Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  per remnants inform us that summer will soon be here and that it is now time to mow the lawn. Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long. HI wake up and it's maybe 5:30 or so in the morning. The three of us are sprawled on top of the bed where we fell asleep. The dogs snooze on the floor next to the near-dead embers. Outside there is only a hint of light, the breathlessness of oleanders and no cooing of doves. I smell the warm carbon dioxide smell of sleep and enclosure. HThese creatures here in this room with me—these are the creatures I love and who love me. Together I feel like we are a strange and forbidden garden—I feel so happy I could die. If I could have it thus, I would like this moment to continue forever. I go back to sleep.

  DEFINE NORMAL

  Fifteen years ago, on what remains as possibly the most unhip day of my life, my entire family, all nine of us, went to have our group portrait taken at a local photo salon. As a result of that hot and endless sitting, the nine of us spent the next fifteen years trying bravely to live up to the corn -fed optimism, the cheerful waves of shampoo, and the airbrushed teeth-beams that the resultant photo is still capable of emitting to this day. We may look dated in this photo, but we look perfect, too. In it, we're beaming ear

  ward what seems to be

  actually Mr. Leonard,

  lonely old widower with

  something mysterious in

  "Fromage!" When

  home, it rested gloriously

  nestly to the right, off tothe future but which was the photographer and a hair implants, holding his left hand and yelling, the photo first came for maybe one hour on

  top of the fireplace, placed there guilelessly by my father, who was shortly thereafter pressured by a forest fire of shrill teenage voices fearful of peer mockery to remove it immediately. It was subsequently moved to a never-sat-in portion of his den, where it hangs to this day, like a forgotten pet gerbil dying of starvation. It is visited only rarely but deliberately by any one of the nine of us, in between our ups and downs in life, when we need a good dose of "but we were all so innocent once" to add that decisive literary note of melodrama to our sorrows.

  BRADYISM: A multisibling sensibility derived from having grown up in large familes. A rarity in those born after

  approximately 1965, symptoms of Bradyism include a facility for mind games, emotional

  withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a well-defined personal space.

  Again, that was fifteen years ago. This year, however, was the year everyone in the family finally decided to stop trying to live up to that bloody photo and the shimmering but untrue promise it made to us. This is the year we decided to call it quits, normality-wise; the year we went the way families just do, the year everyone finally decided to be themselves and to hell with it. The year no one came home for Christmas. Just me and Tyler, Mom and Dad.

  "Wasn't that a fabulous year, Andy? Remember?" This is my sister Deirdre on the phone, referring to the year in which the photo was taken. At the moment Deirdre's in the middle of a "heinously ugly" divorce from a cop down in Texas ("It takes me four years to discover that he's a pseudo-intimate, Andy—whatta slimeball") and her voice is rife with tricyclic antidepressants. She was the Best Looking and Most Popular of the Palmer girls; now she phones friends and relatives at 2:30 in the morning and scares them silly with idle, slightly druggy chat: "The world seemed so shiny and new then, Andy, I know I sound cliche. God— I'd suntan then and not be afraid of sarcomas; all it took to make me feel so alive I thought I might burst was a ride in Bobby Viljoen's Roadrunner to a party that had tons of unknown people."

  Deirdre's phone calls are scary on several levels, not the least of which is that her rantings tend to be true. There really is something silent and dull about losing youth; youth really is, as Deirdre says, a sad evocative perfume built of many stray smells. The perfume of my youth? A pungent blend of new basketballs, Zamboni scrapings, and stereo wiring overheated from playing too many Supertramp albums. And, of course, the steamy halogenated brew of the Kempsey twins' Jacuzzi on a Friday night, a hot soup garnished with flakes of dead skin, aluminum beer cans, and unlucky winged insects.

  I have three brothers and three sisters, and we were never a "hugging family." I, in fact, have no memory of having once been hugged by a parental unit (frankly, I'm suspicious of the practice). No, I think psychic dodge ball would probably better define our family dynamic. I was number five out of the seven children—the total middle child. I had to scramble harder than most siblings for any attention in our household.

  The Palmer children, all seven of us, have the stalwart, sensible, and unhuggable names that our parents' generation favored—Andrew, Deirdre, Kathleen, Susan, Dave, and Evan. Tyler is un peu exotic, but then he is the love child. I once told Tyler I wanted to change my name to something new and hippie-ish, like Harmony or Dust. He looked at me: "You're mad. Andrew looks great on a resume—what more could you ask for? Weirdos named Beehive or Fiber Bar never make middle management."

  Deirdre will be in Port Arthur, Texas this Christmas, being depressed with her bad marriage made too early in life.

  Dave, my oldest brother—the one who should have been the scientist but who grew a filmy pony tail instead and who now sells records in an alternative record shop in Seattle (he and his girlfriend, Rain, only wear black)—he's in London, England this Christmas, doing Ecstasy and going to nightclubs. When he comes back, he'll affect an English accent for the next six months.

  Kathleen, the second eldest, is ideologically opposed to Christmas; she disapproves of most bourgeois sentimentality. She runs a lucrative feminist dairy farm up in the allergen-free belt of eastern British Columbia and says that when "the invasion" finally conies, we'll all be out shopping for greeting cards and we'll deserve everything that happens to us.

  Susan, my favorite sister, the jokiest sister and the family actress, panicked after graduating from college years back, went into law, married this horrible know-everything yuppie lawyer name Brian (a union that can only lead to grief). Overnight she became so unnaturally serious. It can happen. I've seen it happen lots of times.

  The two of them live in Chicago. On Christmas morning Brian will be taking Polaroids of their baby Chelsea (his name choice) in the crib which has, I believe, a Krugerrand inset in the headboard. They'll probably work all day, right through dinner.

  One day I hope to retrieve Susan from her cheerless fate. Dave and I wanted to hire a deprogrammer at one point, actually going so far as to call the theology department of the university to try and find out where to locate one.

  Aside from Tyler, whom you already know about, there remains only Evan, in Eugene, Oregon. Neighbors call him, "the normal Palmer child." But then there are things the neighbors don't know: how he

  BLACK HOLES: An X

  generation subgroup best known for their possession of almost entirely black wardrobes.

  BLACK DENS: Where Black Holes live; often unheated warehouses with Day-Glo spray painting, mutilated mannequins, Elvis references, dozens of overflowing ashtrays, broken mirror sculptures, and Velvet Underground music playing in background.

  STRANGELOVE

  REPRODUCTION: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

  SQUIRES: The most

  common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their frantic attempts to recreate a

  semblance of Eisenhower-era plenitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job life-styles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and

  knickknacks.

  drinks to excess, blows his salary on coke, how he's losing his looks almost daily, and how he will confide to Dave, Tyler, and me how he cheats on his wife, Lisa, whom he addresses in an Elmer Fudd cartoon voice in public. Evan won't eat vegetables, either, and we'r
e all convinced that one day his heart is simply going to explode. I mean, go completely kablooey inside his chest. He doesn't care.

  Oh, Mr. Leonard, how did we all end up so messy? We're looking hard for that fromage you were holding—we really are—but we're just not seeing it any more. Send us a clue, please.

  Two days before Christmas, Palm Springs Airport is crammed with cranberry-skinned tourists and geeky scalped marines all heading home for their annual doses of slammed doors, righteously abandoned meals, and the traditional family psychodramas. Claire is crabbily chain smoking while waiting for her flight to New York; I'm waiting for my flight to Portland. Dag is affecting an ersatz bonhomie; he doesn't want us to know how lonely he'll be for the week we're away. Even the MacArthurs are heading up to Calgary for the holidays.

  Claire's crabbiness is a defense mechanism: "I know you guys think I'm an obsequious doormat for following Tobias to New York. Stop looking at me like that."

  "Actually, Claire, I'm just reading the paper," I say. "Well you want to stare at me. I can tell."

  Why bother telling her she's only being paranoid? Since Tobias left

  that day, Claire has had only the most cursory of telephone conversations with him. She chirped away, making all sort of plans. Tobias merely listened in at the other end like a restaurant patron being lengthily informed of the day's specials —mahimahi, flounder, swordfish—all of which he knew right from the start he didn't want.

  So here we sit in the outdoor lounge area waiting for our buses with wings. My plane leaves first, and before I leave to cross the tarmac, Dag tells me to try not to burn down the house.

  *****

  As mentioned before, my parents, "Frank 'n' Louise," have turned the house into a museum of fifteen years ago—the last year they ever bought new furniture and the year the Family Photo was taken. Since that time, most of their energies have been channeled into staving off evidence of time's passing.

  Okay, obviously a few small tokens of cultural progression have been allowed entry into the house—small tokens such as bulk and generic grocery shopping, boxy ugly evidence of which clutters up the kitchen, evidence in which they see no embarrassment. (I know it's a lapse in taste, pudding, but it saves so much money.")

  There are also a few new items of technology in the house, mostly brought in on Tyler's insistence: a microwave oven, a VCR, and a telephone answering machine. In regard to this, I notice that my parents, technophobes both, will speak into the phone answering machine with all the hesitancy of a Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish making a gramophone recording for a time capsule.

  "Mom, why didn't you and Dad just go to Maui this year and give up on Christmas. Tyler and I are depressed already."

  "Maybe next year, dear, when your father and I are a bit more flush. You know what prices are like. ..."

  "You say that every year. I wish you guys would stop coupon clipping. Pretending you're poor."

  "Indulge us, Pumpkin. We enjoy playing hovel." We're pulling out of the airport in Portland and reentering the familiar drizzling greenscape of Portland. Already, after ten minutes, any spiritual or psychic progress I may have made in the absence of my family, has vanished or been invalidated.

  "So, is that the way you're cutting your hair now, dear?" I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer. "So," I say, "It really is just me and Tyler at home this year?" "Seems that way. But I think Dee might come up from Port Arthur. She'll be in her old bedroom soon enough. I can see the signs."

  POVERTY LURKS:

  Financial paranoia instilled in offspring by depression-era parents.

  PULL-THE-PLUG, SLICE THE PIE: A fantasy in which an offspring mentally tallies up the net worth of his parents.

  UNDERDOGGING: The tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. The consumer expression of this trait is the purchasing of less successful, "sad," or failing products: "/ know these Vienna franks are heart failure on a stick, but they were so sad looking up against all the other yuppie food items that I just had to buy them."

  "Signs?"

  Mom increases the wiper-blade speed and turns on the lights.

  Something's on her mind.

  "Oh, you've all left and come back and left and come back so many

  times now, I don't really even see the point in telling my friends that

  my kids have left home. Not that the subject ever comes up these days.

  My friends are all going through similar things with their kids. When I

  bump into someone at the Safeway nowadays, it's implicit we don't ask

  about the children the way we used to. We'd get too depressed. Oh, by

  the way, you remember Allana du Bois?

  "The dish?"

  "Shaved her head and joined a cult."

  "No!"

  "And not before she sold off all of her mother's jewelry to pay for

  her share of the guru's Lotus Elite. She left Post-it Notes all over the

  house saying, Til pray for you, Mom.' Mom finally booted her out. She's

  growing turnips now in Tennessee."

  "Everyone's such a mess. Nobody turned out normal. Have you

  seen anyone else?"

  "Everyone. But I can't remember their names. Donny . . . Arnold ... I remember their faces from when they used to come over to

  the house for Popsicles. But they all look so beaten, so old now—so

  prematurely middle-aged. Tyler's friends, though, I must say, are all so

  perky. They're different.

  "Tyler's friends live in bubbles."

  "That's neither true nor fair, Andy."

  She's right. I'm just jealous of how unafraid Tyler's friends are of

  the future. Scared and envious. "Okay. Sorry. What were the signs that

  Dee might be coming home? You were saying—"

  The traffic is light on Sandy Boulevard as we head toward the steel

  bridges downtown, bridges the color of clouds, and bridges so large and

  complex that they remind me of Claire's New York City. I wonder if

  their mass will contaminate the laws of gravity.

  "Well, the moment one of you kids phones up and gets nostaligic

  for the past or starts talking about how poorly a job is going, I know it's

  time to put out the fresh linen. Or if things are going too well. Three

  months ago Dee called and said Luke was buying her her own frozen

  yogurt franchise. She'd never been more excited. Right away I told your father, 'Frank, I give her till spring before she's back up in her bedroom boo-hooing over her high-school annuals.' Looks like I'll win that bet. "Or the time Davie had the one halfway decent job he ever had, working as an art director at that magazine and telling me all the time how he loved it. Well, I knew it was only a matter of minutes before he'd become bored, and sure enough, ding-dong, there goes the doorbell, and there's Davie with that girl of his, Rain, looking like refugees from a child labor camp. The loving couple lived at the house for six months, Andy. You weren't here; you were in Japan or something. You have no idea what that was like. I still find toenail clippings everywhere. Your poor father found one in the freezer—black nail polish—awful crea

  ture."

  "Do you and Rain tolerate each other now?"

  "Barely. Can't say I'm unhappy to know she's in England this

  Christmas."

  It's raining heavily now, and making one of my favorite sounds,

  that of rain on a car's metal roof. Mom sighs. "I really did have such

  high hopes for all of you kids. I mean, how can you look in your little

  baby's face a
nd not feel that way? But I just had to give up caring what

  any of you do with your lives. I hope you don't mind, but it's made my

  life that much easier."

  Pulling in the driveway, I see Tyler dashing out into his car, protecting his artfully coifed head from the rain with his red gym bag. "Hi,

  Andy!" he shouts before slamming the door after entering his own warm

  and dry world. Through a crack in the window he cranes his neck and

  adds, "Welcome to the house that time forgot!"

  2 + 2 = 5 -ISM: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. "Oh, all right, I'll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone."

  OPTION PARALYSIS:

  The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

  Christmas Eve. HI am buying massive quantities of candles today, but I'm not saying why. Votive candles, birthday candles, emergency can dles, dinner candles, Jewish candles, Christmas candles, and candles from the Hindu bookstore bearing peoploid cartoons of saints. They all count—all flames are equal. At the Durst Thriftee Mart on 21st Street, Tyler is too embarrassed for words by this shopping compulsion; he's placed a frozen Butterball turkey in my cart to make it look more festive and actly is a votive candle, traying both dizziness as he inhales deeply of cloying synthetic bluener candle. "You light prayer. All the churches $ less deviant. "What exanyway?" asks Tyler, beand a secular upbringing the overpowering and berry pong of a dinthem when you say a in Europe have them."

  "Oh. Here's one you missed." He hands me a bulbous red table candle, covered in fishnet stocking material, the sort that you find in a momand-pop Italian restaurant. "People sure are looking funny at your cart, Andy. I wish you'd tell me what these candles were all for." "lt's a yuletide surprise, Tyler. Just hang in there." We head toward the seasonally busy checkout counter, looking surprisingly normal in our semiscruff outfits, taken from my old bedroom closet and dating from my punk days—Tyler's in an old leather jacket I picked up in Munich; I'm in beat-up layered shirts and jeans.