Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
If you're going to read this, don't bother.
After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.
Save yourself.
There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.
You're not getting any younger.
What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.
At that moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.
It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
"Art never comes from happiness."
Here is where symbols were born.
This is even after the Easter Bunny turned out to be a lie. Even after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Saint Christopher and Newtonian physics and the Niels Bohr model of the atom, this stupid, stupid kid still believed the Mommy.
And the kid tried to feel warmer, but no matter how bright they were, the headlights didn't give off any heat.
growing strong and rich and smart was only the first half of your life story.
And sure as hell, this little brat deserved to get spanked. He deserved whatever he got. This is the deluded little rube who really thought the future would be any better. If you just worked hard enough. If you just learned enough. Ran fast enough. Everything would turn out right, and your life would amount to something.
And the kid is stupid enough to think a picture or a sculpture or a story could somehow replace anybody you love.
Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of. Who thought you could make something, anything, that would last forever.
It feels stupid even to remember this stuff. It's a wonder he's lived this long.
So, again, if you're going to read this, don't.
This isn't about somebody brave and kind and dedicated. He isn't anybody you're going to fall in love with.
Just so you know, what you're reading is the complete and relentless story of an addict. Because in most twelve-step recovery programs, the fourth step makes you take inventory of your life. Every lame, suck-ass moment of your life, you have to get a notebook and write it down. A complete inventory of your crimes. That way, every sin is right at your fingertips. Then you have to fix it all. This goes for alcoholics, drug abusers, and overeaters, as well as sex addicts.
This way you can go back and review the worst of your life any time you want.
Because supposedly, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
So if you're reading this, to tell the truth, it's really none of your business.
and really believed somebody could even promise something so impossible.
So if you think this is going to save you . . .
If you think anything is going to save you . . .
Please consider this your final warning.
All these people you thought were urban legends, well, they're human. Complete with names and faces. Jobs and families. College degrees and arrest records.
We're all here. Alive and unwell.
In the modern Oedipal story, it's the mother who kills the father and then takes the son.
The problem with sex is the same as with any addiction. You're always recovering. You're always backsliding. Acting out. Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut-hosing orgasm.
The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.
These are the only few minutes I can be human.
Just for these minutes, I don't feel lonely.
Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect jack shit.
I'm not so much a good friend as I'm the savior who wants you to worship him forever.
"Beatific" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
"Pilgrimage" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
The point was, there'd be nothing to this if you were beautiful and sexy.
The point was, in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn't. The monkey wasn't. What they were doing wasn't.
The point was, it's not the sex part of pornography that hooked the stupid little boy. It was the confidence. The courage. The complete lack of shame. The comfort and genuine honesty. The up-front-ness of being able to just stand there and tell the world: Yeah, this is how I chose to spend a free afternoon. Posing here with a monkey putting chestnuts up my ass.
And I really don't care how I look. Or what you think.
So deal with it.
He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.
And even if the guy wasn't loving every moment, the ability to smile, to fake your way through this, that would be even more admirable.
"Freedom" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
That's the kind of pride and self-assurance the little boy wanted to have. Someday.
If it was him in those pictures with the monkey, he could look at them every day and think: If I could do this, I could do anything. No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement and somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake.
Even hell.
More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea . . .
That if enough people looked at you, you'd never need anybody's attention ever again.
That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you'd never be able to hide again. There'd be no difference between your public and your private lives.
That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you'd never want to own or do another thing.
That if you could eat or sleep enough, you'd never need more.
That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.
That you could ever be smart enough.
That you could someday get enough sex.
These all became the little boy's new goals. The illusions he'd have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man's smile.
So after that, every time he was scared or sad or alone, every night he woke up panicked in a new foster home, his heart racing, his bed wet, every day he started school in a different neighborhood, every time the Mommy came back to claim him, in every damp motel room, in every rented car, the kid would think of those same twelve photos of the fat man bent over. The monkey and the chestnuts. And it calmed the stupid little shit right down. It showed him how brave and strong and happy a person could become.
How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
"Savior" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.
The kid never knew the man's name. But he never forgot that smile.
"Hero" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
I stop. I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.
Shoveling food into his face, Denny says, "Why you do this is so infantile."
I stagger over and kick him, again.
Why I do this is to put adventure back into people's lives.
Why I do this is to create heroes. Put people to the test.
Like mother, like son.
Why I do this is to make money.
Somebody saves your life, and they'll love you forever. It's that old Chinese custom where if somebody saves your life, they're responsible for you forever.
You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.
All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog.
People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden.
People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor.
"Charity" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
You're the proof of their courage. The proof they were a hero. Evidence of their success. I do this because everybody wants to save a human life with a hundred people watching.
If I can't be a great doctor saving hundreds of patients, this way I'm a great patient creating hundreds of would-be doctors.
By choking, you become a legend about themselves that these people will cherish and repeat until they die. They'll think they gave you life. You might be the one good deed, the deathbed memory that justifies their whole existence.
So be the aggressive victim, the big loser. A professional failure.
People will jump through hoops if you just make them feel like a god.
It's the martyrdom of Saint Me.
Whoever will be so proud. Even if maybe your real folks aren't. This person will be proud of you because you make them so proud of themselves.
It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it.
Just don't hold anything back. This is going to be the best story of somebody's life.
That's why I do all this. Go to all this trouble. To showcase just one brave stranger. To save just one more person from boredom. It's not just for the money. It's not just for the adoration.
But neither one hurts.
It's all so easy. It's not about looking good, at least not on the surface--but you still win. Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. . . .
They have lessons every day in how to tie your shoe, how to button a button, snap a snap. Buckle a buckle. Someone will demonstrate Velcro. Someone will teach you how to zip your zipper. Every morning, they tell you your name. Friends who've known each other sixty years get reintroduced. Every morning.
These are doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, who, day to day, can't master a zipper anymore. This is less teaching than it is damage control. You might as well try to paint a house that's on fire.
Eva wheels a little bit into my mom's room. "You hurt me," she says to me. "And I never told Mother."
These old people. These human ruins.
It's already half-past the Tufted Titmouse, and I have to catch my bus and be at work by the time the Blue Jay sings.
Eva thinks I'm her big brother who diddled her about a century ago. My mom's roommate, Mrs. Novak with her horrible big hanging breasts and ears, she thinks I'm her bastard business partner who gypped her out of a patent for the cotton gin or the fountain pen or something.
Here I get to be all things to all women.
"You hurt me," Eva says and rolls a little closer. "And I've never forgotten it for a minute."
Every time I visit, some old raisin down the hall with wild eyebrows, she called me Eichmann. Another woman with a clear plastic tube of piss looping out from under her bathrobe, she accuses me of stealing her dog and wants it back. Anytime I pass this other old woman who sits in her wheelchair, slumped inside a pile of pink sweaters, she hisses at me. "I saw you," she says, and looks at me with one cloudy eye. "The night of the fire, I saw you with them!"
You can't win. Every man who's ever passed through Eva's life has probably been her big brother in some form. Whether she knew it or not, she's spent her whole life waiting and expecting men to diddle her. For serious, even mummied up in her wrinkled skin, she's still eight years old. Stuck. Just the same as Colonial Dunsboro with its granola crew of burnouts, everybody at St. Anthony's is trapped in their past.
I'm no exception, and don't think you are either.
The correct way to handle a case like Eva is to redirect her attention. Distract her by mentioning lunch or the weather or how nice her hair looks. Her attention span is about a clock tick long and you cane shove her on to a more pleasant topic.
You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away.
That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.
Her whole body leaning forward, her little stick finger trembles in the air at me.
Screw it.
She's already pretty much engaged to become Mrs. Death.
"Yeah, Eva," I say. "I boned you." And I yawn. "Yup. Every chance I got, I stuck it in you and humped out a load."
They call this psychodrama. You could call it just another kind of granny dumping.
Her twisted little finger wilts, and she settles back between the arms of her wheelchair. "So you finally admit it," she says.
"Hell yes," I say. "You're a great piece of ass, baby sis."
She looks off at a blank spot on the linoleum floor and says, "After all these years, he admits it."
This is role-playing therapy, only Eva doesn't know it's not for real.
Her head still loops in little circles, but her eyes come back to me. "And you're not sorry?" she says.
Well, I guess if Jesus could die for my sins, I suppose I can soak up a few for other people. We all get our chance to play scapegoat. Take the blame.
The martyrdom of Saint Me.
The sins of every man in history landing square on my back.
"Eva," I say. "Baby, sweetheart, little sister, love of my life, of course I'm sorry. I was a pig," I say and look at my watch. "You were just such a hot tamale that I was out of control."
Like I need this shit to deal with. Eva just stares at me with her big hyperthyroid eyes until a big tear splurts out of one eye and cuts through the powder on her wrinkled cheek.
I roll my eyes at the ceiling and say, "Okay, I hurt your little woo-woo, but that was eighty frigging years ago, so get over it. Move on with your life."
Then her horrible hands come up, wasted and veined as tree roots or old carrots, and they cover her face. "Oh, Colin," she says behind them. "Oh, Colin."
She takes her hands away, and her face is hosed with eye juice. "Oh, Colin," she whispers, "I forgive you." And her face nods toward her chest, bobbing with short breaths and sniffs, and her terrible hands bring the edge of her bib up to wipe at her eyes.
We just sit there. Jeez, I wish I had some chewing gum. My watch says twelve thirty-five.
She wipes her eyes and sniffs and looks up a little. "Colin," she says. "Do you still love me?"
These frigging old people. Jesus H.
And just in case you're wondering, I'm not a monster.
Just like something in a frigging book, for real I say, "Yeah, Eva." I say, "Yeah, for sure, I guess I can probably still love you."
Eva sobs now, her face hanging over her lap, her whole body rocking. "I'm so glad," she says, her tears dropping straight, gray stuff from her nose dripping right into her empty hands.
She says, "I'm so glad," and she's still crying, and you can smell the chewed up Salisbury steak squirreled away in her shoe, the chewed mushroom chicken in the pocket of her smock. That, and the damn nurse is never going to get my mom back from her shower, and I have to be back at work in the eighteenth century by one o'clock.
It's hard enough remembering my own past so I can do my fourth step. Now it's mixed up with the past of these other people. Which defense attorney I am, today, I can't remember. I look at my fingernails. I ask Eva, "Is Dr. Marshall here, do you think?" I ask, "Do you know if she's married?"
The truth about myself, who I really am, my father and everything, if my mom knows then she's too freaked out with guilt to tell.
I ask Eva, "Could you maybe cry somewhere else?"
Then it's too late. The Blue Jay starts singing.
And Eva, she still won't shut up, crying and rocking, her bib pressed to her face, the plastic bracelet trembling around one wrist, she's saying, "I forgive you, Colin. I forgive you. I forgive you. Oh, Colin, I forgive . . ."
There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.
At this point, how my life starts to feel is like a I'm acting in a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by real people, somewhere.
In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill.
It is in most jobs.
Yeah, I tell them all, I did it. I burned down your house. I bombed your village. I deported your sister. I sold you a shitty blue Nash Rambler in 1968. Then, yeah, I killed your dog.
So get over it!
I tell them, heap it on me. Make me play the big passive bottom in your guilt gang bang. I'll take everybody's load.
"Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?"
My point is, discriminate.
My advice to you is: identify your target market.
The crying part, where I'm hugged in somebody's arms, gasping and crying, that part just gets easier and easier. More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.
I'm a performance artist doing dinner theater, doing three shows a night. Ladies and gentlemen, may I have a volunteer from the audience.
"Screw history. All these fake people, they're the most important people for you to know," the Mommy said.
"You tell me, what does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head? It gets you nothing! This is the real education you need."
"Like, when you're thinking about the rest of your life," she said, and she put her hand over her eyes, "you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road."
And what else she said is, "By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself."
Another thing she said was, "The Englightenment is over. What we're living in now is the Dis-Enlightenment."
She said, "I figure we have about thirty days to pile up a lifetime of happy adventures. That's until my credit cards run out."
She said, "That's thirty days unless we get caught, first."
Cars honked and swerved. The radio yelled after them. Helicopters roared closer down.
And the Mommy said, "Now, just like with 'The Blue Danube Waltz,' hold on to my hand, tight." She said, "And don't think." She said, "Just run."
It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artowrk itself.
"I've defined myself, all my life, by what I was against . . ."
"I fought against everything, but more and more I worry that I was never for anything."
"Griping isn't the same as creating something," my mom's voice-over says. "Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing . . ." And the voice in the speaker fades out.
"We've taken the world apart," she says, "but we have no idea what to do with the pieces . . ."
"My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better," she says. "We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own."
Out of the speaker, her voice says, "I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation."
The voice-over says, "It only looks as if we've accomplished something."
The voice-over says, "I've never contributed anything worthwhile to the world."
All my life, I've been less my mother's child than her hostage. The subject of her social and political experiments. Her own private lab rat. Now she's mine, and she's not going to escape by dying or getting better. I just want one person I can rescue. I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time. Even if it means keeping her crippled, I want to be someone's constant savior.
"I know, I know, I know this sounds terrible," I say, "but I don't know. . . . This is what I think."
Here's where I should tell Paige Marshall what I really think.
I mean, I'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because I'm a guy.
I mean, how many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.
After long enough, you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You're wrong. You get used to the idea. You live down to expectations.
Even if the shoe doesn't really fit, you'll shrink into it.
"I just want to keep control," I say. "For a change, I want to be the adult."
aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?
The point is, it's not important what you think. What's important is that they're sure they have a problem.
And sometimes a euphemism just isn't.
Sometimes a euphemism is more true than what it's supposed to hide.
If the Mommy and the stupid little boy ever met them in public, these men would pretend not to know her. In public, they'd have wives. In the supermarket, they'd have kids. In the park, dogs. They'd have real names.
They'd pay her with damp twenties and fifties from sopping wet wallets full of sweaty photos, library cards, charge cards, club memberships, licenses, change. Obligations. Responsibility. Reality.
If you're looking for enlightenment, the Mommy said, a new car isn't the answer.
"Trichloroethane," the Mommy said and held the tube for him to see. "All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge."
She buried the tube back in her purse.
"That mountain, for example," she said. She took the boy's stupid chin between her thumb and forefinger and made him look with her. "That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it."
Another car slowed down, something brown and four-door, something too late-model, so the Mommy waved it away.
For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow or yin-yang locations. She'd seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.
What she'd seen in that flash wasn't even a "mountain." It wasn't a natural resource. It had no name.
"That's the big goal," she said. "To find a cure for knowledge."
For education. For living in our heads.
Cars went by on the highway, and the Mommy and little boy kept walking with the mountain still sitting there.
Ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, humanity had been a little too smart for its own good, the Mommy said. Ever since eating that apple. Her goal was to find, if not a cure, then at least a treatment that would give people back their innocence.
"The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum," she said, "that's where your problem is."
If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she'd be cured.
This would be somewhere beyond happiness and sadness.
You don't see fish agonized by wild mood swings.
Sponges never have a bad day.
The gravel crushed and shifted under their feet. The cars going by made their own hot wind.
"My goal," the Mommy said, "is not to uncomplicate my life."
She said, "My goal is to uncomplicate myself."
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
"We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a world of symbols."
Here it is again, the fine line between science and sadism. Between a crime and a sacrifice. Between murdering your own child and what Abraham almost did to Isaac in the Bible.
I tell everybody, I'm tired of being jerked around. Okay? So let's just not pretend. I don't have fuck for a heart. You people are not going to make me feel anything. You are not going to get to me.
I'm a stupid, callous, scheming bastard. End of story.
I'll prove to her I'm no Jesus Christ. Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit. And I'm dragging Paige down the hallway.
We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.
What I am is a dirty, filthy, helpless sexaholic, and I can't change, and I can't stop, and that's all I'll ever be.
And I'll prove it.
it got so the stupid kid was terrified to do anything except what everybody else did. Anything new or different or original was probably against the law.
Anything risky or exciting would land you in jail.
The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.
The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.
Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
This is all the stuff the Mommy used to tell him.
She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.
Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.
At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, "My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people's lives."
She'd stared straight into the stupid little boy's eyes and said, "My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell."
"We are teaching our children to be helpless."
Running down the aisle and out a fire exit, she'd yelled, "We're so structured and micromanaged, this isn't a world anymore, it's a damn cruise ship."
A fire alarm is never about a fire, not anymore.
All these houses with their self-contained, climate-controlled, smug illusion of security.
"You don't think I'm really a secretly sensitive and Christlike manifestation of perfect love?"
"No way, dude," Denny says. "You're an asshole."
And I say, "Thanks. Just checking."
She must've saved my life, because I don't know who the hell she is.
"You want to know the real reason why I won't fuck you?"
Doing up the buttons of my britches, I told her, "Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead."
And with both hands above her head, making her black hair brain tight again, Paige said, "Maybe sex and affection aren't mutually exclusive."
And I laughed. My hands tying my cravat, I told her, yes. Yes, they are.
I'm not good and kind and caring or any of that happy horseshit.
I'm nothing but a thoughtless, brain-dead, loser dude. That I can live with. This is who I am. Just a puss-pounding, seam-reaming, dog-driving, fucking helpless sex addict asshole, and I can't ever, ever let myself forget that.
I say, "Tell me again I'm an insensitive asshole."
"No," she says. "That would be stabbing. Hitting someone with a knife is stabbing." She says, "Put the knife down and use your open hand."
So I go to toss the knife.
And Gwen says, "Not on the bed."
So I toss the knife on the dresser, and I raise my hand to slap. From behind her, this is really awkward.
And she says, "But not in the face."
So I move my hand a little lower.
And she says, "And do not hit my breasts unless you want to give me lumps."
See also: Cystic mastitis.
She says, "How about you just slap my ass."
And I say, how about if she just shuts up and lets me rape her my way.
And Gwen says, "If that's how you feel, you can just take your little penis and run along home now."
Gwen sighs and then hauls off and punches me in the chest. "You moron!" she says. "I didn't say 'poodle.'"
It's the sexual equivalent of Simon Sez.
She twists back into my grip. Then she walks us over to the towel and says, "Wait." She goes to the dresser and comes back with a pink plastic vibrator.
"Hey," I say, "you're not using that on me."
Gwen shudders and says, "Of course not. This is mine."
And I say, "So what about me?"
And she says, "Sorry, next time bring your own vibrator."
"No," I say, "what about my penis?"
And she says, "What about your penis?"
And I asked, "How does it fit into all this?"
Setting herself on the towel, Gwen shakes her head and says, "Why do I do this?" Why do I always pick the guy who just wants to be nice and conventional? The next thing you'll want to do is marry me." She says, "Just one time, I'd like to have an abusive relationship. Just once!"
She says, "You can masturbate while you rape me. But only on the towel and only if you don't slop any on me."
She spreads the towel out around her ass and pats a little area of terry cloth next to her. "When it's time," she says, "you can put your orgasm right here."
Her hand goes pat, pat, pat.
Uh, okay, I say, now what?
Gwen sighs and sticks the vibrator in my face. "Use me!" she says. "Degrade me, you stupid idiot! Demean me, you jerk-off! Debase me!"
It's not really clear where the switch is, so she has to show me how to turn it on. Then it's buzzing so hard I drop it. Then it's jumping around on the floor, and I have to catch the damn thing.
"No, Dennis, no. I don't want this, Dennis. Don't. No. You can't have me."
And I say, "My name is Victor."
And she says to shut up and let her concentrate.
The second before you trigger, that feeling when your asshole starts to clench, that's when I turn toward the little spot on the towel Gwen said. Feeling stupid and paper-trained, my white soldiers start to toss, and maybe by accident they misjudge the trajectory and toss across her pink bedspread. Her whole big soft puffy pink landscape. Arc after arc sprays out, in hot cramping gobs of all sizes, all over the spread and the pillow shams, and the pink silk bed skirt.
What would Jesus NOT do?
Spunk graffiti.
"Vandalism" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
"Dude," I say. "Why's there a rock in the fridge."
Denny's here in the kitchen, taking warm clean rocks out of the dishwasher and swiping them with a dish towel, and he says, "Because that's my shelf, you said so." He says, "And that's not just a rock, that's granite."
"But why in the fridge?" I go.
And Denny says, "Because the oven is already full."
The oven is full of rocks. The freezer is full. The kitchen cabinets are so full they're coming down off the wall.
The plan was only one rock a day, but Denny's got such an addictive personality. Now he has to cart home a half-dozen rocks every day just to maintain his habit. Every day the dishwasher is running and the kitchen counters are spread with my mom's good bath towels covered with rocks so they can air-dry. Round gray rocks. Square black rocks. Broken brown and streaked yellow rocks. Travertine limestone. Every new batch that Denny brings home, he loads in the dishwasher and throws the clean, dry rocks from the day before into the basement.
At first you can't see the basement floor because of all the rocks. Then the rocks are piling up around the bottom step. Then the basement's filled to halfway up the stairs. Now you open the basement door and the rocks piled inside spill out into the kitchen. Anymore, there is no basement.
"Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass."
Like somehow we're running out of time.
Being buried alive.
At breakfast I say, "Dude, you said your plan was one rock each day."
And Denny says, "That's all I do. Just one."
And I say, "Dude, you are such a junkie." I say, "Don't lie. I know you're doing at least ten rocks a day."
Putting a rock in the bathroom, in the medicine cabinet, Denny says, "Okay, so I'm a little ahead of schedule."
There's rocks hidden in the toilet tank, I tell him.
And I say, "Just because it's rocks doesn't mean this still isn't substance abuse."
Denny with his running nose, with his shaved head, his baby blanket wet in the rain, he waits at each bus stop, coughing. He shifts the bundle from arm to arm. With his face tucked in close, he pulls up the pink satin edge of the blanket. To better protect his baby this looks like, but really to hide the fact that it's volcanic tufa.
So I ask, what's he going to build?
And Denny says, "Give me the ten bucks," Denny says, "and I'll let you help."
"All these stupid rocks," I say, "what's your goal?"
"This isn't about getting something done," Denny says. "It's about the doing, you know, the process."
"But what are you going to do with all these rocks?"
"I don't know, dude," Denny says. "I just want the days of my life to add up to something."
The way every day of your life, the way it can just disappear in front of the television, Denny says he wants a rock to show for each day. Something tangible. Just one thing. A little monument to mark the end of each day. Each day he doesn't spend jacking himself off.
"Tombstone" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
"This way, maybe my life will add up to something," he says, "something that will last."
I say there needs to be a twelve-step program for rock addicts.
Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you'd think.
To Denny I say, this is me talking, I say, "Women don't want equal rights. They have more power being oppressed. They need men to be the vast enemy conspiracy. Their whole identity is based on it."
"I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything," my mom says. She reaches out and touches the spine of a book, saying, "I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.'"
And from the speaker, scratchy and muffled, my mom's voice says, "How did you decide to become a doctor?"
Paige shrugs. "You have to trade your youth for something. . . ."
"You know the old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember their past are even worse off."
In voice-over, Paige says, "Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up."
The monitor cycles to show them going down a corridor, a book open in my mom's lap. Even in black-and-white, you can tell it's her diary. And she's reading it, smiling.
She looks up, twisting to see Paige behind the wheelchair, and says, "In my opinion, those who remember the past are paralyzed by it."
And Paige pushes her along, saying, "How about: 'Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us'?"
When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.
Whether I'd slash her tires or leave a love note, I don't know.
Watching Denny from the window, I am a rock. I am an island.
I call down, does he need any help?
On the sidewalk, Denny looks around, his arms hugging a rock to his chest.
"Up here," I say. "Do you need me to help you?"
Denny heaves the rock into his shopping cart and shrugs. He shakes his head and looks up at me, one hand shading his eyes. "I don't need help," he says, "but you can help if you want."
Nevermind.
What I want is to be needed.
What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
Unless I'm scamming for money, I'd rather people hate me than feel sorry for me.
Sitting in traffic, my heart would beat at regular speed. I'm not alone. Trapped there, I could just be a normal person headed home to a wife, kids, a house. I could pretend that my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster. That I knew how to function.
Denny starts bedding stones into the new mortar.
I say "What are you building?"
Denny shrugs. He twists a square brown rock deeper into the mortar. With the trowel, he chinks mortar between two stones. Assembling his whole generation of babies into something huge.
Doesn't he need to build it on paper, first? I say, don't you need a plan? There's permits and inspections you have to get. You have to pay fees. There's building codes you have to know.
And Denny says, "How come?"
He rolls around rocks with his foot, then finds the best one and fits it in place. You don't need a permit to paint a picture, he says. You don't need to file a plan to write a book. There're books that do more damage than he ever could. You don't need your poem inspected. There's such a thing as freedom of expression.
Denny says, "You don't need a permit to have a baby. So why do you need to buy permission to build a house?"
And I say, "But what if you build a dangerous, ugly house?"
And Denny says, "Well, what if you raise a dangerous, assholey kid?"
With every row, he's having to lift the stones a little higher. With every row, he's having to be stronger.
All my notes for being Fred Hastings are at home. If I drive a Ford or a Dodge, I can't remember. How many kids I'm supposed to have. What color did we finally paint the dining room. I can't rememeber a single detail about how I'm supposed to live my life.
She says, "What I'm most afraid of is, after I'm gone, there will be no one left in the entire world who'll love Victor."
These frigging old people. These human ruins.
Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk, I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.
What would Jesus NOT do?
If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.
If what I just said about loving Paige was a lie or a vow, I don't know. But it was a trick. This is just heaps more chick bullshit. There is no human soul, and I am absolutely for sure seriously not going to fucking cry.
It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.
These men and women sitting behind unlocked doors know a bigger house is not the answer. Neither is a better spouse, more money, tighter skin.
"Anything you can acquire," she says, "is only another thing you'll lose."
The answer is there is no answer.
Talking to the mirror, she says, "The reason I do the circuit is because, when you think about it, there's no good reason to do anything.
There is no point.
"Why do I do anything?" she says. "I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream."
"because the minute you give yourself a good reason, you'll start chipping away at it."
"Nothing was ever good enough," my mom says, "so here at the end of my life, I'm left with nothing . . ."
Denny says, the longer we can keep building, the longer we can keep creating, the more will be possible. The longer we can tolerate being incomplete. Delay gratification.
I'm saying the only thing we don't know is how this will turn out. And what's more is we don't want to know.
My mom, she just looks at me. Her eyes filled with total infinite understanding and compassion, she says, "What the fuck are you getting at?"
I wanted to save you from the kind of life you'd get.
It's jamais vu. The French opposite of déjà vu where everybody is a stranger no matter how well you think you knew them.
She said a lot of other stuff, but none of it counts.
I'm not loved. I'm not a beautiful soul. I'm not a good-natured, giving person. I'm not anybody's savior.
There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.
Because I can't save anybody, not as a doctor, not as a son. And because I can't save anybody, I can't save myself.
Because now I'm an orphan. I'm unemployed and unloved. Because my guts hurt, and I'm dying anyway, from the inside out.
Because you have to plan your getaway.
Because after you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.
And there's no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.
The detectives look up from the diary, and one says, "Don't panic. It's like it says in the yellow notebook. He's just faking it."
They stand and watch me.
My hands around my throat, I can't draw any air. The stupid little boy who cried wolf.
Like that woman with her throat full of chocolate. The woman was not his mommy.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That's where my problem is.
I'm simplifying myself.
Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness.
Because sponges never have a bad day.
Me, the deluded little rube who thought you could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Fuck enough.
We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.
Letting our past decide our future.
Or we can decide for ourselves.
And maybe it's our job to invent something better.
And maybe knowing isn't the point.
Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.