Choke

Back in the year 2000, I fell in love with the film Fight Club and subsequently the novel as well. My appreciation for the minimalist writing of Chuck Palahniuk led to a lifelong fandom of the author which peaked with me meeting Mr. Palahniuk in 2016 during a signing for Fight Club 2. He was everything I imagined he would be and that experience has gone down as the best celebrity interaction I’ve ever had.

When I finished the novel of Fight Club, I went to Barnes and Noble to pick up another book. This was a different time, before Goodreads, so I just picked up whichever book cover spoke to me, and that was Choke.

Choke is the story of Victor Mancini, a sex addict who pays for his mother’s healthcare by intentionally choking on food in crowded restaurants. What Victor is unable to admit to himself is that he yearns to be touched and told everything will be okay, so he satisfies this need while also playing a role in the story of some strangers life. For some people, saving Victor’s life will be the most meaningful thing they ever do, and so they stay in touch, and Victor cons them out of money by exploiting this strange connection they have with one another: the victim and the hero.

There is a level of absurdity that makes Chuck Palahniuk’s writing so enticing. It’s absurd, yet relatable. He’s able to put into words these strange desires and urges that we all have and then brings them out into the public in the most disturbing ways possible. As a young man, I loved the raw, gross out content. It felt so anti-establishment and was unlike anything else I’d read. But having re-read Choke this past week, I’m in awe of how much depth and nuisance the story contains. I’m not sure if I’m just approaching the story from a different place in my life or if maybe I was too young and too naive to comprehend the themes at play, but Choke is not just about a man who chokes on food to exploit people. It’s about mortality and the meaninglessness of life.

I am not a book reviewer, nor do I intend on breaking down every theme, idea, and quote within this novel. I don’t believe in dissecting media to that degree, because my interpretation could be totally different from yours. I mean, my interpretation at the age of seventeen is vastly different than at forty-one. So, with that disclaimer in mind, let’s continue.

One of the things I struggle with is what will happen as I get older. I have no kids, not much of a family, and no money. I’m not saying it keeps me up at night, but there is a concern that if I were to grow too old, I’d be in a real pickle. As it is today, I hope for a sudden and quick death before I get too old to take care of myself, because I’m not really sure what my options will be. While reading Choke I felt some of these ideas at play. There is a low-key anger that Victor has for his once strong and smart mother being stuck in a nursing home and slowly dying. He’s powerless to fix her, so he attempts to be the unlikely hero to everybody else. He goes as far as to confess to the sins of the other nursing home patients just to bring them peace. Don’t get me wrong, Victor is not a great guy, but there is a part of him that wants to feel needed, loved, and he can find that by being the hero, even if that involves confessing to killing someone’s dog forty years before he was born.

These are doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, who, day to day, can’t master a zipper anymore. This is less teaching than it is damage control. You might as well try to paint a house that’s on fire.

On a couple of occasions, Choke puts aging into perspective. It shows how no matter how smart, powerful, or great you once were, in the end, you are just as helpless as the rest of us. In a “life is fair” sort of way this is comforting, but there is another angle where its not. The angle where you look at how the respectable folks, the rich and powerful, in the end having a feeding tube shoved down their throat in an attempt to keep them alive. Which leads us to the next idea.

It was not lost on me this time that Victor spends his evening choking and being saved, over and over again. However, as mentioned in the novel, a large of deaths in nursing homes occur when individuals do not swallow their food right, and it goes into their lungs, and turns into pneumonia. The juxtaposition of choking and knowing you’ll be saved and choking and condemning yourself to death shows the contrast of youth vs. the eldery.

Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you’d think.

This quote is something my wife has heard me say often. The older I get, the more the world reveals itself, and the more I see the man behind the curtain. Nothing is what it seems and everyone and everything seems to have an agenda. There is some comfort in knowing that in 2001, when this book was written, the world was no different.

When you’re an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

I don’t drink or do drugs, but there are times when I wish I did. I even told my doctor that once after the fourth failed attempt at finding a useful anti-depressant. There I was, going through the “proper” channels, taking something created by some mega-corporation for profit that wasn’t working. I was wasting tons of money picking up prescriptions, making appointments and follow-ups, when a solution to my pain, a little relief was a quick trip to the liquor store or some crazy gummy that everyone I know takes. I did not indulge in these desires, but I understand this sentiment, when you look at life and all that sucks about it, addiction doesn’t look so bad.

Sitting in traffic, my heart would beat at regular speed. I’m not alone. Trapped there, I could just be a normal person headed home to a wife, kids, a house. I could pretend that my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster. That I knew how to function.

I think this may be the most powerful sentence in the entire novel: I could pretend my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster. Victor thinks this as he’s trying to put his life into perspective, and I love how the sentence is surrounded by a fantasy. Victor thinks his life would be better if he had something more, but the key part of the sentence that works for me is “I could pretend…”

This is what we all do. We pretend our lives are so much more. We pretend our families, our jobs, our religion, our pets, our hobbies, our traveling, etc., means so much more than it actually does. All of these things are distractions from the inevitable, that if we are lucky to live a long life, we’ll be one of the old folks, wandering around complaining about something our sibling did seventy years earlier, eventually having a feeding tube shoved down our throat in some wild idea that that is some way to live.

Ultimately, I came away from Choke with a desire to try and find something meaningful in my life, to create something. It doesn’t matter what. Maybe it’s a painting or a blog post, but creating in a world of despair can bring you contentment and I think that is the best most of us can ask for.