Fugatives & Refugees

(a postcard from 1999)

In July of 1995,I sat down with a group of friends and showed them a type-written manuscript called Fight Club. We were drinking beer, and I asked everyone to make a wish on the manuscript. Everyone there had said something, done something that went into the story, and it just seemed right they should get a reward.

Nobody made a wish except my friend Ina. She said, "I want to meet Brad Pitt."

A year later, in 1996, the manuscript was a book. That Saturday night I was with friends at the annual falling-star-watching party thrown by Dennis and Linni Stovall, up on Dixie Mountain Road. Someone brought a copy of the local newspaper with an article about the book. My friends Greg and Sara were reading it in the Stovalls' kitchen and started to laugh.

When I asked, "What was so funny?"

They said, "He's following us."

In the article it said how a Fight Club movie might be made, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. It turns out my friend Sara dated Brad in high school and went to the prom with him. Her husband, Greg, had been his college roommate.

Two years later the movie was filming in Los Angeles, and I went to watch with some friends. My friend Ina met Brad. Most mornings, we ate breakfast at a place called Eat Well in Santa Monica. Our last morning in town, our waiter came to the table. He'd shaved his head the night before, he told us, so he could work as an extra in a movie they were shooting in San Pedro. A movie called, well, you guess.

A year later, in 1999, a friend and I were flying down to Los Angeles to see a rough cut of the film. In the gate area, in Portland, we were waiting to board our flight. Near us was a man wearing a fifties-style brimmed hat, a sort-of fedora with a feather in the hatband. I joked to my friend Mike that he should get a hat just like it. A few minutes later, we end up sitting next to this man in the plane. During the two-hour flight I pull out an emergency pocket card and tell Mike how the director, David Fincher, is having parody pocket cards made for the film. The parody cards would show people fighting for oxygen masks and panicking as their plane crashed.

The man next to us, in the hat, we never talked to him.

Two days later, in Los Angeles, David Fincher is driving me around to the ad agencies that are promoting the film's release. At an agency called Paper, Rock, Scissors, David says I've got to meet the man who designed the movie poster.

They bring him in—and it's the man from the plane, the man in the hat. He and I, we just stand there open-mouthed, staring at each other. Sitting next to me on the flight, he'd overheard me talking about the pocket card but didn't speak up. He thought maybe he'd misunderstood, he didn't think it was possible we'd meet in such a random way.