Fight Club

city at dawn.
    In the picture on the front page of the newspaper, the face is an angry pumpkin, Japanese demon, dragon of avarice hanging in the sky, and the smoke is a witch’s eyebrows or devil’s horns. And people cried with their heads thrown back.
    What did it mean?
    And who would do this? And even after the fires were out, the face was still there, and it was worse. The empty eyes seemed to watch everyone in the street but at the same time were dead.
    This stuff is in the newspaper more and more.
    Of course you read this, and you want to know right away if it was part of Project Mayhem.
    The newspaper says the police have no real leads. Youth gangs or space aliens, whoever it was could’ve died while crawling down ledges and dangling from windowsills with cans of black spray paint.
    Was it the Mischief Committee or the Arson Committee? The giant face was probably their homework assignment from last week.
    Tyler would know, but the first rule about Project Mayhem is you don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem.
    In the Assault Committee of Project Mayhem, this week Tyler says he ran everyone through what it would take to shoot a gun. All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction.
    At the last meeting of the Assault Committee, Tyler brought a gun and the yellow pages of the phone book. They meet in the basement where fight club meets on Saturday night. Each committee meets on a different night:
    Arson meets on Monday.
    Assault on Tuesday.
    Mischief meets on Wednesday.
    And Misinformation meets on Thursday.
    Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of Anarchy. You figure it out.
    Support groups. Sort of.
    So Tuesday night, the Assault Committee proposed events for the upcoming week, and Tyler read the proposals and gave the committee its homework.
    By this time next week, each guy on the Assault Committee has to pick a fight where he won’t come out a hero. And not in fight club. This is harder than it sounds. A man on the street will do anything not to fight.
    The idea is to take some Joe on the street who’s never been in a fight and recruit him. Let him experience winning for the first time in his life. Get him to explode. Give him permission to beat the crap out of you.
    You can take it. If you win, you screwed up.
    "What we have to do, people,” Tyler told the committee, "is remind these guys what kind of power they still have.”
    This is Tyler’s little pep talk. Then he opened each of the folded squares of paper in the cardboard box in front of him. This is how each committee proposes events for the upcoming week. Write the event on the committee tablet. Tear off the sheet, fold it, and put it in the box. Tyler checks out the proposals and throws out any bad ideas.
    For each idea he throws out, Tyler puts a folded blank into the box.
    Then everyone in the committee takes a paper out of the box. The way Tyler explained the process to me, if somebody draws a blank, he only has his homework to do that week.
    If you draw a proposal, then you have to go to the import beer festival this weekend and push over a guy in a chemical toilet. You’ll get extra favor if you get beat up for doing this. Or you have to attend the fashion show at the shopping center atrium and throw strawberry gelatin from the mezzanine.
    If you get arrested, you’re off the Assault Committee. If you laugh, you’re off the committee.
    Nobody knows who draws a proposal, and nobody except Tyler knows what all the proposals are and which are accepted and which proposals he throws in the trash. Later that week, you might read in the newspaper about an unidentified man, downtown, jumping the driver of a Jaguar convertible and steering the car into a fountain.
    You have to wonder. Was this a committee proposal you could’ve drawn?
    The next Tuesday night, you’ll be looking around the Assault Committee meeting under the one light in the black fight club basement, and you’re still wondering who forced the Jag into the fountain.
    Who went to the roof of the art museum and snipered paint balls into the sculpture court reception?
    Who painted the blazing demon mask on the Hein Tower?
    The night of the Hein Tower assignment, you can picture a team of law clerks and bookkeepers or messengers sneaking into offices where they sat, every day. Maybe they were a little drunk even if it’s against the rules in Project Mayhem, and they used passkeys where they could and used spray canisters of Freon to shatter lock cylinders so they could