I’m still asleep.
Here, I’m not sure if Tyler is my dream.
Or if I am Tyler’s dream.
I sniff the gasoline on my hands. There’s nobody else around, and I get up and walk out to the parking lot.
A guy in fight club works on cars so he’s parked at the curb in somebody’s black Corniche, and all I can do is look at it, all black and gold, this huge cigarette case ready to drive me somewhere. This mechanic guy who gets out of the car tells me not to worry, he switched the plates with another car in the long-term parking lot at the airport.
Our fight club mechanic says he can start anything. Two wires twist out of the steering column. Touch the wires to each other, you complete the circuit to the starter solenoid, you got a car to joyride.
Either that, or you could hack the key code through a dealership.
Three space monkeys are sitting in the back seat wearing their black shirts and black pants. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.
I ask, so where’s Tyler?
The fight club mechanic guy is holding the Cadillac open chauffeur style for me. The mechanic is tall and all bones with shoulders that remind you of a telephone pole crossbar.
I ask, are we going to see Tyler?
Waiting for me in the middle of the front seat is a birthday cake with candles ready to be lit. I get in. We start driving.
Even a week after fight club, you’ve got no problem driving inside the speed limit. Maybe you’ve been passing black shit, internal injuries, for two days, but you are so cool. Other cars drive around you. Cars tailgate. You get the finger from other drivers. Total strangers hate you. It’s absolutely nothing personal. After fight club, you’re so relaxed, you just cannot care. You don’t even turn the radio on. Maybe your ribs stab along a hairline fracture every time you take a breath. Cars behind you blink their lights. The sun is going down, orange and gold.
The mechanic is there, driving. The birthday cake is on the seat between us.
It’s one scary fuck to see guys like our mechanic at fight club. Skinny guys, they never go limp. They fight until they’re burger. White guys like skeletons dipped in yellow wax with tattoos, black men like dried meat, these guys usually hang together, the way you can picture them at Narcotics Anonymous. They never say, stop. It’s like they’re all energy, shaking so fast they blur around the edges, these guys in recovery from something. As if the only choice they have left is how they’re going to die and they want to die in a fight.
They have to fight each other, these guys.
Nobody else will tag them for a fight, and they can’t tag anybody except another twitching skinny, all bones and rush, since nobody else will register to fight them.
Guys watching don’t even yell when guys like our mechanic go at each other.
All you hear is the fighters breathing through their teeth, hands slapping for a hold, the whistle and impact when fists hammer and hammer on thin hollow ribs, point-blank in a clinch. You see tendons and muscle and veins under the skin of these guys jump. Their skin shines, sweating, corded, and wet under the one light.
Ten, fifteen minutes disappear. Their smell, they sweat and these guys’ smell, it reminds you of fried chicken.
Twenty minutes of fight club will go by. Finally, one guy will go down.
After a fight, two drug recovery guys will hang together for the rest of the night, wasted and smiling from fighting so hard.
Since fight club, this mechanic guy is always hanging around the house on Paper Street. Wants me to hear the song he wrote. Wants me to see the birdhouse he built. The guy showed me a picture of some girl and asked me if she was pretty enough to marry.
Sitting in the front seat of the Corniche, the guy says, “Did you see this cake I made for you? I made this.”
It’s not my birthday. “Some oil was getting by the rings,” the mechanic guy says, “but I changed the oil and the air filter. I checked the valve lash and the timing. It’s supposed to rain, tonight, so I changed the blades.”
I ask, what’s Tyler been planning?
The mechanic opens the ashtray and pushes the cigarette lighter in. He says, “Is this a test? Are you testing us?”
Where’s Tyler?
“The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club,” the mechanic says. “And the last rule about Project Mayhem is you don’t ask questions.”
So what can he tell me?
He says, “What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God.”
Behind us, my job and my office are smaller, smaller, smaller, gone.
I sniff the gasoline on my hands.
The mechanic says, “If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?”
This is all Tyler Durden dogma. Scrawled on bits of paper while I was asleep and given to me to type and photocopy at work. I’ve read it all. Even my boss has probably read it all.
“What you end up doing,” the mechanic says, “is you spend your life searching for a father and God.”
“What you have to consider,” he says, “is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.”
How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate better than His indifference.
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or Redemption.
Which is worse, hell or nothing?
Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.
“Burn the Louvre,” the mechanic says, “and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.”
The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.
“If the prodigal son had never left home,” the mechanic says, “the fatted calf would still be alive.”
“It’s not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky.”
The mechanic merges the black Corniche onto the old bypass highway with no passing lane, and already a line of trucks strings together behind us, going the legal speed limit. The Corniche fills up with the headlights behind us, and there we are, talking, reflected in the inside of the windshield. Driving inside the speed limit. As fast as the law allows.
A law is a law, Tyler would say. Driving too fast was the same as setting a fire was the same as planting a bomb was the same as shooting a man.
A criminal is a criminal is a criminal.
“Last week, we could’ve filled another four fight clubs,” the mechanic says. “Maybe Big Bob can take over running the next chapter if we find a bar.”
So next week, he’ll go through the rules with Big Bob and give him a fight club of his own.
From now on, when a leader starts fight club, when everyone is standing around the light in the center of the basement, waiting, the leader should walk around and around the outside edge of the crowd, in the dark.
I ask, who made up the new rules? Is it Tyler?
The mechanic smiles and says, “You know who makes up the rules.”
The new rule is that nobody should be the center of fight club, he says. Nobody’s the center of fight club except the two men fighting. The leader’s voice will yell, walking slowly around the crowd, out in the darkness. The men in the crowd will stare at other men across the empty center of the room:
