Fight Club

the line was dead.
    Tyler and Marla, they were up almost all night in the room next to mine. When Tyler woke up, Marla had disappeared back to the Regent Hotel.
    I tell Tyler, Marla Singer doesn’t need a lover, she needs a case worker.
    Tyler says, "Don’t call this love .”
    Long story short, now Marla’s out to ruin another part of my life. Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.
    Fine.
    Neat, I say.
    Tyler asks, is this a problem for me?
    I am Joe’s Clenching Bowels.
    No, I say, it’s fine.
    Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.
    Just great, I say. Really.

8
    MY BOSS SENDS me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed.
    The hole punched through my cheek doesn’t ever heal. I’m going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I’d become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I’m doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone’s hostile little FACE.
    Worker bees can leave
    Even drones can fly away
    The queen is their slave
    You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other human butt wipe.
    Take it, human butt wipe.
    Do it, butt wipe.
    Choke it down. Keep it down, baby.
    Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world.
    Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I’m saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
    Sigh.
    Look. Outside the window. A bird.
    My boss asked if the blood was my blood.
    The bird flies downwind. I’m writing a little haiku in my head.
    Without just one nest
    A bird can call the world home
    Life is your career
    I’m counting on my fingers: five, seven, five.
    The blood, is it mine?
    Yeah, I say. Some of it.
    This is a wrong answer.

    Like this is a big deal. I have two pair of black trousers. Six white shirts. Six pair of underwear. The bare minimum. I go to fight club. These things happen.
    "Go home,” my boss says. "Get changed.”

    I’m starting to wonder if Tyler and Marla are the same person. Except for their humping, every night in Marla’s room.
    Doing it.
    Doing it.
    Doing it.
    Tyler and Marla are never in the same room. I never see them together.
    Still, you never see me and Zsa Zsa Gabor together, and this doesn’t mean we’re the same person. Tyler just doesn’t come out when Marla’s around.
    So I can wash the pants, Tyler has to show me how to make soap. Tyler’s upstairs, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of cloves and burnt hair. Marla’s at the kitchen table, burning the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette and calling herself human butt wipe.
    "I embrace my own festering diseased corruption,” Marla tells the cherry on the end of her cigarette. Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. "Burn, witch, burn.”
    Tyler’s upstairs in my bedroom, looking at his teeth in my mirror, and says he got me a job as a banquet waiter, part time.
    "At the Pressman Hotel, if you can work in the evening,” Tyler says. "The job will stoke your class hatred.”
    Yeah, I say, whatever.
    "They make you wear a black bow tie,” Tyler says. "All you need to work there is a white shirt and black trousers.”
    Soap, Tyler. I say, we need soap. We need to make some soap. I need to wash my pants.
    I hold Tyler’s feet while he does two hundred sit-ups.
    "To make soap, first we have to render fat.” Tyler is full of useful information.
    Except for their humping, Marla and Tyler are never in the same room. If Tyler’s around, Marla ignores him. This is familiar ground. This is exactly how my parents were invisible to each other. Then my father went off to start another franchise.
    My father always said, "Get married before the sex gets boring, or you’ll never get married.”
    My mother said, "Never buy anything with a nylon zipper.”
    My parents never said anything you’d want to embroider on a cushion.
    Tyler does one hundred ninety-eight sit-ups. One