Fight Club

quotes…
    Before you could walk through airports and hear bogus public address announcements paging "Tyler Durden…Would Tyler Durden please pick up the white courtesy phone…”
    Before you could find graffiti in Los Angeles, spray painted tags that claim: "Tyler Durden Lives”…
    Before people in Texas started wearing T-shirts printed with: "Save Marla Singer”…
    Before a variety of illegal Fight Club stage plays…
    Before my refrigerator was covered with photographs sent to me by strangers: grinning, bruised faces and people grappling in backyard boxing rings…
    Before the book in dozens of languages: Club de Combate and De Vechtclub and Borilacki Klub and Klub Golih Pesti and Kovos Klubas…
    Before all that…
    There was just a short story. It was just an experiment to kill a slow afternoon at work. Instead of walking a character from scene to scene in a story, there had to be some way to just—cut, cut, cut. To jump. From scene to scene. Without losing the reader. To show every aspect of a story, but only the kernel of each aspect. The core moment. Then another core moment. Then, another.
    There had to be some kind of chorus. Something bland that wouldn’t hold the reader’s attention, but would act to signal a jump to a new angle or aspect of the story. A bland kind of buffer that would be the touchstone or landmark a reader would need to not feel lost. A kind of neutral sorbet, like something served between courses in a fancy dinner. A signal, like buffer music in radio broadcasts, to announce the next topic. The next jump.
    A kind of glue or mortar that would hold together a mosaic of different moments and details. Giving them all a continuity and yet showcasing each moment by not ramming it up against the next moment.
    Think of the movie Citizen Kane , and how the faceless, nameless newsreel reporters create the framework for telling the story from a lot of different sources.
    That’s what I wanted to do. That one, boring afternoon at work.
    So for that chorus—that "transitional device”—I wrote eight rules. The whole idea of a fight club wasn’t important. It was arbitrary. But the eight rules had to apply to something so why not a club where you could ask someone to fight? The way you’d ask for a dance at a disco. Or challenge someone to a game of pool or darts. The fighting wasn’t the important part of the story. What I needed were the rules . Those bland landmarks that would allow me to describe this club from the past, the present, up close or far away, the beginning and evolution, to cram together a lot of details and moments—all within seven pages—and NOT lose the reader.
    At the time, I had a lingering black eye, a souvenir from a fist fight during my summer vacation. Nobody I worked with had ever asked about it, and I figured that you could do anything in your private life if it left you so bruised that no one would want to know the details.
    At the same time, I’d seen a Bill Moyer television program about how street gangs were really young men raised without fathers, just trying to help one another become men. They issued orders and challenges. Imposed rules and discipline. Rewarded action. All the things a coach or drill sergeant would do.
    At the same time, the bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt . These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. To sit together and tell their stories. To share their lives. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives.
    It would have to give men the structure and roles and rules of a game—or a task—but not too touchy-feely. It would have to model a new way to gather and be together. It could’ve been "Barn-Raising Club” or "Golf Club” and it would’ve probably sold a lot more books. Something nonthreatening.
    But that one slow afternoon, I wrote a seven-page short story called Fight Club. It was the first real story I ever sold. An anthology called The Pursuit of Happiness, published by Blue Heron Press, bought it for fifty bucks. In the first edition the publishers, Dennis and Linni Stovall, printed every copy with the wrong title on the spine, and the cost of reprinting bankrupted their small press. Today, they’ve sold every copy. Those printed and misprinted. Mostly to people looking for that original short story that has since become chapter six of the