Open Book

This is where the stillborn babies and dead children go,” whispers Chuck Palahniuk. We’re in the children’s tower, a five-story shaft in the massive Portland Memorial Mausoleum, one of Palahniuk’s favorite landmarks in Oregon’s largest city. Under the glow of a distant skylight, a cherubic fountain tinkles away in the center of the room, ringed by pink marble nameplates that stack impressively, tragically, out of view. In cubbies, on small shelves, parents have left flowers and windup toys. Members of the city’s Cacophony Society -- a group dedicated to what Palahniuk, a former participant, describes as “experiential potlucks” -- once visited the tower and, he says with characteristic delight, “wound up all the toys and released them at the same time.”

Spend enough time with Palahniuk and you come to expect these kinds of statements, this delivery: genuine wonder mixed with a wicked black sense of humor. We wander the corridors of the cavernous mausoleum, surrounded by countless shelves, and Palahniuk pauses in front of an open vault shrouded by a curtain. “They say the worst sound in the world is when they take a casket out of its berth and, as it tips, the entire liquefied contents rush to the lower end. Just bones and formaldehyde.” He tests a doorknob at random -- he tests all the doorknobs -- and when one turns, he strides into an empty, unlit storage room. “Sometimes this is where they hold the indigent bodies,” he says. “They put them in plastic-lined cardboard boxes, and you’ll go in and all the boxes will be collapsed onto each other.”

The gigantic, maze-like mausoleum (“popular for suicides,” attests Palahniuk) served as a key setting for his book Survivor, and he used to write here, in one of the many empty sanctuaries or one of the dank-looking armchairs that are scattered around. “I would just find a big one, one that didn’t stink so much,” he says with a shrug. “They’ve had water problems for years.” Fifteen years ago Palahniuk even brought his partner here on their first date. The Cacophony Society had staged a scavenger hunt inside the mausoleum and he, along with a hundred others, came dressed in mourning black, carrying calla lilies. “We just got lost, absorbed into the building. You couldn’t hear another person at all,” he says. And his partner? “Oh, he hated it.”

This tour of the mausoleum is the first interview Palahniuk has ever granted to the gay press; his sexuality has previously been either largely unknown or the subject of endless rumor. But I sense no apprehension during our time together. A former machinist, Palahniuk moves with athletic purpose, as if we need to be somewhere. He’s thin and thoughtful, drives a red pickup truck, and wears a black T-shirt that reads "Disappointed" in Disney font. Praise comes easy to him -- praise for other authors, for his mentor and writing teacher Tom Spanbauer, for people with obsessions and passions. And with his company comes a strange -- though, as I would learn, not absolute -- sense of permission, as though no subject matter were out of bounds: the utility of carrots as dildos or the artifacts found on the floors of sex clubs. “I feel a comfort and absurdity and freedom that comes in the face of life,” he says. “No mistake will last forever -- all those bad or good choices you made, you’ll still end up here.”

A bright nihilism pervades Palahniuk’s risky, propulsive novels -- including Fight Club, Choke (which has been made into a feature film due out August 1), and his latest, Snuff, about the making of the world’s biggest gang bang. But for all their excessive situations and willful transgressions, these whiplash entertainments capture a poignant (if extreme and predominantly male) search for new forms of social interaction. “All my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people,” Palahniuk writes in Stranger Than Fiction, his collection of nonfiction. “People want to see new ways of connecting. See How to Make an American Quilt or Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Of course, they are all women’s stories. We don’t see a lot of models for male social interaction. There’s sports and barn raisings. And now fight clubs,” a phenomenon Palahniuk invented and one that persists.