Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Almost California

The infection on my shaved head is finally starting to heal when I get the package in the mail today.

Here's the screenplay based on my first novel, Fight Club.

It's from 20th Century Fox. The agent in New York said this would happen. It's not like I wasn't warned. I was even a little part of the process. I went down to Los Angeles and sat through two days of story conferences where we jerked the plot around. The people at 20th Century Fox got me a room at the Century Plaza. We drove through the studio backlot. They pointed out Arnold Schwarzenegger. My hotel room had a giant whirlpool tub, and I sat in the middle of it and waited most of an hour for it to fill enough that I could turn on the bubble jets. In my hand was my little bottle of mini-bar gin.

The infection on my head was from the day before I was going to Hollywood. I was getting flown to LAX, so what I did is run down to the Gap and try to buy a pumpkin-colored polo shirt. The idea was to look Southern Californian.

The infection was from not reading the directions on a tube of men's depilatory. This is like Nair or Neet, but extra-strong, for black men to shave their faces with.

Right on the tube of Magic brand men's depilatory, it says in all caps: DO NOT USE WITH A RAZOR. This is even underlined. The infection was not the fault of the package designers at Magic. Fast-forward to me sitting in my Century Plaza whirlpool tub. Water rushes in, but the tub is so big that even after half an hour, I'm just sitting there with my gin and my shaved head with my butt in a little puddle of warm water. The walls of the tub are marble, chilled to ice-cold by the air conditioning. The little almond soaps are already packed in my suitcase.

The check from the movie option is already in my bank account.

The bathroom is lined with huge mirrors and indirect lighting, so I can see myself from every angle, naked and wallowing in an inch of water with my drink getting warm. This is everything I wanted to make real. The whole time you're writing, some less-than-Zen little polyp of your brain wants to be flying first-class to LAX. You want to pose for book-jacket photos. You want for there to be a media escort standing at the gate when you get off the plane, and you want to be chauffeured, not delivered, but chauffeured from dazzling interview to glittering book-signing event.

This is the dream. Admit it. Probably, you'd be more shallow than that. Probably, you'd want to be trading toenail secrets with Demi Moore in the green room just before you go onstage as a guest on the David Letterman show.

Yeah. Well, welcome to the market for literary fiction.

Your book has about a hundred days on the bookstore shelf before it's an official failure.

After that, the stores start returning the books to your publisher and prices start to fall. Books don't move. Books go to the shredder.

Your little chunk of your heart, the little first novel you wrote, your heart gets slashed 70 percent, and still nobody wants it.

Then you find yourself at the Gap trying on pastel knit shirts and squinting when you look in the mirror so you look almost good. Almost California. There's the movie deal to support-your hope is, now, that will save your book. Just because a big publisher is doing my first novel, that doesn't make me attractive. Lazy and stupid come to mind. When it comes to being attractive and fun to be around, I just can't compete. Stepping off the airplane in Los Angeles with my hair sprayed and wearing a salmon-colored polo shirt was not going to help.

Having the publicist at the big publishing house call everybody and tell them I was attractive and fun was only going to give people false hope.

The only thing worse than showing up at LAX ugly is showing up ugly but showing signs that you really tried to look good. You gave it your best effort but this is the best you could do. Your hair's cut and skin's tanned, your teeth are flossed and the hair in your nose is tweezed, but you still look ugly. You're wearing a 100 percent cotton casual knit shirt from the Gap. You gargled. You used eyedrops and deodorant, but you still come off the plane missing a few chromosomes.

That wasn't going to happen to me.

The idea was to make sure nobody thought I was even trying to look good. The idea was to wear the clothes I wore every day. To remove any risk of failed hairstyling, I'd shave my head.

This wasn't the first time I'd shaved my head. Most of the time I was writing Fight Club I had that blue, shaved-head look. Then, what can I say, my hair grew back. It was cold. I had hair when it came time to take my book-jacket photo, not that hair helped.

Even when they took my picture for the jacket, the photographer made it clear the pictures would turn out ugly, and it was not her fault.

So I left all the new colors of polo shirts including pumpkin, terra cotta, saffron, and celadon at the Gap, and I went and didn't read the directions on a tube of men's depilatory. I frosted my head with the stuff, and I started to hack at my scalp with a razor. The only thing worse you could do is get water mixed in the depilatory. So I ran hot water over my head.

Imagine your head slashed with razor cuts and then throwing lye on the cuts.

Tomorrow, I was going to Hollywood. That night, I couldn't get my head to stop bleeding. Little bits of toilet paper were stuck all over my swelled-up scalp. It was a sort of papier-mâché look, with my brains inside. I felt better when my head started to scab, but then the red parts were still swollen. The blue stubble of hair started pushing up from underneath scabs. The ingrown hairs made little whiteheads I had to squeeze.

It was: The Elephant Man goes to Hollywood.

The people at the airline hustled me onboard, fast, like a donor organ. When I reclined my seat back, my scabs stuck to the little paper headrest cover. After our touchdown, the flight attendant had to peel it off. This probably wasn't the peak experience of her day, either.

This is why I write.

The infected head thing just got worse. Everyone meeting me looked legendary, like all the guys were JFK Jr. All the women were Uma Thurman. At all the restaurants we went to, execs from Warner Brothers and Tri-Star would come over and talk about their latest project.

This is so why I write.

Nobody made the mistake of eye contact with me. They all talked about the latest buzz.

The producer for the Fight Club movie drove me around the Fox backlot. We saw where they filmed NYPD Blue. I said how I didn't watch television. This was not the best news to let slip.

We went to the Malibu Colony. We went to Venice Beach. The one place I wanted to go was the Getty Museum, but you have to book an appointment a month in advance.

So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn't funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it.

My head would just bleed and bleed. Whoever was lowest in the pecking order, I had to ride in their car. They showed me those concrete hand- and footprints, and they stood off to one side discussing the grosses for Twister and Mission: Impossible while I wandered around the same as the rest of the tourists with their heads bowed looking for Marilyn Monroe.

They drove me through Brentwood and Bel-Air and Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades.

They left me at the hotel where I had two hours before I had to be ready for dinner. There I was, and there was the mini-bar just asking to be violated, and there was a bathroom bigger than where I live. The bathroom was lined with mirror, and everywhere, there I was, all naked with the eruptions on my head finally draining clear liquid. The little hotel gin bottle in my hand. The gigantic bathtub kept filling and filling, but never got more than an inch deep.

All those years you write and write. You sit in the dark and say, someday. A book contract. A jacket photo. A book tour. A Hollywood movie. And someday you get them, and it's not how you planned.

Then you get the screenplay for your book in the mail, and it says: "Fight Club by Jim Uhls." He's the screenwriter. Way underneath that, in parentheses, it says: Based on the novel by you.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can't control life, at least you can control your version. Because even sitting in my puddle of warm Los Angeles water, I was already thinking what I'd tell my friends when they asked about this trip. I'd tell them all about my infection and Malibu and the bottomless bathtub, and they'd say:

You should write that down.