Fifty Shelves of Grey Read online

  11

  Fight Club

  by

  CHUCK PALAHNIUK

  The first rule about fuck club is that you don’t talk about fuck club.

  The second rule about fuck club is that you don’t talk about fuck club.

  Maybe at lunch the waiter comes over to your table and he can barely walk because you spent three hours last night between his thighs, riding and riding, first this way up then that way, forwards, backwards, whatever, till he’s screaming and he can’t breathe and eventually all sweat and saliva he gasps out stop, stop, you’re killing me, but you don’t say anything except I’ll have a chicken Caesar salad, dressing on the side, hold the croutons, because you don’t talk about fuck club, and also you only have a twenty minute lunch break and if you started talking about fuck club then you might forget to mention about holding the croutons, and you’re off gluten.

  You saw the boy who works in the copy centre, a month ago all you had to say to this boy is that the paper feeder is jammed and the photocopier needs more toner and does he have one of those little things you use for pulling staples out, you can’t remember what it’s called, the de-stapler thingy, Christ, why don’t they give those things a name, but now you worship this boy as a deity because you saw him go hardcore on a senior vice president in charge of account liaisons with a severe obesity problem and back hair, and pound him until he went limp and had to stop. That’s the third rule of fuck club. If anyone goes limp, the fuck is over.

  The fourth rule of fuck club is that you don’t wear aftershave or scented lotions, because Tyler has allergies.

  The fifth to seventh rules of fuck club are mostly dress code.

  The first fuck club was just me and Tyler pounding each other. We were in Bed, Bath and Beyond, where I was shopping for ceramic tiles, and Tyler said I want you to fuck me as hard as you can.

  I said to Tyler, I’m not gay.

  Tyler said, It’s not gay to fuck a man. It’s gay to fuck women.

  OK then, I said, but let’s put down some towels first.

  By the end of the fuck, we were surrounded by a ring of store employees, clapping and cheering us on, until management got wind of it and broke it up, and now we’re banned from all domestic interiors stores on the Eastern seaboard, except Home Valu, because they are grateful for the extra custom.

  We’re not supposed to talk about fuck club but nobody said anything about posting clips online and now every week there are more and more men and I don’t know what to do about it. I need to have a chat to Tyler about how to make these men go away but I’m not sure how to raise it. Tyler can be a little touchy.

  Meanwhile every time I go to a damn conference I recognize all the sales reps and middle managers and non-executive partners just from the uncomfortable way they are sitting and the terrible stubble rash, and we acknowledge each other by quietly handing over a tube of antiseptic ointment.

  Later my boss will ask me how I know so many of these guys.

  Book club, I say.

  The first rule about book club is that you don’t talk about book club.

  12

  The Portrait of a Lady

  by

  HENRY JAMES

  Isabel replayed the morning’s events in her mind. She wasn’t sure but she thought that maybe she and Pansy had rubbed bustles outside the Duomo. Perhaps it was an overenthusiastic response to the Eucharist, but she just couldn’t fathom it. She cursed her American naiveté. What she needed was some sound advice from someone urbane, someone who understood these peculiar European customs. She wasn’t sure she was brave enough to go to Madame Merle with her dilemma – but who else had the sophistication to apply to this awkward situation?

  She found the lady in the drawing room. The beauty of the Beethoven sonata she was playing took her breath away. Was there no end to Madame Merle’s accomplishments? Apparently there was not, for she was playing the piano with her feet whilst dissecting a bee with one hand and rolling a cannoli with the other. One could tell Madame Merle had lived on the Continent for some time.

  ‘Dear me, I hadn’t heard your arrival, or I would have changed into something more elegant.’ Madame Merle crawled out suavely from underneath the piano and smoothed the seventeen layers of silk evening gown she was wearing. Isabel immediately regretted her outfit, it felt so American. She nervously adjusted her Stars and Stripes top hat.

  Feeling too fraught to address the subject about which she’d sought the lady out, Isabel instead crossed to the window to admire the likeness Madame Merle had recently styled of Benjamin Disraeli in a privet hedge. It was as she was contemplating its magnificence that she suddenly felt a hand snake around her from behind, cupping a breast. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it but there was something unusual about Madame Merle.

  ‘Tell me, do you like ladies?’ murmured Madame Merle, a feverish excitement in her small grey eyes. Isabel thought of Pansy, of her dear friend, Henrietta, of her kindly Aunt Touchett. ‘I do,’ she replied.

  ‘I thought so. You’ve come to the right place, my dear. Florence is bursting with lesbians.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘But my dear, it is very continental indeed to throw off the chains of servitude to men in favour of cunnilingus with a bosom friend with bosoms.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Why yes. We also enjoy bicycling, striding around the countryside in comfortable shoes and a laissez-faire attitude to bathing, although that last trait is merely European. We are all Sapphists here you know. Lady Pensil is a huge aficionado of the strap-on, hence the nickname, Miss Climber likes to tip the velvet hanging from the chandelier and the Countess Gemini likes it up both passages with any object you can find, the dirty puzzle. What’s your proclivity?’

  Isabel was ashamed. How very American of her not to have a proclivity. She panicked: ‘I enjoy tennis.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, I thought you were all about independence. Live a little, why don’t you?’

  And in an instant Madame Merle had vanished beneath her tea dress, going at her like a raccoon up a chimney stack. Isabel gasped. How perfectly divine this was. Madame Merle was accomplished indeed, she seemed to be everywhere at once, or maybe that was just static. In any case it was magnificent. She shuddered with pleasure: Isabel Archer was clearly no lady. She’d have to cancel getting that portrait done.

  13

  The Road Less Travelled

  by

  M. SCOTT PECK

  Life is difficult. It is full of difficult decisions. Sometimes you will have to choose between two roads. One is the road more travelled. And one is the road less travelled. You may think the choice is obvious. You may think that you should choose the road more travelled, because that is the road that everyone else has chosen, and so it is probably the better one. But I am here to tell you that you are wrong. You should choose the road less travelled. The road less travelled is the more fulfilling of the two roads. That is why this book is called The Road Less Travelled. Although once enough people have chosen the road less travelled it will become the road more travelled, and then I will write a book called The Road More Travelled.

  The thought of the road less travelled may not appeal to you. It is darker. It is narrower. It smells worse. It is a less comfortable journey all round. It may strike you as a road that should be walked down, but never up. You may have become fond of the road more travelled, that easily-accessed, well-lubricated road. But life is not meant to be easy. It is in struggle that we find our greatest satisfaction. So turn your back on the road more travelled, literally. And take a different path. Do not worry. I will help you. So will Vaseline, if you have any handy.

  You may say, I do not think the road less travelled is for me. I am very happy with the road I already have, thank you. I’m not even sure how to get onto the road less travelled. The entrance seems a bit small. There is only one way, and that is through discipline. Discipline is the means of spiritual evolution. If you can’t achieve discipline by your
self, ask for help. It is amazing how motivating a man with a firm hand can be, when negotiating the road less travelled.

  There are four aspects to discipline that you must master to fully appreciate the blessings of the road less travelled.

  1. Delaying gratification. Delaying gratification is the process by which we learn to meet and experience pain first, and then enjoy pleasure. Your journey along the road less travelled may not feel good immediately. In fact you may find yourself thinking, What on earth am I doing on this road? I don’t like this road at all. This is a terrible road. But if you persist, if you push on through the pain, through the psychological walls you have built up around yourself and through the occasional moments of unexpected, excruciating embarrassment, you will wonder why you ever used to take that boring old road more travelled to Yawnsville.

  2. Acceptance of responsibility. You have made this decision to travel this demanding route. Nobody has made you. So it is no good complaining about it when you’re halfway down and it isn’t exactly what you expected. Turning back after you’ve committed to the journey is very unfair on your travel companion.

  3. Dedication to the truth. Never be afraid to say: I am afraid. I have cramp. I need more lube.

  4. Balance. If necessary, prop yourself up with pillows.

  Don’t be disheartened if your voyage is long, hard and uncertain. Extraordinary flexibility is a must for success on the road less travelled. Learn to adapt. Only then will true satisfaction, fulfilment and pleasure be yours.

  14

  The Fall of the House of Usher

  by

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  As the evening shade drew on, I finally came within view of the melancholy House of Usher. At first glimpse I was at once gripped with a sense of such insufferable gloom, a depression of the soul so deep, that I regurgitated some cheese. Which was odd as I’d had chicken for lunch. Inside the mansion it was even worse. There was an atmosphere so peculiar, foetid and pestilent, as if a hundred corpses had burst out of their graves and then gone for a long cross country run without bothering to bathe afterwards. Yet I was tired and I also recalled that my old school friend, Roderick Usher, had a sister, Madeline, who was both handsome, affectionate and, due to myopia and a lazy eye, not particularly choosy if one approached her from the left.

  Upon my entrance into the equally stinky drawing room, my old friend arose from the sofa on which he had been eating a pungent curry, and greeted me with such overdone warmth that I was forced to take a step back to avoid a cumin-tinged kiss on the mouth. His spirits quickly faded however, as he proceeded to tell me how the morale of his existence had been quite destroyed by the constant fear and revulsion he felt towards the house. Personally I felt this was nothing that could not be remedied by opening a window and throwing out a few bathmats, but he would not be consoled. As night rolled in against the smeared, latticed windows, my feeling of unease grew, until all at once the heavy oak door banged open and before us stood Madeline, wild eyed and pale of pallor. To my astonishment she passed slowly by us, blew her nose loudly on the curtains and then floated out again. ‘My sister has been trapped in an otherworldly stupor for days,’ lamented Roderick, ‘she is possessed by Evil.’ ‘Yes, I see,’ I replied, humouring him. Though clearly she just needed to wear her glasses.

  Later, I was enduring a night of fretful sleep due to an intense horror of the hand towel situation in the guest bathroom, when I sensed a figure at the foot of my bed. Before I could scream, it had lifted my bedclothes and night chemise and was working a hungry tongue up and down the insides of my lower calves. Every nerve in my body tingled as the stranger licked and suckled their way upwards until I was engulfed entirely in sensation. Thrashing in ecstasy I cried out, ‘Madeline! You have undone me!’

  ‘I’m not Madeline,’ replied a male voice. ‘Dear God, what phantom was this?’ ‘It’s Roderick. Sorry, I may have misread some signals.’ At this moment, the moon shone brightly and morbidly through the clouds, illuminating the shamefaced visage of Roderick, my old friend and unwelcome lover.

  Leaping from my bed and stubbing my toe macabrely on the nightstand, I screamed, ‘Where is Madeline?’ But Roderick just stood, fixing me with a depraved grin so wicked and devilish that it caused my insides to pop out through my shirt briefly. Finally he replied, ‘I have interred Madeline in the family vault, or third guestroom, for her soul has withered and died.’ ‘She hasn’t died’, I said, ‘she just needs new lenses,’ but Roderick threw his head back and merely cackled.

  I ran from the House of Usher, which was clearly about to fall, for when I slammed the front door, the turret dropped off.

  15

  The Da Vinci Code

  by

  DAN BROWN

  Robert Langdon ran his fingers through the greying hair at his temples, a sign of maturity, which made him look grizzled in a distinguished way, not unlike a young Harrison Ford or slightly older Tom Hanks, depending on who was available. He, who held a Professorship of Symbolologism from the world-famous Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston! Surely the solution to this puzzle was not beyond his abilities! He had to find it! Where was it?

  The young brunette in his bed at the Paris Ritz in Paris turned over in her sleep. She was a numerary assistant of the secretive Catholic organization Opus Dei, and, until he had grazed his mouth over her mortifications of the flesh exactly ten hours and seventeen minutes previously, a celibate. She was also the most beautiful religious extremist he had ever seen. Which made his current predicament all the more excruciating.

  Of course a man of his prodigious learning could not have got where he was today, which was sitting up in bed in the biggest, most elaborate suite at the Paris Ritz in Paris, next to a sleeping nun, the night before a very important lecture at the Louvre, France’s equivalent of the Smithsonian and home of the famously enigmatic painting the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, without having heard of the mythical G spot, the seat of a woman’s sexual pleasure and, legend had it, almost as good as a penis on the orgasm front. But nobody had ever found it. The Catholic Church, in their hateful quest against everything that brings pleasure and joy, had made sure of that, hiding all evidence of its existence and denying that it was even a thing.

  Except that a cadre of devotees of the original, real Jesus, who was a proper man who had sex with Mary Magdalene and enjoyed it, had, with remarkable foresight and striking irony, hidden the location of the G-spot in an intricate religious code, slipped into the Bible, painted into frescoes, carved into the very fabric of the cathedrals where the sex-hating Catholics said their evening matins.

  He’d spent years working on the code. Followed the pointing fingers of saints and the manual stimulation they implied. Deconstructed the looks of sexual satisfaction on the faces of serene Madonnas. Even the very word God was part of the code – for what is it, if not a G and then a spot? (He hadn’t yet figured out the significance of the d.) And all these years of investigation had led him to here, this very bed, this very woman.

  And so the night before, he’d held her in his arms, decoding her breasts, tasting the erudition of her lips, discovering the secrets hidden in her buttocks, until he’d reached the very pinnacle of his life’s work, and he finally had the courage to say to her, ‘Where is it? Where is the G-spot?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she’d said.

  ‘No! Of course not.’

  ‘Well then, you’re not much of a man are you?’

  With that she’d rolled over and started snoring, leaving him in torment. Typical Catholic.

  16

  The Old Curiosity Shop

  by

  CHARLES DICKENS

  Assembled in the parlour of Mrs Quilp were some half-dozen ladies of the borough of Tower Hamlets, partaking of high tea and idle gossip. Mrs Quilp herself was a gentle, pretty little thing, but there could be discerned in her blue eyes no small anxiety. She was pining for her husband, the hunchbacked, boss-eyed, polio-ridden, hai
ry-backed, smelly dwarf Mr Quilp. For though he treated her unkindly she had bound herself to him by those vows that no man may tear asunder, and yet Mr Quilp was out every night a-gambling and a-whoring leaving his wife to yearn for his attentions however meanly meted out.

  Just as her mother was ladling more shrimps onto her generously buttered toast, there was a timid knock at the door. Mrs Quilp daintily ran to answer, hoping it may indeed be her Lord and Master returned early to beat her about a bit, because he did care after all. She bit her lip in disappointment to see the angelic figure of little Nell huddled in the porch clasping a velvet bag to her side.

  ‘Mrs Quilp, I’ve come from the Old Curiosity Shop, hoping to catch your lady-friends. May I come in?’

  Mrs Quilp ushered Nelly’s slight figure into her bower and introduced her to the ladies gathered there.

  ‘This is Little Nell. Her grandfather owns the Old Curiosity Shop.’

  ‘I have brought a special few old and curious things here for your perusal,’ said Nell, drawing from her bag strangely shaped parcels of tissue paper, and setting them one by one on the table. ‘Ladies, we are the weaker sex and our husbands care not for our intimate requirements.’

  So saying, Nell unwrapped the parcel closest to her, revealing a figure in jade. It was in form a sort of undulating slowworm emerging from a carved lotus-flower.

  ‘Curious indeed,’ ventured one of the company. ‘What is’t, Nell?’

  ‘It is an artificial penis,’ answered the sweet slip of a thing.

  There was a chorus of coughing and Mrs Quilp’s mother – who was stout because she was unsympathetic – demanded brusquely, ‘Is this appropriate? Jist how old are ye, child?’