Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Palahniuk Charles Michael «Chuck»

Some people, it gives them a big hickey around their mouth. This is just like when you were a kid and you pressed a plastic glass around your mouth and chin and sucked all the air out until you had a huge dark bruise that looked like the five-o'clock shadow of Fred Flintstone or Homer Simpson.

You should not use the Lip Enhancer if you're a diabetic or have any blood disorder.

According to the catalogue, your new big full pouty lips will last about six hours.

This is how Cinderella must've felt.

There are similar suction systems to give you bigger, more perky nipples.

In the near future, you can imagine, every big evening will begin hours earlier with you getting sucked on by different appliances, each of them making some part of you bigger for a few hours. The whole evening would then be a race to get naked and accomplish some lovin' before your parts snapped back to their original size.

Yes, there's even a system for enlarging your testicles.

I was visitor number 921 to the Lip Enhancer website.

I was visitor number 500,000 to any of the penis enlargement sites.

Your first week with the Lip Enhancer, you have to condition your lips twice a day. This involves short, gentle sessions of getting your lips sucked. This is less exciting than it sounds.

Now, I've kissed thin lips, and I've kissed thick lips. Me, I have what you'd call combination lips, a large lower lip and pretty much no upper lip. Some cultures scar their faces with knives. Some flatten the heads of their babies with special cradle boards. Some distend their necks with wire coils. All these National Geographic images went through my mind as I sat in my car, my head tilted back at the recommended forty-five-degree angle, the Lip Enhancer tight around my mouth and my lips sucked into the tube. Beauty is a construct of the culture. A mutually agreed upon standard. Nobody used to look at George Washington, with his wooden teeth, in his powdered wig, and say, Fashion Victim.

After two minutes-the recommended maximum treatment time-I did not look like Brad. Trying to talk, I pronounced almost all my consonants as B's, the same vaguely racist way the character with the huge lips used to talk in the old Fat Albert cartoons on Saturday morning.

"Hey'b, Fab Alberb," I said to the rearview mirror. "How'b boub dees'b libs?"

My lips felt raw and swollen, as if I'd eaten barrels of salty popcorn.

I could see why none of the lovely models in the Lip Enhancer brochures ever smiled.

I hurried out of the car, still in the window of time before my lips would shrink back to nothing. Back to just the regular, ordinary me. I went to a writers' workshop, and my friend Tom asked, "Didn't you use to have a mustache?"

I tried licking them à la Brad on Oprah.

My friend Erin leaned close, squinted hard, and asked, "Have you had dental work done today?"

I remembered Brad in the dentist's chair, sitting through the whole pain of getting his caps switched, to glam down his look with new broken teeth. How one day he had to have good teeth, and the next day, breaks and chips. How every switch meant more time under the dentist. More pain.

It's funny, but you see yourself in a certain way, and any change is hard to understand. It's hard to say if I looked better or worse. To me it was creepy, like those ads in old comic books where you could send away for "nigger lips" and "Jew noses." A caricature of something. In this case, a caricature of beauty.

According to the package enclosures, you can wash the Lip Enhancer with soap and water. According to the website, it makes a great gift. So now it's washed and wrapped, and Ina's birthday is October 16.

Somewhere in the mail, in the backs of trucks or the bellies of airplanes, various other suction systems are still headed my way. Ten of thousands are headed for other people. Me, these people, we believe. Something will save us. Deliver us. Make us happy. And, sure, you could say this kind of special effect is okay for an actor. An actor is playing a role. Well, I would say, who isn't?

So this wasn't really about Brad.

It's about everybody.

Monkey Think, Monkey Do

This summer a young man pulled me aside in a bookstore and said he loved how in Fight Club I wrote about waiters tainting food. He asked me to sign a book and said he worked in a five-star restaurant where they monkey with celebrities' food all the time.

"Margaret Thatcher," he said, "has eaten my sperm." He held up one hand, fingers spread, and said, "At least five times."

Writing that book, I knew a movie projectionist who collected single frames from porno movies and made them into slides. When I talked to people about cutting these frames into G-rated family movies, one friend said, "Don't. People will read that, and they'll start doing it…"

Later, when they were shooting the Fight Club movie, some Hollywood big names told me the book hit home because they, themselves, had spliced porno into movies as angry teenage projectionists. People told me about blowing their noses into hamburgers at fast-food cooking jobs. They told me about changing the bottles of hair dye from box to box in the drugstore, blond to black, red to brown, and coming back to see angry, wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager. This was the decade of "transgressive novels," starting early with American Psycho and continuing with Trainspotting and Fight Club. These were novels about bored bad boys who'd try anything to feel alive. Everything people told me, I could roll it into a book and sell.

On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in the emergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight would be a struggle not to pop open that door. The air sucking out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, the screaming chaos and "Mayday! Mayday!" emergency landing, it was all so clear. That door, so begging to be opened.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard defines dread as the knowledge of what you must do to prove you're free, even if it will destroy you. His example is Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until God shows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, "Don't eat this." Now Adam is no longer free. There is one rule he can break, he must break, to prove his freedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we are forbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable.