Here’s an excerpt from my all-time favorite book: Survivor by Mr. Palahniuk.

Action.

The way I live, it’s hard enough to bread a veal cutlet. Some nights it’s different; it’s fish or chicken. But the minute my one hand is covered in raw egg and the other’s holding the meat someone is going to call me in trouble.

This is almost every night of my life now.

Tonight, a girl calls me from inside a pounding dance club. Her only words I can make out are “behind.”

She says, “asshole.”

She says what could be “muffin” or “nothing.” The fact of the matter is you can’t begin to fill in the blanks so I’m in the kitchen, alone and yelling to be heard over the dance mix wherever. She sounds young and worn out, so I ask if she’ll trust me. Is she tired of hurting? I ask if there’s only one way to end her pain, will she do it?

My goldfish is swimming around all excited inside the fishbowl on the fridge so I reach up and drop a Valium in its water.

I’m yelling at this girl: has she had enough?

I’m yelling: I’m not going to stand here and listen to her complain.

To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

Most people who call me already know what they want. Some want to die but are just looking for my permission. Some want to die and just need a little encouragement. A little push. Someone bent on suicide won’t have much sense of humor left. One wrong word, and they’re an obituary the next week. Most of the calls I get, I’m only half listening anyway. Most of the people, I decide who lives and who dies just by the tone of their voice.

This is getting nowhere with the girl at the dance club so I tell her, Kill yourself.

She’s saying, “What?”

Kill yourself.

She’s saying, “What?”

Try barbiturates and alcohol with your head inside a dry cleaning

She says, “What?”

You cannot bread a veal cutlet and do a good job with only one hand so I tell her, now or never. Pull the trigger or don’t. I’m with her right now. She’s not going to die alone, but I don’t have all night.

What sounds like part of the dance mix is her starting to cry really hard. So I hang up.

On top of breading a veal cutlet, these people want me to straighten their whole life out.

The phone in my one hand, I’m trying to get bread crumbs to stick with my other. Nothing should be this hard. You flop the cutlet in raw egg. Then you shake it dry, then crumbs. The problem with the cutlet is I can’t get the crumbs right. Some places, the cutlet is bare. The crumbs are so thick in other places you can’t tell what’s inside.

It used to be this was a lot of fun. People just call you on the verge of suicide. Women would call. Here I am just alone with my goldfish, alone in my dirty kitchen breading a pork chop or whatnot, wearing just my boxers, hearing somebody’s prayer. Dishing out guidance and punishment.

A guy will call. After I’m fast asleep, it happens. These calls will come all night if I don’t unplug the phone. Some loser will call tonight just after the bars close to say he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in his apartment. He can’t sleep without having these terrible nightmares. In his dreams, he sees planes full of people crash. It’s so real and then no one will help him. He can’t sleep. He can’t get help. He tells me he’s got a rifle tucked up under his chin and he wants me to give him one good reason not to pull the trigger.

He can’t live with knowing the future and not being able to save anyone.

These victims, they call. These chronic sufferers. They call. They break up my own little tedium. It’s better than television.

I tell him, Go ahead. I’m only half awake. It’s three in the morning, and I have to work tomorrow. I tell him, Hurry before I fall back asleep, pull the trigger.

I tell him this isn’t such a beautiful world that he has to stay in it and suffer. This isn’t much of a world at all.

My job is most of the time I work for a housecleaning service. Full-time drudge. Part-time god.

Past experience tells me to hold the phone a ways from my ear when I hear the little click of the trigger. There’s the blast, just a burst of static, and somewhere a receiver clunks to the floor. I’m the last person to talk to him, and I’m back asleep before the ringing in my ear starts to fade.

There’s the obituary to look for the next week, six column inches about nothing that really mattered. You need the obituary, otherwise you’re not sure if it happened or if it was just a dream. I don’t expect you to understand.

This is probably my favorite chapter from Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters. It’s hysterical!

Jump way back to the last Thanksgiving before my accident when I go home to eat dinner with my folks. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn’t so confronted by solid food.
On the dining room table, covering it all over is a tablecloth I don’t remember, a really nice dark blue damask with a lace
edge. This isn’t something I’d expect my mom to buy so I ask, did somebody give this to her?
Mom’s just pulling up to the table and unfolding her blue damask napkin with everything steaming between us: her, me, and my dad. The sweet potatoes under their layer of marshmallows. The big brown turkey. The rolls are inside a quilted cozy sewed to look like a hen. You lift the wings to take a roll out. There’s the cut-glass tray of sweet pickles and celery filled with peanut butter.
“Give what?” my mom says.
The new tablecloth. It’s really nice.
My father sighs and plunges a knife into the turkey.
“It wasn’t going to be a tablecloth at first,” Mom says. “Your father and I pretty much dropped the ball on our original project.”
The knife goes in again and again and my father starts to dismember our dinner.
My mom says, “Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?”
Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.
“I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane,” Mom says. “We just ran into some problems
with what to sew on it.”
Give me amnesia.
Flash.
Give me new parents.
Flash.
“Your mother didn’t want to step on any toes,” Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate.
“With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn’t want to give
people the wrong idea.”
My mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, “Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue
would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado and masochism.” She says, “Really these panels are to help the people left behind.”
“Strangers are going to see us and see Shane’s name,” my dad says. “We didn’t want them thinking things.”
The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce.
“I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles,” my mom says. “It’s the Nazi symbol for homosexuals.”
She says, “Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like the female pubic hair. The black triangle does.”
My father says, “Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute.”
My mom says, “We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn’t figure which.”
“Yellow,” my father says, “means watersports.”
“A lighter shade of blue,” Mom says, “would mean just regular oral sex.”
“Regular white,” my father says, “would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear.” He says, “I can’t remember which.”
My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.
We’re supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.
“Finally we just gave up,” my mom says, “and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material.”
Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, “Do you know about rimming?”
I know it isn’t table talk.
“And fisting?” my mom asks.
I say, I know. I don’t mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.
We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock
full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.
“Would you pass the butter, please?” my mother says. To my father she says, “Do you know what felchirig is?”
This, it’s too much. Shane’s dead, but he’s more the center of attention than he ever was. My folks wonder why I never come
home, and this is why. All this sick horrible sex talk over Thanksgiving dinner, I can’t take this. It’s just Shane this and Shane that. It’s sad, but what happened to Shane was not something I did.
I know everybody thinks it’s my fault, what happened. The truth is Shane destroyed this family. Shane was bad and mean, and he’s dead. I’m good and obedient and I’m ignored.
Silence.
All that happened was I was fourteen years old. Somebody put a full can of hairspray in the trash by mistake. It was Shane’s
job to burn the trash. He was fifteen. He was dumping the kitchen trash into the burning barrel while the bathroom trash was on fire, and the hair-spray exploded. It was an accident.
Silence.
Now what I wanted my folks to talk about was me. I’d tell them how Evie and me were shooting a new infomercial. My modeling career was taking off. I wanted to tell them about my new boyfriend, Manus, but no. Whether he’s good or bad, alive or dead, Shane still gets all the attention. All I ever get is angry.
“Listen,” I say. This just blurts out. “Me,” I say, “I’m the last child you people have left alive so you’d better start
paying me some attention.”
Silence.
“Felching,” I lower my voice. I’m calm now. “Felching is when a man fucks you up the butt without a rubber. He shoots his load, and then plants his mouth on your anus and sucks out his own warm sperm, plus whatever lubricant and feces are present. That’s felching. It may or may not,” I add, “include kissing you to pass the sperm and fecal matter into your mouth.”
Silence.
Give me control. Give me calm. Give me restraint.
Flash.
The yams are just the way I like them, sugary sweet but crunchy on top. The stuffing is a little dry. I pass my mother the butter.
My father clears his throat. “Bump,” he says, “I think ‘fletching’ is the word your mother meant.” He says, “It means to slice the turkey into very thin strips.”
Silence.
I say, oh. I say, sorry.
We eat.