Short Stories
Monkey Think, Monkey Do
This summer a young man pulled aside in a bookstore and said he loved how in
Fight Club
I wrote about waiters tainting food. He asked me to sign a book andsaid he worked in a five-star restaurant where they monkey with celebrities’food all the time.“Margaret Thatcher,” he said, “has eaten my sperm.” He held up onehand, fingers spread, and said, “At least five times.”Writing that book, I knew a movie projectionist who collected singleframes from porno movies and made them into slides. When I talked to peopleabout cutting these frames into G-rated family movies, one friend said, “Don’t.People will read that, and they’ll start doing it.”Later, when they were shooting the
Fight Club
movie, some Hollywoodbig names told me the book hit home because they, themselves, had splicedporno into movies as angry teenage projectionists. People told me aboutblowing their noses into hamburgers. They told me about changing the bottlesof hair dye from box to box in the drug store, blonde into black et cetera, andcoming back to see angry wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager.This was the decade of “transgressional novels,” starting early with
AmericanPsycho
and continuing with
Trainspotting
and
Fight Club
. These were novelsabout bored bad boys who’d try anything to feel alive. Everything people toldme, I could sell.On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in theemergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight was a struggle not to popthat door open. The air sucked out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, thescreaming chaos and “Mayday, Mayday!” emergency landing, it was all so clear.The door, so begging to be opened.The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, defines dread as theknowledge of what you must do to prove you’re free, even if it will destroyyou. His example is Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until Godshows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, “Don’t eat this.” Now, Adam is nolonger free. There is one rule he can break, he
must
break to prove hisfreedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we areforbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable.Monkey think, monkey do.According to Kierkegaard, the person who allows the law to control hislife, who says the possible isn’t possible just because it’s illegal, is leading theinauthentic life.In Portland, Oregon, where I live, someone is filling tennis balls withhundreds of match heads and taping them shut. They leave the balls on thestreet for anyone to find, and any kick or throw will make them explode. So
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