Monkey Think, Monkey Do

This summer a young man pulled aside in a bookstore and said he loved how inFight
Club I wrote about waiters tainting food. He asked me to sign a book and said he
worked in a five-star restaurant where they monkey with celebrities’ food all the
time.
“Margaret Thatcher,” he said, “has eaten my sperm.” He held up one hand, fin-
gers spread, and said, “At least five times.”

Writing that book, I knew a movie projectionist who collected single frames from porno movies and made them into slides. When I talked to people about cutting these frames into G-rated family movies, one friend said, “Don’t. People will read that, and they’ll start doing it.”

Later, when they were shooting the Fight Club movie, some Hollywood big names told me the book hit home because they, themselves, had spliced porno into movies as angry teenage projectionists. People told me about blowing their noses into hamburgers. They told me about changing the bottles of hair dye from box to box in the drug store, blonde into black et cetera, and coming back to see angry wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager. This was the decade of “transgressional nov- els,” starting early with American Psycho and continuing withTrainspo tting andFight
Club. These were novels about bored bad boys who’d try anything to feel alive.
Everything people told me, I could sell.

On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in the emergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight was a struggle not to pop that door open. The air sucked out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, the screaming chaos and “Mayday, Mayday!” emergency landing, it was all so clear. The door, so begging to be opened.