Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  Big Things. / try and talk about things like nuclear issues that matter to me with my parents and it's like I'm speaking Bratislavan. They listen

  MUSICAL HAIRSPLITTING: The act of

  classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: "The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska."

  101 -ISM: The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using halfunderstood pop psychology as a tool.

  I

  indulgently to me for an appropriate length of time, and then after I'm out of wind, they ask me why I live in such a God-forsaken place like the Mojave Desert and how my love life is. Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blithely handing over the world to us like so much skid -marked underwear."

  PURCHASED EXPERIENCES DON'T

  COUNT

  "Check that out," says Dag, a few hours later, pulling the car over to the side of the road and pointing to the local Institute for the Blind. "Notice anything funny?" At first I see nothing untoward, but then it dawns on me that the Desert Moderne style building is landscaped with enormous piranha-spiked barrel cactuses, lovely but razor deadly; vi sions of plump little Far Side cartoon children bursting like breakfast sausages upon impact, enter my head, fit's hot out. We're returning from Palm Desert, where polisher, and on the way the Betty Ford Clinic the Eisenhower facility, died. 'Hang on a secof those spines for the tion." Dag pulls a pair of we drove to rent a floor back we rattled past (slowly) and then past where Mr. Liberace ond; I want to get a few charmed object collecpliers and a Zip-Loc

  plastic bag from the clapped-out glove box which is held closed with a bungie cord. He then jackrabbits across the traffic hell of Ramon Road. Two hours later the sun is high and the floor polisher lies exhausted on Claire's tiles. Dag, Tobias, and I are lizard lounging in the demilitarized zone of the kidney-shaped swimming pool central to our bungalows. Claire and her friend Elvissa are female bonding in my kitchen, drinking little cappuccinos and writing with chalks on my black wall, f A truce has been affected between the three of us guys out by

  the pool, and to his credit, Tobias has been rather amusing, telling tales of his recent trip to Europe—Eastern bloc toilet paper: "crinkly and shiny, like a K-Mart flyer in the L.A. Times," and "the pilgrimage"— visiting the grave of Jim Morrison at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris: "It was super easy to find. People had spray painted 'This way to Jimmy's' all over the tombstones of all these dead French poets. It was great." Poor France.

  Elvissa is Claire's good friend. They met months ago at Claire's doodad and bijou counter at I. Magnin. Unfortunately, Elvissa isn't her real name. Her real name is Catherine. Elvissa was my creation, a name that stuck from the very first time I ever used it (much to her pleasure) when Claire brought her home for lunch months ago. The name stems from her large, anatomically disproportionate head, like that of a woman who points to merchandise on a TV game show. This head is capped by an Elvis -oidal Mattel toy doll jet-black hairdo that frames her skull like a pair of inverted single quotes. And while she may not be beautiful per se, like most big-eyed women, she's compelling. Also, in spite of living in the desert, she's as pale as cream cheese and she's as thin as a greyhound chasing a pace bunny. Subsequently, she will seem a little bit cancer prone.

  Although their background orbits are somewhat incongruous, Claire and Elvissa share a common denominator—both are headstrong, both have a healthy curiosity, but most important, both left their old lives behind them and set forth to make new lives for themselves in the name of adventure. In their similiar quest to find a personal truth, they willingly put themselves on the margins of society, and this, I think, took some guts. It's harder for women to do this than men .

  Conversation with Elvissa is like having a phone call with a noisy child from the deep South—Tallahassee, Florida, to be exact—but a child speaking from a phone located in Sydney, Australia, or Vladivostok in the USSR. There's a satellite time lag between replies, maybe one-tenth of a second long, that makes you think there's something suspect malfunctioning in your brain—information and secrets being withheld from you.

  As for how Elvissa makes her living, none of us are quite sure, and none of us are sure we want to even know. She is living proof of Claire's theory that anyone who lives in a resort town under the age of thirty is on the make. I think her work may have to do with pyramid or Ponzi schemes, but then it may be somehow sexual: I once saw her in a Princess Stephanie one-piece swimsuit ("please, my maillot") chatting amiably with a mafioso type while counting a wad of bills at the poolside of the Ritz Carlton, high in the graham cracker—colored hills above Rancho Mirage. Afterward she denied she was there. When pressed, she will admit to selling never-to-be-seen vitamin shampoos, aloe products, and Tupperware containers, on which subject she is able to improvise convincing antiweevil testimonials on the spot ('This crisper saved my life").

  Elvissa and Claire exit my bungalow. Claire appears both depressed and preoccupied, eyes focused on an invisible object hovering above the ground a body's length in front of her. Elvissa, however, is in a pleasant state and is wearing an ill-fitting 1930s swimsuit, which is her attempt to be hip and retro. In Elvissa's mind this afternoon is her "time to be Young and do Young things with Young people my own age." She thinks of us as Youngsters. But her choice of swimwear merely accentuates how far removed she has become from current bourgeois time/ space. Some people don't have to play the hip game; I like Elvissa, but she can be so clued out.

  "Check out the Vegas housewife on chemotherapy," whispers Tobias to me and Dag, misguidedly trying to win our confidence through dumb wisecracks.

  "We love you, too, Tobias," replies Dag, after which he smiles up at the girls and says, "Hi, kids. Have a nice chat?" Claire listlessly grunts and Elvissa smiles. Dag hops up to kiss Elvissa while Claire flops out on a sun-bleached yellow fold-out deck chair. The overall effect around the pool is markedly 1949, save for Tobias's Day-Glo green swimsuit.

  "Hi, Andy," Elvissa whispers, bending down to peck me on the cheek. She then mumbles a cursory hello to Tobias, after which she grabs her own lounger to begin the arduous task of covering every pore of her body with PABA 29, her every move under the worshipful looks of Dag, who is like a friendly dog unfortunately owned by a never-athome master. Claire's body on the other side of Dag is totally rag-doll slack with gloom. Did she receive bad news, or something?

  (Perish the thought.)

  "Spare me, please." retaliates Elvissa. "I know your type exactly.

  You yuppies are all the same and I am fed up indeed with the likes of you. Let me see your eyes."

  "What?"

  "Let me see your eyes."

  Tobias leans over to allow Elvissa to put a hand around his jaw and extract information from his eyes, the blue color of Dutch souvenir plates. She takes an awfully long time. "Well, okay. Maybe you're not all that bad. I might even tell you a special story in a few minutes. Remind me. But it depends. I want you to tell me something first: after you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth?"

  "What do you mean? I don't get it."

  "What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway?"

  There is a silence. Tobias doesn't get her point, and frankly, neither do I. She continues: "Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive."

  Tobias does not readily volunteer any info. I think he needs an example first.

  "I've got one," says Claire.

  All eyes turn to her.

  "Snow,"
she says to us. "Snow."

  YUPPIE WANNABE'S:

  An X generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form o f substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about

  Armageddon after three drinks.

  E M E M B E EARTH CLEARLY

  "Snow," says Claire, at the very moment a hailstorm of doves erupts upward from the brown silk soil of the MacArthurs' yard next door. The MacArthurs have been trying to seed their new lawn all week, but the doves just love those tasty little grass seeds. And doves being so cute and all, it's impossible to be genuinely angry with them. Mrs. Mac Arthur (Irene) halfheartedly shoos them away every so often, but the doves simply fly up on top of the roof of their house, where they consider themselves hidden, at exciting little dove parties. the first time I saw snow. was just after the first was in New York visit standing beside a traffic Park Avenue. I'd never which point they throw I'll always remember I was twelve and it and biggest divorce. I ing my mother and was island in the middle of been out of L.A. before.

  I was entranced by the big city. I was looking up at the Pan Am Building and contemplating the essential problem of Manhattan." 'Which is —?" I ask. "Which is that there's too much weight improperly distributed: towers and elevators; steel, stone, and cement. So much mass up so high that gravity itself could end up being warped—some dreadful inversion—an exchange program with the sky." (I love it when Claire gets weird.) "I was shuddering at the thought of this. But right then my brother Allan yanked at my sleeve because the walk signal light was green. And when I turned my head to walk across, my face went bang, right into my first snowflake ever. It melted in my eye. I didn't even know what it was at first, but then I saw millions of flakes—all white and smelling like ozone, floating downward like the shed skins of angels. Even Allan stopped. Traffic was honking at us, but time stood still. And so, yes—if I take one memory of earth away with me, that moment will be the one. To this day 1 consider my right eye charmed."

  "Perfect," says Elvissa. She turns to Tobias. "Ge t the drift?" "Let me think a second."

  "I've got one," says Dag with some enthusiasm, partially the result,

  I suspect, of his wanting to score brownie points with Elvissa. "It happened in 1974. In Kingston, Ontario." He lights a cigarette and we wait. "My dad and I were at a gas station and 1 was given the task of filling up the gas tank—a Galaxy 500, snazzy car. And filling it up was a big responsibility for me. I was one of those goofy kids who always got colds and never got the hang of things like filling up gas tanks or unraveling tangled fishing rods. I'd always screw things up somehow; break some thing; have it die.

  "Anyway, Dad was in the station shop buying a map, and I was outside feeling so manly and just so proud of how I hadn't botched anything up yet—set fire to the gas station or what have you—and the tank was a/most full. Well, Dad came out just as I was topping the tank off, at which point the nozzle simply went nuts. It started spraying all over. I don't know why—it just did —all over my jeans, my running shoes, the license plate, the cement—like purple alcohol. Dad saw everything and I thought I was going to catch total shit. I felt so small. But instead he smiled and said to me, 'Hey, Sport. Isn't the smell of gasoline great? Close your eyes and inhale. So clean. It smells like the future.'

  "Well, I did that—I closed my eyes just as he asked, and breathed in deeply. And at that point I saw the bright orange light of the sun coming through my eyelids, smelled the gasoline and my knees buckled. But it was the most perfect moment of my life, and so if you ask me (and I have a lot of my hopes pinned on this), heaven just has to be an awful lot like those few seconds. That's my memory of earth."

  "Was it leaded or unleaded?" asks Tobias.

  "Leaded," replies Dag.

  "Perfect."

  "Andy?" Elvissa looks to me. "You?"

  "I know my earth memory. It's a smell—the smell of bacon. It was

  a Sunday morning at home and we were all having breakfast, an unprecedented occurrence since me and all six of my brothers and sis ters inherited my mother's tendency to detest the sight of food in the morning. We'd sleep in instead.

  "Anyhow, there wasn't even a special reason for the meal. All nine of us simply ended up in the kitchen by accident, with everyone being funny and nice to each other, and reading out the grisly bits from the newspaper. It was sunny; no one was being psycho or mean.

  "I remember very clearly standing by the stove and frying a batch of bacon. I knew even then that this was the only such morning our family would ever be given—a morning where we would all be normal and kind to each other and know that we liked each other without any strings attached—and that soon enough (and we did) we would all become batty and distant the way families invariably do as they get along in years.

  "And so I was close to tears, listening to everyone make jokes and feeding the dog bits of egg; I was feeling homesick for the event while it was happening. All the while my forearms were getting splattered by little pinpricks of hot bacon grease, but I wouldn't yell. To me, those pinpricks were no more and no less pleasurable than the pinches my sisters used to give me to extract from me the truth about which one I loved the most—and it's those little pinpricks and the smell of bacon that I'm going to be taking away with me; that will be my memory of earth."

  Tobias can barely contain himself. His body is poised forward, like a child in a shopping cart waiting to lunge for the presweetened breakfast cereals: "I know what my memory is! I know what it is now!" "Well just tell us, then," says Elvissa.

  "It's like this —" (God only knows what it will be) "Every summer back in Tacoma Park" (Washington, D.C. I knew it was an eastern city) "my dad and I would rig up a shortwave radio that he had left over from the 1950s. We'd string a wire across the yard at sunset and tether it up to the linden tree to act as an antenna. We'd try all of the bands, and if the radiation in the Van Allen belt was low, then we'd pick up just about everywhere: Johannesburg, Radio Moscow, Japan, Punjabi stuff. But more than anything we'd get signals from South America, these weird

  ULTRA SHORT TERM NOSTALGIA: Homesickness for the extremely recent past: "God, things seemed so much better in the world last week."

  haunted-sounding bolero -samba music transmissions from dinner theaters in Ecuador and Caracas and Rio. The music would come in faintly—faintly but clearly.

  "One night Mom came out onto the patio in a pink sundress and carrying a glass pitcher of lemonade. Dad swept her into his arms and they danced to the samba music with Mom still holding the pitcher. She was squealing but loving it. I think she was enjoying that little bit of danger the threat of broken glass added to the dancing. And there were crickets cricking and the transformer humming on the power lines behind the garages, and 1 had my suddenly young parents all to myself—them and this faint music that sounded like heaven—faraway, clear, and impossible to contact—coming from this faceless place where it was always summer and where beautiful people were always dancing and where it was impossible to call by telephone, even if you wanted to. Now that's earth to me."

  Well, who'd have thought Tobias was capable of such thoughts? We're going to have to do a reevalu ation of the lad.

  "Now you have to tell me the story you promised," says Tobias to Elvissa, who seems saddened by the prospect, as though she has to keep a bet she regrets having made.

  "Of course. Of course I will," she says, "Claire tells me you people tell stories sometimes, so you won't find it too stupid. You're none of you allowed to make any cracks, okay?"

  "Hey," I say, "that's always been our main rule."

  CHANGE COLOR

  Elvissa starts her tale: "It's a story I call The Boy with the Hummingbird Eyes." So if all of you will please lean back and relax now, I will tell it. 'lt starts in Tallahassee, Florida, where I grew up. There was this boy next door, Curtis, who was best friends with my brother Matt. My mother called him Lazy Curtis because he just drawled his
way through life, rarely speaking, silently chewing bologna sandwiches inside his lantern jaw and hitting baseballs farther than anyone else whenever he got up the will to do so. fully silent. So competent course, madly adored moment our U-haul house and I saw him door smoking a cigarette, mother just about faint. He was just so wonderat everything. I, of Curtis ever from the first pulled up to the new lying on the grass next an act that made my He was maybe only

  fifteen. "I promptly copied everything about him. Most superficially I copied his hair (which I still indirectly feel is slightly his to this day), his sloppy T -shirts and his lack of speech and his panthery walk. So did my brother. And the three of us shared what are still to me the best times of our lives walking around the subdivision we lived in, a development that somehow never got fully built. We'd play war inside these tract houses that had been reclaimed by palm trees and mangroves and small animals that had started to make their homes there, too: timid a well-cut head of black hair and a hot bod. He would also occasionally bob his head up and down, then sideways, not like a spastic, but more as though he kept noticing something sexy from the corner of his eyes but was continually mistaken.

  "Anyhow, this rich broad, this real Sylvia type" (Elvissa calls rich women with good haircuts and good clothes Sylvias) "comes out from the spa building going mince mince mince with her little shoey-wooeys and her Lagerfeld dress, right up to this guy in front of me. She purrrrs something I miss and then puts a little gold bracelet around this guy's wrist which he offers up to her (body language) with about as much enthusiasm as though he were waiting for her to vaccinate it. She gives the hand a kiss, says 'Be ready for nine o'clock' and then toddles off. "So I'm curious.