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Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread - Hardcover

Palahniuk, Chuck

 
9780385538053: Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385538057 ISBN 13: 9780385538053
Verlag: Doubleday, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Stories you'll never forget—just try—from literature's favorite transgressive author

Representing work that spans several years, Make Something Up is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. In "Expedition," fans will be thrilled to find to see a side of Tyler Durden never seen before in a precusor story to Fight Club. And in other stories, the absurdity of both life and death are on full display; in "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments, while in "Tunnel of Love," a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients. 

Funny, caustic, bizarre, poignant; these stories represent everything readers have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahniuk.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHUCK PALAHNIUK is the author of fourteen novels—Beautiful You, Doomed, Damned, Tell-All, Pygmy, Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Diary, Lullaby, Choke, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, and Fight Club—which have sold more than five million copies altogether in the United States. He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees, published as part of the Crown Journey Series, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest. Visit him on the web at chuckpalahniuk.net.

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Knock-­Knock

My old man, he makes everything into a Big Joke. What can I say? The old man loves to get a laugh. Growing up, half the time I ­didn’t have a clue what his jokes were about, but I laughed anyways. Down at the barbershop, it ­didn’t matter how many guys my father let take cuts ahead of him in line, he just wanted to sit there all Saturday and crack people up. Make folks bust a gut. Getting his hair cut was definitely a low priority.

He says, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before . . .” The way my old man tells it, he walks into the oncologist’s office and he says, “After the chemotherapy, will I be able to play the violin?”

In response, the oncologist says, “It’s metastasized. You’ve got six months to live . . .”

And working his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, tapping the ash from an invisible cigar, my old man says, “Six months?” He says, “I want a second opinion.”

So the oncologist, he says, “Okay, you’ve got cancer and your jokes stink.”

So they do chemotherapy, and they give him some radiation like they do even if the shit burns him up so bad on the inside he tells me that taking a piss is like passing razor blades. He’s still every Saturday down by the barbershop telling jokes even if now he’s bald as a cue ball. I mean, he’s skinny as a bald skeleton, and he’s getting to haul around one of those cylinders of oxygen under pressure, like some little version of a ­ball-­and-­chain. He walks into the barbershop dragging that pressurized cylinder of oxygen with the tube of it going up and looping around his nose, over his ears, and around his bald head, and he says, “Just a little off the top, please.” And folks laugh. Understand me: My old man is no Uncle Milty. He’s no Edgar Bergen. The man’s skinny as a Halloween skeleton and bald and going to be dead by six weeks so it don’t matter what he says, folks are going to ­hee-­haw like donkeys just out of their genuine affection for him.

But, seriously, I’m not doing him justice. It’s my fault if this ­doesn’t come across, but my old man is funnier than he sounds. Maybe his sense of humor is a talent I ­didn’t inherit. Back when I was his little Charlie McCarthy, the whole time growing up, he used to ask me, ­“Knock-­knock?”

I’d say, “Who’s there?”

He’d say, “Old Lady . . .”

I’d say, “Old Lady, who?”

And he’d say, “Wow, I ­didn’t know you could yodel!”

Me, I ­didn’t get it. I was so stupid, I was seven years old and still stuck in the first grade. I ­didn’t know Switzerland from Shinola, but I want for my old man to love me so I learned to laugh. Whatever he says, I laugh. By “Old Lady” my guess is he means my mom who ran away and left us. All’s my old man will say about her is how she was a “Real Looker” who just ­couldn’t take a joke. She just was NOT a Good Sport.

He used to ask me, “When that Vinnie van Gogh cut off his ear and sent it to the whore he was so crazy about, how’d he send it?”

The punch line is “He sent it by ‘ear mail,’ ” but being seven years old, I was still stuck back on not knowing who van Gogh is or ­what’s a whore, and nothing kills a joke faster than asking my old man to explain himself. So when my old man says, “What do you get when you cross a pig with Count Dracula?” . . . I knew to never ask, “What’s a ‘Count Dracula’?” I’d just get a big laugh ready for when he tells me, “A ­‘Ham-­pire’!”

And when he says, ­“Knock-­knock . . .”

And I say, “Who’s there?” And he says, “Radio.”

And I say, “Radio who?” And he’s ALREADY started to bust a gut when he says, “Radio not I’m going to cum in your mouth . . .” ­Then—­what the ­hell—­I just keep laughing. My whole growing up I figure I’m just too ignorant to appreciate a good joke. Me, my teachers still ­haven’t covered long division and all the ­multiple-­cation tables so it’s not my old man’s fault I don’t know ­what’s “cum.”

My old lady, who abandoned us, he says she hated that joke so maybe I inherited her lack of humor. But love . . . I mean you have to love your old man. I mean, after you’re born it’s not like you get a choice. Nobody wants to see their old man breathing out of some tank and going into the hospital to die ­sky-­high on morphine and he’s not eating a bite of the ­red-­flavored ­Jell-­O they serve for dinner.

Stop me if I already told you this one: but my old man gets that prostrate cancer ­that’s not even like cancer because it takes twenty, thirty years before we even know he’s so sick, and the next thing I know is I’m trying to remember all the stuff he’s taught me. Like, if you spray some ­WD-­40 on the shovel blade before you dig a hole the digging will go a lot easier. And he taught me how to squeeze a trigger instead of pulling it and wrecking my aim. He taught me to remove bloodstains. And he taught me jokes . . . lots of jokes.

And, sure, he’s no Robin Williams, but I watched this movie one time about Robin Williams who gets dressed up with a red rubber ball on his nose and this big ­rainbow-­colored afro wig and those big clown shoes with a fake carnation stuck in his buttonhole of his shirt that squirts water, and the guy’s a hotshot doctor who makes these little kids with cancer laugh so hard they stop dying. Understand me: These bald kid ­skeletons—­who look worse off than my old ­man—­they get HEALTHY, and that whole movie is based on a True Story.

What I mean is, we all know that Laughter is the Best Medicine. All that time being stuck in the hospital Waiting Room, even I read the ­Reader’s Digest. And we’ve all heard the true story about the guy with a brain cancer the size of a grapefruit inside his skull and he’s about to ­croak—­all the doctors and priests and experts say he’s a ­goner—­only he forces himself to watch nonstop movies about the Three Stooges. This Stage Four cancer guy forces himself to laugh nonstop at Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy and those Marx brothers, and he gets healed by the ­end-­orphans and ­oxy-­generated blood.

So I figure, what’ve I got to lose? All I need to do is remember some of my old man’s favorite gags and get him started back laughing on the road to recovery. I figure, what could it hurt?

So this ­grown‑up son walks into his father’s hospice room, pulls up a chair beside the bed, and sits down. The son looks into his old man’s pale, dying face and says: “So this blond gal walks into a neighborhood bar where she’s never been before, and she’s got tits out to HERE and a tight little heinie and she asks the bartender for a Michelob, and he serves her a Michelob, except he sneaks a Mickey Finn into her bottle and this blonde goes unconscious, and every guy in the bar leans her over the edge of the pool table and hikes up her skirt and fucks her, and at closing time they slap her awake and tell her she’s got to leave....

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385538057
ISBN 13 
9780385538053
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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Verantwortliche Person
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