Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  us, darling," adds Claire. "You're being so moody." Torpor defines my mood as I sit on the crumbling, poxed, and leprous never-used macadam at the corner of Cottonwood and Sapphire avenues, thinking

  my stories to myself and crumbling pungent sprigs of sage in my fingers. "Well, my brother, Tyler, with David Bowie." "I don't know. All I reno idea what to say to once shared an elevator 'How many floors?" member is that Tyler had him. So he said nothing."

  "I have found," says snce of anything to talk you can always say to Claire, "that in the ab about with celebrities,

  them, 'Oh, Mr. Celebity! I've got all your albums'—even if they're not musicians." ''Look—" says Dag, turning his head, "Some people are actually driving here." HA black Buick sedan filled with young Japanese tou rists—a rarity in a valley visited mainly by Canadians and West Germans—floats down the hill, the first vehicle in all the time we've been having our picnic. 'They probably took the Verbenia Street off ramp by mistake. I bet you anything, they're looking for the cement dinosaurs up at the Cabazon truck stop," Dag says.

  LESSNESS: A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: "I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find

  happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho."

  STATUS

  SUBSTITUTION: Using an object with intellectual or

  fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely

  pricey: "Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother's

  BMW."

  "Andy, you speak Japanese. Go talk to them," Claire says. "That's a bit presumptuous. Let them stop and ask directions first," which, of course, they immediately do. I rise and go to talk into their electronically lowered window. Inside the sedan are two couples, roughly my age, immaculately (one might say sterilely as though they were entering a region of biohazard) dressed in summer funwear and wearing the reserved, please-don't -murder-me smile Japanese tourists in North America started adopting a few years ago. The exp ressions immediately put me on the defensive, make me feel angry at their presumption of my violence. And God only knows what they make of our motley quintet and our Okie transport sprawled with meal remains of mismatched dishes. A blue jeans ad come to life.

  I speak English (why ruin their desert USA fantasy?) and in the ensuing convulsed pidgin of hand signals and they-went-(that-aways, I discover that the Japanse do want to go visit the dinosaurs. And shortly, after garnering directions, they are off in a puff of dust and roadside debris, from which we see a camera emerge, out of the rear window. The camera is held backward by one hand and a finger on top of it snaps our photo, at which point Dag shouts, "Look! A camera! Bite the insides of your cheeks, q uick. Get those cheekbones happening!" Then, once the car is out of view, Dag then jumps in on me: "And what, may I ask, was with your Arnold the Yokel act?"

  "Andrew. You speak lovely Japanese," adds Claire. "You could have given them such a thrill."

  "It wasn't called for," I reply, remembering how much of a letdown it was for me when I was living in Japan and people tried to speak to me in English. "But it did remind me of a bedtime story for today." "Pray tell."

  And so, as my friends, gleaming of cocoa butter, lean back and absorb the sun's heat, I tell my tale:

  "A few years ago I was working at this teenybopper magazine office in Japan—part of a half-year job exchange program with the university—when a strange thing happened to me one day." "Wait," interrupts Dag, "This is a true story?" "Yes." "Okay."

  "It was a Friday morning and I, being a dutiful foreign photo researcher, was on the phone to London. I was on deadline to get some

  photos from Depeche Mode's people who were at some house party there —an awful Eurosquawk was on the other end. My ear was glued to the receiver and my hand was over the other ear trying to block out the buzz of the office, a frantic casino of Ziggy Stardust coworkers with everyone hyper from ten-dollar Tokyo coffees from the shop across the street.

  "I remember what was going through my mind, and it wasn't my job—it was the way that cities have their own signature odor to them. Tokyo's street smell put this into my mind—udon noodle broth and faint sewage; chocolate and car fumes. And I thought of Milan's smell—of cinnamon and diesel belch and roses—and Vancouver with its Chinese roast pork and salt water and cedar. I was feeling homesick for Portland, trying to remember its smell of trees and rust and moss when the ruckus of the office began to dim perceptibly.

  "A tiny old man in a black Balmain suit came into the room. His skin was all folded like a shrunken apple-head person's, but it was dark, peat-colored, and shiny like an old baseball mitt or the Bog Man of Denmark. And he was wearing a baseball cap and chatting with my working superiors.

  "Miss Ueno, the drop -dead cool fashion coordinator in the desk next to mine (Olive Oyl hair; Venetian gondolier's shirt; harem pants I and Viva Las Vegas booties) became flustered the way a small child does when presented with a bear-sized boozed -up drunk uncle at the front door on a snowy winter night. I asked Miss Ueno who this guy was

  and she said it was Mr. Takamichi, the kacho, the Grand Poobah of the company, an Americaphile renowned for bragging about his golf scores in Parisian brothels and for jogging through Tasmanian gaming houses with an L.A. blonde on each arm.

  "Miss Ueno looked really stressed. I asked her why. She said she wasn't stressed but angry. She was angry because no matter how hard she worked she was more or less stuck at her little desk forever—a cramped cluster of desks being the Japanese equivalent of the veal fattening pen. 'But not only because I'm a woman,' she said, 'But also because I'm a Japanese. Mostly because I'm a Japanese. I have ambition. In any other country I could rise, but here I just sit. I murder my ambition.' She said that Mr. Takamichi's appearance somehow simply underscored her situation. The hopelessness.

  "At that point, Mr. Takamichi headed over to my desk. I just knew

  this was going to happen. It was really embarrassing. In Japan you get phobic about being singled out from the crowd. It's about the worst thing that someone can do to you.

  " 'You must be Andrew,' he said, and he shook my hands like a Ford dealer. 'Come on upstairs. We'll have drinks. We'll talk,' he said, and I could feel Miss Ueno burning like a road flare of resentment next to me. And so 1 introduced her, but Mr. Takamichi's response was benign. A grunt. Poor Japanese people. Poor Miss Ueno. She was right—they're just so trapped wherever they are—frozen on this awful boring ladder.

  "And as we were walking toward the elevator, I could feel everyone in the office shooting jealousy rays at me. It was such a bad scene and I could just imagine everyone thinking 'who does he think he is?' I felt dishonest. Like I was coasting on my foreignness. I felt I was being ex-communicated from the shin Jin rui —that's what the Japanese newspapers call people like those kids in their twenties at the office— new human beings. It's hard to explain. We have the same group over here and it's just as large, but it doesn't have a name—an X generation—purposefully hiding itself. There's more space over here to hide in—to get lost in—to use as camouflage. You're not allowed to disappear in Japan. "But I digress.

  "We went upstairs in the elevator to a floor that required a special key for access, and Mr. Takamichi was being sort of theatrically ballsy the whole way up, like a cartoon version of an American, you know, talking about football and stuff. But once we got to the top he suddenly turned Japanese—so quiet. He turned right off—like I'd flipped a switch. I got really worried that I was going to have to endure three hours of talk about the weather.

  "We walked down a thickly carpeted hallway, dead silent, past small Impressionist paintings and tufts of flowers arranged in vases in the Victorian style. This was the western part of his floor. And when this part ended, we came to the Japanese part. It was like entering hyperspace, at which point Mr. Takamichi pointed to a navy cotton robe for me to change into, which I did.

  "Inside the main Japanese room that we
entered there was a toko no ma shrine with chrysanthemums, a scroll, and a gold fan. And in the center of the room was a low black table surrounded by terra -cotta colored cushions. On the table were two onyx carp and settings for tea. The one artifact in the room that jarred was a small safe placed in a corner—not even a good safe , mind you, but an inexpensive model of the sort that you might have expected to find in the back office of a Lincoln, Nebraska shoe store just after World War II—really cheap looking, and in gross contrast to the rest of the room.

  "Mr. Takamichi asked me to sit down at the table whereupon we sat down for salty green Japanese tea.

  "Of course, I was wondering what his hidden agenda was in getting me up into his room. He talked pleasantly enough . . . how did I like my job? . . . what did I think of Japan? . . . stories about his kids. Nice boring stuff. And he told a few stories about time he had spent in New York in the 1950s as a stringer for the Asahi newspapers . . . about meeting Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote and Judy Holiday. And after a half hour or so, we shifted to warmed sake, delivered, with the clapping of Mr. Takamichi's hands, by a midge of a servant in a drab brown kimono the color of shopping bag paper.

  "And after the servant left, there was a pause. It was then that he asked me what I thought the most valuable thing was that I owned.

  "Well, well. The most valuable thing that I owned. Try and explain the concept of sophomoric minimalism to an octogenarian Japanese publishing magnate. It's not easy. What thing could you possibly own of any value? I mean really. A beat up VW Bug? A stereo? I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored, for even further embarrassment, under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I said, quite truthfully (and, it dawned on me, quite refreshingly), that I owned no thing of any value.

  He then changed the discussion to the necessity of wealth being transportable, being converted into paintings, gems, and precious metals and so forth (he'd been through wars and the depression and spoke with authority), but I'd pushed some right button, said the right thing— passed a test—and his tone of voice was pleased. Then, maybe t en minutes later, he clapped his hands again, and the tiny servant in the noiseless brown kimono reappeared and was barked an instruction. This caused the servant to go to the corner and to roll the cheap little safe across the tatami mat floor next to where Mr. Takamichi sat cross-legged on the cushions.

  "Then, looking hesitant but relaxed, he dialed his combination on the knob. There was a click, he pulled a bar, and the door opened, revealing what, I couldn't see.

  "He reached in and pulled out what I could tell to be from the distance, a photograph—a black-and-white 1950s photo, like the shots they take at the scene of the crime. He looked at the mystery picture and sighed. Then, flipping it over and giving it to me with a little outpuff of breath meaning 'this is my most valuable thing,' he handed me the photo and I was, I'll admit, shocked at what it was.

  "It was a photo of Marilyn Monroe getting into a Checker cab, lifting up her dress, no underwear, and smooching at the photographer, pre sumably Mr. Takamichi in his stringer days. It was an unabashedly sexual frontal photo (get your minds out of the gutter—black as the ace of spades if you must know) and very taunting. Looking at it, I said to Mr. Takamichi, who was waiting expressionlessly for a reaction, "well, well," or some such drivel, but internally I was actually quite mortified that this photo, essentially only a cheesy paparazzi shot, unpublishable at that, was his most valued possession.

  "And then I had an uncontrollable reaction. Blood rushed to my ears, and my heart went bang; I broke out into a sweat and the words of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain —his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die. The burning blood in my ears told me that Mr. Takamichi had somehow mistaken the Monroe photo in the safe for the letter inside of himself, and that I, myself, was in peril of making some sort of similar mistake.

  "I smiled pleasantly enough, I hope, but 1 was reaching for my pants and making excuses, blind, grabbing excuses, while I raced to the elevator, buttoning up my shirt and bowing along the way to the confused audience of Mr. Takamichi hobbling behind me making old man noises. Maybe he thought I'd be excited by his photo or complimentary or aroused even, but I don't think he expected rudeness. The poor guy.

  "But what's done is done. There is no shame in impulse. Breathing stertorously, as though I had just vandalized a house, I fled the building, without even collecting my things—just like you, Dag—and that night I packed my bags. On the plane a day later, I thought of more Rilke:

  Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing subject to profound laws, and if he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of things happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then his whole situation drops from him as from a dead man, although he stands in the very midst of life.

  "Two days later I was back in Oregon, back in the New World, breathing less crowded airs, but I knew even then that there was still too much history there for me. That I needed less in life. Less past.

  "So I came down here, to breathe dust and walk with the dogs— to look at a rock or a cactus and know that I am the first person to see that cactus and that rock. And to try and read the letter inside me."

  * *

  SURVIVULOUSNESS: The

  tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last remaining person on earth. "I'd take a

  helicopter up and throw

  microwave ovens down on the Taco Bell."

  PLATONIC SHADOW: A nonsexual friendship with a member of the opposite sex.

  "I've got an end of the world story," says Dag, finishing off the remainder of the iced tea, ice cubes long melted. He then takes off his shirt, revealing his somewhat ribby chest, lights another filter-tipped cigarette, and clears his throat in a nervous gesture.

  The end of the world is a recurring motif in Dag's bedtime stories, eschatological You-Are-There accounts of what it's like to be Bombed, lovingly detailed, and told in deadpan voice. And so, with little more ado, he begins:

  "Imagine you're standing in line at a supermarket, say, the Vons supermarket at the corner of Sunset and Tahquitz—but theoretically it can be any supermarket anywhere —and you're in just a vile mood because driving over you got into an argument with your best friend. The argument started over a road sign saying Deer Next 2 Miles and you said, 'Oh, really, they expect us to believe there are any deer left?' which made your best friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat looking through the box of cassette tapes, curl up their toes inside their running shoes. And you sense you've said something that's struck a nerve and it was fun, so you pushed things further: 'For that matter,' you said, 'you don't see nearly as many birds these days as you used to, do you? And, you know what I heard the other day? That down in the Caribbean, there aren't any shells left anywhere because the tourists took them all. And, haven't you ever wondered when flying back from Europe, five miles over Greenland, that there's just something, I don't know—inverted—about shopping for cameras and scotch and cigarettes up in outer space?'

  "Your friend then exploded, called you a real dink, and said, 'Why the hell are you so negative all the time? Do you have to see something depressing in everything?'

  "You said back, 'Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don't have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere, has gone very very cuckoo?'

  "The whole argument goes nowhere, of course. That sort of argument always does, and possibly you are accused of being unfashionably neg

  ative. The net result is you standing alone in Vons checkout line number three with marshmallows and briquettes for the evening barbecue, a stoma
ch that's quilted and acidic with pissed-offedness, and your best friend sitting out in the car, pointedly avoiding you and sulkily listening to big band music on the A.M. radio station that broadcasts ice rink music down valley from Cathedral City.

  "But a part of you is also fascinated with the cart contents of the byany-standards-obese man in line up ahead of you.

  "My gosh, he's got one of everything in there! Plastic magnums of diet colas, butterscotch-flavored microwave cake mixes complete with their own baking tins (ten minutes of convenience; ten million years in the Riverside County Municipal Sanitary Landfill), and gallons and gallons of bottled spaghetti sauce . . . why his whole family must be awfully constipated with a diet like that, and hey—isn't that a goiter on his neck? 'Gosh, the price of milk is so cheap, these days,' you say to yourself, noting a price tag on one of his bottles. You smell the sweet cherry odor of the gum rack and unread magazines, cheap and alluring. "But suddenly there's a power surge.

  "The lights brighten, return to normal, dim, then die. Next to go is the Muzak, followed by a rising buzz of conversation similar to that in a movie theater when a film snaps. Already people are heading to aisle seven to grab the candles.

  "By the exit, an elderly shopper is peevishly trying to bash her cart through electric doors that won't open. A staff member is trying to explain that the power is out. Through the other exit, propped open by a shopping cart, you see your best friend enter the store. 'The radio died,' your friend announces, 'and look—' out the front windows you see scores of vapor trails exiting the direction of the Twentynine Palms Marine base up the valley, '—something big's going on.'

  "That's when the sirens begin, the worst sound in the world, and the sound you've dreaded all your life. It's here: the soundtrack to hell—wailing, flaring, warbling, and unreal—collapsing and confusing both time and space the way an ex-smoker collapses time and space at night when they dream in horror that they find themselves smoking. But here the ex-smoker wakes up to find a lit cigarette in his hand and the horror is complete.