Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

To start with, there was music. An unseen hand pressed an offstage button, and a thumping bass beat shook that staid auditorium. The house lights dimmed. From loudspeakers, a voice shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Pathological Society of London brings you the sexy …the sin-sational …the searing-hot, one-and-only …the Elephant Man!”

In Lady Daisy’s revision Joseph Merrick made his entrance in a burst of blue smoke bomb, wearing a skintight California highway patrolman’s buff-color uniform. A brown stripe running down the outside of each thigh. Twenty-one, twenty-two years old. He’d wear a giant-sized pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses in perfect proportion to his huge Elephant Man head. His every seam was cleverly held together with Velcro; he’d wear nothing you couldn’t get off with a firm yank. He’d wear a banana hammock engineered for maximum flop. And boots. Sexy black leather boots.

One nipple was pierced, pinned through with a polished policeman’s badge on his otherwise bare torso.

No, when Joseph Merrick was presented to the Pathological Society of London in 1884 he didn’t need to dance—but he did. That was the fantasy of Daisy St. Patience. No working the brass pole, not for him, but Daisy imagined him wearing a black Chippendales bow tie. This Elephant Man augmented his tan with baby oil. Who’s to say what really went down? History tells us the Elephant Man didn’t sport sexy Speedo tan lines—those sexy runway lines that point the shortcut to some sexy Elephant Man groin, groin, groin. Rumor has it he didn’t shave his legs or wax his chest, not even while he was touring the European Continent. Again, history records that he was twenty-one, twenty-two years old. Who’s to say Joseph Merrick didn’t get his elephant ears pierced for some hot saddle plugs? A gold ring glinting in his sexy navel. Odds are excellent that he got his lopsided Elephant Man chest inked with a couple of tribal tats. In Daisy’s version, Joe Merrick wore the effects of his Proteus syndrome and neuro-fibromatosis like a hot-pink thong, bumping and grinding his G-stringed self to invade the personal space of those esteemed scientist voyeurs. No passive object for critical gaze, he rotated his deformed hips. Shimmying and finger-snapping. Flexing his washboard elephant abs. No cowering victim, he flexed his fibroid-distorted self and returned their aghast stares with his sexy Elephant Man smile. He grinned his bulbous Elephant Man face like he’d been growing his big forehead lump since he was a three-year-old kid in Leicestershire, pumping up his skull and practicing moves in front of a mirror for today’s command performance. His skeleton might’ve been tortured, but his capped teeth looked perfect, blazing white in the spotlight. Delivering it home, hot, to those whale-boned mamas. Bringing them the ol’ razzle-dazzle with his Elephant Man jazz hands, he did his smooth moonwalk. Working his mutilations with the arrogance of a Playgirl centerfold, Merrick executed perfect backflips. He did handstands and shook his junk in everyone’s cookie-cutter Victorian face. So close they could feel the heat coming off his Elephant Man thighs, he was just boom, boom, boom to the scorching mix of Donna Summer and Lady Gaga. Strutting the sexy curvature of his twisted spine, he pumped his bony cockeyed pelvis. Unmistakable. Sans apology. His every knotted muscle said: Here, this is what it is to be alive. His thrusting crotch said: Come and get it!

Showing his audience no mercy, Merrick was all: Deal with it, bitches.

He was sweating now, flaunting his Elephant Man nipples and his bushy Elephant Man armpit hair. He sidled up to rub his pheromone-drenched elephant skin, all Brillo Pad–wet, against folks seated along the aisle. Dry-humping the shoulders of elegant gents, he shook his elephant ass cheeks like two scoops of lizard ice cream.

In Daisy’s version, barely legal Joe Merrick, almost-elephant-jailbait, he sold the audience his bad attitude self. Like a flaming banquet of all-you-can eat birth defects. Like a visitor from the planet of Worst-Case Scenario. He made those eminent Victorian ladies want nothing more than to be the mama of his Elephant Man babies. Outsider sexy, he made everyone present forget the tragedy they’d been sold about his Elephant Man life.

Elephant Joe. The Elephant Dude. He worked that Bloomsbury crowd for all the pound notes they could tuck into his G-string. He lap-danced the blushing bachelorettes until they spilled their Long Island iced teas, intentionally, just to hide the overly excited wet soaking through their hoop skirts. The telephone had barely been invented, but already people were trying to slip Joseph Merrick their unlisted numbers.

No, the way Daisy told the story, he didn’t just stand there like an object for physicians to stare at. Nobody screamed. Nobody wept quietly into their handkerchiefs, or barfed.

People whistled and stomped. They swooned. People chanted, in unison, “Elephant MAN …elephant MAN …elephant MAN!”

That was what happened when Joseph Merrick was presented at Pathological Society of London in 1884. According to Daisy St. Patience, he had thick, flowing, shoulder-length blond hair.

And if that’s not exactly how it actually happened, says Daisy …well, that’s the way it should’ve.

y dress I carry my ass around Evie’s wedding in is tighter than skintight. It’s what you’d call bone-tight. It’s that knockoff print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons all button through the stigmata. Then I’m wearing yards and yards of black silk gloves bunched up on my arms. My heels are nosebleed-high. I wrap Brandy’s half mile of black tulle studded with sparkle up around my scar tissue, over the shining cherry pie where my face used to be, wrapped tight, until only my eyes are out. It’s a look that’s bleak and morbid. The feeling is we’ve got a little out of control.

It takes more effort to hate Evie than it used to. My whole life is moving farther away from any reason to hate her. It’s moving far away from reason itself. It takes a cup of coffee and a Dexedrine capsule to feel even vaguely pissed about anything.

Brandy, she wears the knockoff Bob Mackie suit with the little peplum skirt and the big, I don’t know, and the thin, narrow I couldn’t care less. She wears a hat, since it’s a wedding, after all. Got some shoes on her feet made from the skin of some animal. Accessorized including jewelry, you know, stones dug out of the earth, polished and cut to reflect light, set in alloys of gold and copper, atomic weight, melted and beat with hammers, all of it so labor-intensive. Meaning, all of Brandy Alexander.

Ellis, he wears a double-breasted, whatever, a suit, a single vent in the back, black. He looks the way you’d imagine yourself dead in a casket if you’re a guy, not a problem for me, since Ellis has outlived his role in my life.

Ellis’s strutting around now that he’s proved he can seduce something in every category. Not that knobbing Mr. Parker makes him King of Fag Town, but now he’s got Evie under his belt, and maybe enough time’s gone by Ellis can go back on duty, get his old beat back in Washington Park.

So we take the gold-engraved wedding invitation that I stole, Brandy and Ellis each take a Percodan, and we go to Evie’s wedding reception moment.

Jump to eleven o’clock ante meridiem at the baronial West Hills manor house of crazy Evie Cottrell, gun-happy Evie, newly united Mrs. Evelyn Cottrell Skinner, as if I could care at this point. And. This is oh so dazzling. Evie, she could be the wedding cake, in tier on tier of sashes and flowers rising around her big hoop skirt, up and up to her cinched waist, then her big Texas breasts popped out the top of a strapless bodice. There’s so much of her to decorate, the same as Christmas at a shopping mall. Silk flowers are bunched at one side of her waist. Silk flowers over both ears anchor a veil thrown back over her blond on blond sprayed-up hair. In that hoop skirt and those pushed-up Texas grapefruits, the girl walks around riding her own parade float.