Fight Club

lock the car doors.
    The headlights on the boulevard go by behind the price painted on the Impala-big wraparound Cinemascope windshield. See the U.S.A. The price is ninety-eight dollars. From the inside, this looks like eighty-nine cents. Zero, zero, decimal point, eight, nine. America is asking you to call.
    Most of the cars here are about a hundred dollars, and all the cars have an "AS IS” sales agreement hanging in the driver’s window.
    We chose the Impala because if we have to sleep in a car on Saturday night, this car has the biggest seats.
    We’re eating Chinese because we can’t go home. It was either sleep here, or stay up all night at an after-hours dance club. We don’t go to dance clubs. Tyler says the music is so loud, especially the base tracks, that it screws with his biorhythm. The last time we went out, Tyler said the loud music made him constipated. This, and the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cut off from participating with anyone else.
    You’re the corpse in an English murder mystery.
    We’re sleeping in a car tonight because Marla came to the house and threatened to call the police and have me arrested for cooking her mother, and then Marla slammed around the house, screaming that I was a ghoul and a cannibal and she went kicking through the piles of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, and then I left her there. In a nutshell.
    After her accidental on-purpose suicide with Xanax at the Regent Hotel, I can’t imagine Marla calling the police, but Tyler thought it would be good to sleep out, tonight. Just in case.
    Just in case Marla burns the house down.
    Just in case Marla goes out and finds a gun.
    Just in case Marla is still in the house.
    Just in case.
    I try to get centered:
    Watching white moon face
    The stars never feel anger
    Blah, blah, blah, the end
    Here, with the cars going by on the boulevard and a beer in my hand in the Impala with its cold, hard Bakelite steering wheel maybe three feet in diameter and the cracked vinyl seat pinching my ass through my jeans, Tyler says, "One more time. Tell me exactly what happened.”
    For weeks, I ignored what Tyler had been up to. One time, I went with Tyler to the Western Union office and watched as he sent Marla’s mother a telegram.
    HIDEOUSLY WRINKLED (stop) PLEASE HELP ME! (end)
    Tyler had showed the clerk Marla’s library card and signed Marla’s name to the telegram order, and yelled, yes, Marla can be a guy’s name sometimes, and the clerk could just mind his own business.
    When we were leaving the Western Union, Tyler said if I loved him, I’d trust him. This wasn’t something I needed to know about, Tyler told me and he took me to Garbonzo’s for hummus.
    What really scared me wasn’t the telegram as much as it was eating out with Tyler. Never, no, never had Tyler ever paid cash for anything. For clothes, Tyler goes to gyms and hotels and claims clothing out of the lost and found. This is better than Marla, who goes to Laundromats to steal jeans out of the dryers and sell them at twelve dollars a pair to those places that buy used jeans. Tyler never ate in restaurants, and Marla wasn’t wrinkled.
    For no apparent reason, Tyler sent Marla’s mother a fifteen-pound box of chocolates.
    Another way this Saturday night could be worse, Tyler tells me in the Impala, is the brown recluse spider. When it bites you, it injects not just a venom but a digestive enzyme or acid that dissolves the tissue around the bite, literally melting your arm or your leg or your face.
    Tyler was hiding out tonight when this all started. Marla showed up at the house. Without even knocking, Marla leans inside the front door and shouts, "Knock, knock.”
    I’m reading Reader’s Digest in the kitchen. I am totally nonplussed.
    Marla yells, "Tyler. Can I come in? Are you home?”
    I yell, Tyler’s not home.
    Marla yells, "Don’t be mean.”
    By now, I’m at the front door. Marla’s standing in the foyer with a Federal Express overnight package, and says, "I needed to put something in your freezer.”
    I dog her heels on the way to the kitchen, saying, no.
    No.
    No.
    No.
    She is not going to start keeping her junk in this house.
    "But Pumpkin,” Marla says, "I don’t have a freezer at the hotel, and you said I could.”
    No, I did not. The last thing I want is Marla moving in, one piece of crap at a time.
    Marla has her Federal Express package ripped open