Before anyone knew any better, a lot of gay guys had wanted children, and now the children are sick and the mothers are dying and the fathers are dead, and sitting in the hospital vomit smell of piss and vinegar while a nurse asks each mother how long she's been sick and how much weight she's lost and if her child has any living parent or guardian, Marla decides, no.
If she was going to die, Marla didn't want to know about it.
Marla walked around the corner from the clinic to City Laundry and stole all the jeans out of the dryers, then walked to a dealer who gave her fifteen bucks a pair. Then Marla bought herself some really good pantyhose, the kind that don't run.
"Even the good kind that don't run," Marla says, "they snag."
Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart.
Marla started going to the support groups since it was easier to be around other human butt wipe. Everyone has something wrong. And for a while, her heart just sort of flatlined.
Marla started a job doing prepaid funeral plans for a mortuary where sometimes great fat men, but usually fat women, would come out of the mortuary showroom carrying a crematory urn the size of an egg cup, and Marla would sit there at her desk in the foyer with her dark hair tied down and her snagged pantyhose and breast lump and doom, and say, "Madam, don't flatter yourself. We couldn't get even your burned-up head into that tiny thing. Go back and get an urn the size of a bowling ball."
Marla's heart looked the way my face was. The crap and the trash of the world. Post-consumer human butt wipe that no one would ever go to the trouble to recycle.
Between the support groups and the clinic, Marla told me, she had met a lot of people who were dead. These people were dead and on the other side, and at night they called on the telephone. Marla would go to bars and hear the bartender calling her name, and when she took the call the line was dead.
At the time, she thought this was hitting bottom.
"When you're twenty-four," Marla says, "you have no idea how far you can really fall, but I was a fast learner."
The first time Marla filled a crematory urn, she didn't wear a face mask, and later she blew her nose and there in the tissue was a black mess of Mr. Whoever.
In the house on Paper Street, if the phone rang only once and you picked it up and the line was dead, you knew it was someone trying to reach Marla. This happened more than you might think.
In the house on Paper Street, a police detective stated calling about my condominium explosion, and Tyler stood with his chest against my shoulder, whispering into my ear while I held the phone to the other ear, and the detective asked if I knew anyone who could make homemade dynamite.
"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution," Tyler whispered, "toward tragedy and dissolution."
I told the detective that it was the refrigerator that blew up my condo.
"I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions,' Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit."
The dynamite, the detective said, there were impurities, a residue of ammonium oxalate and potassium perchloride that might mean the bomb was homemade, and the dead bolt on the front door was shattered.
I said I was in Washington, D.C., that night.
The detective on the phone explained how someone had sprayed a canister of Freon into the dead-bolt lock and then tapped the lock with a cold chisel to shatter the cylinder. This is the way criminals are stealing bicycles.
"The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said, "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."
The detective said whoever set the homemade dynamite could've turned on the gas and blown out the pilot lights on the stove days before the explosion took place. The gas was just the trigger. It would take days for the gas to fill the condo before it reached the compressor at the base of the refrigerator and the compressor's electric motor set off the explosion.
"Tell him," Tyler whispered. "Yes, you did it. You blew it all up. That's what he wants to hear."
I tell the detective, no, I did not leave the gas on and then leave town. I loved my life. I loved that condo. I loved every stick of furniture
That was my whole life. Everything, the lamps, the chairs, the rugs were me. The dishes in the cabinets were me. The plants were me. The television was me. It was me that blew up. Couldn't he see that?
The detective said not to leave town.
15
MISTER HIS HONOR, mister chapter president of the local chapter of the national united projectionist and independent theater operators union just sat.
Under and behind and inside everything the man took for granted, something horrible had been growing.
Nothing is static.
Everything is falling apart.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
For three years Tyler had been doing film buildup and breakdown for a chain of movie houses. A movie travels in six or seven small reels packed in a metal case. Tyler's job was to splice the small reels together into single fivefoot reels that self-threading and rewinding projectors could handle. After three years, seven theaters, at least three screens per theater, new shows every week, Tyler had handled hundreds of prints.
Too bad, but with more self-threading and rewinding projectors, the union didn't need Tyler anymore. Mister chapter president had to call Tyler in for a little sit-down.
The work was boring and the pay was crap, so the president of the united union of united projection operators independent and united theaters united said it was doing Tyler Durden a chapter favor by giving Tyler the diplomatic shaft.
Don't think of this as rejection. Think of it as downsizing.
Right up the butt mister chapter president himself says, "We appreciate your contribution to our success."
Oh, that wasn't a problem, Tyler said, and grinned. As long as the union kept sending a paycheck, he'd keep his mouth shut.
Tyler said, "Think of this as early retirement, with pension."
Tyler had handled hundreds of prints.
Movies had gone back to the distributor. Movies had gone back out in re-release. Comedy. Drama. Musicals. Romance. Action adventure.
Spliced with Tyler's single-frame flashes of pornography.
Sodomy. Fellatio. Cunnilingus. Bondage.
Tyler had nothing to lose.
Tyler was the pawn of the world, everybody's trash.
This is what Tyler rehearsed me to tell the manager of the Pressman Hotel, too.
At Tyler's other job, at the Pressman Hotel, Tyler said he was nobody. Nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual. This is what Tyler told me to say in the hotel manager's office with security guards sitting outside the door.
Tyler and I stayed up late and traded stories after everything was over.
Right after he'd gone to the projectionist union, Tyler had me go and confront the manager of the Pressman Hotel.
Tyler and I were looking more and more like identical twins. Both of us had punched-out cheekbones, and our skin had lost its memory, and forgot where to slide back to after we were hit.
My bruises were from fight club, and Tyler's face was punched out of shape by the president of the projectionist union. After Tyler crawled out of the union offices, I went to see the manager of the Pressman Hotel.
I sat there, in the office of the manager of the Pressman Hotel.
I am Joe's Smirking Revenge.
The first thing the hotel manager said was I had three minutes. In the first thirty seconds, I told how I'd been peeing into soup, farting on creme brulees, sneezing on braised endive, and now I wanted the hotel to send me a check every week equivalent to my average week's pay plus tips. In return, I wouldn't come to work anymore, and I wouldn't go to the newspapers or the public health people with a confused, tearful confession.
The headlines:
Troubled Waiter Admits Tainting Food.
Sure, I said, I might go to prison. They could hang me and yank my nuts off and drag me through the streets and flay my skin and burn me with lye, but the Pressman Hotel would always be known as the hotel where the richest people in the world ate pee.
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.
And I used to be such a nice person.
At the projectionist union office, Tyler had laughed after the union president punched him. The one punch knocked Tyler out of his chair, and Tyler sat against the wall, laughing.
"Go ahead, you can't kill me," Tyler was laughing. "You stupid fuck. Beat the crap out of me, but you can't kill me."
You have too much to lose.
I have nothing.
You have everything.
Go ahead, right in the gut. Take another shot at my face. Cave in my teeth, but keep those paychecks coming. Crack my ribs, but if you miss one week's pay, I go public, and you and your little union go down under lawsuits from every theater owner and film distributor and mommy whose kid maybe saw a hard-on in Bambi.
"I am trash," Tyler said. "I am trash and shit and crazy to you and this whole fucking world," Tyler said to the union president. "You don't care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility."
Sitting in the office at the Pressman Hotel, my fight club lips were still split into about ten segments. The butthole in my cheek looking at the manager of the Pressman Hotel, it was all pretty convincing.
Basically, I said the same stuff Tyler said.
After the union president had slugged Tyler to the floor, after mister president saw Tyler wasn't fighting back, his honor with his big Cadillac body bigger and stronger than he would ever really need, his honor hauled his wingtip back and kicked Tyler in the ribs and Tyler laughed. His honor shot the wingtip into Tyler's kidneys after Tyler curled into a ball, but Tyler was still laughing.
"Get it out," Tyler said. "Trust me. You'll feel a lot better. You'll feel great."
In the office of the Pressman Hotel, I asked the hotel manager if I could use his phone, and I dialed the number for the city desk at the newspaper. With the hotel manager watching, I said:
Hello, I said, I've committed a terrible crime against humanity as part of a political protest. My protest is over the exploitation of workers in the service industry.