Chuck Palahniuk - Diary

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Chuck Palahniuk

Diary

For my grandfather,

Joseph Tallent,

who told me to be

whatever I wanted.

1910–2003

June 21—

The Three-Quarter Moon

TODAY, A MAN CALLED from Long Beach. He left a long message on the

answering machine, mumbling and shouting, talking fast and slow, swearing and

threatening to call the police, to have you arrested.

Today is the longest day of the year—but anymore, every day is.

The weather today is increasing concern followed by full-blown dread.

The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing.

June 22

BY THE TIME you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.

The official name for your liver spots is hyperpigmented lentigines . The official anatomy

word for a wrinkle is rhytide . Those creases in the top half of your face, the rhytides

plowed across your forehead and around your eyes, this is dynamic wrinkling , also called

hyperfunctional facial lines , caused by the movement of underlying muscles. Most

wrinkles in the lower half of the face are static rhytides, caused by sun and gravity.

Let’s look in the mirror. Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth.

This is what you think you know best.

Your skin comes in three basic layers. What you can touch is the stratum corneum, a

layer of flat, dead skin cells pushed up by the new cells under them. What you feel, that

greasy feeling, is your acid mantle, the coating of oil and sweat that protects you from

germs and fungus. Under that is your dermis. Below the dermis is a layer of fat. Below

the fat are the muscles of your face.

Maybe you remember all this from art school, from Figure Anatomy 201. But then,

maybe not.

When you pull up your upper lip—when you show that one top tooth, the one the

museum guard broke—this is your levator labii superioris muscle at work. Your sneer

muscle. Let’s pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband’s just killed

himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the

driver’s seat. Pretend you still have to drive this stinking rusted junk pile to work, with

everyone watching, everyone knowing, because it’s the only car you have.

Does any of this ring a bell?

When a normal person, some normal innocent person who sure as hell deserved a lot

better, when she comes home from waiting tables all day and finds her husband

suffocated in the family car, his bladder leaking, and she screams, this is simply her

orbicularis oris stretched to the very limit.

That deep crease from each corner of your mouth to your nose is your nasolabial fold .

Sometimes called your “sneer pocket.” As you age, the little round cushion of fat inside

your cheek, the official anatomy word is malar fat pad, it slides lower and lower until it

comes to rest against your nasolabial fold—making your face a permanent sneer.

This is just a little refresher course. A little step-by-step.

Just a little brushing up. In case you don’t recognize yourself.

Now frown. This is your triangularis muscle pulling down the corners of your orbicularis

oris muscle.

Pretend you’re a twelve-year-old girl who loved her father like crazy. You’re a little

preteen girl who needs her dad more than ever before. Who counted on her father always

to be there. Imagine you go to bed crying every night, your eyes clamped shut so hard

they swell.

The “orange peel” texture of your chin, these “popply” bumps are caused by your

mentalis muscle. Your “pouting” muscle. Those frown lines you see every morning,

getting deeper, running from each corner of your mouth down to the edge of your chin,

those are called marionette lines . The wrinkles between your eyebrows, they’re glabellar

furrows . The way your swollen eyelids sag down is called ptosis . Your lateral canthal

rhytides, your “crow’s-feet,” are worse every day and you’re only twelve fucking years

old for God’s sake.

Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is about.

This is your face.

Now, smile—if you still can.

This is your zygomatic major muscle. Each contraction pulls your flesh apart the way

tiebacks hold open the drapes in your living room window. The way cables pull aside a

theater curtain, your every smile is an opening night. A premiere. You unveiling yourself.

Now, smile the way an elderly mother would when her only son kills himself. Smile and

pat the hand of his wife and his preteen daughter and tell them not to worry—everything

really will work out for the best. Just keep smiling and pin up your long gray hair. Go

play bridge with your old lady friends. Powder your nose.

That huge horrible wad of fat you see hanging under your chin, your jowls, getting bigger

and jigglier every day, that’s submental fat. That crinkly ring of wrinkles around your

neck is a platysmal band . The whole slow slide of your face, your chin and neck is

caused by gravity dragging down on your superficial musculo-aponeurotic system .

Sound familiar?

If you’re a little confused right now, relax. Don’t worry. All you need to know is this is

your face. This is what you think you know best.

These are the three layers of your skin.

These are the three women in your life.

The epidermis, the dermis, and the fat.

Your wife, your daughter, and your mother.

If you’re reading this, welcome back to reality. This is where all that glorious, unlimited

potential of your youth has led. All that unfulfilled promise. Here’s what you’ve done

with your life.

Your name is Peter Wilmot.

All you need to understand is you turned out to be one sorry sack of shit.

June 23

A WOMAN CALLS FROM Seaview to say her linen closet is missing. Last

September, her house had six bedrooms, two linen closets. She’s sure of it. Now she’s

only got one. She comes to open her beach house for the summer. She drives out from the

city with the kids and the nanny and the dog, and here they are with all their luggage, and

all their towels are gone. Disappeared. Poof.

Bermuda triangulated.

Her voice on the answering machine, the way her voice screeches up, high, until it’s an

air-raid siren by the end of every sentence, you can tell she’s shaking mad, but mostly

she’s scared. She says, “Is this some kind of joke? Please tell me somebody paid you to

do this.”

Her voice on the machine, she says, “Please, I won’t call the police. Just put it back the

way it was, okay?”

Behind her voice, faint in the background, you can hear a boy’s voice saying, “Mom?”

The woman, away from the phone, she says, “Everything’s going to be fine.” She says,

“Now let’s not panic.”

The weather today is an increasing trend toward denial.

Her voice on the answering machine, she says, “Just call me back, okay?” She leaves her

phone number. She says, “Please . . .”

June 25

PICTURE THE WAY a little kid would draw a fish bone—the skeleton of a fish, with

the skull at one end and the tail at the other. The long spine in between, it’s crossed with

rib bones. It’s the kind of fish skeleton you’d see in the mouth of a cartoon cat.

Picture this fish as an island covered with houses. Picture the kind of castle houses that a

little girl living in a trailer park would draw—big stone houses, each with a forest of

chimneys, each a mountain range of different rooflines, wings and towers and gables, all

of them going up and up to a lightning rod at the top. Slate roofs. Fancy wrought-iron

fences. Fantasy houses, lumpy with bay windows and dormers. All around them, perfect

pine trees, rose gardens, and red brick sidewalks.

The bourgeois daydreams of some poor white trash kid.

The whole island was exactly what a kid growing up in some trailer park—say some

dump like Tecumseh Lake, Georgia—would dream about. This kid would turn out all the

lights in the trailer while her mom was at work. She’d lie down flat on her back, on the

matted-down orange shag carpet in the living room. The carpet smelling like somebody

stepped in a dog pile. The orange melted black in spots from cigarette burns. The ceiling

was water-stained. She’d fold her arms across her chest, and she could picture life in this

kind of place.

It would be that time—late at night—when your ears reach out for any sound. When you

can see more with your eyes closed than open.

The fish skeleton. From the first time she held a crayon, that’s what she’d draw.

The whole time this kid’s growing up, maybe her mom was never home. She never knew

her dad, and maybe her mom worked two jobs. One at a shitty fiberglass insulation

factory, one slopping food in a hospital cafeteria. Of course, this kid dreams of a place

like this island, where nobody works except to keep house and pick wild blueberries and

beachcomb. Embroider handkerchiefs. Arrange flowers. Where every day doesn’t start

with an alarm clock and end with the television. She’s imagined these houses, every

house, every room, the carved edge of each fireplace mantel. The pattern in every parquet

floor. Imagined it out of thin air. The curve of each light fixture or faucet. Every tile, she

could picture. Imagine it, late at night. Every wallpaper pattern. Every shingle and

stairway and downspout, she’s drawn it with pastels. Colored it with crayons. Every brick

sidewalk and boxwood hedge, she’s sketched it. Filled in the red and green with

watercolors. She’s seen it, pictured it, dreamed of it. She’s wanted it so bad.

Since as early as she could pick up a pencil, this was all she ever drew.

Picture this fish with the skull pointed north and the tail south. The spine is crossed with

sixteen rib bones, running east and west. The skull is the village square, with the

ferryboat coming and going from the harbor that’s the fish’s mouth. The fish’s eye would

be the hotel, and around it, the grocery store, the hardware supply, the library and church.

She painted the streets with ice in the bare trees. She painted it with birds coming back,

each gathering beach grass and pine needles to build a nest. Then, with foxgloves in

bloom, taller than people. Then with even taller sunflowers. Then with the leaves

spiraling down and the ground under them lumpy with walnuts and chestnuts.

She could see it so clear. She could picture every room, inside every house.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more

she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people. Especially not her own

hippie mom, always tired and smelling like French fries and cigarette smoke.

It got until Misty Kleinman gave up on ever being a happy person. Everything was ugly.

Everyone was crass and just . . . wrong.

Her name was Misty Kleinman.

In case she’s not around when you read this, she was your wife. In case you’re not just

playing dumb—your poor wife, she was born Misty Marie Kleinman.

The poor idiot girl, when she was drawing a bonfire on the beach, she could taste ears of

corn and boiled crabs. Drawing the herb garden of one house, she could smell the

rosemary and thyme.

Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got—until nothing in her real world

was good enough. It got until she didn’t belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good

enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls.

Nothing was as real as her imagined world. This got until she was going to student

counseling and stealing money from her mom’s purse to spend on dope.

So people wouldn’t say she was crazy, she made her life about the art instead of the

visions. Really, she just wanted the skill to record them. To make her imagined world

more and more accurate. More real.

And in art school, she met a boy named Peter Wilmot. She met you, a boy from a place

called Waytansea Island.

And the first time you see the island, coming from anyplace else in the entire world, you

think you’re dead. You’re dead and gone to heaven, safe forever.

The fish’s spine is Division Avenue. The fish’s ribs are streets, starting with Alder, one

block south of the village square. Next is Birch Street, Cedar Street, Dogwood, Elm, Fir,

Gum, Hornbeam, all of them alphabetical until Oak and Poplar Streets, just before the

fish’s tail. There, the south end of Division Avenue turns to gravel, and then mud, then

disappears into the trees of Waytansea Point.

This isn’t a bad description. That’s how the harbor looks when you arrive for the first

time on the ferryboat from the mainland. Narrow and long, the harbor looks like the

mouth of a fish, waiting to gobble you up in a story from the Bible.

You can walk the length of Division Avenue, if you’ve got all day. Have breakfast at the

Waytansea Hotel and then walk a block south, past the church on Alder Street. Past the

Wilmot house, the only house on East Birch, with sixteen acres of lawn going right down

to the water. Past the Burton house on East Juniper Street. The woodlots dense with oaks,

each tree twisted and tall as a moss-covered lightning bolt. The sky above Division

Avenue, in summer it’s green with dense, shifting layers of maple and oak and elm

leaves.

You come here for the first time, and you think all your hopes and dreams have come

true. Your life will end happily ever after.

The point is, for a kid who’s only ever lived in a house with wheels under it, this looks

like the special safe place where she’ll live, loved and cared for, forever.

For a kid who used to sit on shag carpet with a box of colored pencils or crayons and

draw pictures of these houses, houses she’d never seen. Just pictures of the way she

imagined them with their porches and stained-glass windows. For this little girl to one

day see these houses for real. These exact houses. Houses she thought she’d only ever

imagined . . .

Since the first time she could draw, little Misty Marie knew the wet secrets of the septic

tanks behind each house. She knew the wiring inside their walls was old, cloth-wrapped

for insulation and strung through china tubes and along china posts. She could draw the

inside of every front door, where every island family marked the names and height of

each child.

Even from the mainland, from the ferry dock in Long Beach, across three miles of salt

water, the island looks like paradise. The pines so dark green they look black, the waves

breaking against the brown rocks, it’s like everything she could ever want. Protected.

Quiet and alone.

Nowadays, this is how the island looks to a lot of people. A lot of rich strangers.

For this kid who’d never swam in anything bigger than the trailer park pool, blinded by

too much chlorine, for her to ride the ferry into Waytansea Harbor with the birds singing

and the sun bouncing bright off the rows and rows of the hotel windows. For her to hear

the ocean rolling into the side of the breakwater, and feel the sun so warm and the clean

wind in her hair, smelling the roses in full bloom . . . the thyme and rosemary . . .

This pathetic teenager who’d never seen the ocean, she’d already painted the headlands

and the cliffs that hung high above the rocks. And she’d got them perfect.

Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman.

This girl came here as a bride, and the whole island came out to greet her. Forty, fifty

families, all of them smiling and waiting their turn to shake her hand. A choir of grade

school kids sang. They threw rice. There was a big dinner in her honor at the hotel, and

everyone toasted her with champagne.

From its hillside up above Merchant Street, the windows of the Waytansea Hotel, all six

stories of them, the rows of windows and glassed-in porches, the zigzag lines of dormers

in the steep roof, they were all watching her arrive. Everyone was watching her come to

live in one of the big houses in the shady, tree-lined belly of the fish.

Just one look at Waytansea Island, and Misty Kleinman figured it was worth kissing off

her blue-collar mom. The dog piles and shag carpet. She swore never to set foot in the old

trailer park. She put her plans for being a painter on hold.

The point is, when you’re a kid, even when you’re a little older, maybe twenty and

enrolled in art school, you don’t know anything about the real world. You want to believe

somebody when he says he loves you. He only wants to marry you and take you home to

live in some perfect island paradise. A big stone house on East Birch Street. He says he

only wants to make you happy.

And no, honestly, he won’t ever torture you to death.

And poor Misty Kleinman, she told herself, it wasn’t a career as an artist that she wanted.

What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the family, the peace.

Then she came to Waytansea Island, where everything was so right.

Then it turned out she was wrong.

June 26

A MAN CALLS FROM the mainland, from Ocean Park, to complain that his kitchen

is gone.

It’s natural not to notice at first. After you live anywhere long enough—a house, an

apartment, a nation—it just seems too small.

Ocean Park, Oysterville, Long Beach, Ocean Shores, these are all mainland towns. The

woman with the missing closet. The man with his bathroom gone. These people, they’re

all messages on the answering machine, people who had some remodeling done on their

vacation places. Mainland places, summer people. You have a nine-bedroom house you

only see two weeks each year, it might take you a few seasons to notice you’re missing

part. Most of these people have at least a half dozen houses. These aren’t really homes.

These are investments. They have condos and co-ops. They have apartments in London

and Hong Kong. A different toothbrush waits in every time zone. A pile of dirty clothes

on every continent.

This voice complaining on Peter’s answering machine, he says there was a kitchen with a

gas range. A double oven in one wall. A big two-door refrigerator.

Listening to him gripe, your wife, Misty Marie, she nods yes, a lot of things used to be

different around here.

It used to be you could catch the ferry just by showing up. It runs every half hour, to the

mainland and back. Every half hour. Now you get in line. You wait your turn. Sit in the

parking lot with a mob of strangers in their shiny sports cars that don’t smell like urine.

The ferry comes and goes three or four times before there’s room for you on board. You,

sitting all that time in the hot sun, in that smell.

It takes you all morning just to get off the island.

You used to walk into the Waytansea Hotel and get a window table, no problem. It used

to be you never saw litter on Waytansea Island. Or traffic. Or tattoos. Pierced noses.

Syringes washed up on the beach. Sticky used condoms in the sand. Billboards.

Corporate tagging.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how his dining room wall is nothing but perfect oak

wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. The baseboard and picture molding and cove

molding run seamless and unbroken from corner to corner. He knocked, and the wall is

solid, plaster drywall on wood-frame construction. In the middle of this perfect wall is

where he swears the kitchen door used to be.

Over the phone, the Ocean Park man says, “Maybe this is my mistake, but a house has to

have a kitchen? Doesn’t it? Isn’t that in the building code or something?”

The lady in Seaview only missed her linen closet when she couldn’t find a clean towel.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how he took a corkscrew from the dining room

sideboard. He screwed a little hole where he remembered the kitchen door. He got a steak

knife from the sideboard and stabbed the hole a little bigger. He has a little flashlight on

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摘要：

ChuckPalahniukDiaryFormygrandfather,JosephTallent,whotoldmetobewhateverIwanted.1910–2003June21—TheThree-QuarterMoonTODAY,AMANCALLEDfromLongBeach.Heleftalongmessageontheansweringmachine,mumblingandshouting,talkingfastandslow,swearingandthreateningtocallthepolice,tohaveyouarrested.Todayisthelongestday...

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