But then there’s this one kid who wrote me back, saying, ‘Dude, we used to make necklaces like this in camp, when I was seven!’ That made me feel ‘Oh, this is why people made fun of me in high school.’ Ok. Going along, he says, “It gets me really high to know that during any week, 75 to 100 packages are arriving on all these doorsteps. I want them to be finding shred in their carpet for months to come.” Duck with his flat side against the box wall facing you. “No! Not those! My God! Are you colorblind? Ok, now, put Mr. “Now, get two five-foot-long complementary-colored ribbons,” Chuck says. He and his helper are unspooling ribbon and gathering clumps of cavity-filling Mylar confetti – “shred,” Chuck calls it. What he does know is that, historically, bad reviews have led to best-seller-size sales, an appropriate perversity in Chuckland, and all he can do now is pack boxes. They call him “the new generation’s Kurt Vonnegut” and show up en masse at his readings, to listen to him read stories, tell stories and answer questions, because he puts on quite some show. It’s the stuff that readers who have never read books before – blue-collar types, goths, anarchists, the chronically unemployed, the snaggletoothed and the highly tattooed - love to read.
It’s the stuff that Chuck has got to get down on paper before it disappears. It’s the stuff that circulates in Chuck’s brain. Taken as one, what they’re about is testosterone, balls-out fist-fighting, rage, mass suicide, necrophilia, estrogen therapy, chaos, sex addiction, disfigured fashion models, God, fetal brain-cell harvesting, telekinesis, pop-culture-hating anti-consumerism and, finally, the redemptive power of community.
The most famous of his books is Fight Club, which was made into a movie in 1999, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, but he’s also written eight others, with titles like Survivor, Lullaby, Choke and Invisible Monsters. Not far from the packing area is the desk where Chuck works on his books when he’s not bundling all that weird stuff into boxes, to send to his legion of fan-mail-writing fans and to bookstores nationwide, as props for his readings. Others are getting hundreds of teriyaki-steak-scented room fresheners, and lots of T-bone-steak-shaped bathmats, and bunches of very lifelike plastic limbs, hacked off at the joints bloodily – arms, legs, feet, hands. Into some of the boxes go Whitman’s Samplers, chocolate-covered cherries, necklaces strung by him with beads that spell out the names of the addressees, small rubber ducks, birthday candles, novelty erasers and fake dog poo. CHUCK PALAHNIUK IS PACKING BOXES, large boxes and small boxes.
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