, signing everything in sight and taking a variety of pictures. Some of the fans had the severed hands from previous signings, and he was autographing those and using them to pose with fans in compromising positions. The whole time, he was grinning, and it was very clear that he was actually happy to be there. Most writers get tired and take breaks, but he seemed to be full of energy, and he kept going.



He spent so much time with his fans that it was obvious that Barnes and Noble employees were getting tired of it. By the time they called 200-250, they were telling people to be fast, and that he was only going to sign books from here on out. However, I was at a good vantage point by then, and I hadn’t seen ANYONE from B&N approach Palahniuk. This was an executive decision.

I kind of wished I could have gotten that PLAYBOY signed, but oh well.

Soon, my number range was called, and I got in line. As I slowly approached, I decided that I was going to be one of those memorable confessions, but I didn’t know what the hell I was going to tell him. I engaged in conversation with a few other fans around me as we waited, but it seemed that they were just interested in meeting him . . . again. That’s right, it seemed like I was the only one around there who was meeting him for the first time.

Finally, it was my turn, and I stepped forward with my stack of books balanced in one hand and my other hand extended in greeting. He was very polite, and he looked me in the eye when he asked for my name. His handshake wasn’t strong, but it was firm and excited.

And then, it hit me. “You know,” I said to him, “I have a confession to make.”

His eyes lit up. “What’s that, John?”

“Have you ever seen Kevin Smith’s movie, MALLRATS?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Oh.” I deflated a little, but not too much. “Are you familiar with the term, ‘stink-palming’?”

“No,” he said as he signed.

“It’s when you stick your hand in your ass and clench tight until the stink latches on to your hand, and you then shake hands with your enemy. The stink transfers to him, and he’ll spend the rest of the day trying to figure out where the smell is coming from. It won’t wash off for at least that long, you know.”

He raised an eyebrow, and then smelled his own hand.

I laughed. “Don’t worry, I didn’t do it to you.”

“That’s a relief,” he said.

“But I did do it to Oliver North.”

He broke out into laughter. “You met Oliver North?”

“At a book signing,” I said.

“And you, what is it, stink-palmed him?”

“Yep.”

“I have to give you kudos for that,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve heard a confession like that before.” He handed over the final signed book, LULLABY. “It was nice to meet you.”



I reached out to shake his hand again, and he glanced sidelong at me. “I promise, I didn’t do it to you.”

“Okay,” he said, and he shook my hand.

When I got back to the car and looked at the signed pages, I noticed that he’d signed LULLABY in an interesting way: “To John—-I wash my hands! Chuck Palahniuk.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. If you ever get the chance to meet him, I suggest you do. He really is the nicest writer you can ever meet.