Free Choke by Chuck Palahniuk Page B

coffee, you could save a child’s life. Be a sponsor. The hook is you can’t just save somebody’s life one time. People are having to save me again and again. The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.
    The same as in medical school, you can only save somebody so many times before you can’t. It’s the Peter Principle of Medicine.
    These people sending money, they’re paying for heroism in installments.
    There’s Moroccan food to choke on. There’s Sicilian. Every night.
    After I was born, my mom just stayed put in the States. Not in this house. She didn’t live here until her last release, after the school bus theft charge. Auto theft and kidnapping. This isn’t anyhouse I remember from childhood, or this furniture. This is everything her parents sent from Italy. I guess. She could’ve won it on a game show for all I really know.
    Just once, I asked her about her family, my grandparents back in Italy.
    And she said, this I remember, she said:
    “They don’t know about you so don’t make any trouble.”
    And if they don’t know about her bastard child, it’s a safe bet they don’t know about her obscenity conviction, her attempted murder conviction, her reckless endangerment, her animal harassment. It’s a safe bet they’re insane, too. Just look at their furniture. They’re probably insane and dead.
    I flip back and forth through the phone book.
    The truth is it costs three thousand bucks a month to keep my mom in St. Anthony’s Care Center. At St. Anthony’s, fifty bucks gets you about one diaper change.
    God only knows how many deaths I’ll have to almost die to pay for a stomach tube.
    The truth is, so far the big book of heroes has just over three hundred names recorded in it, and I still don’t pull in three grand every month. Plus there’s the waiter every night with a bill. Plus there’s the tip. The damn overhead is killing me.
    The same as any good pyramid scheme, you always have to be enrolling people at the bottom. The same as Social Security, it’s a mass of good people all paying for somebody else. Nickel-and-diming these Good Samaritans is just my own personal social safety net.
    “Ponzi scheme” isn’t the right phrase, but it’s the first that comes to mind.
    The miserable truth is, every night I still have to pick through the telephone directory and find a good place to almost die.
    What I’m running is the Victor Mancini Telethon.
    It’s no worse than the government. Only in the Victor Mancini welfare state, the people who foot the bill don’t complain. They’re proud. They actually brag about it to their friends.
    It’s a gifting scam with just me at the top and new members lined up to buy in by hugging me from behind. Bleeding these good generous people is.
    Still, it’s not like I’m spending the money on drugs and gambling. It’s not like I even get to finish a meal anymore. Halfway through every main course, I have to go to work. Do my gagging and thrashing. Even then, some people never come across with any money. Some never seem to give it another thought. After long enough even the most generous people will stop sending a check.
    The crying part, where I’m hugged in somebody’s arms, gasping and crying, that part just gets easier and easier. More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can’t stop.
    Not crossed out in the phone book, there’s still fondue. There’s Thai. Greek. Ethiopian. Cuban. There’s still a thousand places I haven’t gone to die.
    To increase cash flow, you have to create two or three heroes every night. Some nights you have to hit three or four places before you’ve had a full meal.
    I’m a performance artist doing dinner theater, doing three shows a night. Ladies and gentlemen, may I have a volunteer from the audience.
    “Thank you, but no thank you,” I’d like to tell my dead relatives. “But I can build my own family.”
    Fish. Meat. Vegan. Tonight, like most nights, the easiest way is to just close