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.