Generation X Page 4

  SAFETY NET-ISM: The

  belief that there will always be a

  I TRY TO IMAGINE MYSELF IN THIS SAME JOB ONE YEAR FROM NOW...

  JUST NOT SEEING ANY PICTURES

  financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.

  DIVORCE ASSUMPTION: A form of Safety Net-ism, the belief that if a marriage doesn't work out, then there is no

  problem because partners can simply seek a divorce.

  a chance to eat." And talk about pretense! They kept the same unread copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung lying on the table for three days running. I tell you.

  At a nearby table, Mr. Baxter, Claire's father, sat with his glistening and be-gemmed business cronies ignoring his progeny, while Mrs. Scott- I Baxter, his fourth (and trophy) wife, blond and young and bored, glowered at the Baxter spawn like a mother mink in a mink farm, just waiting for a jet to strafe the facility, affording her an excuse to feign terror and eat her young.

  The whole Baxter clan had en masse been imported from L. A. that weekend by the highly superstitious Mr. Baxter, a New Age convert (thanks to wife number three), to avoid a most certain doom in the city. Shakey Angelinos like him were luridly envisioning the strangely large I houses of the valley and canyons being inhaled into chinks in the earth with rich glottal slurps and no mercy, all the while being pelleted by rains of toads. A true Californian, he joked: "Hey, at least it's visual."

  Claire, however, sat looking profoundly unamused by her family's spirited, italicized conversations. She was idly tethering her paper plate loaded with a low-calorie/high fiber lunch of pineapple bean sprouts and skinless chicken to the outdoor tabletop while forceful winds, unseasonably fierce, swept down from Mount San Jacinto. I remember the morbid snippets of chitchat that were being prattled around the table by the hordes of sleek and glamorous young Baxters:

  "It was Hister, not Hitler, Nostradamus predicted," one brother, Allan, a private school Biff-and-Muffy type, yelled across a table, "and he predicted the JFK assassination, too.'"

  "I don't remember the JFK assassination."

  "I'm wearing a pillbox hat to the end of the world party at Zola's, tonight. Like Jackie. Very historical."

  "The hat was a Halston, you know."

  "That's so Warh ol."

  "Dead celebrities are, de facto amusing."

  "Remember that Halloween a few years ago during the Tylenol tampering scare, when everyone showed up at parties dressed as boxes of Tylenol ..."

  ". . . and then looked hurt when they realized they weren't the only ones who'd come up with the idea."

  "You know, this is so stupid being here because there are three

  34

  GENERATION X

  earthquake faults that run right through the city. We might as well paint •gets on our shirts."

  "Did Nostradamus ever say anything about random snipers?"

  "Can you milk horses?" "What's that got to do with

  anything?"

  Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years. But then their words so strongly captured the spirit of the times, and they remain my mind:

  "I saw a record producer in the parking lot. He and wifey were heading to Utah. They said this place was a disaster area, and only Utah was safe. They had this really hot gold Corniche, and in the trunk they had cartons of freeze -dried army food and bottled water from Alberta. Wifey looked really scared."

  "Did you see the pound of plastic lipofat in the nurse's office? Just Eke the fake food in sushi restaurant windows. Looks like a dish of raspberry kiwi fruit puree."

  "Someone turn off the wind machine, for Chrissake, it's like a fashion shoot out here."

  "Stop being such a male model."

  "I'll hum some Eurodisco."

  (Paper plates loaded wit h beef and chutney and baby vegetables w ere, at that point, gliding off the bright white tables, and into the pool.) "Ignore the wind, Davie. Don't cosign nature's bullshit. It'll go away."

  "Hey ... is it possible to damage the sun? I mean, we can wreck just about anything we want to here on earth. But can we screw up the sun if we wanted to? I don't know. Can we?"

  "I'm more worried about computer viruses."

  Claire got up and came over to the bar where I was working to pick up her tray load of Cape Cods ("More Cape than Cod, please") and made shrugging, "My family, zheeesh!" gesture. She then walked back to th e table, showing me her back, which was framed by a black one-piece swimsuit —a pale white back bearing a Silly Putty -colored espalier of cars. These were remnants, I discovered later on, of a long-past child hood illness that immobilized her for years in hospitals spanning from Brentwood to Lausanne. In these hospitals doctors tapped vile viral

  ANTI-SABBATICAL: A

  job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally

  meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit

  sweaters in Hong Kong.

  Employers are rarely informed of intentions.

  syrups from her spine and in them she also spent the formative years of her life conversing with healing invalid souls —institutional borderline cases, the fringed, and the bent ("To this day, I prefer talking with incomplete people; they're more complete").

  But then Claire stopped in midmotion and came back to the bar, where she lifted her sunglasses and confided to me, "You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even like each other. And, should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers, even for a second, you will feel just dreadful."1 That's what / think. What about you?"

  History does not record my response.

  She delivered the drinks to her family, who delivered a chorus of "Thanks, Spinster," and then returned. Her hair then, as now, was cut short and Boopishly bobbed, and she wanted to know what on earth I was doing in Palm Springs. She said that anyone under the age of thirty living in a resort community was on the make somehow: "pimping, dealing, hooking, detoxing, escaping, scamming, or what have you." I obliquely told her I was merely trying to erase all traces of history from my past, and she took that at face value. She then described her own job in L. A. while sipping her drink, absentmindedly scanning her complexion for arriviste pimples in her reflection in the mirrored shelf behind me.

  "I'm a garment buyer—daywear" she fessed up, but then admitted that fashion was only a short -term career. "I don't think it's making me a better person, and the garment business is so jammed with dishonesty. I'd like to go somewhere rocky, somewhere Maltese, and just empty my brain, read books, and be with people who wanted to do the same thing." This was the point where I planted the seed that soon bore such unexpected and wonderful fruit in my life. I said, "Why don't you move here. Quit everything." There was a friendliness between us that made me wordlessly continue: "Clean your slate. Think life out. Lose your unwanted momentums. Just think of how therapeutic it could be, and there's an empty bungalow right next to my place. You could move in tomorrow and I know lots of jokes."

  "Maybe I will," she said, "maybe I will." She smiled and then swung to look at her family, as ever preening and chatting away, arguing about the reported length of John Dillinger's member, discussing the demonic aspects of Claire's stepsister Joanne's phone number—which contained three sixes in a row—and more about the dead Frenchman Nostradamus and his predictions.

  "Look at them, will you? Imagine having to go to Disneyland with 11 of your brothers and sisters at the age of twenty-seven. I can't believe let myself get dragged into this. If the wind doesn't knock thi
s place down first, it'll implode from a lack of hipness. You have bro thers and sisters?"

  I explained that I have three of each.

  "So you know what it's like when everyone starts carving up the future into nasty little bits. God, when they start talking like that—you know all of this sex gossip and end-of-the-world nonsense, I wonder if they're really only confessing something else to each other." "Like?"

  "Like how scared sick they all are. I mean, when people start talking seriously about hoarding cases of Beef-a-Roni in the garage and get all misty-eyed about the Last Days, then it's about as striking a confession as you're ever likely to get of how upset they are that life isn't working out the way they thought it would."

  I was in heaven! How could I not be, after finding someone who likes to talk like this? So we continued on in this vein for an hour, maybe, interrupted only by my serving the occasional rum drink and Allan's arrival to grab a dish of smoked almonds and to slap Claire on the back: "Hey, Mister—is Spinster putting the make on you?"

  "Allan and my family consider me a freak because I'm not married yet," she told me and then turned to pour her pink Cape Cod cocktail down his shirt. "And stop using that awful name."

  Allan didn't have time to retaliate, though. From Mr. Baxter's table there arose a commotion as one of the seated bodies slumped and a flurry of middle-age men with tans, paunches, and much jewelry crossed themselves and gathered around that slumped body—Mr. Baxter with a hand clutched to his chest and eyes wide, resembling those of Cocoa, the velvet painting clown.

  "Not again," said Allan and Claire in unison.

  "You go this time, Allan. It's your turn."

  Allan, dripping juice, grudgingly headed over toward the commotion, where several people were claiming to have already alerted the paramedics.

  "Excuse me, Claire," I said, "but your father looks like he's had a heart attack or something. Aren't you being slightly, oh, I don't know . . . bloodless about the matter?"

  "Oh, Andy. Don't worry. He does this three times a year—just as long as he has a big audience."

  It was a busy little scene, that poolside, but you could tell the Baxters amid the chaos by their lack of concern with the excitement, pointing languidly toward the hubbub when the two paramedics and their trolley (a familiar sight in Palm Springs) arrived. There, they loaded Mr. Baxter onto the trolley, after having told a novice Mrs. Scott-Baxter to stop trying to stuff quartz crystals into his hand (she was a New Ager, too), carted him away, only to hear loud clanging sounds that stopped the whole poolside crowd in their tracks. Looking over toward the cart they saw that several stems of tableware had fallen out of Mr. Baxter's pocket. His ashen face looked mortified and the silence was both in candescent and painful.

  "Oh, Dad," said Allan, "How could you embarrass us like this?" he then said, picking up a piece and looking at it appraisingly. "It's obviously only plate. Haven't we trained you properly?"

  The taut cord of tension broke. There were laughs, and Mr. Baxter was carted away, only to be treated for what turned out in the end to be a genuinely perilous heart attack after all. Claire meanwhile, I noticed peripherally, sitting over on the edge of one of the ocher-silted mineral pools, her feet dangling in the honey-colored murk of water and staring at the sun, now almost set over the mountain. In her small voice she was talking to the sun and telling it she was very sorry if we'd hurt it or caused it any pain. I knew then that we were friends for life.

  dogs are already pooped from the heat and lying in the shadow of Saab, chasing dream bunnies with twitching back legs. Dag and I, being in a carbohydrate coma, aren't far behind and are in a good stening mood as Claire begins her story of the day. "It's a Texlahoma she says, much to our pleasure, for Texlahoma is a mythic world created in which to set many of our stories. It's a sad Everyplace, where citizens are always getting fired from their jobs at 7-Eleven and

  where the kids do drugs

  dance crazes at the local fantasize about being check scams as they infor chemical burns from mans shoplift cheap imstores and shoot and practice the latest lake, where they also adult and pulling welfarespect each other's skin the lake water. Texlahoitation perfumes from each other over Thanksing dinners every year. And about the only good thing that happens there is the cultivation of cold, unglamorous wheat in which Texlahomans a justifiable pride; by law, all citizens must put bumper stickers I their cars saying: NO FARMERS: NO FOOD. Life is boring there, but are some thrills to be had: all the adults keep large quantities of cheaply sewn scarlet sex garments in their chests of drawers. These are panties and ticklers rocketed in from Korea— and I say rocketed in because Texlahoma is an asteroid orbiting the earth, where the year is

  permanently 1974, the year after the oil shock and the year starting from which real wages in the U.S. never grew ever again. The atmosphere contains oxygen, wheat chaff, and A.M. radio transmissions. It's a fun place to spend one day, and then you just want to get the hell out of there.

  Anyhow, now that you know the setting, let's jump into Claire's story.

  "This is a story about an astronaut named Buck. One afternoon, Buck the Astronaut had a problem with his spaceship and was forced to land in Texlahoma—in the suburban backyard of the Monroe family. The problem with Buck's spacecraft was that it wasn't programmed to deal with Texlahoma's gravity—the people back on earth had forgotten to tell him that Texlahoma even existed!

  ' That always happens,' said Mrs. Monroe, as she led Buck away from the ship and past the swing set in the backyard toward the house, 'Cape Canaveral just plum forgets that we're here.'

  "Being the middle of the day, Mrs. Monroe offered Buck a hot nutritious lunch of cream of mushroom soup meatballs and canned niblet corn. She was glad to have company: her three daughters were at work, and her husband was out on the thresher.

  "Then, after lunch, she invited Buck into the parlor to watch TV game shows with her. 'Normally I'd be out in the garage working on my inventory of aloe products that I represent, but business is kind of slow right now.'

  "Buck nodded his concurrence.

  ' 'You ever thought of being a rep for aloe products after you retire from being an astronaut, Buck?"

  " 'No ma'am,' said Buck, 'I hadn't.'

  ' 'Give it a thought. All you have to do is get a chain of reps working under you, and before you know it, you don't have to work at all—just sit back and skim the profit.'

  " 'Well, I'll be darned,' said Buck, who also complimented Mrs. Monroe on her collection of souvenir matchbooks placed in an oversized brandy snifter on the parlor table.

  "But suddenly something went wrong. Right before Mrs. Monroe's eyes, Buck began to turn pale green, and his head began to turn boxy and veined, like Frankenstein's. Buck raced to look at a little budgie mirror, the only mirror available, and knew instantly what had happened: he had developed space poisoning. He would start to look like a monster, and shortly, he would fall into an almost permanent sleep.

  "Mrs. Monroe immediately assumed, however, that her cream of mushroom soup meatballs had been tainted and that as a result of her culinary shortcomings, she had ruined Buck's adorable astronaut's good looks, and possibly his career. She offered to take him to the local clinic, but Buck deferred.

  ' 'That's probably for the best,' said Mrs. Monroe, 'considering that all there is at the clinic is peritonitis vaccinations and a jaws of life.'

  '' 'Just show me a place where I can fall down to sleep,' Buck said, 'I've come down with space poisoning, and within minutes I'll be out cold. And it looks like you'll have to nurse me for a while. You promise to do that?'

  ' 'Of course,' replied Mrs. Monroe, eager to be let off the hook of food contamination, and he was quickly shown to the cool basement room with half-finished wall covered with simulated wood grain particle board. There were also bookshelves bearing Mr. Monroe's bonspiel tro phies and the toys belonging to the three daughters: an array of Snoopy plush toys, Jem dolls, Easy Bake ovens, and Nancy Drew mystery novels. And the bed Bu
ck was given to sleep in was smallish—a child's bed —covered with ruffled pink Fortrel sheets that smelled like they'd been sitting in a Goodwill shop for years. On the headboard there were scuffed up Holly Hobby, Veronica Lodge, and Betty Cooper stickers that had been stuck and halfheartedly peeled away. The room was obviously never used and pretty well forgotten, but Buck didn't mind. All he wanted to do was fall into a deep deep sleep. And so he did.

  "Now, as you can imagine, the Monroe daughters were most excited indeed at having an astronaut/monster hibernating in their guest room. One by one the three daughters, Arleen, Darleen, and Serena came down to the room to stare at Buck, now sleeping in their old bed amid the clutter of their childhood. Mrs. Monroe wouldn't let her daughters peek long, still being fractionally convinced of her implication in Buck's illness, and shooed them away, wanting him to get better. "Anyhow, life returned more or less to normal. Darleen and Serena went to work at the perfume counter of the local dime store, Mrs. Monroe's aloe product business picked up a bit, taking her out of the house, Mr. Monroe was out on his thresher, leaving only Arleen, the eldest daughter, who had recently been fired from the 7 -Eleven, to take care of Buck.

  LEGISLATED

  NOSTALGIA: To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess: "How can I be a part of the 1960s generation when I don't even remember any of it?"

  NOW DENIAL: To tell

  oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future.

  " 'Make sure he gets lots to eat!' shouted Mrs. Monroe from her salt-rusted blue Bonneville sedan as she screeched out of the driveway, to which Arleen waved and then rushed inside to the bathroom where she brushed her blond feathered hair, applied alluring cosmetics, and then dashed down to the kitchen to whip up a special lunchtime treat for Buck, who, owing to his space poisoning, would only awaken once a day at noon, and then only for a half hour. She made a platter of Vienna franks appended to toothpicks and accessorized by little blocks of orange cheese. These she prettily arranged on a platter in a shape reminiscent of the local shopping mall logo, the Crestwood Mall letter C, angled heavily to the right. 'Facing the future' as the local newspaper had phrased it upon the mall's opening several hundred years previously when it was still 1974, even back then, since, as I have said, it has a/ways been 1974 in Texlahoma. As far back as records go. Shopping malls, for instance, a recent innovation on Earth, have been supplying Texlahomans with running shoes, brass knickknacks, and whimsical greeting cards for untold millennia.