Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  DON'T WORRY, MOTHER...IF THE MARRIAGE DOESN'T WORK OUT, WE CAN

  ALWAYS GET

  DIVORCED

  ST. MARTIN'S PRESS NEW YORK

  GENERATION X

  TALES FOR AN ACCELERATED CULTURE

  DOUGLAS COUPLAND

  "Her hair was totally 1950s Indiana Woolworth perfume clerk. You know—sweet but dumb —she'll marry her way out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was early '60s Aeroflot stewardess—you know—that really sad blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo caps. And such make-up! Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with these little PVC floral applique earrings that looked like antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa 1956. She really caught the sadness—she was the hippest person there. Totally."

  TRACEY,27

  "They're my children. Adults or not, I just can't kick them out of the house. It would be cruel. And besides—they're great cooks."

  HELEN, 52

  PART ONE THE SUN I S

  YOUR

  ENEMY

  Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Bran don, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun. I must have made a strange sight at my young age, being pencil thin and practically albino, quietly checking into a TraveLodge motel to spend the night alone, happily watching snowy network television offerings and drinking glasses of water from glass tumblers that had been washed and rewrapped in times they looked like ered. But the night soon morning of the eclipse, I took civic bus transportaThere, I walked far down a farmer's field — some paper sheaths so many they had been sandpap ended, and come the eschewed tour buses and tion to the edge of town. a dirt side road and into sort of cereal that was

  chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely—a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination—a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.

  * * * * * WHILE YOU

  CAN

  One and a half decades later my feelings are just as ambivalent and I sit on the front lanai of my rented bungalow in Palm Springs, California, grooming my two dogs, smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snapdragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine that drift in from the courtyard while I wait for dawn.

  I look east over the San Andreas fault that lies down the middle of the valley like a piece of overcooked meat. Soon enough the sun will explode over that fault and into my day like a line of Vegas showgirls bursting on stage. My dogs are watching, too. They know that an event of import will happen. These dogs, I tell you, they are so smart, but they worry me sometimes. For instance, I'm plucking this pale yellow cottage cheesy guck from their snouts, rather like cheese atop a micro waved pizza, and I have this horrible feeling, for I suspect these dogs (even though their winsome black mongrel eyes would have me believe otherwise) have been rummaging through the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center again, and their snouts are accessorized with, dare I say, yuppie liposuction fat. How they manage to break into the California state regulation coyote-proof red plastic flesh disposal bags is beyond me. I guess the doctors are being naughty or lazy. Or both.

  This world.

  I tell you.

  From inside my little bungalow I hear a cupboard door slam. My

  friend Dag, probably fetching my other friend Claire a starchy snack or a sugary treat. Or even more likely, if I know them, a wee gin and tonic. They have habits.

  Dag is from Toronto, Canada (dual citizenship). Claire is from Los Angeles, California. I, for that matter, am from Portland, Oregon, but where you're from feels sort of irrelevant these days ("Since everyone has the same stores in their mini-malls," according to my younger brother, Tyler). We're the three of us, members of the poverty jet set, an enormous global group, and a group I joined, as mentioned earlier, at the age of fifteen when I flew to Manitoba.

  Anyhow, as this evening was good for neither Dag nor Claire, they had to come invade my space to absorb cocktails and chill. They needed it. Both had their reasons.

  For example, just after 2:00 A.M., Dag got off of shift at Larry's Bar where, along with me, he is a bartender. While the two of us were walking home, he ditched me right in the middle of a conversation we were having and darted across the road, where he then scraped a boulder across the front hood and windshield of a Cutlass Supreme. This is not the first time he has impulsively vandalized like this. The car was the color of butter and bore a bumper sticker saying WE'RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN'S INHERITANCE, a message that I suppose irked Dag, who was bored and cranky after eight hours of working his Mcjob ("Low pay, low prestige, low benefits, low future").

  I wish I understood this destructive tendency in Dag; otherwise he is such a considerate guy —to the point where once he wouldn't bathe for a week when a spider spun a web in his bathtub.

  "I don't know, Andy," he said as he slammed my screen door, doggies in tow, resembling the lapsed half of a Mormon pamphleting duo with a white shirt, askew tie, armpits hinged with sweat, 48-hour stubble, gray slacks ("not pants, slacks") and butting his head like a rutting elk almost immediately into the vegetable crisper of my Frigidaire, from which he pulled wilted romaine leaves off the dewy surface of a bottle of cheap vodka, "whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I'm just upset that the world has gotten too big—way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers." He chugs from the bottle. "I feel insulted either

  «

  way.

  So it must have been three in the morning. Dag was on a vandal's high, and the two of us were sitting on couches in my living room looking at the fire burning in the fireplace, when shortly Claire stormed in (no knock), her mink-black-bob-cut aflutter, and looking imposing in spite of her shortness, the effect carried off by chic garnered from working the Chanel counter at the local I. Magnin store.

  "Date from hell," she announced, causing Dag and I to exchange meaningful glances. She grabbed a glass of mystery drink in the kitchen

  MCJOB: A low -pay, low prestige, low -dignity, low

  benefit, no-future job in the

  service sector. Frequently

  considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

  POVERTY JET SET: A

  group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of longterm job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phonecall relationships with people named Serge or llyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties.

  and then plonked herself down on the small sofa, unconcerned by the impending fashion disaster of multiple dog hairs on her black wool dress. "Look, Claire. If your date was too hard to talk about, maybe you can use some little puppets and reenact it for us with a little show."

  "Funn ee, Dag. Funnee. God. Another bond peddler and another nouvelle dinner of seed bells and Evian water. And, of course, he was a survivalist, too. Spent the whole night talking about moving to Montana and the chemicals he's going to put in his gasoline tank to keep it all from decomposing. I can't keep doing this. I'll be thirty soon. I feel like a character in a color cartoon."

  She
inspected my serviceable (and by no means stunning) furnished room, a space cheered up mainly by inexpensive low-grade Navajo Indian blankets. Then her face loosened. "My date had a low point, too. Out on Highway 111 in Cathedral City there's this store that sells chickens that have been taxidermied. We were driving by and I just about fainted from wanting to have one, they were so cute, but Dan (that was his name) says, 'Now Claire, you don't need a chicken,' to which I said, That's not the point, Dan. The point is that I want a chicken.' He thereupon commenced giving me this fantastically boring lecture about how the only reason I want a stuffed chicken is because they look so good in a shop window, and that the moment I received one I'd start dreaming up ways to ditch it. True enough. But then I tried to tell him that stuffed chickens are what life and new relationships was all about, but my explanation collapsed some where—the analogy became too mangled—and there was that awful woeto-the-human-race silence you get from pedants who think they're talking to half-wits. I wanted to throttle him." "Chickens?" asked Dag. "Yes, Chickens." "Well." "Yes."

  "Cluck cluck."

  Things became both silly and morose and after a few hours I retired to the lanai where I am now, plucking possible yuppie fat from the snouts of my dogs and watching sunlight's first pinking of the Coachella Valley, the valley in which Palm Springs lies. Up on a hill in the distance I can see the saddle -shaped form of the home that belongs to Mr. Bob Hope, the entertainer, melting like a Dali clock into the rocks. I feel calm because my friends are nearby.

  "Polyp weather," announces Dag as he comes and sits next to me, brushing sage dust off the rickety wood stoop.

  "That is just too sick, Dag," says Claire sitting on my other side and putting a blanket over my shoulders (I am only in my underwear).

  "Not sick at all. In fact, you should check out the sidewalks near the patio restaurants of Rancho Mirage around noon some day. Folks shedding polyps like dandruff flakes, and when you walk on them it's like walking on a bed of Rice Krispies cereal."

  I say, "Shhhh ..." and the five of us (don't forget the dogs) look eastward. 1 shiver and pull the blanket tight around myself, for I am colder than I had realized, and I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather. . . . Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.

  Maybe someone got cheated along the way. I wonder.

  You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I have always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realization that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good -naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social convention to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports. The thought is fleeting.

  The first chink of sun rises over the lavender mountain of Joshua, but three of us are just a bit too cool for our own good; we can't just let the moment happen. Dag must greet this flare with a question for us, a gloomy aubade: "What do you think of when you see the sun? Quick. Before you think about it too much and kill your response. Be honest. Be gruesome. Claire, you go first."

  Claire understands the drift: "Well, Dag. I see a farmer in Russia, and he's driving a tractor in a wheat field, but the sunlight's gone bad on him—like the fadedness of a black-and-white picture in an old Life magazine. And another strange phenomenon has happened, too: rather than sunbeams, the sun has begun to project the odor of old Life magazines instead, and the odor is killing his crops. The wheat is thinning

  HISTORICAL

  UNDERDOSING: To live in a period of time when nothing

  seems to happen. Major

  symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

  HISTORICAL

  OVERDOSING: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major

  symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

  as we speak. He's slumped over the wheel of his tractor and he's crying.

  His wheat is dying of history poisoning."

  "Good, Claire. Very weird. And Andy? How about you?"

  "Let me think a second."

  "Okay, I'll go instead. When I think of the sun, I think of an

  Australian surf bunny, eighteen years old, maybe, somewhere on Bondi Beach, and discovering her first keratosis lesion on her shin. She's screaming inside her brain and already plotting how she's going to steal Valiums from her mother. Now you tell me, Andy, what do you think of when you see the sun?"

  I refuse to participate in this awfulness. I refuse to put people in my vision. "I think of this place in Antarctica called Lake Vanda, where the rain hasn't fallen in more than two million years." "Fair enough. That's all?" "Yes, that's all."

  There is a pause. And what I don't say is this: that this is also the same sun that makes me think of regal tangerines and dimwitted butterflies and lazy carp. And the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood seeping from skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branch next door—drops that hang like rubies from their old brown leather source, alluding to the intense ovarian fertility inside.

  The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them."

  I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert—to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.

  "Strip." T'Talk to yourself." 1I"Look at the view." t'Mas turbate." Ill's a day later (well, actually not even twelve hours later) and the five of us are rattling down Indian Avenue, headed for our afternoon picnic up in the mountains. We're in Dag's syphilitic old Saab, an endearingly tinny ancient red model of the sort driven up the sides of buildings in Disney cartoons and held together by Popsicle sticks, chewing gum and Scotch tape. And in the car we're playing a quick game—answering to "name all of the ac they're by themselves out nude Polaroids." T'Hoard debris." T'Shoot those bits with a shotgun." kind of like life, isn't it?" Claire's open command tivities people do when in the desert." T'Take little pieces of junk and little pieces of junk to H"Hey," roars Dag, "it's HThe car rolls along.

  IT'Sometimes," says Claire, as we drive past the I. Magnin where she works, "I develop this weird feeling when I watch these endless waves of gray hair g obbling up the jewels and perfumes at work. I feel like I'm watching this enormous dinner table surrounded by hundreds of greedy little children who are so spoiled, and so impatient, that they can't even wait for food to be prepared. They have to reach for live animals placed on the table and suck the food right out of them."

  Okay, okay. This is a cruel, lopsided judgment of what Palm Springs really is —a small town where old people are trying to buy back their youth and a few rungs on the social ladder. As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth. It's really not a bad place here, and it's undeniably lovely—hey, I do live here, after all.

  But the place makes me worry.

  *****

  There is no weather in Palm Springs—just like TV. There is also no middle class, and in that sense the place is medieval. Dag says that every time someone on the planet uses a paper clip, fabric softens their laundry, or watches a rerun of "Hee Haw" on TV, a resident somewhere here in the Coachella Valley collects a penny. He's probably right.

  Claire notices that the rich people here pay the poor people to cut the thorns from their cactuses. "I've also noticed that they tend to throw out their houseplants rather than maintain them. God.
I magine what their kids are like."

  Nonetheless, the three of us chose to live here, for the town is undoubtedly a quiet sanctuary from the bulk of middle -class life. And we certainly don't live in one of the dishier neighborhoods the town has to offer. No way. There are neighborhoods here, where, if you see a glint in a patch of crew-cut Bermuda grass, you can assume there's a silver dollar lying there. Where we live, in our little bungalows that share a courtyard and a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a twinkle in the grass means a broken scotch bottle or a colostomy bag that has avoided the trashman's gloved clutch.

  *****

  The car heads out on a long stretch that heads toward the highway and Claire hugs one of the dogs that has edged its face in between the two front seats. It is a face that now grovels politely but insistently for attention. She lectures into the dog's two obsidian eyes: "You, you cute little creature. You don't have to worry about having snowmobiles or cocaine or a third house in Orlando, Florida. That's right. No you don't. You just want a nice little pat on the head."

  The dog meanwhile wears the cheerful, helpful look of a bellboy in a foreign country who doesn't understand a word you're saying but who still wants a tip.

  "That's right. You wouldn't want to worry yourself with so many things. And do you know why?" (The dog raises its ears at the inflection, giving the illusion of understanding. Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church, but Claire objected to this because she said she knew for a fact, that when she was in France, the dogs spoke French.) "Because all of those objects would only mutiny and slap you in the face. They'd only remind you that all you're doing with your life is collecting objects. And nothing else."

  HISTORICAL SLUMMING: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages— locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back—so as to experience relief when one returns back to "the present."

  BRAZILIFICATION: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the