Fight Club

of capers.
    I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.
    The doorman blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the good slap of a pitch into a catcher’s mitt.
    You could go up to the fifteen floor, the doorman said, but nobody could go into the unit. Police orders. The police had been asking, did I have an old girlfriend who’d want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite.
    "It wasn’t worth going up,” the doorman said. "All that’s left is the concrete shell.”
    The police hadn’t ruled out arson. No one had smelled gas. The doorman raises an eyebrow. This guy spent his time flirting with the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. Three years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in.
    The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a big puddle of gasoline. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. People who want out from under.
    I asked to use the lobby phone.
    "A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things,” the doorman said.
    I called Tyler.
    The phone rang in Tyler’s rented house on Paper Street.
    Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
    And the phone rang.
    The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, "A lot of young people don’t know what they really want.”
    Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
    And the phone rang.
    "Young people, they think they want the whole world.”
    Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
    Deliver me from clever art.
    And the phone rang and Tyler answered.
    "If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don’t.”
    May I never be complete.
    May I never be content.
    May I never be perfect.
    Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
    Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.
    The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me. It was still raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared through the windshield.
    Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I would have to do him a favor.
    The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear.
    There, drunk in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked Tyler what he wanted me to do.
    Tyler said, "I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

6
    TWO SCREENS INTO my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn’t know the material, but he won’t let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it’s been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I’m running the laptop projector so I’m off to one side of the room, in the dark.
    More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood climbing the cracks between my teeth.
    You can swallow about a pint of blood before you’re sick.
    Fight club is tomorrow, and I’m not going to miss fight club.
    Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip. Walter with his signet ring shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, "I’d hate to see what happened to the other guy.”
    The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.
    I tell Walter I fell.
    I did this to myself.
    Before the presentation, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the script each slide cues and when I wanted to run the video segment, my boss says, "What do you get yourself into every weekend?”
    I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say. It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer’s showroom in