Chuck Palahniuk - Make Something Up

Contents

Stories youll never forget just try from literatures most transgressive author

Twenty-one stories and a novella that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display. In Zombies, the best and brightest of a high 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-colour joke to his dying father, while in Tunnel of Love, a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing relief to dying clients. And in Excursion, fans will be thrilled to find a side of Tyler Durden never seen before in a precusor story to Fight Club.

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

Chuck Palahniuk is the author of fourteen best-selling novels Beautiful You, Doomed, Damned, Tell-All, Pygmy, Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Diary, Lullaby, Choke, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, and Fight Club. He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees and the non-fiction collection Stranger Than Fiction.

He lives in the Pacific Northwest. Visit him on the web at chuckpalahniuk.net

Fight Club

Survivor

Invisible Monsters

Choke

Lullaby

Fugitives and Refugees

Diary

Stranger Than Fiction

Haunted

Rant

Snuff

Pygmy

Tell-All

Damned

Doomed

Beautiful You

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781448189793
Version 1.0

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Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

Jonathan Cape is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright Chuck Palahniuk 2015

Chuck Palahniuk has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 This book is a work of fiction.

This book is a work of fiction.

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2015

www.vintage-books.co.uk

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 didnt have a clue what his jokes were about, but I laughed anyways. Down at the barbershop, it didnt 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 youve heard this one before The way my old man tells it, he walks into the oncologists office and he says, After the chemotherapy, will I be able to play the violin?

In response, the oncologist says, Its metastasized. Youve 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, youve 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. Hes still every Saturday down by the barbershop telling jokes even if now hes bald as a cue ball. I mean, hes skinny as a bald skeleton, and hes 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. Hes no Edgar Bergen. The mans skinny as a Halloween skeleton and bald and going to be dead by six weeks so it dont matter what he says, folks are going to hee-haw like donkeys just out of their genuine affection for him.

But, seriously, Im not doing him justice. Its my fault if this doesnt come across, but my old man is funnier than he sounds. Maybe his sense of humor is a talent I didnt inherit. Back when I was his little Charlie McCarthy, the whole time I was growing up, he used to ask me, Knock-knock?

Id say, Whos there?

Hed say, Old Lady

Id say, Old Lady, who?

And hed say, Wow, I didnt know you could yodel!

Me, I didnt get it. I was so stupid, I was seven years old and still stuck in the first grade. I didnt 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. Alls my old man will say about her is how she was a Real Looker who just couldnt 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, howd 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 whats 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, Whats a Count Dracula? Id just get a big laugh ready for when he tells me, A Ham-pire!

And when he says, Knock-knock

And I say, Whos there? And he says, Radio.

And I say, Radio who? And hes ALREADY started to bust a gut when he says, Radio not Im going to cum in your mouth Thenwhat the hellI just keep laughing. My whole growing up I figure Im just too ignorant to appreciate a good joke. Me, my teachers still havent covered long division and all the multiple-cation tables so its not my old mans fault I dont know whats 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 youre born its 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 hes not eating a bite of the red-flavored Jell-O they serve for dinner.