Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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I joked that I wanted to leave my job as a technical writer who worked on diesel trucks all day.
Now those pages are a movie starring Pitt and Norton and Bonham Carter, directed by David Fincher. Now I'm unemployed.
Twentieth Century Fox let me bring some friends down to the movie shoot, and every morning we ate at the same café in Santa Monica. Every breakfast, we got the same waiter, Charlie, with his movie-star looks and thick hair, until the last morning we were in town. That morning, Charlie walked out of the kitchen with his head shaved. Charlie was in the movie.
My friends who'd been anarchist waiters with shaved heads were now being served eggs by a real waiter who was an actor who was playing a fake anarchist waiter with a shaved head.
It's that same feeling when you get between two mirrors in the barber shop and you can see your reflection of your reflection of your reflection going off into infinity…
Now waiters are refusing my money. Editors are grousing. Guys take me aside at bookstore events and beg to know where the local club meets. Women ask, quiet and serious, "Is there a club like this for women?"
A late-night fight club where you can tag some stranger in the crowd and then slug it out until one of you drops…?
These young women say, "Yeah, I really, really need to go to something like that."
A German friend of mine, Carston, learned to speak English in only funny outdated clichés. For him, every party was an "all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza."
Now Carston's clumsy pidgin words are coming out of Brad Pitt's mouth, forty feet high, in front of millions of people. My friend Jeff's trashed ghetto kitchen is re-created in a Hollywood soundstage. The night I went to save my friend Kevin from a Xanax overdose is now Brad rushing to save Helena.
Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.
The story is no longer my story. It's David Fincher's. The set for Edward Norton's yuppie condo is a re-creation of an apartment from David's past. Edward wrote and rewrote his own lines. Brad chipped his teeth and shaved his head. My boss thinks the story is about how he struggles to please his demanding boss. My father thought the story was about his absent father, my grandfather, who killed his wife and himself with a shotgun.
My father was four in 1943 when he hid under a bed as his parents fought and his twelve brothers and sisters ran into the woods. Then his mother was dead, and his father stomped around the house looking for him, calling for him, still carrying the shotgun.
My father remembers the boots stomping past the bed and the barrel of the shotgun trailing along near the floor. Then he remembers pouring buckets of sawdust on the bodies, to protect them from wasps and flies.
The book, and now the movie, is a product of all these people. And with everything added to it, the fight club story becomes stronger, cleaner, not just the record of one life, but of a generation. Not just of a generation, but of men.
The book is the product of Nora Ephron and Thom Jones and Mark Richard and Joan Didion, Amy Hempel and Bret Ellis and Denis Johnson because those are the people I read.
And now most of my old friends, Jeff and Carston and Alice are moved away, gone, married, dead, graduated, back in school, raising children. This summer, someone murdered my father in the mountains of Idaho and burned his body down to a few pounds of bone. The police say they have no real suspects. He was fifty-nine.
The news came on a Friday morning, through my publicist, who'd been called by the Latah County Sheriff's Office, who'd found me through my publisher on the Internet. The poor publicist, Holly Watson, called me and said, "This might be some kind of sick joke, but you need to call a detective in Moscow, Idaho."
Now here I sit with a table full of food, and you'd think a free bento and free fish would taste great, but that's not always the case.
I still wander at night.
All that's left is a book, and now a movie, a funny, exciting movie. A wild, excellent movie. What for other people will be a whiplash carnival ride, for my friends and me, is a nostalgic scrapbook. A reminder. Amazing reassuring proof that our anger, our disappointment, our striving and resentment unite us with each other, and now with the world.
What's left is proof we can create reality.
Frieda, the woman who shaved Brad's head, promised me the hair for my Christmas cards, but then she forgot, so I trimmed a friend's golden retriever. Another woman, a friend of my father, calls me, frantic. She's sure the white supremacists killed him, and she wants to "go under deep cover" into their world around Hayden Lake and Butler Lake, in Idaho. She wants me to go along and "act as backup." To "cover her."
So my adventures continue. I will go into the Idaho panhandle. Or I will sit at home like the police want, take Zoloft and wait for them to call.
Or, I don't know.
My father was a sweepstakes junkie, and every week small prizes still arrive in the mail. Wristwatches, coffee mugs, golf towels, calendars, never the big prizes, the cars or boats, these are the little stuff. Another friend, Jennifer, recently lost her father to cancer, and she gets the same kind of little prizes from contests he entered her in months ago. Necklaces, soup mix, taco sauce, and every time one arrives, videogames, toothbrushes, her heart breaks.
Consolation prizes.
A few nights before my father died, he and I talked long distance for three hours about a tree house he'd built my brother and me. We talked about a batch of chickens I'm raising, how to build them a coop, and if the laying box for each hen should have a wire-mesh floor.
And he said no, a chicken would not shit in its nest.
We talked about the weather, how cold it was at night. He said how in the woods where he lived, the wild turkeys had just hatched their chicks, and he told me how each tom turkey would open its wings at dusk and gather in all its young. Because they were too large for the hen to protect. To keep them warm.