Generation X Read online

  accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

  VACCINATED TIME

  TRAVEL: To fantasize about traveling backward in time, but only with proper vaccinations.

  We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.

  At meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, fellow drinksters will get angry with you if you won't puke for the audience. By that, I mean spill your guts —really dredge up those rotted baskets of fermented kittens and

  murder implements that lie at the bottoms of all of our personal lakes. AA members want to hear the horror stories of how far you've sunk in

  I life, and no low is low enough. Tales of spouse abuse, embezzlement, and public incontinence are both appreciated and expected. I know this as a fact because I've (lurid details of my own date), and I've seen the ship in action—and

  sordid enough tales of share. 'Never be afraid diseasedlungforthespec been to these meeting s life will follow at a later process of onedownmanbeen angry at not having debauchery of my own to to cough up a bit of tators," said a man who sat next to me at a meeting once, a man with skin like a half-cooked pie crust and who had five grown children who would no longer return his phone calls: "How are people ever going to help themselves if they can't grab onto a fragment of your own horror? People want that little fragment, they need it. That little piece of lung makes their own fragments less scary." I'm still looking for a description of storytelling as vital as this. Thus inspired by my meetings of the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, I instigated a policy of storytelling in my own life, a policy

  of "bedtime stories," which Dag, Claire, and I share among ourselves. It's simple: we come up with stories and we tell them to each other. The only rule is that we're not allowed to interrupt, just like in AA, and at the end we're not allowed to criticize. This noncritical atmosphere works for us because the three of us are so tight assed about revealing our emotions. A clause like this was the only way we could feel secure with each other.

  Claire and Dag took to the game like ducklings to a stream. "I firmly believe," Dag once said at the beginning, months ago, "that everybody on earth has a deep, dark secret that they'll never tell another soul as long as they live. Their wife, their husband, their lover, or their priest. Never.

  "I have my secret. You have yours. Yes, you do—I can see you smiling. You're thinking about your secret right now. Come on: spill it out. What is it? Diddle your sister? Circle jerk? Eat your poo to check the taste? Go with a stranger and you'd go with more? Betray a friend? Just tell me. You may be able to help me and not even know it."

  Anyhow, today we're going to be telling bedtime stories on our picnic, and on Indian Avenue we're just about to turn off onto the Interstate 10 freeway to head west, riding in the clapped-out ancient red Saab, with Dag at the wheel, informing us that passengers do not really "ride" in his little red car so much as they "motor": "We are motoring off to our picnic in hell."

  Hell is the town of West Palm Springs Village—a bleached and defoliated Flintstones color cartoon of a failed housing development from the 1950s. The town lies on a chokingly hot hill a few miles up the valley, and it overlooks the shimmering aluminum necklace of Interstate 10, whose double strands stretch from San Bernardino in the west, out to Blythe and Phoenix in the east.

  In an era when nearly all real estate is coveted and developed, West Palm Springs Village is a true rarity: a modern ruin and almost deserted save for a few hearty souls in Airstream trailers and mobile homes, who give us a cautious eye upon our arrival through the town's welcoming sentry—an abandoned Texaco gasoline station surrounded by a chain link fence, and lines of dead and blackened Washingtonia palms that seem to have been agent-oranged. The mood is vaguely reminiscent of a Vietnam War movie set.

  "You get the impression," says Dag as we drive past the gas station at hearse speed, "that back in, say, 1958, Buddy Hackett, Joey Bishop, and a bunch of Vegas entertainers all banded together to make a bundle on this place, but a key investor split town and the whole place just died."

  •

  But again, the village is not entirely dead. A few people do live there, and these few troopers have a splendid view of the windmill ranch down below them that borders the highway—tens of thousands of turbo blades set on poles and aimed at Mount San Gorgonio, one of the windiest places in America. Conceived of as a tax dodge after the oil shock, these windmills are so large and powerful that any one of their blades could cut a man in two. Curiously, they turned out to be functional as well as a good tax dodge, and the volts they silently generate power detox center air conditioners and cellulite vacuums of the region's burgeoning cosmetic surgery industry.

  Claire is dressed today in bubble gum capri pants, sleeveless blouse, scarf, and sunglasses: starlet manque. She likes retro looks, and she also once told us that if she has kids, "I'm going to give them utterly retro names like Madge or Verna or Ralph. Names like people have in diners."

  Dag, on the other hand, is dressed in threadbare chinos, a smooth cotton dress shirt, and sockless in loafers, essentially a reduction of his usual lapsed Mormon motif. He has no sunglasses: he is going to stare at the sun: Huxley redux or Monty Clift, prepping himself for a role and trying to shake the drugs.

  "What," ask both my friends, "is this lurid amusement value dead celebrities hold for us?"

  Me? I'm just me. I never seem to be able to get into the swing of using "time as a color" in my wardrobe, the way Claire does, or "time cannibalizing" as Dag calls the process. I have enough trouble just being now. I dress to be obscure, to be hidden—to be generic. Camouflaged.

  *****

  DECADE BLENDING:

  In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two or more items from various decades to create a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quant earrings (1960s) + cork wedgie platform shoes (1970s) + black leather jacket (1950s and 1980s).

  So, after cruising around house-free streets, Claire chooses the corner of Cottonwood and Sapphire avenues for our picnic, not because there's anything there (which there isn't, merely a crumbling asphalt road being reclaimed by sage and creosote bushes) but rather because "if you try real hard you can almost feel how optimistic the developers were when they named this place."

  The back flap of the car clunks down. Here we will eat chicken breasts, drink iced tea, and greet with exaggerated happiness the pieces of stick and snakeskin the dogs bring to us. And we will tell our bedtime stories to each other under the hot buzzing sun next to vacant lots that in alternately forked universes might still bear the gracious desert homes of such motion picture stars as Mr. William Holden and Miss Grace Kelly. In these homes my two friends Dagmar Bellinghausen and Claire Baxter would be more than welcome for swims, gossip, and frosty rum drinks the color of a Hollywood, California sunset.

  But then that's another universe, not this universe. Here the three of us merely eat a box lunch on a land that is barren—the equivalent of blank space at the end of a chapter—and a land so empty that all objects placed on its breathing, hot skin become objects of irony. And here, under the big white sun, I get to watch Dag and Claire pretend they inhabit that other, more welcoming universe.

  I

  Dag says he's a lesbian trapped inside a man's body. Figure that out. To watch him smoke a filter-tipped cigarette out in the desert, the sweat

  I on his face evaporating as quickly as it forms, while Claire teases the dogs with bits of ch
icken at the back of the Saab's hatch gate, you can't help but be helplessly reminded of the sort of bleached Kodak snapshots

  [ taken decades ago and found in shoe boxes in attics everywhere. You

  ' know the type: all yellowed and filmy, always with a big faded car in the background and fashingly hip. When you see

  [ help but wonder at just innocent all moments of tripping of a camera's the future is still unus, and also for that brief ions that look surpris such photos, you can't how sweet and sad and life are rendered by the shutter, for at that point known and has yet to hurt moment, our poses are accepted as honest. As I watch Dag and Claire piddle about the desert, I also realize that my descriptions of myself and my two friends have been slightly vague until now. A bit more description of them and myself is in order. Time for case studies. I'll begin with Dag. Dag's car pulled up to the curb outside my bungalow about a year ago, its Ontario license plates covered in a mustard crust of Oklahoma mud and Nebraska insects. When he opened the door, a heap of clutter fell out the door and onto the pavement, including a bottle of Chanel Crystalle perfume that smashed. ("Dykes just love Crystalle, you know. So active. So sporty.") I never found out what the perfume was for, but life's been considerably more interesting around here since.

  Shortly after Dag arrived, I both found him a place to live—an empty bungalow in between mine and Claire's—and got him a job with me at Larry's Bar, where he quickly took control of the scene. Once, for example, he bet me fifty dollars that he could induce the locals —a depressing froth of failed Zsa Zsa types, low-grade bikers who brew cauldrons of acid up in the mountains, and their biker-bitch chicks with pale-green gang tattoos on their knuckles and faces bearing the appalling complexions of abandoned and rained-on showroom dummies—he bet me he could have them all singing along with him to "It's a Heartache," a grisly, strangely out-of-date Scottish love tune that was never removed from the jukebox, before the night was out. This notion was too silly to even consider, so, of course, I accepted the bet. A few minutes later I was out in the hallway making a long-distance call underneath the native Indian arrowhead display, when suddenly, what did I hear inside the bar but the tuneless bleatings and bellowings of the crowd, accompanied by their swaying beehive do's and waxen edemic biker's arms flailing arrhythmically to the song's beat. Not without admiration, then, did I give Dag his fifty, while a terrifying biker gave him a hug ("I love this guy!"), and then watched Dag put the bill into his mouth, chew it a bit, and then swallow.

  "Hey, Andy. You are what you eat."

  *****

  People are wary of Dag when meeting him for the first time, in the same visceral way prairie folk are wary of the flavor of seawater when tasting it for the first time at an ocean beach. "He has eyebrows," says Claire when describing him on the phone to one of her many sisters.

  Dag used to work in advertising (marketing, actually) and came to California from Toronto, Canada, a city that when I once visited gave the efficient, ordered feel of the Yellow Pages sprung to life in three dimensions, peppered with trees and veined with cold water.

  "1 don't think I was a likable guy. I was actually one of those putzes you see driving a sports car down to the financial district every morning with the roof down and a baseball cap on his head, cocksure and pleased with how frisky and complete he looks. I was both thrilled and flattered and achieved no small thrill of power to think that most manufacturers of life-style accessories in the Western world considered me their most desirable target market. But at the slightest provocation I'd have been i willing to apologize for my working life—how I work from eight till five in front of a sperm-dissolving VDT performing abstract tasks that in -I directly enslave the Third World. But then, hey! Come five o'clock, I'd go nuts! I'd streak my hair and drink beer brewed in Kenya. I'd wear bow ties and listen to alternative rock and slum in the arty part of town." Anyhow, the story of why Dag came to Palm Springs runs through my brain at the moment, so I will continue here with a reconstruction built of Dag's own words, gleaned over the past year of slow nights tending bar. I begin at the point where he once told me how he was at work and suffering from a case of "Sick Building Syndrome," saying, "The windows in the office building where I worked didn't open that morning, and I was sitting in my cubicle, affectionately named the veal-I fattening pen. I was getting sicker and more headachy by the minute as the airborne stew of office toxins and viruses recirculated—around and around —in the fans.

  "Of course these poison winds were eddying in my area in partic-ular, aided by the hum of the white noise machine and the glow of the VDT screens. I wasn't getting much done and was staring at my IBM clone surrounded by a sea of Post-it Notes, rock band posters ripped of construction site hoarding boards, and a small sepia photo of a wooden whaling ship, crushed in the Antarctic i ce, that I once found in an old National Geographic. I had placed this photo behind a little gold frame I bought in Chinatown. I would stare at this picture constantly, never quite able to imagine the cold, lonely despair that people who are genuinely trapped must feel—in the process think better of my own plight in life.

  "Anyhow, I wasn't going to produce much, and to be honest, I had decided that morning that it was very hard to see myself doing the same job two years down the road. The thought of it was laughable; depressing. So I was being a bit more lax than normal in my behavior. It felt nice. It was pre -quitting elation. I've had it a few times now.

  "Karen and Jamie, the "VDT Vixens" who worked in the veal

  VEAL-FATTENING PEN:

  Small, cramped office

  workstations built of fabriccovered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.

  fattening pens next to me (we called our area the junior stockyard or the junior ghetto, alternately) weren't feeling well or producing much, either. As I remember, Karen was spooked about the Sick Building business more than any of us. She had her sister, who worked as an Xray technician in Montreal, give her a lead apron, which she wore to protect her ovaries when she was doing her keyboarding work. She was going to quit soon to pick up work as a temp: 'More freedom that way —easier to date the bicycle couriers.'

  "Anyway, I remember I was working on a hamburger franchise campaign, the big goal of which, according to my embittered ex-hippie boss, Martin, was to 'get the little monsters so excited about eating a burger that they want to vomit with excitement.' Martin was a forty-yearold man saying this. Doubts I'd been having about my work for months were weighing on my mind.

  "As luck would have it, that was the morning the public health inspector came around in response to a phone call I'd made earlier that week, questioning the quality of the working environment.

  "Martin was horrified that an employee had called the inspectors, and I mean really freaked out. In Toronto they can force you to make architectural changes, and alterations are ferociously expensive—fresh air ducts and the like —and health of the office workers be damned, cash signs were dinging up in Martin's eyes, tens of thousands of dollars' worth. He called me into his office and started screaming at me, his teeny-weeny salt and pepper ponytail bobbing up and down, 'I just don't understand you young people. No workplace is ever okay enough. And you mope and complain about how uncreative your jobs are and how you're getting nowhere, and so when we finally give you a promotion you leave and go pick grapes in Queensland or some other such nonsense.'

  "Now, Martin, like most embittered ex-hippies, is a yuppie, and I have no idea how you're supposed to relate to those people. And before you start getting shrill and saying yuppies don't exist, let's just face facts: they do. Dickoids like Martin who snap like wolverines on speed when they can't have a restaurant's window seat in the nonsmoking section with cloth napkins. Androids who never get jokes and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence, like an underfed Chihuahua baring its teeny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in or like a glass of milk sloshed on top of the
violet filaments of a bug

  barbecue: a weird abuse of nature. Yuppies never gamble, they calculate. They have no aura: ever been to a yuppie party? It's like being in an empty room: empty hologram people walking around peeking at themselves in mirrors and surreptitiously misting their tonsils with Binaca spray, just in case they have to kiss another ghost like themselves. There's just nothing there.

  "So, 'Hey Martin,' I asked when I go to his office, a plush James Bond number overlooking the downtown core—he's sitting there wearing a computer-generated purple sweater from Korea—a sweater with lots of texture. Martin likes torture. 'Put yourself in my shoes. Do you really think we enjoy having to work in that toxic waste dump in there?' "Uncontrollable urges were overtaking me.

  ' '. . . and then have to watch you chat with your yuppie buddies about your gut liposuction all day while you secrete artificially sweetened royal jelly here in Xanadu?'

  "Suddenly I was into this tres deeply. Well, if I'm going to quit anyway, might as well get a thing or two off my chest. ' 'I beg your pardon,' says Martin, the wind taken out of his sails. ' 'Or for that matter, do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbedire fence around the rest. You really make me sick.'

  "Unfortunately the phone rang then, so I missed what would have undoubtedly been a feeble retort . . . some higher-up Martin was in the I middle of a bum-kissing campaign with and who couldn't be shaken off the line. I dawdled off into the staff cafeteria. There, a salesman from the copy machine company was pouring a Styrofoam cup full of scalding hot coffee into the soil around a ficus tree which really hadn't even