Polaroids From the Dead Read online

  Polaroids from the Dead

  Douglas Coupland

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One: Polaroids from the Dead

  1. The 1960s Are Disneyland

  2. You Are Afraid of the Smell of Shit

  3. You Are Exhausted by Risk

  4. T or F: Self-Perfection Is Attainable Within Your Lifetime

  5. Tinkering with Oblivion Carries Risks

  6. You Don’t Own Your Body

  7. You Fear Involuntary Sedation

  8. You Can’t Remember What You Chose to Forget

  9. Technology Will Spare Us the Tedium of Repeating History

  10. How Clear Is Your Vision of Heaven?

  Part Two: Portraits of People and Places

  11. Lions Gate Bridge, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

  12. The German Reporter

  13. Postcard from the Former East Berlin (Circus Envy)

  14. Letter to Kurt Cobain

  15. Harolding in West Vancouver

  16. Two Postcards from the Bahamas

  17. Postcard from Palo Alto

  18. James Rosenquist’s F-111 (F-One Eleven)

  19. Postcard from Los Alamos (Acid Canyon)

  20. Washington, D.C.: Four Microstories, Super Tuesday 1992

  Part Three: Brentwood Notebook

  About the Author

  Other Books by Douglas Coupland

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  KITCHEN DRAWER FILLED WITH PHOTOS

  The pieces in this book reflect an early 1990s worldview that seems time-expired now—jettisoned behind us like sparkling chunks of Apollo rocket tumbling back to earth.

  This book—comprised of both fiction and nonfiction—explores the world that existed in the early 1990s, back when the decade was young and had yet to locate its own texture. Back in 1990, North American society seemed to be living in a 1980s hangover and was unclear in its direction. People seemed unsure that the 1990s were even going to be capable of generating their own mood. Now I read these pieces over, and it’s as though I’ve opened a kitchen drawer and found a Kleenex box full of already nostalgic Polaroid snapshots and postcards. I hope the photographic imagery in the book will help accentuate this feeling of riffling through evocative old missives.

  Anyway, hindsight is twenty-twenty: most people are now more than well aware of vast changes altering everyday life—changes that quickly made the eighties seem as far away from the 1990s as East is from West. Many of these changes. I hope, are reflected in the pieces contained in this book.

  It seems important to me to remember that as our world seemingly “accelerates,” the expiry dates on “what defines an era” either shrink or become irrelevant. I find myself thinking wistfully of that place in time, say, not three years ago, when teenage bedrooms again sprouted daisy stickers and when Grunge ruled the catwalks. On another level, I think of when the imperative to become “wired” hadn’t yet so much filled the world’s workforce with dark dreams of low-tech paranoia and security-free obsolescence. It’s been a busy half decade.

  This book is mainly an examination of people and places I found fascinating (for whatever reasons we develop fascinations) during this brief window in time. My main area of attraction is the milieu in which I and much of North America was raised: middle-middle-class life, and how this middle class underwent, and continues to undergo, a profound transformation. Between 1990 and 1996, ideas once considered out on “the edge” or “the fringe” became the dominant ideas in everyday discourse: the vanishing middle; the collapse of entitlement; the rise and dominance of irony; extreme social upheaval brought about by endless new machines…and the sense that even a place in time as recent as last week can now feel like it happened a decade ago.

  “Polaroids from the Dead” was “experienced” over a series of Grateful Dead concerts at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum the weekend before I turned thirty, in 1991. Since then, of course, the band’s leader, Jerry Garcia, has died and the Grateful Dead have disbanded—and the intensely distilled reality they once stood at the center of, has, for the time being, dispersed. I’ve always been happy with this series of mini-stories, and were I to do them again, the only thing I might change is to convey more clearly the amount of joy the concerts’ attendees experienced while there—or just the plain good fun they had.

  The stories in Washington, D.C., were researched over a two-week period bridging the Super Tuesday primaries in 1992. In them I tried to capture certain political sentiments of people working inside the political world—and the way people and machines have modified an act as simple as voting.

  The “Brentwood Notebook” was written in 1994, months after the Brown Simpson/Goldman murders. It was to have been written a year previously as a municipal analysis similar to the piece on Palo Alto (also in this book). But without a “story hook,” I found it pretty well impossible to find a magazine editor interested in running a story on an anonymous, invisible Los Angeles neighborhood. (“But that’s the point!” I would explain, “Its invisibility!”) I have always found that things become utterly invisible just moments before they explode. The piece was compiled over a period of one day, the thirty-second anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s ambiguous Brentwood death, her house a brisk ten-minute walk from O. J. Simpson’s North Rockingham house, just up above Sunset Boulevard. Backup historical information was done over the next few days. The “verdict” has come and gone, but the essential essence of ambiguity and death—the core of the article—remains as true, if not truer, than ever. Brentwood’s artifice might not breed or cause the events that happen there, but nevertheless it does create a continually fitting setting for them. It is not intended as any sort of indictment of either Brentwood or Los Angeles but as an attempt to make visible the previously invisible.

  Anyway, I’m going on too long here. My finest regards.

  Doug

  Part One

  Polaroids from the Dead

  AP/Wide World Photos

  1

  THE 1960s ARE DISNEYLAND

  “ARE WE IN THE 1960S YET?” ASKS CHEYENNE.

  “Hippies smell like booger,” says Amy.

  Rain is falling on Oakland for the first time in five years. The drought is over. Scott, Amy, Todd and Cheyenne sit hamstered inside Scott’s stepmother’s steamy-windowed Lexus, parked atop Spyglass Road, surveying the moistening, months-old remains of the Oakland Hills fire storm—hills once bursting with sequoias, Nile lilies, sago palms and mansions, now all incinerated into a fine oyster-gray dust the color of recycled paper.

  “I mean, if the Soviets really wanted to roast the Bay Area,” says Todd, “they didn’t need a bomb. A hibachi and a few drunk teenagers would have been way cheaper.”

  “Whose picture is that on the acid?” calls Cheyenne from the rear seat, mopping up a gin spill from her Okie dress and Goodwill cardigan.

  “Your mother’s.”

  “Fuck on, Scott.”

  “It’s Bart Simpson,” says Amy, the in-car substance authority. “Eighty mikes. And avoid the peace-sign blotter circulating around now because it’s totally washout.”

  A half-hour previously the four friends had liaisoned in Walnut Creek at the Broadway Plaza Mall, their tribe-defining shopping nucleus. Now, serenaded by a My Dad Is Dead CD, they cruise into Oakland via the Highway 24 tunnel through the Berkeley Hills, all four eager to be punctual for Deadhead-parking lot action at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Nutty pre-concert fun starts at four o’clock.

  Todd spots a melted satellite dish down the hill. “Imagine BMX’ing in this shit. Or using ATVs. Better buy Mom some more scratch-’n’-wins.”


  “Wasn’t she a hippie?” asks Cheyenne.

  “Booger-booger-booger,” chants Amy. “A sixties chick.”

  “The 1960s…” Todd begins. He considers that era as distant and meaningful to his own life as that of the Civil War or the Flintstones—faint images of beehive hairdos, the moon walk, fat guys with bad haircuts yelling at helicopters. “I don’t like the 1960s,” Todd decides. “I’d rather be here. Now.”

  Amy chews apricot leather and scans the cities below, down the gray slopes: Oakland, Alameda, Emeryville, Berkeley—and San Francisco across the Bay—birthplaces of the transuranium elements, flower power, nouvelle cuisine and the Intel microchip. Amy sees these cities now slick with water and cottoned in a fine Pacific mist the ash color of burned houses. She remembers the day last October when the hills ignited—she inventories her mental images of exploding eucalyptus trees, Siamese cats sizzling inside garages-turned-kilns, sparrows burning their claws landing on the stove-element-hot husks of Jeeps, frightened citizens escaping from walls of flame only to drive down the wrong road into fire storms and molten deaths.

  And now the hills are cool and damp.

  Amy sees a road sign out the window, but the painted letters have burned off. A few minutes ago driving uphill she saw a sign saying, THIS WAS ONCE SOMEONE’S HOME. GO AWAY. Well, she thinks, at least at a Dead concert you can forget for a few hours that the world is going to go bang. You pay your money and you hop on the ride: Fun costumes, tunes as seen on MTV, and afterward you can return to the present.

  A cop pounds the window.

  “Whoa!” A startled Scott lowers the glass. Apparently the Lexus is parked in a potential mud-slide zone; they must drive on. And so they do—down past the now-rusted melted stoves and heating tanks of the ex-mansions, down onto Highway 24, which connects to the once-quake-pancaked Interstate 880 Nimitz Freeway, then toward the Coliseum parking lot, licking their Bart Simpson acid and dodging jackknifed big rigs and liquid oxygen spills along the way, Scott amusing his friends with tales of his hypothetical career working in the used-car lots of Antarctica.

  “In the 1960s they had Merry Pranksters,” says Cheyenne. “What do we have now?”

  “Wacky funsters,” answers Scott.

  “Look!” says Amy, rolling down her window amid the entranceway gridlock of VW microbuses. “A Tricia Nixon dress—that’s so cool.”

  “History is cool,” says Todd, nodding.

  Scott, Amy, Todd and Cheyenne near the concert. Already the scorched hill behind them has been forgotten, along with the other news of the day—minor temblors in Watsonville and Loma Prieta and controversy over the storage of vasectomized nuclear weapons up-Bay in Richmond. But a smattering of the imagery they have seen today will stick. Their way of looking at the world, continuing a process that began fifteen years ago back in day care, will become even more fortressed.

  Scott thinks, as he inches toward the lot, that if he, Amy, Todd and Cheyenne killed enough old people, or if enough old people were killed, or if enough old people were simply to die, or if the system imploded and the four of them were somehow magically able to afford to build houses of their own, he would design a house for the real world. His roof would be shingled with slate, not tinderbox cedar, his yard would be free of flammable trees-of-death, his water would be stored in vast dark black tanks buried deep beneath the soil, and his walls, though stuccoed in bright and amusing colors like bubble-gum, lemon or swimming-pool blue, would be lined with steel.

  Lee Foster/FPG

  AP/Wide World Photos

  2

  YOU ARE AFRAID OF THE SMELL OF SHIT

  “DEADHEADS AREN’T LIKE DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS FREAKS OR STAR TREKKIES,” says Ross, “though there is, of course, some overlap. Don’t crush the puppy.”

  Daniel trips over a bewildered Samoyed pup then looks up to see a grim reaper-costumed figure headed his way carrying a basket of oranges. The puppy sniffs Daniel’s nose and darts off; Daniel’s jeans are soaked from the lakes of water formed by the downpour of rain. Behind him a waterlogged, gone-to-seed surf dude in bib overalls and a Guatemalan sweater juggles cartons of soy milk and shouts, “Doses! Doses!” Next to him prances a pretty blond girl with dilated pupils in an anorak and a tie-dyed hippie skirt. She blesses all passersby with waves of her wand—a rainbow-striped stick tipped with glistening, frayed silver Mylar filaments.

  “God, Ross. The guys here all look like Charles Manson,” says Daniel as he rights himself, “and the women all look like Sharon Tate.”

  AP/Wide World Photos

  AP/Wide World Photos

  “Certain archetypal dramas continue to replay themselves over and over,” replies Ross, who plans to major in philosophy. “Want a carob cookie? And where did Tamara and Stacey go?”

  This is Daniel’s first Grateful Dead concert. Having seen the freaky skeleton video on MTV, Daniel is curious about the Dead, but not curious to the point of drugging, which might affect his GPA and condemn him to a life batter-frying poultry byproducts in fast-food restaurants. Ross, in his FUCK THA POLICE T-shirt, is Daniel’s old high school buddy from San Raphael. Thankfully tolerant of Daniel’s nerdiness, Ross can occasionally inflict a graze wound: “I smell oregano burning. Is Dan nearby?”

  Daniel has heard lore of the Dead pre-concert parking-lot scene, but the actuality of the event is overpowering: a dope-smoke-scented anti-mall, constructed of crammed-together beat-up rustbucket trucks, vans and school buses license-plated mainly from California, Oregon. Washington, B.C., Nevada. Colorado and Arizona. In front of these vehicles, an impromptu tent city of vendors flaunt standard head-shop goodies: antler pipes, skeleton decals, skull candles, tie-dyed shirts, porcupine quills, juggling supplies, Peruvian mittens, conspiracy-theory paperbacks, rolling papers and bumper stickers: MUCHAS GARCIAS and ONE NUCLEAR FAMILY CAN RUIN YOUR WHOLE DAY and JUST SAY N2O TO DRUGS.

  Older hippie ladies ripe with B.O. gorge on condom balloon animals of nitrous oxide; relentless bongo drums beat; troll hippies in plaid flannel shirts vend health food dinners soaked with rain—“Veggie stir-fry! Veggie stir-fry!”

  Daniel buys a Styrofoam plate of tofu, hijiki mushrooms, tamari sauce and Maui onion bits. “With lecithin and engevista yeast,” the spacey vendor proudly says. Daniel holds his plate and asks for a plastic spoon. The troll druggily cackles back, “Hey, man, I’m organic.”

  Daniel abandons the cutlery-free plate on the vendor’s counter next to a mandala-painted sea-salt shaker. He then drifts back to home base for the early evening: Ross’s five-color 1971 microbus, which differs from other nearby buses by the driftwood, bungie cords and Kurt Vonnegut novels crammed between the dash and the front window and by a battery-powered space heater glowing from within like a Chernobyl reactor core. A saucily upside-down U.S. flag flaps in the stormy wind above the plastic tarpaulin canopying the VW’s sliding doors. Ross says. “Microbuses are the interlocking paving stones of the New Dark Age.”

  Before entering the van, Daniel avoids a mound of puppy shit lying under the slightly less wet area covered by the tarpaulin. Once inside he suggests to his schoolmates, all UC Berkeley freshmen like himself, and all smoking mystery substances from a bong, that perhaps somebody in the van has trailed a dab of the puppy’s business inside.

  “Daniel,” says Ross, marveling at Daniel’s coolness deficiency, “nothing is more bourgeois than fear of the smell of feces. Chill. Swig this.” Ross hands Daniel a beer. “Look. There go Tamara and Stacey. Come along, Deadsters.”

  Farther down the congested and soaking wet medieval midway, Daniel and Ross meet Tamara and Stacey, standing under another tarpaulined space where instant fire logs burn directly on the tar surface of the parking lot. “Greetings, Deadlets,” says Ross. “Love the wimple, Stace.”

  Stacey pats her wimple—a pointy purple velvet Maid Marion hat. “Thanks Ross.” She attempts lighting small cones of wisteria-and lotus-scented incense to cover the petroleum reek of burning tar.

  “What music are they dr
umming?” Daniel asks the group.

  “Kwakiutl and Haida chants,” says Tamara, burrowing into her fanny pack full of pine cones and polished moonstones for a sugar cube, which she finds, then swallows. “Isn’t it great?” She offers a cube to Daniel, who awkwardly declines.

  The Econoline van next to the fire hosts a 24-inch Hitachi monitor displaying a never-ending spiral of vibrant Mandelbrot fractal patterns. Daniel hears a helium-charged squeaking voice shopping for Ecstasy. Nearby dogs (so many dogs!) gobble discarded grilled-cheese sandwiches and sniff one another’s bums, remembering each other from Dead shows in Meadowlands, Nassau and Shoreline.

  Emerson and Dale—friends of Ross—discuss the evening’s possible lineup of songs with a curatorial facility Daniel had considered to be held only by his mother’s wine-bore boyfriends. “No, no. They opened the second set of the first 1989 Spectrum show in Philadelphia with ‘China Cat Sunflower,’ not ‘One More Saturday Night.’”