Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

VIP免费

2024-12-07 0 0 646.66KB 138 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

CHOKE

by Chuck Palahniuk

________________________________________

Anchor ISBN: 0-385-72092-0

Book design by Dana Leigh Treglia

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-21-02

Chapter 1

IF YOU'RE GOING TO READ THIS, DON'T BOTHER.

After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while

you're still in one piece.

Save yourself.

There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on

your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make

something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.

You're not getting any younger.

What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and

worse.

What you're getting here is a stupid story about a stupid little boy. A stupid true life

story about nobody you'd ever want to meet. Picture this little spaz being about waist

high with a handful of blond hair, combed and parted on one side. Picture the icky little

shit smiling in old school photos with some of his baby teeth missing and his first adult

teeth coming in crooked. Picture him wearing a stupid sweater striped blue and yellow, a

birthday sweater that used to be his favorite. Even that young, picture him biting his

dickhead fingernails. His favorite shoes are Keds. His favorite food, fucking corn dogs.

Imagine some dweeby little boy wearing no seat belt and riding in a stolen school

bus with his mommy after dinner. Only there's a police car parked at their motel so the

Mommy just blows on past at sixty or seventy miles an hour.

This is about a stupid little weasel who, for sure, used to be about the stupidest little

rat fink crybaby twerp that ever lived.

The little cooz.

The Mommy says, "We'll have to hurry," and they drive uphill on a narrow road,

their back wheels wagging from side to side on the ice. In their headlights the snow looks

blue, spreading from the edge of the road out into the dark forest.

Picture this all being his fault. The little peckerwood.

The Mommy stops the bus a little ways back from the base of a rock cliff, so the

headlights glare against its white face, and she says, "Here's as far as we're going to get,"

and the words come boiling out as white clouds that show how big inside her lungs are.

The Mommy sets the parking brake and says, "You can get out, but leave your coat

in the bus."

Picture this stupid runt letting the Mommy stand him right in front of the school bus.

This bogus little Benedict Arnold just stands looking into the glare of the headlights, and

lets the Mommy pull the favorite sweater off over his head. This wimpy little squealer

just stands there in the snow, half naked, while the bus's motor races, and the roar echoes

off the cliff, and the Mommy disappears to somewhere behind him in the night and the

cold. The headlights blind him, and the motor noise covers any sound of the trees

scraping together in wind. The air is too cold to breathe more than a mouthful at a time so

this little mucous membrane tries to breathe twice as fast.

He doesn't run away. He doesn't do anything.

From somewhere behind him, the Mommy says, "Now whatever you do, don't turn

around."

The Mommy tells him how there used to be a beautiful girl in ancient Greece, the

daughter of a potter.

Like every time she gets out of jail and conies back to claim him, the kid and the

Mommy have been in a different motel every night. They'll eat fast food for every meal,

and just drive all day, every day. At lunch today, the kid tried to eat his corn dog while it

was still too hot and almost swallowed it whole, but it got stuck and he couldn't breathe

or talk until the Mommy charged around from her side of the table.

Then two arms were hugging him from behind, lifting him off his feet, and the

Mommy whispered, "Breathe! Breathe, damn it!"

After that, the kid was crying, and the entire restaurant crowded around.

At that moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those

people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.

It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love.

You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

"Okay. There," the Mommy said as she wiped his mouth, "now I've given you life."

The next moment, a waitress recognized him from a photograph on an old milk

carton, and then the Mommy was driving the evil little squealer back to their motel room

at seventy miles an hour.

On the way back, they'd got off the highway and bought a can of black spray paint.

Even after all their rushing around, where they've arrived is the middle of nowhere in

the middle of the night.

Now from behind him, this stupid kid hears the rattle of the Mommy shaking the

spray paint, the marble inside the can knocking from end to end, and the Mommy says

how the ancient Greek girl was in love with a young man.

"But the young man was from another country and had to go back," the Mommy

says.

There's a hissing sound, and the kid smells spray paint. The bus motor changes

sounds, clunks, running faster now and louder, and the bus rocks a little from tire to tire.

So the last night the girl and her lover would be together, the Mommy says, the girl

brought a lamp and set it so it threw the lover's shadow on the wall.

The hiss of spray paint stops and starts. There's a short hiss, after that a longer hiss.

And the Mommy says how the girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she

would always have a record of how he looked, a document of this exact moment, the last

moment they would be together.

Our little crybaby just keeps looking straight into the headlights. His eyes water, and

when he shuts them he can see the light shining, red, right through his eyelids, his own

flesh and blood.

And the Mommy says how the next day, the girl's lover was gone, but his shadow

was still there.

Just for a second, the kid looks back to where the Mommy is tracing the outline of

his stupid shadow against the cliff face, only the boy's so far away that his shadow falls a

head taller than the mother. His skinny arms look big around. His stubby legs stretch

long. His pinched shoulders spread wide.

And the Mommy tells him, "Don't look. Don't move a muscle or you'll ruin all my

work."

And the doofus little tattletale turns to stare into the headlights.

The can of spray paint hisses, and the Mommy says that before the Greeks, nobody

had any art. This was how painting pictures was invented. She tells the story of how the

girl's father used the outline on the wall to model a clay version of the young man, and

that's the way sculpture was invented.

For serious, the Mommy told him, "Art never comes from happiness."

Here is where symbols were born.

The kid stands, shivering now in the glare, trying to not move, and the Mommy

keeps working, telling the huge shadow how someday it will teach people everything that

she's taught it. Someday it will be a doctor saving people. Returning them to happiness.

Or something better than happiness: peace.

It'll be respected.

Someday.

This is even after the Easter Bunny turned out to be a lie. Even after Santa Claus and

the Tooth Fairy and Saint Christopher and Newtonian physics and the Niels Bohr model

of the atom, this stupid, stupid kid still believed the Mommy.

Someday, when he's grown up, the Mommy tells the shadow, the kid will come back

here and see how he's grown into the exact outline she'd planned for him this night.

The kid's bare arms shake with the cold.

And the Mommy said, "Control yourself, damn it. Hold still or you'll ruin

everything."

And the kid tried to feel warmer, but no matter how bright they were, the headlights

didn't give off any heat.

"I need to make a clear outline," the Mommy said. "If you tremble, you'll turn out all

blurred."

It wasn't until years later, until this stupid little loser was through college with honors

and he'd busted his hump to get into the University of Southern California School of

Medicine—until he was twenty-four years old and in his second year of medical school,

when his mother was diagnosed and he was named as her guardian—it wasn't until then

that it dawned on this little stooge that growing strong and rich and smart was only the

first half of your life story.

Now the kid's ears ache with the cold. He feels dizzy and hyperventilated. His little

stool-pigeon chest is all dimpled chicken skin. His nipples are pinched up by the cold into

hard red pimples, and the little ejaculate tells himself: For real, I deserve this.

And the Mommy says, "Try to at least stand up straight."

The kid rolls his shoulders back and imagines the headlights are a firing squad. He

deserves pneumonia. He deserves tuberculosis.

See also: The teddy bear hamster.

They slipped in the shower and fell, bull's-eye, on a greased shampoo bottle. They're

always being attacked by a person or persons unknown and assaulted with candles, with

baseballs, with hard-boiled eggs, flashlights, and screwdrivers that now need removing.

Here are the guys who get stuck in the water inlet port of their whirlpool hot tub.

Halfway down the hallway to Room 234, Nico pulls me against the wall. She waits

until some people have walked past us and says, "I know a place we can go."

Everybody else is going into the pastel Sunday school room, and Nico smiles after

them. She twirls one finger next to her ear, the international sign language for crazy, and

she says, "Losers." She pulls me the other way, toward a sign that says Women.

Among the folks in Room 234 is the bogus county health official who calls to quiz

fourteen-year-old girls about the appearance of their vagina.

Here's the cheerleader who gets her stomach pumped and they find a pound of

sperm. Her name is Lou Ann.

The guy in the movie theater with his dick stuck through the bottom of a box of

popcorn, you can call him Steve, and tonight his sorry ass is sitting around a paint-stained

table, squeezed into a child's plastic Sunday school chair.

All these people you think are a big joke. Go ahead and frigging laugh your frigging

head off.

These are sexual compulsives.

All these people you thought were urban legends, well, they're human. Complete

with names and faces. Jobs and families. College degrees and arrest records.

In the women's room, Nico pulls me down onto the cold tile and squats over my hips,

digging me out of my pants. With her other hand, Nico cups the back of my neck and

pulls my face, my open mouth, into hers. Her tongue wrestling against my tongue, she's

wetting the head of my dog with the pad of her thumb. She's pushing my jeans down off

my hips. She lifts the hem of her dress in a curtsey with her eyes closed and her head

tilted a little back. She settles her pubes hard against my pubes and says something

against the side of my neck.

I say, "God, you're so beautiful," because for the next few minutes I can.

And Nico pulls back to look at me and says, "What's that supposed to mean?"

And I say, "I don't know." I say, "Nothing, I guess." I say, "Never mind."

The tile smells disinfected and feels gritty under my butt. The walls go up to an

acoustical tile ceiling and air vents furry with dust and crud. There's that blood smell

from the rusty metal box for used napkins.

"Your release form," I say. I snap my fingers. "Did you bring it?"

Nico lifts her hips a little and then drops, lifts and settles herself. Her head still back,

her eyes still closed, she fishes inside the neckline of her dress and brings out a folded

square of blue paper and drops it on my chest.

I say, "Good girl," and take the pen clipped on my shirt pocket.

A little higher each time, Nico lifts her hips and sits down hard. Grinding a little

front to back. With a hand planted on the top of each thigh, she pushes herself up, then

drops.

"Round the world," I say. "Round the world, Nico."

She opens her eyes maybe halfway and looks down at me, and I make a stirring

motion with the pen, the way you'd stir a cup of coffee. Even through my clothes, I'm

getting the grid of the tile engraved in my back.

"Round the world, now," I say. "Do it for me, baby."

And Nico closes her eyes and gathers her skirt around her waist with both hands. She

settles all her weight on my hips and swings one foot over my belly. She swings the other

foot around so she's still on me, but facing my feet.

"Good," I say and unfold the blue paper. I spread it flat against her round humped

back and sign my name at the bottom, on the blank that says sponsor. Through her dress,

you can feel the thick back of her bra, elastic with five or six little wire hooks. You can

feel her rib bones under a thick layer of muscle.

Right now, down the hall in Room 234 is the girlfriend of your best friend's cousin,

the girl who almost died banging herself on the stick shift of a Ford Pinto after she ate

Spanish fly. Her name is Mandy.

There's the guy who snuck into a clinic in a white coat and gave pelvic exams.

There's the guy who always lies in his motel room, naked on top of the covers with

his morning boner, pretending to sleep until the maid walks in.

All those rumored friends of friends of friends of friends . . . they're all here.

The man crippled by the automatic milking machine, his name is Howard.

The girl hanging naked from the shower curtain rod, half dead from autoerotic

asphyxiation, she's Paula and she's a sexaholic.

Hello, Paula.

Give me your subway feelers. Your trench coat flashers.

The men mounting cameras inside the lip of some women's room toilet bowl.

The guy rubbing his semen on the flaps of deposit envelopes at automatic tellers.

All the peeping toms. The nymphos. The dirty old men. The restroom lurkers. The

handballers.

All these sexual bogeymen and -women your mom warned you about. All those

scary cautionary tales.

"We're all here. Alive and unwell.

This is the twelve-step world of sexual addiction. Compulsive sexual behavior.

Every night of the week, they meet in the back room of some church. In some community

center conference room. Every night, in every city. You even have virtual meetings on

the Internet.

My best friend, Denny, I met him at a sexaholics meeting. Denny had got up to the

point where he needed to masturbate fifteen times a day just to break even. Anymore, he

could barely make a fist, and he was worried about what all that petroleum jelly might do

to him, long term.

He'd considered changing to some lotion, but anything made to soften skin seemed to

be counterproductive.

Denny and all these men and women you think are so horrible or funny or pathetic,

here's where they all let their hair down. This is where we all go to open up.

Here are prostitutes and sex criminals out on a three-hour release from their

minimum-security jail, elbow to elbow with women who love gang bangs and men who

give head in adult bookstores. The hooker reunites with the John here. The molester faces

the molested.

Nico brings her big white ass almost to the top of my dog and bangs herself down.

Up and then down. Riding her guts tight around the length of me. Pistoning up and then

slamming down. Pushing off against my thighs, the muscles in her arms get bigger and

bigger. My thighs under each of her hands go numb and white.

"Now that we know each other," I say, "Nico? Would you say you liked me?"

She turns to look back over her shoulder at me, "When you're a doctor, you'll be able

to write prescriptions for anything, right?"

That's if I ever go back to school. Never underestimate the power of a medical

degree for getting you laid. I bring my hands up, each hand open against the stretched

smooth underside of each thigh. To help lift her, I figure, and she twines her cool soft

fingers through mine.

Sleeved tight around my dog, without looking back, she says, "My friends bet me

money that you're already married."

I hold her smooth white ass in my hands.

"How much?" I say.

I tell Nico that her friends might be right.

The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't

know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be

more than just your mistress.

In the modern Oedipal story, it's the mother who kills the father and then takes the

son. And it's not as if you can divorce your mother.

Or kill her.

And Nico says, "What do you mean all the other women? Jeez, how many are we

talking about?" She says, "I'm glad we used a rubber."

For a complete list of sexual partners, I'd have to check my fourth step. My moral

inventory notebook. The complete and relentless history of my addiction.

That's if I ever go back and complete the damn step.

For all those people in Room 234, working on their twelve steps in a sexaholics

meeting is a valuable important tool for understanding and recovering from . . . well, you

get the idea.

For me, it's a terrific how-to seminar. Tips. Techniques. Strategies for getting laid

you never dreamed of. Personal contacts. When they tell their stories, these addict people

are frigging brilliant. Plus there's the jail girls out for their three hours of sex addict talk

therapy.

Nico included.

Wednesday nights mean Nico. Friday nights mean Tanya. Sundays mean Leeza.

Leeza sweats yellow with nicotine. You can almost put your hands around her waist since

her abs are rock-hard from coughing. Tanya always smuggles in some rubber sex toy,

usually a dildo or a string of latex beads. Some sexual equivalent of the prize in a box of

cereal.

The old rule about how a thing of beauty is a joy forever, in my experience, even the

most beauteous thing is only a joy for about three hours, tops. After that, she'll want to

tell you all about her childhood traumas. Part of meeting these jail girls is its so sweet to

look at your watch and know she'll be behind bars in half an hour.

It's a Cinderella story, only at midnight she turns back into a fugitive.

It's not that I don't love these women. I love them just as much as you'd love a

magazine centerfold, a fuck video, an adult website, and for sure, for a sexaholic that can

be buckets of love. And it's not that Nico loves me much, either.

This isn't so much romance as it is opportunity. You put twenty sexaholics around a

table, night after night, and don't be surprised.

Plus the sexaholic recovery books they sell here, it's every way you always wanted to

get laid but didn't know how. Of course, all this is to help you realize you're a sex junkie.

It's delivered in a kind of "if you do any of the following things, you may be an al-

coholic" checklist. Their helpful hints include:

Do you cut the lining out of your bathing suit so your genitals show through?

Do you leave your fly or blouse open and pretend to hold conversations in glass

telephone booths, standing so your clothes gap open with no underwear inside?

Do you jog without a bra or athletic supporter in order to attract sexual partners?

My answer to all the above is, Well, I do now!

Plus, being a pervert here is not your fault. Compulsive sexual behavior is not about

always getting your dick sucked. It's a disease. It's a physical addiction just waiting for

the Diagnostic Statistical Manual to give it a code of its own so treatment can be billed to

medical insurance.

The story is even Bill Wilson, a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, couldn't

overcome the sex monkey on his back, and spent his sober life cheating on his wife and

filled with guilt.

The story is that sex addicts become dependent on a body chemistry created by

constant sex. Orgasms flood the body with endorphins that kill pain and tranquilize you.

Sex addicts are really addicted to the endorphins, not the sex. Sex addicts have lower

natural levels of monoamine oxidase. Sex addicts really crave the peptide

phenylethylamine that might be triggered by danger, by infatuation, by risk and fear.

For a sex addict, your tits, your dick, your clit or tongue or asshole is a shot of

heroin, always there, always ready to use. Nico and I love each other as much as any

junkie loves his fix.

Nico bears down hard, bucking my dog against the front wall of her insides, using

two wet fingers on herself.

I say, "What if that cleaning woman walks in?"

And Nico stirs me around inside herself, saying, "Oh yeah. That would be so hot."

Me, I can't help imagining what kind of a big shining butt print we're going to polish

into the waxed tile. A row of sinks look down. Fluorescent lights flicker, and reflected in

the chrome pipes under each sink you can see Nico's throat is one long straight tube, her

head thrown back, eyes closed, her breath panting out at the ceiling. Her big flower-print

breasts. Her tongue hangs off to one side. The juice coming off her is scalding hot.

To keep from triggering I say, "What all did you tell your folks about us?"

And Nico says, "They want to meet you."

I think about the perfect thing to say next, but it doesn't really matter. You can say

anything here. Enemas, orgies, animals, admit to any obscenity, and nobody is ever

surprised.

In Room 234, everybody compares war stories. Everybody takes their turn. That's the

first part of the meeting, the check-in part.

After that they'll read the readings, the prayer things, they'll discuss the topic for the

night. They'll each work on one of the twelve steps. The first step is to admit you're

powerless. You have an addiction, and you can't stop. The first step is to tell your story,

all the worst parts. Your lowest lows.

The problem with sex is the same as with any addiction. You're always recovering.

You're always backsliding. Acting out. Until you find something to fight for, you settle

for something to fight against. All these people who say they want a life free from sexual

compulsion, I mean forget it. I mean, what could ever be better than sex?

For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose . . .

watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut-

hosing orgasm.

Painting a picture, composing an opera, that's just something you do until you find

the next willing piece of ass.

The minute something better than sex comes along, you call me. Have me paged.

None of these people in Room 234 are Romeos or Casanovas or Don Juans. These

aren't Mata Haris or Salomes. These are people you shake hands with every day. Not

ugly, not beautiful. You stand next to these legends on the elevator. They serve you

coffee. These mythological creatures tear your ticket stub. They cash your paycheck.

They put the Communion wafer on your tongue.

In the women's room, inside Nico, I cross my arms behind my head.

For the next I don't know how long, I've got no problems in the world. No mother.

No medical bills. No shitty museum job. No jerk-off best friend. Nothing.

I feel nothing.

To make it last, to keep from triggering, I tell Nice's flowered backside how beautiful

she is, how sweet she is and how much I need her. Her skin and hair. To make it last.

Because this is the only time I can say it. Because the moment this is over, we'll hate each

other. The moment we find ourselves cold and sweating on the bathroom floor, the

moment after we both come, we won't want to even look at each other.

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

These are the only few minutes I can be human.

Just for these minutes, I don't feel lonely.

And riding me up and down, Nico says, "So when do I get to meet your mom?"

And, "Never," I say. "That's impossible, I mean."

And Nico, her whole body clenched and jacking me with her boiling wet insides, she

says, "She in prison or a loony bin or something?"

Yeah, for a lot of her life.

Ask any guy about his mom during sex, and you can delay the big blast forever.

And Nico says, "So is she dead now?"

And I say, "Sort of."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

CHOKEbyChuckPalahniuk________________________________________Copyright©2001byChuckPalahniukAnchorISBN:0-385-72092-0BookdesignbyDanaLeighTregliaeBookscanned&proofedbyBinwiped11-21-02Chapter1IFYOU'REGOINGTOREADTHIS,DON'TBOTHER.Afteracouplepages,youwon'twanttobehere.Soforgetit.Goaway.Getoutwhileyou'res...

展开>> 收起<<

Chuck Palahniuk - Choke.pdf

共138页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: