Generation X Page 5

  "Anyway, Arleen raced down to the basement with the food platter and pulled a chair up to the bed and pretended to read a book. When Buck woke up at one second past noon, the first thing he glimpsed was her reading, and he thought she looked ideal. As for Arleen, well, her heart had a romantic little arrhythmia right on the spot, even in spite of Buck's looking like a Frankenstein monster.

  ' 'I'm hungry,' Buck said to Arleen, to which she replied, 'Won't you please please have some of these Vienna frank-and-cheese kebabs. I made them myself. They were most popular indeed at Uncle Clem's wake last year.'

  " 'Wake?' asked Buck. ' 'Oh, yes. His combine overturned during the harvest, and he was

  trapped inside for two hours while he waited for the jaws of life to arrive.

  He wrote his will out in blood on the cab ceiling.'

  "From that moment on, a conversational rapport developed between

  the two, and before long, love bloomed, but there was a problem with

  their love, for Buck would always fall back asleep almost as soon as he

  would awaken, owing to his space poisoning. This grieved Arleen. "Finally one noon, just as Buck awoke, he said to Arleen, 'Arleen,

  I love you very much. Do you love me?' And, of course, Arleen replied,

  'yes,' to which Buck said, 'Would you be willing to take a big risk and help me? We could be together always and I could help you leave

  Texlahoma.'

  "Arleen was thrilled at both thoughts and said, 'Yes, yes,' and then

  Buck told her what she would have to do. Apparently, the radiation

  waves emitted by a woman in love are of just the right frequency to

  boost the rocket ship's engines and help it to lift off. And if Arleen

  would just come with him in the ship, they could leave, and Buck could

  get a cure for his space poisoning at the moon base. 'Will you help me,

  Arleen?'

  " 'Of course, Buck.'

  " There's just one catch.'

  " 'Oh?' Arleen froze.

  'You see, once we take off, there's only enough air in the s hip

  for one person, and I'm afraid that after takeoff, you'd have to die. Sorry.

  But, of course, once we got to the moon, I'd have the right machines to

  revive you. There's really no problem.'

  "Arleen stared at Buck, and a tear came down her cheek, dripped

  over her lip and onto her tongue, where it tasted salty, like urine. '

  I'm sorry, Buck, but I can't do that,' she said, adding that things

  would probably be for the best if she no longer took care of him.

  Heartbroken but unsurprised, Buck fell back to sleep and Arleen went

  upstairs.

  "Fortunately, Darleen, the youngest daughter, got fired from her perfume sales job that day and was able to take care of Buck next, while Arleen got hired at a fried chicken outlet and was no longer around to cast gloomy feelings on Buck.

  "But with Buck's being on the rebound and Darleen's having too much free time on her hands, it was only a matter of minutes, practically, before love again blossomed. Days later, Buck was making the same plea for help to Darleen that he had made to Arleen, 'Won't you please help me, Darleen, I love you so much?'

  "But when Buck's plea came to the part about Darleen's having to lie, like her sister before her, she froze. 'I'm sorry, Buck, but I can't do that,' she, too, said, adding that things would probably be for the best if she no longer took care of him. Again heartbroken but again unsurprised, Buck fell back to sleep and Darleen went upstairs.

  "Need I say it, but history repeated itself again. Darleen got hired at the local roadside steak house, and Serena, the middle child, got fired from Woolworth's scent counter and so was put in charge of taking

  care of Buck, who had ceased being a novelty in the basement and had become instead, kind of a grudge—of the same caliber of grudge as, say, a pet dog that the children argue over whose turn it is to feed. And when Serena appeared at noon with lunch one day, all Buck could bring himself to say was, 'God, did another one of you Monroe girls get fired?

  Can't any of you hold a job?'

  "This just bounced right off of Serena. 'They're just small jobs,'

  she said. 'I'm learning how to paint and one of these days I'm going to

  become so good that Mr. Leo Castelli of the Leo Castelli art galleries

  of New York City is going to send a rescue party up to get me off of this

  God forsaken asteroid. Here,' she said, jabbing a plate of erudite celery

  and carrot in his chest, 'eat these celery sticks and shut up. You look

  like you need fiber.'

  "Well. If Buck thought he had been in love before, he realized now

  that those were merely mirages and that Serena was indeed his real True

  Love. He spent his waking time for the next few weeks, savoring his

  half hours which he spent telling Serena of the views of the heavens as

  seen from outer space, and listening to Serena talk of how she would

  paint the planets if only she could see what they looked like. ' 'I can show you the heavens, and I can help you leave Texlahoma,

  too —if you're willing to come with me, Serena my love,' said Buck,

  who outlined his escape plans. And when he e xplained that Serena

  would have to die, she simply said, 'I understand.'

  "The next day at noon when Buck awoke, Serena lifted him out of the bed and carried him out of the basement and up the stairs, where his feet knocked down framed family portraits taken years and years ago. 'Don't stop,' said Buck. 'Keep moving—we're running out of time.' "It was a cold gray afternoon outside as Serena carried Buck across the yellowed autumn lawn and into the spaceship. Once inside, they sat down, closed the doors, and Buck used his last energies to turn the ignition and kiss Serena. True to his word, the love waves from her heart boosted the engine, and the ship took off, high into the sky and out of the gravitational field of Texlahoma. And before Serena passed out and then died from a lack of oxygen, the last sights she got to see were Buck's face shedding its pale green Frankenstein skin in lizardy chunks onto the dashboard, thus revealing the dashing pink young astronaut beneath, and outside she saw the glistening pale blue marble of Earth against the black heavens that the stars had stained like spilled milk. "Below on Texlahoma, Arleen and Darleen, meanwhile, were both returning home from their jobs, from which they both been fired, just time to see the rocket fire off and their sister vanish into the strato sphere in a long, colonic, and fading white line. They sat on the swing Bet, unable to go back into the house, thinking and staring at the point where the jet's trail became nothing, listening to the creak of chains

  and the prairie wind.

  " 'You realize,' said Arleen, 'that that whole business of Buck being

  | able to bring us back to life was total horseshit.'

  " 'Oh, I knew that,' said Darleen. 'But it doesn't change the fact that I feel jealous.'

  " 'No, it doesn't, does it?'

  "And together the two sisters sat into the night, silhouetted by the luminescing earth, having a contest with each other to see who could swing their swing the highest."

  CON STRUCT

  Claire and I never fell in love, even though we both tried hard. It happens. Anyhow, this is probably as good a point as any to tell some thing about myself. How shall I begin? Well, my name is Andrew Palmer, I'm almost thirty, I study languages (Japanese is my specialty), I come from a big family (more on that later), and I was born with an ectomorphic body, all skin and bones. However, after being inspired by a passage from the diaries of the Pop artist, Mr. Andy Warhol—a passage where he expresses his sorrow dle fifties that if he had had a body (imagine not galvanized into action. I regimen that turned my a pigeon breast. Hence, I one problem out of the after learning in his midexercised, he could have having a body!)—I was began a dreary exercise birdcage of a thorax into now
have a body—that's way. But then, as mentioned, I've never been in love, and that's a problem. I just seem to end up as friends with everyone, and I tell you, I really hate it. I want to fall in love. Or at least I think I do. I'm not sure. It looks so ... messy. A11 right, all right, I do at least recognize the fact that I don't want to go through life alone, and to illustrate this, I'll tell you a secret story, a story I won't even tell Dag and Claire today out here on our desert picnic. It goes like this:

  Once upon a time there was a young man named Edward who lived

  BAMBIFICATION: The

  mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.

  DISEASES FOR KISSES (HYPERKARMA): A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.

  by himself with a great amount of dignity. He had so much dignity that when he made his solitary evening meal every night at six thirty, he always made sure he garnished it with a jaunty little sprig of parsley. That's how he thought the parsley looked: jaunty. Jaunty and dignified. He also made sure that he promptly washed and dried his dishes after completing his solitary evening meal. Only lonely people didn't take pride in their dinners and in their washing up, and Edward held it as a point of honor that while he had no need for people in his life, he was not going to be lonely. Life might not be much fun, mind you, but it seemed to have fewer people in it to irritate him.

  Then one day Edward stopped drying the dishes and had a beer instead. Just for kicks. Just to relax. Then soon, the parsley disappeared from his dinners and another beer appeared. He made small excuses for it. I forget what they were.

  Before long, dinner became the lonely klonk of a frozen dinner on the microwave floor saluted by the tinkle of scotch and ice in a highball glass. Poor Edward was getting fed up with cooking and eating by himself, and before long, Edward's dinner became whatever he could microwave from the local Circle Knuke 'n' serve boutique—a beef-and-bean bur-rito, say, washed down with Polish cherry brandy, the taste for which he acquired during a long, sleepy earnest summer job spent behind the glum, patronless counter of the local Enver Hoxha Communist bookstore. But even then, Edward found cooking and eating too much of a hassle, and dinner ended up becoming a glass of milk mixed in with whatever was in the discount bins at Liquor Barn. He began to forget what it felt like to pass firm stools and fantasized that he had diamonds in his eyes.

  Again: poor Edward—his life seemed to be losing its controlability. One night, for instance, Edward was at a party in Canada but woke up the next morning in the United States, a two hour drive away, and he couldn't even remember driving home or crossing the border.

  Now, here's what Edward thought: he thought that he was a very smart guy in some ways. He had been to school, and he knew a great number of words. He could tell you that a veronica was a filmy piece of gossamer used to wrap the face of Jesus, or that a cade was a lamb abandoned by its mother and raised by human beings. Words, words, words.

  Edward imagined that he was using these words to create his own

  48 GENERATION X

  private world —a magic and handsome room that only he could inhabit—a room in the proportion of a double cube, as defined by the British architect Adam. This room could only be entered through darkly stained doors that were padded with leather and horsehair that muffled the knocking of anyone who tried to enter and possibly disturb Edward's concentration.

  In this room he had spent ten endless years. Large sections of its walls were lined with oak bookshelves, overflowing with volumes; framed maps covered other sections of walls that were painted the sapphire color of deep deep swimming pools. Imperial blue oriental carpets layered all of the floor and were frosted with the shed ivory hairs of Edward's trusty and faithful spanieJ, Ludwig, who followed Edward everywhere. Ludwig would loyally listen to all Edward's piquant little observations on life, which he found himself not infrequently making while seated at his desk much of the day. At this desk he would also read and smoke a calabash pipe, while gazing out thro ugh leaded windows over a landscape that was forever a rainy fall afternoon in Scotland.

  Of course, visitors were forbidden in this magic room, and only a Mrs. York was allowed in to bring him his rations—a bun-headed and betweeded grandmother. Handcarverd by central casting, who would deliver to Edward his daily (what else) cherry brandy, or, as time wore on, a forty-ounce bottle of Jack Daniels and a glass of milk. Yes, Edward's was a sophisticated room, sometimes so sophisticated that it was only allowed to exist in black and white, reminiscent of an old

  drawing room comedy. How's that for elegance? So. What happened?

  One day Edward was up on his wheeled bookshelf ladder and reaching for an old book he wanted to reread, in an attempt to take his mind off his concern that Mrs. York was late with his day's drink. But when he stepped down from the ladder, his feet went smack into a mound of Ludwig's Jog mess and he got very angry. He walked toward the satin chaise longue behind which Ludwig was napping. "Ludwig," he shouted, "You bad dog, you. ..."

  But Edward didn't get far, for behind the sofa Ludwig had magically and (believe me) unexpectedly turned from a spunky, affectionate little , funmoppet with an optimistically jittery little stub of tail into a flaring, black-gummed sepia gloss rottweiler that pounced at Edward's throat, missing the jugular vein by a hair as Edward recoiled in horror. The

  SPECTACULARISM. A fascination with extreme situations.

  new Ludwig-cum-Cerberus then went for Edward's shins with foaming fangs and the desperate wrenched offal howl of a dozen dogs being run over by trucks on the freeway.

  Edward hopped epileptically onto the ladder and hollered for Mrs. York who, as fate would have it, he noticed just then out the window. She was wearing a blond wig and a terry cloth robe and hopping into the little red sports car of a tennis pro, abandoning Edward's service forever. She looked quite smashing—dramatically lit under a harsh new sky that was scorching and ozoneless —certainly not at all an autumn sky in Scotland. Well.

  Poor Edward.

  He was trapped in the room, able only to roll back and forth across the bookshelves on the heights of his wheeled ladder. Life in his once charmed room had become profoundly dreadful. The thermostat was out of reach and the air became muggy, fetid and Calcuttan. And of course, with Mrs. York gone, so were the cocktails to make this situation bearable.

  Meanwhile, millipedes and earwigs, long asleep behind obscure top-shelf books, were awakened by Edward as he grimly reached for volumes to throw at Ludwig in an attempt to keep the monster at bay— from continually lunging at his pale trembling toes. These insects would crawl over Edward's hands. And books thrown at Ludwig would bounce insouciantly off his back, with the resulting pepper-colored shimmy of bugs that sprinkled onto the carpet being lapped up by Ludwig with his long pink tongue.

  Edward's situation was indeed dire.

  There was only one option of course, and that was to leave the room, and so, to the enraged thwarted howls of Ludwig who charged at Edward from across the room, Edward breathlessly opened his heavy oak doors, his tongue galvanized with the ferric taste of adrenalin, and frantic but sad, left his once magic room for the first time in what seemed ever.

  Ever was actually about ten years, and the sight Edward found outside those doors really amazed him. In all the time he had been sequestering himself, being piquant in his little room, the rest of humanity had been busy building something els e—a vast city, built not of words but of relationships. A shimmering, endless New York, shaped

  of lipsticks, artillery shells, wedding cakes, and folded shirt cardboards; a city built of iron, papier-mache and playing cards; an ugly/lovely world surfaced with carbon and icicles and bougainvillea vines. Its boulevards were patternless, helter-skelter, and cuckoo. Everywhere there were booby traps of mousetraps, Triffids, and black holes. And yet in spite of this city's transfixing madness, Edward noticed that its multi
tude of inhabitants moved about with ease, unconcerned that around any corner there might lurk a clown-tossed marshmallow cream pie, a Brigada Rosa kneecapping, or a kiss from the lovely film star Sophia Loren. And directions were impossible. But when he asked an inhabitant where he could buy a map, the inhabitant looked at Edward as though he were mad, then ran away screaming.

  So Edward had to acknowledge that he was a country bumpkin in this Big City. He realized he had to learn all the ropes with a ten-year handicap, and that prospect was daunting. But then, in the same way that bumpkins vow to succeed in a new city because they know they have a fresh perspective, so vowed Edward.

  And he promised that once he made his way in this world (without getting scalded to death by its many fountains of burning perfume or maimed by the endless truckloads of angry clucking cartoon chickens that were driven about the city's streets) he would build the tallest tower of them all. This silver tower would stand as a beacon to all voyagers who, like himself, arrived in the city late in life. And at the tower's peak there would be a rooftop patio lounge. In this lounge, Edward knew that he would do three things: he would serve tomato juice cocktails with little wedges of lemon, he would play jazz on a piano layered with zinc sheeting and photos of forgotten pop stars, and he would have a little pink booth, out back near the latrines, that sold (among other things) maps.

  ENTER HYPERSPAC

  "Andy." Dag prods me with a greasy chicken bone, bringing me back to the picnic. "Stop being so quiet. It's your turn to tell a story, and do me a favor, babe—give me a dose of celebrity content." " Do amuse