The man at the charity dinner was loud and knew how to work a story. Such people are worth studying. Even if the story doesn’t pan out, you can still pick up tricks in pacing and voice. I listened.
In response to the chatty seatmate on the airplane he’d finished the last of his wine. He’d explained that he was an oncologist who specialized in rare cancers. What she’d just described to him—that burning sensation when she drank alcohol—was what cancer doctors call “a canary indicator.” It was an early and unmistakable sign that she’d developed Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He’d advised her to call her lawyer as soon as the plane landed. Her lawyer, not her doctor, because if the symptoms had begun so long ago she had only a few weeks left to live. She needed to write her will and arrange for her funeral.
He told us that the woman was a lot less chatty after that. He gave her his card, and a day later her primary care physician called him to say, “You’re right. She’ll be dead soon. But you could’ve been a little less of a prick in the way you told her…”
That’s how fast a piece of information can change your perception forever. For the rest of your life, your first sip of alcohol will be about as pleasant as having a biopsy taken. But your second sip—it will taste better than any second sip has ever tasted. That second sip will taste like good health.
The following books will have a similar effect. They will spoil some default part of your thinking, but they will give you a greater appreciation of something you’ve heretofore taken for granted.
Death in Yellowstone by Lee Whittlesey
Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge
From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play by Victor Turner
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” by Linda Williams
MFA vs. NYC edited by Chad Harbach
Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers by Harry Bruce
The Gift by Lewis Hyde
The Program Era by Mark McGurl
The Rites of Passage by Arnold van Gennep
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure by Victor Turner
The Sovereign Outsider: 19th Century American Literature, (Non-) Discursive Formation and Postanarchist Politics by Mathias Hagen König
Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde
Another Postcard
from the Tour
Every so often I ask myself, “Is this where you stop?” I avoid reading reviews because, good or bad, they mess with my head. Triggering mania or depression. But every so often someone brings one to me, laying the best or worst at my feet. The day Salon posted its response to my book Diary, I asked myself, “Is this where you stop?”
Teaching is always an option. God bless my parents, but when I quit my last real job, at the Freightliner Corporation, where I mostly loved my work and my co-workers for thirteen years, my mother and father insisted I take a withdrawal from the union instead of quitting full out. So I’m still a member in good standing with the autoworkers’ union, with the laminated card to prove it. Writing is a blast, a career beyond anything I’d ever imagined as a kid. But shit happens.
Bad shit, beyond anything even a writer can imagine.
My publisher told me to never tell the story about what went on in San Diego. They promised to provide bodyguards after it happened, and for a while I’d be flanked by security guys who’d whisk me out of stores and into a waiting car the moment a book event was over.
And over the past decade-plus I’ve tried to unpack the San Diego mess. To tweeze out my responsibility in the disaster.
Maybe I showed too much belly. San Diego, I say here, but really it was in El Cajon. But who knows El Cajon? The bookstore in question had hosted Dr. Laura Schlessinger shortly before me, back when Dr. Laura was still a thing. The manager kept telling me, “You’ve got more people than Dr. Laura.” Who’d gotten eight hundred people. In a big store in a shopping center of big-box stores, still daylight, I had to stand in the center of everyone and turn a little to see them all.
Not a couple of words into my blather, I could see people at the edge of the crowd. Certain persons, spaced at more or less equal distance apart, held up large sheets of poster board. The boards were fluorescent hot pink, pale blue, pale green. The people held them in both hands, overhead. They’d written something on these signs, and they kept turning in place, slowly, displaying the messages. Each time I risked looking, a particular sign was turned the wrong way. Was I reading? Answering questions? I forget, but I was giving people these heavy gilded crowns as reward for asking things. Different colors of glass jewels ran around the outside of the crowns, and white satin padded the inside. This was a couple dozen big crowns I’d shipped to the store beforehand. I’d autographed the satin. I thought they looked snazzy.
Between doing something and saying something, I caught sight of a neon poster board sign. It read: DID YOU KNOW THAT CHUCK PALAHNIUK RAPED AND KILLED A NINE-YEAR-OLD BLACK GIRL IN 1987?
This wasn’t just one sign. All the signs held aloft, turning slowly, stationed throughout the bookstore…they all made that claim.
A tricky situation, to say the least. I felt too shocked to take offense. It occurred as some prank. After years watching the Cacophony Society prank whole cities. Like doctoring an Apple billboard that showed a huge close-up of Amelia Earhart so that it read, “Think Doomed.” Or one Easter morning staging a passion play and crucifying a gigantic stuffed pink Easter bunny on a telephone pole immediately outside the front doors of a packed Baptist church. I knew that sometimes pranks can go too far and fall flat, and I didn’t want to
