At a first look a business card doesn’t seem like a powerful marketing tool, but it is one of the most an important and cheap parts of the marketing plan. Just think about the production cost of a business card, very cheap, and now think of what an impact it can have. Of course, do not expect to say everything about your company, just to make a very good first impression that will remain in the customer’s head.
Choose a business card with a design that matches your company’s profile. Just think if you are a financial consultant, or a Forex market broker, a business card with pink flowers will end up in the first garbage can. That is why when you choose your design try to choose the image that your company wants to promote. Usually that means you would have to choose from around 5 styles.
1. Simple style - The card in this category is usually printed black on white. You choose this type when your potential clients are serious people that don’t like anything else except fact and figures.
2. Picture style - When you put your picture on the card you will make the client to remember you better. Also you can choose to put on the card a picture with your product, remember, a picture makes more than a1000 words.
3. Multi - functional style - A business card makes more than you show the address and the phone number of the company. You could print on the back a map of the location of the company, or a calendar. In this way you could make it useful for the people who have it and maybe they won’t throw it away.
4. Touch style - The shape of the card could be unconventional or if it is not made out of cardboard, it could be kept because it is special. You also could give it the shape of your product, lets say a car, and the business card would be easier remembered.
5. Crazy style - this style allows you to make anything you want with the card, anything to draw attention on it.
With all that said, I wish you good luck, and remember to verify 10 times the address and telephone number to be printed correctly.
At a first look a business card doesn’t seem like a powerful marketing tool, but it is one of the most an important and cheap parts of the marketing plan. Just think about the production cost of a business card, very cheap, and now think of what an impact it can have. Of course, do not expect to say everything about your company, just to make a very good first impression that will remain in the customer’s head.
Choose a business card with a design that matches your company’s profile. Just think if you are a financial consultant, or a Forex market broker, a business card with pink flowers will end up in the first garbage can. That is why when you choose your design try to choose the image that your company wants to promote. Usually that means you would have to choose from around 5 styles.
1. Simple style - The card in this category is usually printed black on white. You choose this type when your potential clients are serious people that don’t like anything else except fact and figures.
2. Picture style - When you put your picture on the card you will make the client to remember you better. Also you can choose to put on the card a picture with your product, remember, a picture makes more than a1000 words.
3. Multi - functional style - A business card makes more than you show the address and the phone number of the company. You could print on the back a map of the location of the company, or a calendar. In this way you could make it useful for the people who have it and maybe they won’t throw it away.
4. Touch style - The shape of the card could be unconventional or if it is not made out of cardboard, it could be kept because it is special. You also could give it the shape of your product, lets say a car, and the business card would be easier remembered.
5. Crazy style - this style allows you to make anything you want with the card, anything to draw attention on it.
With all that said, I wish you good luck, and remember to verify 10 times the address and telephone number to be printed correctly.
What makes you a good manager? Did you ever think of that? Is it something you were born with or something you learned in time? A recent study made by Gallup showed some interesting things. The study was made with 80.000 top managers from all around the world. The study has shown that they follow a certain pattern, even though they work in different parts of the world.
1) Top managers has to set the financial goal of the company but leaves the decision on how to reach those goals to the rest of the team
2) Top managers try to offer the employees new challenges. They try to make changes so people don’t get bored at the work place and as productive as they can.
3) The top manager has to understand each employee, to know what are they good at, and give them an assignment that matches their working profile.
In conclusion top managers have to understand people they work with and to stimulate them to reach their professional best at their work place.
What makes you a good manager? Did you ever think of that? Is it something you were born with or something you learned in time? A recent study made by Gallup showed some interesting things. The study was made with 80.000 top managers from all around the world. The study has shown that they follow a certain pattern, even though they work in different parts of the world.
1) Top managers has to set the financial goal of the company but leaves the decision on how to reach those goals to the rest of the team
2) Top managers try to offer the employees new challenges. They try to make changes so people don’t get bored at the work place and as productive as they can.
3) The top manager has to understand each employee, to know what are they good at, and give them an assignment that matches their working profile.
In conclusion top managers have to understand people they work with and to stimulate them to reach their professional best at their work place.
TWO SCREENS INTO my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn't know the material, but he won't let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it's been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I'm running the laptop projector so I'm off to one side of the room, in the dark.
More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood climbing the cracks between my teeth. You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick. Fight club is tomorrow, and I'm not going to miss fight club. Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip. Walter with his signet ring shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, "I'd hate to see what happened to the other guy." The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. I tell Walter I fell. I did this to myself. Before the presentation, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the script each slide cues and when I wanted to run the video segment, my boss says, "What do you get yourself into every weekend?" I just don't want to die without a few scars, I say. It's nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer's showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste. The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the two black eyes of a giant panda from fight club last weekend when you saw him get his head pinched between the concrete floor and the knee of a two-hundred pound stock boy who kept slamming a fist into the bridge of the waiter's nose again and again in flat hard packing sounds you could hear over all the yelling until the waiter caught enough breath and sprayed blood to say, stop. You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends. You saw the kid who works in the copy center, a month ago you saw this kid who can't remember to three-hole-punch an order or put colored slip sheets between the copy packets, but this kid was a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out of an account representative twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp until the kid had to stop. That's the third rule in fight club, when someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over. Every time you see this kid, you can't tell him what a great fight he had. Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club. Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the kid in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn't be talking to the same man. Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows. After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn't piss you off. In the real world, I'm a recall campaign coordinator in a shirt and tie, sitting in the dark with a mouthful of blood and changing the overheads and slides as my boss tells Microsoft how he chose a particular shade of pale cornflower blue for an icon. The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other. It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I'd be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lira is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Tyler never knew his father. Maybe self-destruction is the answer. Tyler and I still go to fight club, together. Fight club is in the basement of a bar, now, after the bar closes on Saturday night, and every week you go and there's more guys there.
Tyler gets under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes. First thing Tyler yells is, "The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. "The second rule about fight club," Tyler yells, "is you don't talk about fight club." Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise. What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women. Tyler standing under the one light in the after-midnight blackness of a basement full of men, Tyler runs through the other rules: two men per fight, one fight at a time, no shoes no shirts, fights go on as long as they have to. "And the seventh rule," Tyler yells, "is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight." Fight club is not football on television. You aren't watching a bunch of men you don't know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex. Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says. Like Tyler says, even a snuffle looks pumped. My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married. I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need. What happens at fight club doesn't happen in words. Some guys need a fight every week. This week, Tyler says it's the first fifty guys through the door and that's it. No more. Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must've had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor. Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, "Cool." I shake the guy's hand and say, good fight. This guy, he says, "How about next week?" I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month? You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive at fight club. When it's you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There's grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn't about looking good. There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved. After my last fight, the guy who fought me mopped the floor while I called my insurance to pre-approve a visit to the emergency room. At the hospital, Tyler tells them I fell down. Sometimes, Tyler speaks for me. I did this to myself. Outside, the sun was coming up. You don't talk about fight club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn't exist. When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you've never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you're capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, "I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can." I didn't want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself. About self-destruction. At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. I looked around and said, okay. Okay, I say, but outside in the parking lot. So we went outside, and I asked if Tyler wanted it in the face or in the stomach. Tyler said, "Surprise me." I said I had never hit anybody. Tyler said, "So go crazy, man." I said, close your eyes. Tyler said, "No." Like every guy on his first night in fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler's jaw like in every cowboy movie we'd ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler's neck. Shit, I said, that didn't count. I want to try it again. Tyler said, "Yeah it counted," and hit me, straight on, pox, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Saturday morning cartoons, right in the middle of my chest and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we'd gotten somewhere we'd never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive. Tyler said, "Cool." I said, hit me again. Tyler said, "No, you hit me." So I hit him, a girl's wide roundhouse to right under his ear, and Tyler shoved me back and stomped the heel of his shoe in my stomach. What happened next and after that didn't happen in words, but the bar closed and people came out and shouted around us in the parking lot. Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything in the world that didn't work, my cleaning that came back with the collar buttons broken, the bank that says I'm hundreds of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. And Marla Singer, who stole the support groups from me. Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered. The first night we fought was a Sunday night, and Tyler hadn't shaved all weekend so my knuckles burned raw from his weekend beard. Lying on our backs in the parking lot, staring up at the one star that came through the streetlights, I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting. Tyler said, his father. Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves. There's nothing personal about who you fight in fight club. You fight to fight. You're not supposed to talk about fight club, but we talked and for the next couple of weeks, guys met in that parking lot after the bar had closed, and by the time it got cold, another bar offered the basement where we meet now. When fight club meets, Tyler gives the rules he and I decided. "Most of you," Tyler yells in the cone of light in the center of the basement full of men, "you're here because someone broke the rules. Somebody told you about fight club." Tyler says, "Well, you better stop talking or you'd better start another fight club because next week you put your name on a list when you get here, and only the first fifty names on the list get in. If you get in, you set up your fight right away if you want a fight. If you don't want a fight, there are guys who do, so maybe you should just stay home. "If this is your first night at fight club," Tyler yells, "you have to fight." Most guys are at fight club because of something they're too scared to fight. After a few fights, you're afraid a lot less. A lot of best friends meet for the first time at fight club. Now I go to meetings or conferences and see faces at conference tables, accountants and junior executives or attorneys with broken noses spreading out like an eggplant under the edges of bandages or they have a couple stitches under an eye or a jaw wired shut. These are the quiet young men who listen until it's time to decide. We nod to each other. Later, my boss will ask me how I know so many of these guys. According to my boss, there are fewer and fewer gentlemen in business and more thugs. The demo goes on.
Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here's a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren't divorced, his father was never home, and here he's looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half a leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter's thinking about a meatless, painfree potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth's desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably he's not.
ONE MORNING, THERE'S the dead jellyfish of a used condom floating in the toilet. This is how Tyler meets Marla. I get up to take a leak, and there against the sort of cave paintings of dirt in the toilet bowl is this. You have to wonder, what do sperm think. This? This is the vaginal vault? What's happening here? All night long, I dreamed I was humping Marla Singer. Marla Singer smoking her cigarette. Marla Singer rolling her eyes. I wake up alone in my own bed, and the door to Tyler's room is closed. The door to Tyler's room is never closed. All night, it was raining. The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures.
When it's raining, we have to pull the fuses. You don't dare turn on the lights. The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a basement. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor. The baseboard moldings are carved and varnished and eighteen inches high. The rain trickles down through the house, and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust.
Everywhere there are rusted nails to step on or snag your elbow on, and there's only one bathroom for the seven bedrooms, and now there's a used condom. The house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down. I asked Tyler how long he's been here, and he said about six weeks. Before the dawn of time, there was an owner who collected lifetime stacks of the National Geographic and Reader's Digest. Big teetering stacks of magazines that get taller every time it rains. Tyler says the last tenant used to fold the glossy magazine pages for cocaine envelopes. There's no lock on the front door from when police or whoever kicked in the door. There's nine layers of wallpaper swelling on the dining-room walls, flowers under stripes under flowers under birds under grasscloth. Our only neighbors are a closed machine shop and across the street, a blocklong warehouse. Inside the house, there's a closet with sevenfoot rollers for rolling up damask tablecloths so they never have to be creased. There's a cedarlined, refrigerated fur closet. The tile in the bathroom is painted with little flowers nicer than most everybody's wedding china, and there's a used condom in the toilet. I've been living with Tyler about a month. I am Joe's White Knuckles. How could Tyler not fall for that. The night before last, Tyler sat up alone, splicing sex organs into Snow White. How could I compete for Tyler's attention. I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection. What's worse is this is all my fault. After I went to sleep last night, Tyler tells me he came home from his shift as a banquet waiter, and Marla called again from the Regent Hotel. This was it, Marla said. The tunnel, the light leading her down the tunnel. The death experience was so cool, Marla wanted me to hear her describe it as she lifted out of her body and floated up. Marla didn't know if her spirit could use the telephone, but she wanted someone to at least hear her last breath. No, but no, Tyler answers the phone and misunderstands the whole situation. They've never met so Tyler thinks it's a bad thing that Marla is about to die. It's nothing of the kind. This is none of Tyler's business, but Tyler calls the police and Tyler races over to the Regent Hotel. Now, according to the ancient Chinese custom we all learned from television, Tyler is responsible for Marla, forever, because Tyler saved Marla's life. If I had only wasted a couple of minutes and gone over to watch Marla die, then none of this would have happened. Tyler tells me how Marla lives in room 8G, on the top floor of the Regent Hotel, up eight flights of stairs and down a noisy hallway with canned television laughter coming through the doors. Every couple seconds an actress screams or actors die screaming in a rattle of bullets. Tyler gets to the end of the hallway and even before he knocks a thin, thin, buttermilk sallow arm slingshots out the door of room 8G, grabs his wrist, and yanks Tyler inside. I bury myself in a leader's Digest. Even as Marla yanks Tyler into her room, Tyler can hear brake squeals and sirens collecting out in front of the Regent Hotel. On the dresser, there's a dildo made of the same soft pink plastic as a million Barbie dolls, and for a moment, Tyler can picture millions of baby dolls and Barbie dolls and dildos injectionmolded and coming off the same assembly line in Taiwan. Marla looks at Tyler looking at her dildo, and she rolls her eyes and says, "Don't be afraid. It's not a threat to you." Marla shoves Tyler back out into the hallway, and she says she's sorry, but he shouldn't have called the police and that's probably the police downstairs right now. In the hallway, Marla locks the door to 8G and shoves Tyler toward the stairs. On the stairs, Tyler and Marla flatten against the wall as police and paramedics charge by with oxygen, asking which door will be 8G. Marla tells them the door at the end of the hall. Marla shouts to the police that the girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster. The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything. "The girl in 8G has no faith in herself," Marla shouts, "and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options." Marla shouts, "Good luck." The police pile up at the locked door to 8G, and Marla and Tyler hurry down to the lobby. Behind them, a policeman is yelling at the door: "Let us help you! Miss Singer, you have every reason to live! Just let us in, Marla, and we can help you with your problems!" Marla and Tyler rushed out into the street. Tyler got Marla into a cab, and high up on the eighth floor of the hotel, Tyler could see shadows moving back and forth across the windows of Marla's room. Out on the freeway with all the lights and the other cars, six lanes of traffic racing toward the vanishing point, Marla tells Tyler he has to keep her up all night. If Marla ever falls asleep, she'll die. A lot of people wanted Marla dead, she told Tyler. These people were already dead and on the other side, and at night they called on the telephone. Marla would go to bars and hear the bartender calling her name, and when she took the call, the line was dead. Tyler and Marla, they were up almost all night in the room next to mine. When Tyler woke up, Marla had disappeared back to the Regent Hotel. I tell Tyler, Marla Singer doesn't need a lover, she needs a case worker. Tyler says, "Don't call this love." Long story short, now Marla's out to ruin another part of my life. Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends. Fine. Neat, I say. Tyler asks, is this a problem for me? I am Joe's Clenching Bowels. No, I say, it's fine. Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. Just great, I say. Really.
M Y B O S S S E N D S me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed. The hole punched through my cheek doesn't ever heal. I'm going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE. Worker bees can leave Even drones can fly away The queen is their slave
You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other hum; butt wipe. Take it, human butt wipe. Do it, butt wipe. Choke it down. Keep it down, baby. Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world. Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I'm saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me. Sigh. Look. Outside the window. A bird. My boss asked if the blood was my blood. The bird flies downwind. I'm writing a little haiku in my head.
Without just one nest A bird can call the world home Life is your career
I'm counting on my fingers: five, seven, five. The blood, is it mine? Yeah, I say. Some of it. This is a wrong answer.
Like this is a big deal. I have two pair of black trousers. Six white shirts. Six pair of underwear. The bare minimum. I go to fight club. These things happen. "Go home," my boss says. "Get changed." I'm starting to wonder if Tyler and Marla are the same person. Except for their humping, every night in Marla's room. Doing it. Doing it. Doing it. Tyler and Marla are never in the same room. I never see them together. Still, you never see me and Zsa Zsa Gabor together, and this doesn't mean we're the same person. Tyler just doesn't come out when Marla's around. So I can wash the pants, Tyler has to show me how to make soap. Tyler's upstairs, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of cloves and burnt hair. Marla's at the kitchen table, burning the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette and calling herself human butt wipe. "I embrace my own festering diseased corruption," Marla tells the cherry on the end of her cigarette. Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. "Burn, witch, burn." Tyler's upstairs in my bedroom, looking at his teeth in my mirror, and says he got me a job as a banquet waiter, part time.
"At the Pressman Hotel, if you can work in the evening," Tyler says. "The job will stoke your class hatred." Yeah, I say, whatever. "They make you wear a black bow tie," Tyler says. "All you need to work there is a white shirt and black trousers." Soap, Tyler. I say, we need soap. We need to make some soap. I need to wash my pants. I hold Tyler's feet while he does two hundred sit-ups. "To make soap, first we have to render fat." Tyler is full of useful information. Except for their humping, Marla and Tyler are never in the same room. If Tyler's around, Marla ignores him. This is familiar ground. "The big sleep, `Valley of the Dogs' style. "Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you." Marla looks at me as if I'm the one humping her and says, "I can't win with you, can I?" Marla goes out the back door singing that creepy "Valley of the Dolls" song. I just stare at her going. There's one, two, three moments of silence until all of Marla is gone from the room. I turn around, and Tyler's appeared. Tyler says, "Did you get rid of her?" Not a sound, not a smell, Tyler's just appeared. "First," Tyler says and jumps from the kitchen doorway to digging in the freezer. "First, we need to render some fat." About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota. Tyler starts pulling out sandwich bags of frozen white stuff and dropping them in the sink. Me, I'm supposed to put a big pan on the stove and fill it most of the way with water. Too little water, and the fat will darken as it separates into tallow. "This fat," Tyler says, "it has a lot of salt so the more water, the better." Put the fat in the water, and get the water boiling. Tyler squeezes the white mess from each sandwich bag into the water, and then Tyler buries the empty bags all the way at the bottom of the trash. Tyler says, "Use a little imagination. Remember all that pioneer shit they taught you in Boy Scouts. Remember your high school chemistry." It's hard to imagine Tyler in Boy Scouts.
Another thing I could do, Tyler tells me, is I could drive to my boss's house some night and hook a hose up to an outdoor spigot. hook the hose to a hand pump, and I could inject the house plumbing with a charge of industrial dye. Red or blue or green, and wait to see how my boss looks the next day. Or, I could just sit in the bushes and pump the hand pump until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi. This way, when someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150 psi, if someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell. Tyler only says this to make me feel better. The truth is I like my boss. Besides, I'm enlightened now. You know, only Buddha-style behavior. Spider chrysanthemums. The Diamond Sutra and the Blue Cliff Record. Hari Rama, you know, Krishna, Krishna. You know, Enlightened. "Sticking feathers up your butt," Tyler says, "does not make you a chicken." As the fat renders, the tallow will float to the surface of the boiling water. Oh, I say, so I'm sticking feathers up my butt. As if Tyler here with cigarette burns marching up his arms is such an evolved soul. Mister and Missus Human Butt Wipe. I calm my face down and turn into one of those Hindu cow people going to slaughter on the airline emergency procedure card. Turn down the heat under the pan. I stir the boiling water. More and more tallow will rise until the water is skinned over with a rainbow mother-of-pearl layer. Use a big spoon to skim the layer off, and set this layer aside. So, I say, how is Marla? Tyler says, "At least Marla's trying to hit bottom." I stir the boiling water. Keep skimming until no more tallow rises. This is tallow we're skimming off the water. Good clean tallow. Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn't just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn't just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can't just play it safe anymore. This isn't a seminar. "If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom," Tyler says, "you'll never really succeed." Only after disaster can we be resurrected. "It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything." What I'm feeling is premature enlightenment. "And keep stirring," Tyler says. When the fat's boiled enough that no more tallow rises, throw out the boiling water. Wash the pot and fill it with clean water. I ask, am I anywhere near hitting bottom? "Where you're at, now," Tyler says, "you can't even imagine what the bottom will be like." Repeat the process with the skimmed tallow. Boil the tallow in the water. Skim and keep skimming. "The fat we're using has a lot of salt in it," Tyler says. "Too much salt and your soap won't get solid." Boil and skim. Boil and skim. Marla is back. The second Marla opens the screen door, Tyler is gone, vanished, run out of the room, disappeared. Tyler's gone upstairs, or Tyler's gone down to the basement. Poof.
Marla comes in the back door with a canister of lye flakes. "At the store, they have one-hundred-percent-recycled toilet paper," Marla says. "The worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper." I take the canister of lye and put it on the table. I don't say anything. "Can I stay over, tonight?" Marla says. I don't answer. I count in my head: five syllables, seven, five.
A tiger can smile A snake will say it loves you Lies make us evil Marla says, "What are you cooking?" I am Joe's Boiling Point. I say, go, just go, just get out. Okay? Don't you have a big enough chunk of my life, yet? Marla grabs my sleeve and holds me in one place for the second it takes to kiss my cheek. "Please call me," she says. "Please. We need to talk." I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The moment Marla is out the door, Tyler appears back in the room. Fast as a magic trick. My parents did this magic act for five years. I boil and skim while Tyler makes room in the fridge. Steam layers the air and water drips from the kitchen ceiling. The forty-watt bulb hidden in the back of the fridge, something bright I can't see behind the empty ketchup bottles and jars of pickle brine or mayonnaise, some tiny light from inside the fridge edges Tyler's profile bright. Boil and skim. Boil and skim. Put the skimmed tallow into milk cartons with the tops opened all the way. With a chair pulled up to the open fridge, Tyler watches the tallow cool. In the heat of the kitchen, clouds of cold fog waterfall out from the bottom of the fridge and pool around Tyler's feet. As I fill the milk cartons with tallow, Tyler puts them in the fridge. I go to kneel beside Tyler in front of the fridge, and Tyler takes my hands and shows them to me. The life line. The love line. The mounds of Venus and Mars. The cold fog pooling around us, the dim bright light on our faces. "I need you to do me another favor," Tyler says. This is about Marla isn't it? "Don't ever talk to her about me. Don't talk about me behind my back. Do you promise?" Tyler says. I promise. Tyler says, "If you ever mention me to her, you'll never see me again." I promise. "Promise?" I promise. Tyler says, "Now remember, that was three times that you promised." A layer of something thick and clear is collecting on top of the tallow in the fridge. The tallow, I say, it's separating. "Don't worry," Tyler says. "The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix the glycerin back in when you make soap. Or, you can skim the glycerin off." Tyler licks his lips, and turns my hands palm-down on his thigh, on the gummy flannel lap of his bathrobe. , , "You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin," Tyler says. I breathe with my mouth open and say, nitroglycerin. Tyler licks his lips wet and shining and kisses the back of my hand.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite," Tyler says. The kiss shines wet on the back of my white hand. Dynamite, I say, and sit back on my heels.
Tyler pries the lid off the can of lye. "You can blow up bridges," Tyler says. "You can mix the nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives," Tyler says. "You could blow up a building, easy," Tyler says. Tyler tilts the can of lye an inch above the shining wet kiss on the back of my hand. "This is a chemical burn," Tyler says, "and it will hurt worse than you've ever been burned. Worse than a hundred cigarettes." The kiss shines on the back of my hand. "You'll have a scar," Tyler says. "With enough soap," Tyler says, "you could blow up the whole world. Now remember your promise." And Tyler pours the lye.
TWO SCREENS INTO my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing. My boss doesn't know the material, but he won't let me run the demo with a black eye and half my face swollen from the stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it's been fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script, and I'm running the laptop projector so I'm off to one side of the room, in the dark.
More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood climbing the cracks between my teeth. You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick. Fight club is tomorrow, and I'm not going to miss fight club. Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip. Walter with his signet ring shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, "I'd hate to see what happened to the other guy." The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. I tell Walter I fell. I did this to myself. Before the presentation, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the script each slide cues and when I wanted to run the video segment, my boss says, "What do you get yourself into every weekend?" I just don't want to die without a few scars, I say. It's nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer's showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste. The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the two black eyes of a giant panda from fight club last weekend when you saw him get his head pinched between the concrete floor and the knee of a two-hundred pound stock boy who kept slamming a fist into the bridge of the waiter's nose again and again in flat hard packing sounds you could hear over all the yelling until the waiter caught enough breath and sprayed blood to say, stop. You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when fight club starts and when fight club ends. You saw the kid who works in the copy center, a month ago you saw this kid who can't remember to three-hole-punch an order or put colored slip sheets between the copy packets, but this kid was a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out of an account representative twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp until the kid had to stop. That's the third rule in fight club, when someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over. Every time you see this kid, you can't tell him what a great fight he had. Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club. Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the kid in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn't be talking to the same man. Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows. After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn't piss you off. In the real world, I'm a recall campaign coordinator in a shirt and tie, sitting in the dark with a mouthful of blood and changing the overheads and slides as my boss tells Microsoft how he chose a particular shade of pale cornflower blue for an icon. The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other. It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I'd be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lira is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer. Tyler never knew his father. Maybe self-destruction is the answer. Tyler and I still go to fight club, together. Fight club is in the basement of a bar, now, after the bar closes on Saturday night, and every week you go and there's more guys there.
Tyler gets under the one light in the middle of the black concrete basement and he can see that light flickering back out of the dark in a hundred pairs of eyes. First thing Tyler yells is, "The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. "The second rule about fight club," Tyler yells, "is you don't talk about fight club." Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn't so much like a family as it's like he sets up a franchise. What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women. Tyler standing under the one light in the after-midnight blackness of a basement full of men, Tyler runs through the other rules: two men per fight, one fight at a time, no shoes no shirts, fights go on as long as they have to. "And the seventh rule," Tyler yells, "is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight." Fight club is not football on television. You aren't watching a bunch of men you don't know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex. Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says. Like Tyler says, even a snuffle looks pumped. My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married. I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need. What happens at fight club doesn't happen in words. Some guys need a fight every week. This week, Tyler says it's the first fifty guys through the door and that's it. No more. Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must've had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor. Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, "Cool." I shake the guy's hand and say, good fight. This guy, he says, "How about next week?" I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month? You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive at fight club. When it's you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isn't about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn't about words. You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There's grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn't about looking good. There's hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved. After my last fight, the guy who fought me mopped the floor while I called my insurance to pre-approve a visit to the emergency room. At the hospital, Tyler tells them I fell down. Sometimes, Tyler speaks for me. I did this to myself. Outside, the sun was coming up. You don't talk about fight club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn't exist. When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you've never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you're capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, "I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can." I didn't want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself. About self-destruction. At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. I looked around and said, okay. Okay, I say, but outside in the parking lot. So we went outside, and I asked if Tyler wanted it in the face or in the stomach. Tyler said, "Surprise me." I said I had never hit anybody. Tyler said, "So go crazy, man." I said, close your eyes. Tyler said, "No." Like every guy on his first night in fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler's jaw like in every cowboy movie we'd ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler's neck. Shit, I said, that didn't count. I want to try it again. Tyler said, "Yeah it counted," and hit me, straight on, pox, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Saturday morning cartoons, right in the middle of my chest and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we'd gotten somewhere we'd never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive. Tyler said, "Cool." I said, hit me again. Tyler said, "No, you hit me." So I hit him, a girl's wide roundhouse to right under his ear, and Tyler shoved me back and stomped the heel of his shoe in my stomach. What happened next and after that didn't happen in words, but the bar closed and people came out and shouted around us in the parking lot. Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything in the world that didn't work, my cleaning that came back with the collar buttons broken, the bank that says I'm hundreds of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. And Marla Singer, who stole the support groups from me. Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered. The first night we fought was a Sunday night, and Tyler hadn't shaved all weekend so my knuckles burned raw from his weekend beard. Lying on our backs in the parking lot, staring up at the one star that came through the streetlights, I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting. Tyler said, his father. Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves. There's nothing personal about who you fight in fight club. You fight to fight. You're not supposed to talk about fight club, but we talked and for the next couple of weeks, guys met in that parking lot after the bar had closed, and by the time it got cold, another bar offered the basement where we meet now. When fight club meets, Tyler gives the rules he and I decided. "Most of you," Tyler yells in the cone of light in the center of the basement full of men, "you're here because someone broke the rules. Somebody told you about fight club." Tyler says, "Well, you better stop talking or you'd better start another fight club because next week you put your name on a list when you get here, and only the first fifty names on the list get in. If you get in, you set up your fight right away if you want a fight. If you don't want a fight, there are guys who do, so maybe you should just stay home. "If this is your first night at fight club," Tyler yells, "you have to fight." Most guys are at fight club because of something they're too scared to fight. After a few fights, you're afraid a lot less. A lot of best friends meet for the first time at fight club. Now I go to meetings or conferences and see faces at conference tables, accountants and junior executives or attorneys with broken noses spreading out like an eggplant under the edges of bandages or they have a couple stitches under an eye or a jaw wired shut. These are the quiet young men who listen until it's time to decide. We nod to each other. Later, my boss will ask me how I know so many of these guys. According to my boss, there are fewer and fewer gentlemen in business and more thugs. The demo goes on.
Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here's a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren't divorced, his father was never home, and here he's looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half a leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter's thinking about a meatless, painfree potluck he went to last weekend or the ozone or the Earth's desperate need to stop cruel product testing on animals, but probably he's not.
ONE MORNING, THERE'S the dead jellyfish of a used condom floating in the toilet. This is how Tyler meets Marla. I get up to take a leak, and there against the sort of cave paintings of dirt in the toilet bowl is this. You have to wonder, what do sperm think. This? This is the vaginal vault? What's happening here? All night long, I dreamed I was humping Marla Singer. Marla Singer smoking her cigarette. Marla Singer rolling her eyes. I wake up alone in my own bed, and the door to Tyler's room is closed. The door to Tyler's room is never closed. All night, it was raining. The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures.
When it's raining, we have to pull the fuses. You don't dare turn on the lights. The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a basement. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor. The baseboard moldings are carved and varnished and eighteen inches high. The rain trickles down through the house, and everything wooden swells and shrinks, and the nails in everything wooden, the floors and baseboards and window casings, the nails inch out and rust.
Everywhere there are rusted nails to step on or snag your elbow on, and there's only one bathroom for the seven bedrooms, and now there's a used condom. The house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down. I asked Tyler how long he's been here, and he said about six weeks. Before the dawn of time, there was an owner who collected lifetime stacks of the National Geographic and Reader's Digest. Big teetering stacks of magazines that get taller every time it rains. Tyler says the last tenant used to fold the glossy magazine pages for cocaine envelopes. There's no lock on the front door from when police or whoever kicked in the door. There's nine layers of wallpaper swelling on the dining-room walls, flowers under stripes under flowers under birds under grasscloth. Our only neighbors are a closed machine shop and across the street, a blocklong warehouse. Inside the house, there's a closet with sevenfoot rollers for rolling up damask tablecloths so they never have to be creased. There's a cedarlined, refrigerated fur closet. The tile in the bathroom is painted with little flowers nicer than most everybody's wedding china, and there's a used condom in the toilet. I've been living with Tyler about a month. I am Joe's White Knuckles. How could Tyler not fall for that. The night before last, Tyler sat up alone, splicing sex organs into Snow White. How could I compete for Tyler's attention. I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection. What's worse is this is all my fault. After I went to sleep last night, Tyler tells me he came home from his shift as a banquet waiter, and Marla called again from the Regent Hotel. This was it, Marla said. The tunnel, the light leading her down the tunnel. The death experience was so cool, Marla wanted me to hear her describe it as she lifted out of her body and floated up. Marla didn't know if her spirit could use the telephone, but she wanted someone to at least hear her last breath. No, but no, Tyler answers the phone and misunderstands the whole situation. They've never met so Tyler thinks it's a bad thing that Marla is about to die. It's nothing of the kind. This is none of Tyler's business, but Tyler calls the police and Tyler races over to the Regent Hotel. Now, according to the ancient Chinese custom we all learned from television, Tyler is responsible for Marla, forever, because Tyler saved Marla's life. If I had only wasted a couple of minutes and gone over to watch Marla die, then none of this would have happened. Tyler tells me how Marla lives in room 8G, on the top floor of the Regent Hotel, up eight flights of stairs and down a noisy hallway with canned television laughter coming through the doors. Every couple seconds an actress screams or actors die screaming in a rattle of bullets. Tyler gets to the end of the hallway and even before he knocks a thin, thin, buttermilk sallow arm slingshots out the door of room 8G, grabs his wrist, and yanks Tyler inside. I bury myself in a leader's Digest. Even as Marla yanks Tyler into her room, Tyler can hear brake squeals and sirens collecting out in front of the Regent Hotel. On the dresser, there's a dildo made of the same soft pink plastic as a million Barbie dolls, and for a moment, Tyler can picture millions of baby dolls and Barbie dolls and dildos injectionmolded and coming off the same assembly line in Taiwan. Marla looks at Tyler looking at her dildo, and she rolls her eyes and says, "Don't be afraid. It's not a threat to you." Marla shoves Tyler back out into the hallway, and she says she's sorry, but he shouldn't have called the police and that's probably the police downstairs right now. In the hallway, Marla locks the door to 8G and shoves Tyler toward the stairs. On the stairs, Tyler and Marla flatten against the wall as police and paramedics charge by with oxygen, asking which door will be 8G. Marla tells them the door at the end of the hall. Marla shouts to the police that the girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster. The girl is infectious human waste, and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything. "The girl in 8G has no faith in herself," Marla shouts, "and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options." Marla shouts, "Good luck." The police pile up at the locked door to 8G, and Marla and Tyler hurry down to the lobby. Behind them, a policeman is yelling at the door: "Let us help you! Miss Singer, you have every reason to live! Just let us in, Marla, and we can help you with your problems!" Marla and Tyler rushed out into the street. Tyler got Marla into a cab, and high up on the eighth floor of the hotel, Tyler could see shadows moving back and forth across the windows of Marla's room. Out on the freeway with all the lights and the other cars, six lanes of traffic racing toward the vanishing point, Marla tells Tyler he has to keep her up all night. If Marla ever falls asleep, she'll die. A lot of people wanted Marla dead, she told Tyler. These people were already dead and on the other side, and at night they called on the telephone. Marla would go to bars and hear the bartender calling her name, and when she took the call, the line was dead. Tyler and Marla, they were up almost all night in the room next to mine. When Tyler woke up, Marla had disappeared back to the Regent Hotel. I tell Tyler, Marla Singer doesn't need a lover, she needs a case worker. Tyler says, "Don't call this love." Long story short, now Marla's out to ruin another part of my life. Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends. Fine. Neat, I say. Tyler asks, is this a problem for me? I am Joe's Clenching Bowels. No, I say, it's fine. Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. Just great, I say. Really.
M Y B O S S S E N D S me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed. The hole punched through my cheek doesn't ever heal. I'm going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone's hostile little FACE. Worker bees can leave Even drones can fly away The queen is their slave
You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other hum; butt wipe. Take it, human butt wipe. Do it, butt wipe. Choke it down. Keep it down, baby. Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world. Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I'm saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me. Sigh. Look. Outside the window. A bird. My boss asked if the blood was my blood. The bird flies downwind. I'm writing a little haiku in my head.
Without just one nest A bird can call the world home Life is your career
I'm counting on my fingers: five, seven, five. The blood, is it mine? Yeah, I say. Some of it. This is a wrong answer.
Like this is a big deal. I have two pair of black trousers. Six white shirts. Six pair of underwear. The bare minimum. I go to fight club. These things happen. "Go home," my boss says. "Get changed." I'm starting to wonder if Tyler and Marla are the same person. Except for their humping, every night in Marla's room. Doing it. Doing it. Doing it. Tyler and Marla are never in the same room. I never see them together. Still, you never see me and Zsa Zsa Gabor together, and this doesn't mean we're the same person. Tyler just doesn't come out when Marla's around. So I can wash the pants, Tyler has to show me how to make soap. Tyler's upstairs, and the kitchen is filled with the smell of cloves and burnt hair. Marla's at the kitchen table, burning the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette and calling herself human butt wipe. "I embrace my own festering diseased corruption," Marla tells the cherry on the end of her cigarette. Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. "Burn, witch, burn." Tyler's upstairs in my bedroom, looking at his teeth in my mirror, and says he got me a job as a banquet waiter, part time.
"At the Pressman Hotel, if you can work in the evening," Tyler says. "The job will stoke your class hatred." Yeah, I say, whatever. "They make you wear a black bow tie," Tyler says. "All you need to work there is a white shirt and black trousers." Soap, Tyler. I say, we need soap. We need to make some soap. I need to wash my pants. I hold Tyler's feet while he does two hundred sit-ups. "To make soap, first we have to render fat." Tyler is full of useful information. Except for their humping, Marla and Tyler are never in the same room. If Tyler's around, Marla ignores him. This is familiar ground. "The big sleep, `Valley of the Dogs' style. "Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you." Marla looks at me as if I'm the one humping her and says, "I can't win with you, can I?" Marla goes out the back door singing that creepy "Valley of the Dolls" song. I just stare at her going. There's one, two, three moments of silence until all of Marla is gone from the room. I turn around, and Tyler's appeared. Tyler says, "Did you get rid of her?" Not a sound, not a smell, Tyler's just appeared. "First," Tyler says and jumps from the kitchen doorway to digging in the freezer. "First, we need to render some fat." About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota. Tyler starts pulling out sandwich bags of frozen white stuff and dropping them in the sink. Me, I'm supposed to put a big pan on the stove and fill it most of the way with water. Too little water, and the fat will darken as it separates into tallow. "This fat," Tyler says, "it has a lot of salt so the more water, the better." Put the fat in the water, and get the water boiling. Tyler squeezes the white mess from each sandwich bag into the water, and then Tyler buries the empty bags all the way at the bottom of the trash. Tyler says, "Use a little imagination. Remember all that pioneer shit they taught you in Boy Scouts. Remember your high school chemistry." It's hard to imagine Tyler in Boy Scouts.
Another thing I could do, Tyler tells me, is I could drive to my boss's house some night and hook a hose up to an outdoor spigot. hook the hose to a hand pump, and I could inject the house plumbing with a charge of industrial dye. Red or blue or green, and wait to see how my boss looks the next day. Or, I could just sit in the bushes and pump the hand pump until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi. This way, when someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150 psi, if someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell. Tyler only says this to make me feel better. The truth is I like my boss. Besides, I'm enlightened now. You know, only Buddha-style behavior. Spider chrysanthemums. The Diamond Sutra and the Blue Cliff Record. Hari Rama, you know, Krishna, Krishna. You know, Enlightened. "Sticking feathers up your butt," Tyler says, "does not make you a chicken." As the fat renders, the tallow will float to the surface of the boiling water. Oh, I say, so I'm sticking feathers up my butt. As if Tyler here with cigarette burns marching up his arms is such an evolved soul. Mister and Missus Human Butt Wipe. I calm my face down and turn into one of those Hindu cow people going to slaughter on the airline emergency procedure card. Turn down the heat under the pan. I stir the boiling water. More and more tallow will rise until the water is skinned over with a rainbow mother-of-pearl layer. Use a big spoon to skim the layer off, and set this layer aside. So, I say, how is Marla? Tyler says, "At least Marla's trying to hit bottom." I stir the boiling water. Keep skimming until no more tallow rises. This is tallow we're skimming off the water. Good clean tallow. Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved. Jesus did it with his crucifixion thing. I shouldn't just abandon money and property and knowledge. This isn't just a weekend retreat. I should run from self-improvement, and I should be running toward disaster. I can't just play it safe anymore. This isn't a seminar. "If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom," Tyler says, "you'll never really succeed." Only after disaster can we be resurrected. "It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything." What I'm feeling is premature enlightenment. "And keep stirring," Tyler says. When the fat's boiled enough that no more tallow rises, throw out the boiling water. Wash the pot and fill it with clean water. I ask, am I anywhere near hitting bottom? "Where you're at, now," Tyler says, "you can't even imagine what the bottom will be like." Repeat the process with the skimmed tallow. Boil the tallow in the water. Skim and keep skimming. "The fat we're using has a lot of salt in it," Tyler says. "Too much salt and your soap won't get solid." Boil and skim. Boil and skim. Marla is back. The second Marla opens the screen door, Tyler is gone, vanished, run out of the room, disappeared. Tyler's gone upstairs, or Tyler's gone down to the basement. Poof.
Marla comes in the back door with a canister of lye flakes. "At the store, they have one-hundred-percent-recycled toilet paper," Marla says. "The worst job in the whole world must be recycling toilet paper." I take the canister of lye and put it on the table. I don't say anything. "Can I stay over, tonight?" Marla says. I don't answer. I count in my head: five syllables, seven, five.
A tiger can smile A snake will say it loves you Lies make us evil Marla says, "What are you cooking?" I am Joe's Boiling Point. I say, go, just go, just get out. Okay? Don't you have a big enough chunk of my life, yet? Marla grabs my sleeve and holds me in one place for the second it takes to kiss my cheek. "Please call me," she says. "Please. We need to talk." I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The moment Marla is out the door, Tyler appears back in the room. Fast as a magic trick. My parents did this magic act for five years. I boil and skim while Tyler makes room in the fridge. Steam layers the air and water drips from the kitchen ceiling. The forty-watt bulb hidden in the back of the fridge, something bright I can't see behind the empty ketchup bottles and jars of pickle brine or mayonnaise, some tiny light from inside the fridge edges Tyler's profile bright. Boil and skim. Boil and skim. Put the skimmed tallow into milk cartons with the tops opened all the way. With a chair pulled up to the open fridge, Tyler watches the tallow cool. In the heat of the kitchen, clouds of cold fog waterfall out from the bottom of the fridge and pool around Tyler's feet. As I fill the milk cartons with tallow, Tyler puts them in the fridge. I go to kneel beside Tyler in front of the fridge, and Tyler takes my hands and shows them to me. The life line. The love line. The mounds of Venus and Mars. The cold fog pooling around us, the dim bright light on our faces. "I need you to do me another favor," Tyler says. This is about Marla isn't it? "Don't ever talk to her about me. Don't talk about me behind my back. Do you promise?" Tyler says. I promise. Tyler says, "If you ever mention me to her, you'll never see me again." I promise. "Promise?" I promise. Tyler says, "Now remember, that was three times that you promised." A layer of something thick and clear is collecting on top of the tallow in the fridge. The tallow, I say, it's separating. "Don't worry," Tyler says. "The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix the glycerin back in when you make soap. Or, you can skim the glycerin off." Tyler licks his lips, and turns my hands palm-down on his thigh, on the gummy flannel lap of his bathrobe. , , "You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin," Tyler says. I breathe with my mouth open and say, nitroglycerin. Tyler licks his lips wet and shining and kisses the back of my hand.
"You can mix the nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite," Tyler says. The kiss shines wet on the back of my white hand. Dynamite, I say, and sit back on my heels.
Tyler pries the lid off the can of lye. "You can blow up bridges," Tyler says. "You can mix the nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives," Tyler says. "You could blow up a building, easy," Tyler says. Tyler tilts the can of lye an inch above the shining wet kiss on the back of my hand. "This is a chemical burn," Tyler says, "and it will hurt worse than you've ever been burned. Worse than a hundred cigarettes." The kiss shines on the back of my hand. "You'll have a scar," Tyler says. "With enough soap," Tyler says, "you could blow up the whole world. Now remember your promise." And Tyler pours the lye.
Statistics have shown that one client out of four is not pleased with the services / product he receives from a company, at one point. The client that is unhappy usually complaints, in average, to another 12 people, that he didn’t like the service / product.
Also statistics has shown that only 5 % of the unhappy clients report to the company what they did not like. The other 95 % believe that if the notify the company about their problem nobody would care. In conclusion they chose to go to another company that would satisfy their problems. That is why you should always listen to the problems that your clients have. To earn a new client you will have to spend 8 times more than you would have spent to keep one client with the company.
You should ask yourself a couple of questions to anticipate your customers demands 1. How many steps should a customer take in order to get what he wants?
2. The front desk employees do whatever they can to resolve the customers needs?
3. Are they willing do go around the company system in order to resolve client problems without creating an obligation from the company?
4. The business procedures are made for the company or for the clients? In order to get answers to these questions you need to discuss with your front desk staff, they are the best people to ask about the customer’s problems.
Also you should try to make your customers complete surveys about your company. With all of that said, I wish you good luck!
Statistics have shown that one client out of four is not pleased with the services / product he receives from a company, at one point. The client that is unhappy usually complaints, in average, to another 12 people, that he didn’t like the service / product.
Also statistics has shown that only 5 % of the unhappy clients report to the company what they did not like. The other 95 % believe that if the notify the company about their problem nobody would care. In conclusion they chose to go to another company that would satisfy their problems. That is why you should always listen to the problems that your clients have. To earn a new client you will have to spend 8 times more than you would have spent to keep one client with the company.
You should ask yourself a couple of questions to anticipate your customers demands 1. How many steps should a customer take in order to get what he wants?
2. The front desk employees do whatever they can to resolve the customers needs?
3. Are they willing do go around the company system in order to resolve client problems without creating an obligation from the company?
4. The business procedures are made for the company or for the clients? In order to get answers to these questions you need to discuss with your front desk staff, they are the best people to ask about the customer’s problems.
Also you should try to make your customers complete surveys about your company. With all of that said, I wish you good luck!
I got a flyer today about the national obesity forum and scanned their speakers. No mention whatever of addiction to food. No mention whatever about the self destructive nature of over eating.
Obesity is caused by eating too much of the wrong kind of food. Food addicts eat the wrong kind of food to excess, and are at risk to becoming obese if they dont take pills vomit starve or exercise afterwards. We all know this. We just dont know why.
People who are addicted to drugs use drugs to slowly kill themselves. People who are addicted to food use food to slowly kill themselves. Obesity is a sign of self-harming behavior, much as the scars of cutting or the bald patches where hair has been wrenched out.
When will they learn? The Obesity Forum will get nowhere if they refuse to see that addiction is slow suicide and food addiction causes obesity.
I got a flyer today about the national obesity forum and scanned their speakers. No mention whatever of addiction to food. No mention whatever about the self destructive nature of over eating.
Obesity is caused by eating too much of the wrong kind of food. Food addicts eat the wrong kind of food to excess, and are at risk to becoming obese if they dont take pills vomit starve or exercise afterwards. We all know this. We just dont know why.
People who are addicted to drugs use drugs to slowly kill themselves. People who are addicted to food use food to slowly kill themselves. Obesity is a sign of self-harming behavior, much as the scars of cutting or the bald patches where hair has been wrenched out.
When will they learn? The Obesity Forum will get nowhere if they refuse to see that addiction is slow suicide and food addiction causes obesity.
Newspapers are always looking for hot new subjects or subjects with what they can fill their pages. They are looking for new products or services that are on the market, so if your company has a new product, you only have to send a press release to newspapers.
There are big chances that they will publish an article about you. Editors get a lot of requests daily from companies that want an article published about them, so the competition in very stiff. Here are some rules you should follow for your press release to be in pole position:
1. Make sure that your article has a lot of pictures with the product and what is the product good for, remember, a picture makes more than 1000 words.
2. Send your article to the magazines that your customers are likely to read. It’s very important that your future customers to learn about your product and to make them want it.
3. The article should de written by a person who has some experience with the press and has knowledge about how it should be written. Also he / she has to know about the product, to point out its best functions.
4. Insist on the qualities of the product. Try to point out as much good things as you can, and how it can improve our lifestyle, remember, people like to hear that.
Newspapers are always looking for hot new subjects or subjects with what they can fill their pages. They are looking for new products or services that are on the market, so if your company has a new product, you only have to send a press release to newspapers.
There are big chances that they will publish an article about you. Editors get a lot of requests daily from companies that want an article published about them, so the competition in very stiff. Here are some rules you should follow for your press release to be in pole position:
1. Make sure that your article has a lot of pictures with the product and what is the product good for, remember, a picture makes more than 1000 words.
2. Send your article to the magazines that your customers are likely to read. It’s very important that your future customers to learn about your product and to make them want it.
3. The article should de written by a person who has some experience with the press and has knowledge about how it should be written. Also he / she has to know about the product, to point out its best functions.
4. Insist on the qualities of the product. Try to point out as much good things as you can, and how it can improve our lifestyle, remember, people like to hear that.
THE SECURITY TASK force guy explained everything to me. Baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. The security task force guy, he called baggage handlers Throwers. Modern bombs don't tick. But a suitcase that vibrates, the baggage handlers, the Throwers, have to call the police. How I came to live with Tyler is because most airlines have this policy about vibrating baggage. My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts. Two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive. Traveling alarm clock. Cordless electric razor. Toothbrush. Six pair underwear. Six pair black socks. It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie. A list of all these things used to hang on the inside of my bedroom door at home.
Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn't open the windows so even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom. Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and low-voltage track lighting. Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building. These things happen. Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture the floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind. Fifteen floors over the city, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and shattering down on everyone's car. Me, while I'm heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83 or 455 miles an hour, true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back at Dulles. Nine times out of ten, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. This was my cordless electric razor. The other time, it's a vibrating dildo. The security task force guy told me this. This was at my destination, without my suitcase, where I was about to cab it home and find my flannel sheets shredded on the ground. Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it's even a man. It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article. A dildo. Never your dildo. Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on. A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required evacuating your baggage. Rain was falling when I woke up for my connection in Stapleton. Rain was falling when I woke up on our final approach to home. An announcement told us to please take this opportunity to check around our seats for any personal belongings we might have left behind. Then the announcement said my name. Would I please meet with an airline representative waiting at the gate. I set my watch back three hours, and it was still after midnight. There was the airline representative at the gate, and there was the security task force guy to say, ha, your electric razor kept your checked baggage at Dulles. The task force guy called the baggage handlers Throwers. Then he called them Rampers. To prove things could be worse, the guy told me at least it wasn't a dildo. Then, maybe because I'm a guy and he's a guy and it's one o'clock in the morning, maybe to make me laugh, the guy said industry slang for flight attendant was Space Waitress. Or Air Mattress. It looked like the guy was wearing a pilot's uniform, white shirt with little epaulets and a blue tie. My luggage had been cleared, he said, and would arrive the next day. The security guy asked my name and address and phone number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a cockpit. "You can only get one prick into a condom," he said. I cabbed home on my last ten bucks. The local police had been asking a lot of questions, too. My electric razor, which wasn't a bomb, was still three time zones behind me. Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters, now. My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now. And I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain. We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti. All that sitting in the bathroom. The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe. The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that. The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah. Hemlig hat boxes. Yes. The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this. The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the following: Orchid. Fuschia. Cobalt. Ebony. Jet. Eggshell or heather. It took my whole life to buy this stuff. The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables. My Steg nesting tables. You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you. Until I got home from the airport. The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there's been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions. The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must've leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on. Detonation. The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare. Oh, not my refrigerator. I'd collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers. I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food. The doorman blew his nose and something went into his handkerchief with the good slap of a pitch into a catcher's mitt. You could go up to the fifteen floor, the doorman said, but nobody could go into the unit. Police orders. The police had been asking, did I have an old girlfriend who'd want to do this or did I make an enemy of somebody who had access to dynamite. "It wasn't worth going up," the doorman said. "All that's left is the concrete shell." The police hadn't ruled out arson. No one had smelled gas. The doorman raises an eyebrow. This guy spent his time flirting with the day maids and nurses who worked in the big units on the top floor and waited in the lobby chairs for their rides after work. Three years I lived here, and the doorman still sat reading his Ellery Queen magazine every night while I shifted packages and bags to unlock the front door and let myself in. The doorman raises an eyebrow and says how some people will go on a long trip and leave a candle, a long, long candle burning in a big puddle of gasoline. People with financial difficulties do this stuff. People who want out from under. I asked to use the lobby phone. "A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things," the doorman said. I called Tyler. The phone rang in Tyler's rented house on Paper Street. Oh, Tyler, please deliver me. And the phone rang. The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, "A lot of young people don't know what they really want." Oh, Tyler, please rescue me. And the phone rang. "Young people, they think they want the whole world." Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. And the phone rang and Tyler answered. "If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."
May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar. The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me. It was still raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared through the windshield. Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with him, but I would have to do him a favor. The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of underwear. There, drunk in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked Tyler what he wanted me to do. Tyler said, "I want you to hit me as hard as you can."
