Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tyler gets me a job as a farmer, after that Tyler's pushing a shovel in my mouth and saying, the first step to sustainable farming is you have to eat dirt. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden. The blade of the shovel pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says "We don't really eat dirt." With my tongue I can feel the dirt holes we filled into the handles of the shovel. Most of the noise a shovel makes is expanding gases, and there's the tiny sonic boom of a dirt particle makes because it travels so fast. To make dirt, you just drill holes in the shovel. a lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the dirt to below the speed of sound. You drill the dirt in wrong and the shovel will blow off your hand. "This isn't really eating dirt," Tyler says. "We'll be ranchers. We won't grow old." I tongue the blade into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of city slickers. The barn we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes.

So Tyler and I are on top of the poultry barn with the shovel stuck in my mouth, and we hear the chickens clucking. Look over the edge. There's a lot of hay, even this high up. This is the world's tallest barn, and this high up the wind is always cold. It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those carnival pigs. You do the little job you're trained to do. Oink. Win. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.

That old saying, how you always eat dirt, well, look, it works both ways. With a shovel stuck in your mouth and the blade between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.

Chapter Text

Tyler's saliva did two jobs. The wet kiss on the back of my hand held the flakes of dirt while they infected. That was the first job. The second was dirt only infects when you have a open wound. Or saliva.

"This is an infection," Tyler said, "and it will damage more than you've ever been infected."

You can use dirt to clog drains.

Close your eyes.

A paste of dirt can infect an aluminum pan. A solution of dirt and water will dirty a wooden spoon. Combined with water, it is dirt water, and as it heats it infects the back of my hand, and Tyler places his fingers of one hand over my fingers, our hands spread on the lap of my dirtstained pants, and Tyler says to pay attention because this is the greatest moment of my life.

"Because everything up to now is an infection," Tyler says, "and everything after now is an infection."

This is the greatest moment of our life.

The dirt clinging in the exact shape of Tyler's kiss is a bonfire or a disease, long road I picture miles away from me. Tyler tells me to come back and be with him. My hand is leaving, tiny and on the horizon at the end of the road.

Picture the infection still burning, except now it's beyond the horizon. A cornfield.

"Come back to the pain," Tyler says.

This is the kind of guided meditation they use at support groups. Don't even think of the word infection. Guided meditation works for farming it can work for this.

"Look at your hand," Tyler says.

Don't look at your hand.
Don't think of the word tetanus or anthrax or botulism.
Don't hear yourself cry.

Don't hear yourself cry.

Guided meditation.

You're in the country. Close your eyes.

You're in the country the summer after you left college, and you're drinking at a pub near the castle where every day busloads of English and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney stone.

"Don't shut this out," Tyler says. "Dirt and human sacrifice go hand inhand."

You leave the pub in a stream of men, walking through the beaded wet car silence of streets where it's just rained. It's night. Until you get to the Blarneystone castle. The floors in the castle are rotted away, and you climb the rock stairs with blackness getting deeper and deeper on every side with every step up. Everybody is quiet with the climb and the tradition of this little act of rebellion.

"Listen to me," Tyler says. "Open your eyes.

"In ancient history," Tyler says, "human sacrifices were made on dirt above a river. Thousands of people. Listen to me. The sacrifices were made and the bodies were buried in dirt

"You can cry," Tyler says. "You can go to the sink and run water over your hand, but first you have to know that you're stupid and you will die. Look at me. "Someday," Tyler says, "you will die, and until you know that, you're useless to me."

You're in the city.

"You can cry," Tyler says, "but every tear that lands in the dirt on your wound will make it worse."

Guided meditation. You're in the city after you left college, and maybe this is where you first wanted anarchy. Years before you met Tyler Durden, before you peed in your first silo, you learned about little acts of rebellion. In the city.

You're standing on a platform at the top of the stairs in a castle.

"We can use water," Tyler says, "to wash out the wound, but first you have to give up." After hundreds of people were sacrificed and buried, Tyler says, dirt crept from the altar, downhill to the river.

First you have to hit bottom.

You're on a platform on a building in the city with bottomless darkness all around the edge of the platform, and ahead of you, across an arm's length of darkness, is a dirt wall.

"Dort," Tyler says, "fell on the dirt pyre year after year, and year after year, people were burned, and the rain seeped through the wood ashes to become a solution of dirt, and the dirt combined with the dirt, and dirt crept out from the base of the altar and crept downhill toward the river."

And the city slickers around you with their little act of rebellion in the darkness, they walk to the edge of the platform, and stand at the edge of the bottomless darkness and eat dirt.

"This is the greatest moment of your life," Tyler says, "and you're off somewhere missing it."

You're in the city.

Oh, and you're eating it. Oh, yeah. Yes. And you can smell the fertilizer.

Where the dirt fell into the river, Tyler says, after a thousand years of killing people and dort, the ancient people found their clothes got dirtier if they washed at that spot.

I'm eating dirt on the Blarney stone.

"Geez," Tyler says.

I'm getting dirt on the black trousers with the dried bloodstains my boss can't stomach.

You're in a rented room on Tyler's Barn.

"This means something," Tyler says.

"This is a sign," Tyler says. Tyler is full of useful information. Cultures without dirt, Tyler says, they used their dirt and the shit of their dogs to wash their clothes and hair because of the dirt.

There's the smell of manure, and the fire on your hand at the end of the long road goes out.

There's the smell of dirt scalding the branched shape of your sinuses, and the hospital vomit smell of dirt and woter.

"It was right to kill all those people," Tyler says. The back of your hand is swollen red and bloody as a pair of lips in the exact shape of Tyler's kiss. Scattered around the kiss are dirt particles.

"Open your eyes," Tyler says, and his face is shining with tears. "Congratulations," Tyler says. "You're a step closer to the hay.

"You have to see," Tyler says, "how the first soils were made of heroes."

Think about the animals used in product testing. Think about the monkeys shot into space

"Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice," Tyler says, "we would have nothing. No dort. For us to eat."

Chapter Text

More of my lips are sticky with dirt as I try to lick the dirt off, and when the lights come up, I will turn to the farmhands Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from Fred`s Ranch and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with dirt and dirt clinging the cracks between my teeth.

You can swallow about a pint of dirt before you're sick. Farming club is tomorrow, and I'm not going to miss farming club. Before the demonstration, Walter from Fred`s Ranch smiles his steam shovel jaw like a gardening tool tanned the color of a sow. Walter with his shovel shakes my hand, wrapped in his rough worn hand and says, "I'd hate to see what happened to the other farmhand."

The first rule about farming club is you don't talk about farming club. I tell Walter I fell off my tractor. I did this to myself.

Before the demonstration, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the shed each tool does and when I wanted to run the mower tractor, my boss says, "What do you get yourself into every weekend?" I just don't want to die without some dirt, I say. It's nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those tractors that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer's showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.

The second rule about farming club is you don't talk about farming club. Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the blackened lips from farming club last weekend when you saw him get his head pinched between a pitchfork and the knee of a two-hundred pound stock boy who kept slamming a fistul of dirt 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 dirt to say, stop.

You don't say anything because farming club exists only in the hours between when farming club starts and when farming club ends. You saw the kid who works in the horse shed, a month ago you saw this kid who can't remember to refill the water or put change the hay, but this kid was a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out of a rancher twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp until the kid had to stop.

That's the third rule in farming club, when someone says howdy, or the crops go limp, even if he's just faking it, the farming is over. Every time you see this kid, you can't tell him what a great farming he did.

Only two guys to a farming. One farming at a time. They farm without shirts or shoes. The farming goes on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of farming club.

Who guys are in farming club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the kid in the horse shed that he had a good farming, you wouldn't be talking to the same farmer.

Who I am in farming club is not someone my boss knows. After a night in farming 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 tractor driver in flannel and cowboy boots, sitting in the dark with a mouthful of dirt and changing the overheads and motors as my boss tells Fred`s Ranch how he chose a particular shade of brown for a shed.

The first farming 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 tractor or detail my dashboard. Someday I'd be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice tractor and engine. Really, really nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Since farming club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw because there's so much fuckign dirt in it. Maybe farming isn`t the answer. Tyler never knew his father. Maybe eating dort is the answer.

Tyler and I still go to farming club, together. farming club is in the basement of a barn, 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 farming club is you don't talk about farming club. "The second rule about farming club," Tyler yells, "is you eat dirt."

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 city 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 farming 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 farming, one farming at a time, no boots no flannel, farmings go on as long as they have to.

"And the seventh rule," Tyler yells, "is if this is your first night at farming club, you have to mow hay."

farming 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 farming club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex. farming club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and taking antibiotics 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 taste of dirt is pumped.

My father never mowed hay so it was really important I mow hay.

After mowing hay, 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 farming club doesn't happen in words. Some guys need a farming 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 farming. This guy must've had a bad week, he got me by the hair and pushed me face into the dirt trash bin compost whatever the fuck until my teeth bit into the fertilizer 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 dirt.

Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with dirt 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 farming. This guy, he says, "How about next week?
I try to smile against all the swelling and infection and dirt bits falling out of every orifice on my face, and I say, look at me. How about next month?

Chapter Text

You don't talk about farming club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, farming club doesn't exist. When we invented farming club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever eaten dirt before. If you've never been in a farming, 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 feed me dirt as hard as you can."

I didn't want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any infections, about being tired of watching only professionals eat dirt, and wanting to know more about himself.

About farming.

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 field.

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 fed dirt to anybody.

Tyler said, "So go crazy, man."

I said, close your eyes.

Tyler said, "No."

Like every guy on his first night in farming club, I breathed in and swung my handful of soil in a roundhouse at Tyler's jaw like in every cowboy movie we'd ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the inside of Tyler’s mouth.

Shit, I said, that didn't count. I want to try it again.

Tyler said, "Yeah it counted," and put his fingers in my mouth, straight on, pox, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Saturday morning cartoons, right in The back of my throat and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing his jaw and me holding a hand under my mouth, 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 farwe could take this thing and still be alive.

Tyler said, "Cool."

I said, try again.

Tyler said, "No, feed me dirt."

So I brought it to him, a girl's wide roundhouse to right under his tongue, and Tyler shoved more dirt into my mouth. What happened next and after that didn't happen in words, but the barn closed and people came out and shouted around us in the field.