No, I’ve never raped or murdered anyone, black or white, just to settle that question. So I did a callout to the sign holders and asked them to stow the signs, and they did. The event moved on, and someone…somebody asked me what I’d never bring myself to depict in fiction.
My response has always been the same. I’d never depict the senseless torture and killing of an animal. Even in make-believe. The scene in David Foster Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair where the characters douse the little puppy with lighter fluid and set it on fire and laugh as it runs around a basement screaming until it dies…that had done a number on me. Consensual violence I can get behind, hence Fight Club with all of its structure and rules. But the moment that novel’s characters veered into attacking someone—the mayor’s special envoy on recycling—and the moment we see Marla’s black eye, that’s when I stopped liking the story and could happily bring it to an end.
So I gave my speech about consent and about animals being innocent victims of everything. I showed belly. I showed my belly to the crowd. Then I showed too much belly by reciting a John Irving poem about a beloved dog. Old and dying, the dog was so obedient that as it died and began to lose control of its bowels it painfully dragged its dying self onto a spread-out patch of newspapers so it wouldn’t soil the carpet. And there it died.
By then I was on my back, showing full belly in public. That poem kills me, as does Amy Hempel’s essay “A Full Service Shelter,” written about the volunteer work she does in Manhattan animal shelters. There she describes, as a cost-cutting measure, how each doomed dog is given its lethal injection of phenobarbital in full sight of the heap of dead dogs. The dying dog is dragged by a leash and forced to climb this soft, still-warm heap of dead animals, so that it will die on the pinnacle, atop the previous dog that’s barely died, and all of this brutality is shelter policy because it prevents the risk of back injury to any employee who’d otherwise be forced to lift and carry any fully dead animal.
Fuck me. I was stupid. I showed full belly, something no one onstage is supposed to do. Instead of making the emotion occur in my audience I got myself choked up. With all this talk about the suffering of poor beasts, I’d gotten misty-eyed and tight throated. A self-indulgent, cardinal no-no for the writer of Fight Club.
My point is that I can own what happened. I called down the bad mojo on myself.
The blah-blah presentation ended, and the book signing began. With such a big turnout the store’s staff had to run the registers. I sat alone in a back corner, and a line of patient readers queued up to say hello. Among them was the group who’d brought the rape/murder signs. I asked about their motive, and they seemed sheepishly to say they thought it would be funny in a Project Mayhem way. A prank. No point in shaming them. Shit like this happens when you’re pushing the envelope. I’ve pulled some boneheaded moments, too, told some cheap-shot jokes and been booed by vast crowds. We shook hands.
One among them gave me a book to sign. A shaggy blond beach type, maybe he was a surfer? He looked like a surfer. A surfer or a skater, he stepped forward like their leader and gave me a novel by Don DeLillo.
The book’s cover was defaced with scribbles and hash marks in thick black felt-tipped pen, but it was still a DeLillo book. People bring me all kinds of books to sign. Usually Bibles. Usually they ask me to write “I suck Satan’s cock” in their family Bible and to sign it. More than a handful of these Bibles looked to be ancient, bound in leather and gilded, with Dore illustrations and faded family genealogies, so elegant they look positively Gutenberg. And I always give a polite no. A handshake follows. There’s no game in embarrassing anyone.
As usual, I said I didn’t sign books by other authors.
And the blond said, “This is one of your books.”
This is while hundreds of people wait in a line that snakes up and down the aisles of bookshelves.
I point out that Don DeLillo’s name is on the cover.
The guy insists I sign. I don’t sign. The surfer and his crew of pranksters depart. No big deal.
It can occur as a tragedy, to meet a writer. Physical proof of the author means you’ll never meet the characters you’ve come to accept as friends or heroes. I’ve experienced this so many times that I avoid meeting people whose work I enjoy. And understanding this disappointment, I try to control the damage.
Me, the faggoty, animal-loving, poetry-spouting, choked-up writer who turned out not to be the living embodiment of Tyler Durden, I got back to meeting people and signing books. People step up to the table with such excitement, it’s impossible not to try and match it smile for smile. Hug for hug. Some readers have hyped themselves almost to tears. The quiet people have to be coaxed to say hello. Pictures have to be posed for. I ask questions and listen for key words I can mimic in funny inscriptions. A person is meeting me for the first time, and I try to meet each as if he or she is the only person I’m meeting that evening. This leaves no attention for anything beyond the little bubble of me and the person to meet next.
For years my longest signing had been at Barbara’s Bookstore in Oak Park, Illinois. Eight hours. Torture at the time. Now eight hours would be light duty. My book signings regularly stretch to twelve and fourteen hours. David Sedaris signs books until after four in the morning. Stephen King will sign only three
