Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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A few days later, I called him from the bathtub, where I'm sitting in a puddle of piss and blood, drinking California champagne and popping Vicodins. On the phone, I tell him, "I passed my stone," and in my other hand is a nine-millimeter ball of tiny oxalic acid crystals, all of them razor-sharp.
The next day, I flew to Spokane and accepted an award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association for Fight Club.
The week after, on the day of my follow-up appointment, someone called to say the doctor was dead. A heart attack in the night, and he died alone, on the floor, next to his bed.
My fiberglass bathtub still has a blood-red ring around it.
The black and red lights. The standing sets. The embalmed cadavers. My doctor, my friend, dead on his bedroom floor. I want to believe they're all just stories now. Our physical bodies, I want to believe that they're all just props. That life, physical life, is an illusion.
And I do believe it, but only for a moment at a time.
It's funny, but the last time I saw my father alive was at my brother-in-law's funeral. He was young, my brother-in-law, young-ish, in his late forties, when he had the stroke. The church gave us a menu and said to choose two hymns, a psalm, and three prayers. It was like ordering a Chinese dinner.
My sister came out of the viewing room, from her private viewing of her husband's body, and she waved our mother inside, saying, "There's been a mistake."
This thing in the casket, drained and dressed and painted, looked nothing like Gerard. My sister said, "That's not him."
This last time I saw my father, he handed me a blue-striped tie and asked how to tie it. I told him to hold still. With his collar turned, I looped the tie around his neck and started tying it. I told him, "Look up."
It was the opposite of the moment when he'd shown me the trick of the rabbit running around the cave and he'd tied my first pair of shoes.
That was the first time in decades my family had gone to mass together.
While I'm writing this, my mother calls to say my grandfather's had a series of strokes. He's unable to swallow, and his lungs are filling with fluid. A friend, maybe my best friend, calls to say he has lung cancer. My grandfather's five hours away. My friend's across town. Me, I have work to do.
The waitress used to say, "What will you be doing when you're old men?"
I used to tell her, "I'll worry about that when I get there."
If I get there.
I'm writing this piece right on deadline.
My brother-in-law used to call this behavior "brinksmanship," the tendency to leave things until the last moment, to imbue them with more drama and stress and appear the hero by racing the clock.
"Where I was born," Georgia O'Keeffe used to say, "and where and how I have lived is unimportant."
She said, "It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of any interest."
I'm sorry if this all seems a little rushed and desperate.
It is.
Now I Remember…
Item: Twenty-seven boxes of Valentine's candy, cost $298.
Item: Fourteen talking robotic birds, cost $112.
As April 15 gets closer and closer, my tax preparer, Mary, keeps calling, asking, "What is this all about?"
Item: Two nights at the Carson Hilton in Carson, California, February 21, 2001.
Mary asks, why was I in Carson? The twenty-first is my birthday. What about this trip makes it a business deduction?
The Valentine's candy, the talking birds, the nights in the Carson Hilton, they make me so glad I keep receipts. Otherwise I'd have no idea. A year later, I have no memory about what these items represent.
That's why, the moment I saw Guy Pearce in Memento, I knew finally someone was telling my story. Here was a movie about the predominant art form of our time:
Note taking.
All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they're always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what's about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there's those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos-this century's equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive.
I'm not surprised that people like Memento. I'm surprised it didn't win every Academy Award and then destroy the entire consumer market for recordable compact discs, blank-page books, Dictaphones, DayTimers, and every other prop we use to keep track of our lives.
My filing system is my fetish. Before I left the Freightliner Corporation, I bought a wall of black steel four-drawer filing cabinets at the office-surplus price of five bucks each. Now, when the receipts pile up, the letters and contracts and whatnot, I close the blinds and put on a compact disc of rain sounds and file, file, file. I use hanging file folders and special color-coded plastic file labels. I am Guy Pearce without the low body fat and good looks. I'm organizing by date and nature of expense. I'm organizing story ideas and odd facts.
This summer, a woman in Palouse, Washington, told me how rapeseed can be grown as a food or a lubricant. There are two different varieties of the seed. Unfortunately, the lubricant type is poisonous. Because of this, every county in the nation must choose whether it will allow farmers to grow either the food or the lubricant variety of rapeseed. A few of the wrong type seeds in a county and people could die. She also told me how the people bankrolling the seeming-grassroots movement to tear down dams are really the American coal industry-not environmentalist fish-huggers and white-water rafters, but coal miners who resent hydroelectric power. She knows, she says, because she designs their websites.