Stranger than fiction

• Chuck Palahniuk makes Portland’s real-life oddballs the stars of his new book

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Jul 8, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

At the Portland Memorial Mausoleum at Southeast 14th Avenue and Bybee Boulevard, Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk wanders through the honeycombed necropolis, marveling at the wide range of monument styles and the permanently low temperature.

“Unofficially,” he whispers, “I’m told this is the best place to take acid in Portland.”

The mausoleum looks like a giant apartment building that sits above Oaks Bottom. White concrete, gray skies, black water.

“On a rainy day, this place is great. It’s the mall of the dead. It’s the Clackamas Town Center of the dead. If they would let me walk my dogs here, I’d be in heaven.”

Last summer, the author of the best seller “Fight Club” and four other novels revisited some of the scenes of his youth. Palahniuk (pronounced “PAULA-nick”) had been commissioned to write one of the Crown Journeys series of literary travel guides. Not for him prissy Provincetown or pompous Rome. His subject is Portland, the city that made him the most genial transgressor in the literary world.

“Fugitives and Refugees,” available July 15, is the result, and it’s just the sort of book Portland needs. Because of its controversial nature, the 41-year-old likes to think of the book as a “bomb” that will sit on the shelves of tourist shops next to the Pendleton blankets and boysenberry jam.

Palahniuk has a worldwide following.

“Ninety-nine percent of the readers will never come (to Portland), so it’s an armchair adventure,” he says. There are chapters on bizarro collections (the Kidd Toy Museum, the Self-Cleaning House), sex clubs straight and gay (Ace of Hearts, Zippers Down), haunted places (the Rose and Raindrop pub, the Heathman Hotel), shopping (the “Bins,” the ReBuilding Center), and dozens of oddities that set Portland apart from America’s cookie-cutter cities.

He speaks fondly of his first visit to the mausoleum, for a scavenger hunt in the mid-1990s held by the Cacophony Society, a bunch of urban pranksters. “There were 75 people dressed as Addams Family members holding calla lilies, and in less than 10 minutes we were all lost Ñ no one could find anything.”

Sex, drugs and death

As a writer, Palahniuk delights in high weirdness, but his strength is linking it to everyday life. And Portland has been the perfect host since he moved here in 1981, just out of high school in Burbank in southeastern Washington. (Everyone else was going to Seattle. He wanted a fresh start.)

After getting a journalism degree, he ended up in a frustrating job as a technical writer at truck maker Freightliner.

He wrote “Invisible Monsters” in his spare time, then “Fight Club,” which became his first published novel in 1996. While on the book tour for “Fight Club,” he wrote “Survivor” (1999). And somewhere in his closet is a 700-page manuscript he rarely mentions, also from the Freightliner days.

One of the reasons that “Fight Club” broke through was because it rendered postmodernism in stark imagery Ñ catalog furniture, liposuction-fat soap, collapsing tall buildings Ñ rather than in abstract concepts. As with his take on Portland, he’s more interested in the funny stories that people tell one another and the truths they convey than in theory and generalization.

He’s an Internet-age author. He uses it for research, and his fans use it to keep up with him. How else would we know that last September he told a crowd at a book signing in Tempe, Ariz., that writing is his greatest form of therapy?

Some things are personal, though. Palahniuk is married but never talks about his wife. For this, he cites writer David Sedaris, who acknowledged that he has alienated his family by turning them into comic fodder. “It’s separated them, and I’m determined that’s not going to happen,” Palahniuk says.

He does, however, refer constantly to his friends. Finding them is not hard.

“I regret publishing the names of my friends on the acknowledgments page of “Fight Club” because I never thought that “Fight Club” would really turn into anything. Now they get calls from all over the world, strangers saying, ‘How can I meet Chuck? Can you give him my manuscript?’ ”

Ina Gebert, one of those acknowledged, is a model for the Marla Singer character in “Fight Club” (played by Helena Bonham Carter in the movie).

“He is as he presents himself to be,” Gebert said recently. “He has no hidden agenda.” She met him at Freightliner, where he was always cracking jokes that no one got. “When I arrived, the others said, ‘Chuck, finally, someone who gets you,’ ” she says.

“I don’t see as much of him as before his fame and fortune,” she says, but they do talk almost daily.

Palahniuk is loyal to his friends. He recently invited Gebert to come on the road with him to Spokane and Idaho, where he was doing research for a magazine article (she couldn’t). “Last fall, in San Francisco, we were supposed to go to some party, so he took me to Saks and bought me an outfit worth, like, $700.”

Geoff Pleat met Palahniuk in 1995 at the gym and is partly responsible for Tyler Durden (the Brad Pitt character in the “Fight Club” movie).

“He was good at getting his friends to do crazy stuff,” Pleat says ruefully. “I think he was a little star-struck for a while.”

Pleat now lives in Seattle and doesn’t see much of Palahniuk. Having just been laid off as a software developer, there’s a touch of dark humor when Pleat says, “He says, ‘Don’t sell out, quit your job and don’t worry about money.’ He comes off like Mr. Crazy Fight Club, but he never screwed up anything important to him, like his writing or his family.”

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