Elmore Leonard and Chuck Palahniuk

better than being sewn inside the stomach of a dead horse
Went to an odd free event at the Free Library last night: I saw both Elmore Leonard and Chuck Palahniuk.

I wanted to see Chuck Palahniuk, but I wasn't desperate to. I wasn't sure how I felt about the tour t-shirts and the rabid fans. By the time we got to the library (at 6:15 for an 8:00 reading) the line went around the block. The library wasn't prepared for this, but the employees handled it as well as they could. When we went in they channeled people into separate lines for Chuck's signing and Elmore's reading. We talked to an official-looking person near the front door and she told us that the auditorium would be cleared out after Elmore's reading and they would then re-seat for the Chuck reading. Luke estimated that there were more than enough people to fill the auditorium in front of us in the Chuck line. (To make the whole scene even more odd, many of the Chuck fans [male and female] were wearing wedding gowns, in response to something in Chuck's new book, Rant. I'd done my internet research ahead of time, so I expected this. But I wonder what the Elmore fans thought of it.)

Anyway, Lucas and I thought that we might as well go see Elmore Leonard, who probably deserves all this attention more than Chuck Palahniuk does. We thought maybe they'd let us stay in the auditorium after all, and maybe they wouldn't. Either way, we'd get to see someone read for free. We gambled, but it didn't seem like much of a gamble because Elmore was fantastic. I'm semi-embarrassed to admit this, but I think it's kind of funny now: I thought Elmore Leonard was young and black. I really knew nothing about him. In fact, he's very old and very white, and is a charming and engaging storyteller and speaker. I loved that he didn't stick to a script. He just meandered, telling stories about his life in literature and movies. He was so funny -- I kept writing things down. At one point, he was talking about a character but couldn't remember which book he was in. Then he forgot the title of a book: "You know, the one in '05..." The audience kept supplying answers for him, and he said, "my readings become more participatory as I get older."

Random notes: Before he writes, Leonard picks up one of his old books and opens to a random page. He reads a passage so he can get his own rhythm in his head.

He talked about his son, who just scored a two-book deal. The son once went to jail in Italy for stealing a taxi.

Someone asked him when he started writing, and he said that in fifth grade he wrote a play influenced by All Quiet on the Western Front. "Do I wish I had that now!" he said. "I could sell it!"

He got 84 rejections for something, after he was already an established writer. But he said, "I have a good time writing. I really do." "I write what I want. You can't have a better job than that."

I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at a reading. And they didn't kick us out of the auditorium. We stayed there while the director of the reading series told us that they had about 300 more people than they expected for Chuck's reading. We watched people file in and fill every seat in the house. Then we had a "rain delay" while the library people set up a video screen out in the lobby. I thought, "there's no way Chuck Palahniuk is worth all this attention." But he absolutely was.

He came onstage, and he reminded me of the guy in that interior decorator show -- the guy who says, "see you later, decorator!" He wore a white button-up shirt and high-waisted black pants, and his diction was generally creepy. I kind of knew what to expect from the reading because I read an article about him in Rolling Stone a while ago. But I still wasn't prepared for it.

He read fan letters and answered questions in between each story. The fan letters were funny and sad -- one was about a person who had an internship at Warner Brothers, and whose job it was to stamp fan letters with "return to sender". He eventually started stealing the letters and writing back. Another was from someone who is making a musical based on Night of the Living Dead. The third was from a man with too much extra skin.

He gave free books and threw bridesmaids' bouquets of fake flowers to question-askers. He promised to send "delightful" packages to all the people who wore wedding dresses. At the end of the reading, he and his assistant threw fake plastic severed limbs and dog-toy hamburgers at the crowd.

But then there was his work: two stories that were wonderful and terrible and utterly compelling. I never once looked at the time and wished he would hurry up. The first, "Cold Calling", was a "tour-only" story, never published anywhere. The second, "Guts", is notorious. It's profane, stressful, gut-wrenching and its most amazing feature is that it reminds you what it was like to be a stupid kid. (Luckily not quite as stupid as the kids in the story.) "Guts" is published somewhere, but it was the combination of the words and his patient, semi-creepy reading style that put it over the top. (The top of what? I don't know.)

The whole thing was visceral -- that's the word I kept thinking. When we left the library I didn't want to read or see anything -- it was like just after you come out of the theater after a really great movie, when all you want to do is wander around and keep absorbing it.

The thing that got me was the earnestness, the sweetness, of Chuck talking about the people he writes about. He said that he writes because he's going to die, and so are we, and so is everyone he loves. And through his writing maybe he can keep a little part of those people alive. He may have been bullshitting us, but he seemed to completely believe it. And when he worked at the Freightliner factory, and wrote Fight Club at the same time, he said he was happy if, on top of working and being alive and doing what he had to do, he wrote one sentence a day. That was good enough. He had this aura of care, for himself and for everyone else. And, as cheesy as it sounds now, I left feeling like we're all in this together -- Chuck, and the guy with too much extra skin, and the medical student whose hazing included passing out and waking up naked and sewn into the stomach of a dead horse, and the first-day people on the TV sets who were told to "wash the gels" -- sheets of colored, hardened gelatin that immediately dissolved and went down the drain when put in cold water. And the woman who invited all the Brownies in her troop over to try out the amazing vibrating heating pad she discovered. And the people who leapt, arms outstretched, to catch plastic severed limbs. It's a weird world, but it's comforting to think that we don't always have to navigate it alone.