Chuck Palahniuk's Crazy Stories (Compilation) - Joe Rogan Experience

It's harming fiction, harming literature. You can't explore the darker ideas. You know, oh, you want to see me crucify myself right now? Yeah. Okay. This is kind of the career ending moment. For several years I was in a writer's workshop. And the core group of us had been meeting since 1990. So this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old. And gradually people were asking each other not to use certain words. First, you know, nobody really used the N word, but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop. And then in a story I used the word faggot. And a very good friend of mine said, you're not bringing that word into workshop. You're not writing anything with the F word. And it just became more and more tightly strictured that way. And so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other. And one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strayed, who had written a book called Wild, which was a hugely successful book. It was chosen as an Oprah book. And it will be on bookstore shelves for the rest of history. Cheryl's book Wild. But while she was writing it, she had written a segment about how as a child, she would be sat on the sofa with her grandfather. And her grandfather taught her how to masturbate him. And so as a child, she would masturbate her grandfather until he achieved orgasm. And then later she would find these featherless birds that had fallen out of a nest. And she picked one up and she knew it would die. So she crushed it between her bare hands. This is a very small child. And she wrote how as that bird died crushed between her hands, its death rose, its spasms of death felt exactly like her grandfather's penis ejaculating in her little hand. Whoa. That was the best thing she ever wrote. And her editor at Knopf said, that is not going in this book because we want this book to be a big book. And if we see you jerking off your grandfather and then killing baby birds, that is not going to make Oprah Winfrey happy. So it was a magnificent piece of writing and a magnificent kind of parallel and awareness for a child to have. And this juxtaposition of sexual abuse and death was magnificent. Oh my God, it worked on every level. But the publisher said this is not going to be in the book. Did she send it to you or did she show it to you? She brought it to the workshop and she read it. There was even a newspaper reporter present there. And we all realized it was fantastically powerful. But then she said, they won't take this. This can't go in. This is not the first workshop I've been bumped out of. The first workshop I was in was a lot of very nice ladies. And I was probably 28. And I had written a scene in which a young man has done up an inflatable sex doll so it looks exactly like the woman he's obsessed with. And during the seduction of this sex doll, he accidentally snags the back of it with a zipper of its dress. And he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air. So he's got to copulate faster and faster to try to achieve orgasm before this thing completely goes flat. And at the end of the scene, he's standing there with this completely deflated sex doll hanging off of his erection like this surrender flag. And of course, his mother walks into the room. And after I wrote that scene, the leader of the workshop I was in, my first workshop, she took me aside afterwards and she said, the other writers in the workshop no longer feel safe around you. She really did. She said, you've written something that really frightens them and they would like you to politely leave the workshop and not come back. And so that's when I started with Tom Spanbauer's workshop, in which almost anything went. That seems to be if anybody's going to appreciate that, it's going to be creative writers. It's not my mind. I'm delving into the de-recesses, if I'm lucky, if I'm doing it right, of your mind, of something like comedians. They'll say, oh my gosh, that happened to you too. And a lot of times, there are things that people have never ever talked about. I tell a classic anecdote. After I had read the GUT story at an event, a woman came up and she was a middle-aged woman. She was about my age. And she said, I really love that you read that story about how you got your anus prolapsed while masturbating in a swimming pool, which is not my story, but I'm the one that read it. So that's the one, I'm the one that they're picturing in this horrendous situation. And she says, since you can tell that story, I'm going to tell you a story. And she said how when she was seven years old, she was in second grade, and she was in an organization called the Brownies, which is a precursor to the Girl Scouts. You wear a brown dress, a little brown hat, you get these little merit badges. And she said, one day I had a stomach ache, and my mom kept me home from school. And we had this heating pad, it must have been in the 1960s, and this heating pad had this vibrating function. And she put me face down on this heating pad on my stomach. And I fell asleep, and while I was asleep, this vibrating, warm heating pad must have slid down between my legs. She says, because I woke up with the most amazing feeling, a feeling like I'd never felt before. Oh my God, it felt so good. And so next time it was my turn to host the Brownies, I said, Brownies, you've got to try this heating pad. And she says, all the Brownies, they turned the heating pad on, the vibrating heating pad, and they rode it like a pony all afternoon. And she said, it was like Sex and the City for seven-year-old girls. They could not get enough of this heating pad. And they were all riding this heating pad, and they had a great time. And she said, and for the first time in my life, I was the most popular girl in my class. And I was the girl that all the girls wanted to play with. And for every Brownie troop meeting, it was at my house. And I was the leader until the day that my mother came home from work early. And she caught us with a heating pad. And she sent the other Brownies home. And she whipped the cord out of the wall. She just ripped it out of the socket. And she started to beat me with it. And she beat me with that cord. And she beat me. And she said, you fucking piece of shit, you dirty whore. What kind of a fucking whore am I raising? You whore. And she beat me, and she beat me. And she says, this woman who's my age now, she says, I have not had an orgasm since I was seven years old. And then she goes, but if you can tell that swimming pool story about how you got hurt jacking off underwater, she says, I can tell my heating pad story. And I can tell that story until I can make it funny. And then maybe someday I can go back to my mom and I can say, do you remember that heating pad we used to have? And it'll be complete. Holy shit. And so, see, see, see, see, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to create the opening for people to tell these stories that they never thought that they could tell. Because that's the way in which they're going to resolve these stories. And they're going to master these stories. If someone's telling a joke, if someone's on stage talking about someone who's fat and there's a fat person in the front row, that joke will bomb. It just, yeah. But that's because people are good people overall. You know, they recognize that they don't want to cause pain. Another really odd comic, David Sedara's story, is that he always told me, when you're on the road, don't read from your current book. Always read from the next book. Because it's a way of road testing the stories and finding out which ones work and should go into the next book. And in doing so, he was telling this story about being in this forensic laboratory as an autopsy was taking place. And this autopsy table was adjacent to this huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite from this lunchroom. And then the lunchroom were the rest of the forensic staff. They were all eating their lunches. They were eating a bunch of sandwiches and cans of coke and barbecued potato chips. And they were watching through the window as this absolutely perfect 12-year-old boy was being autopsy'd. And just hours before this kid, like two hours before this kid had been riding his bicycle, he'd fallen over, he'd hit his head on the curb, and now two hours later, he was dead. He was dead without almost a scratch on him. Just this perfect, naked, dead 12-year-old boy on the autopsy table. And as the technicians eating their lunch, watching it through a window, they watch as the pathologist in sizes around the top of the kid's face, at the top of the forehead, the hairline, and peels the face down like peeling an orange, peels the entire face off of the skull of this little boy, and leaves the face around the neck like a mask, like a rubber mask. And this exposes this liver-colored dark red musculature of the child's underlying face. And this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich, he points this out, and he says, see that? That there? That's the color of red that I want to paint our rec room. Holy shit. And when Sedaris told that story in front of 600 people, it was dead silent. And you could hear people weeping. People were crying, and they were hating David Sedaris in that moment. And so I had to laugh. I laughed really loud like a donkey. And it was amazing how the hatred in that auditorium swung from hating David, who they did not want to hate, to hating this jackass over here who was actually laughing. And so I threw myself on the sword for David, and that story never went in any book. Wow. Did the story not go in any book just because of the reaction by the audience, or just the uncomfortable moment? He just decided? Did you speak to him about it? No, I didn't. Not afterwards. It was just such an awkward, painful thing. I would never kind of throw it back in his face. Right. But to my knowledge, that was the only time the story was told. Do you have those scattered about? Are there scenes where you wrote and you just sat and looked at him and went, no. I just got to put that one somewhere else. Set that aside. Jokes that I told where I got hissed by 800 people. And you know, if you can live through those moments, you realize you can live through a lot. If you can be hated by 1,100 people at a Barnes & Noble on Union Square, yeah, you can be hated by your mother. It's okay. Now, when those people come to see you, how many of those people are fans of literature, and how many of those people are specifically fans of your work? There would be a difference. Like the people who are fans of your work would at least expect some uncomfortable moments. And for the most part, they tend to be more or less just fans of my work. And still, still hiss. Oh, yeah. But again, they're hissing on behalf of someone. They're not hissing for themselves. You know, I made this horrible cheap shot, and they always know a cheap shot. People always know a cheap shot. I was commenting about how in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote had made this observation that Americans don't like true beauty, true classical natural beauty. They want to see a very plain person who has been so groomed, so exercised, so made up, so stylized that she can kind of pass as this amazing, strange beauty. That's what Americans want, because natural classic beauty is not egalitarian. You're either born with it or you're not. They want to see a plain person who has been transformed. And to make my point, at the end of the story, I made a cheap shot. I said, and that's why we have Sarah Jessica Parker. And I said this in New York. And in New York, Sarah Jessica Parker is worshipped like a god. And that whole crowd hissed and booed and did everything but throw excrement at me. Wow. But then later in line, half of them came up and whispered, that was really funny. Another thing is I'm really, really conflicted about the nature of my creativity, this idea that in journalism school, they call the theory seduce and betray, that when you go into an interview situation, your goal is to gain the trust of that person and to get them to reveal something very intimate that you're going to betray by revealing to the public. So you're basically going in there to charm them and then to hurt them. And so much of my creative process is that way, because for example, the gut story, the story in which the guy puts the carrot up his butt, that was my best friend at the time in late 20s. And he got fantastically drunk and he told me that carrot story. And I honestly believe he had never told anybody the carrot story. And I kept that story in my mind for, you know, 10, 15, almost probably 20 years until I found a way to put it with three similar stories and make a larger piece out of it. And the first time I read that story, I hadn't seen him in maybe a couple of years, this friend. And I look across this big auditorium and there he is. And I'm telling his carrot story in front of hundreds and hundreds of people. And the look on his face, he's just stricken. And he hasn't talked to me since. And this is why even David's. David, did you use his name? No. Then fuck him. No, but. What's wrong with him? People still feel betrayed. Get over it. You need to hang out with more comedians. If he was a comic, you'd be laughing. Well, David Sedaris has told me, he said his family is very reluctant to share their lives with him anymore because he's kind of made them involuntary public figures and they have to deal with a fallout from these stories about them. And really only his brother and his sister, Amy, have kind of been able to spin this in a good way. But it alienates a lot of people. I had a hired car from Philadelphia to New York once on tour. And as we're going past Liberty Hall in Philadelphia, this great guy with a Philly accent driving the car, he points at Liberty Hall and he says, that building has stood for 300 years. I bet you can't tell me why. And I just looked and I said, because the bricks are laid in Flemish Bond, I think that's probably it. The bricks are offset in such a way that they bond in the center. It's called Flemish Bond. And the guy's so silent. Nobody's ever answered the question. And his father was a bricklayer and he was so proud. And he goes, you're right. Nobody's ever said Flemish Bond. That's why it still stands. And we were best friends. Just talking like crazy all the way into Manhattan. We get into Manhattan. There's two guys walking down the street. The guy goes, oh, Christ, I hate coming to New York. Ah, the fags. And I said, well, you know, I'm married to a man. And faggot is pretty much my middle name. And that poor guy had to do this whole science. Re-juggling of everything that the guy who knew Flemish Bond was also one of them. And it was one of those wonderful kind of icky but necessary moments. And, you know, they're horrible, but, you know, things are better afterwards. You must have loved that moment, though. You? No, it was a horrible moment because I felt like I was throwing away any kind of chatty conversational relationship I had with this guy. It seemed like just the salt of the earth, great funny guy. And it was just kind of going out on a limb and saying, okay, you know, he's going to hate my guts after this.