Generation X (10 page)

"Then, looking hesitant but relaxed, he dialed his combination on t h e k n o b . T h e r e w a s a c l i c k , h e p u l l e d a b a r , a n d t h e d o o r o p e n e d , revealing
w h a t ,
I c o u l d n ' t s e e .

"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 out-puff 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. T a k a m i c h i i n h i s s t r i n g e r d a y s . I t w a s a n u n a b a s h e d l y 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 a t t h a t , w a s h i s m o s t v a l u e d p o s s e s s i o n .

"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 s m i l e d p l e a s a n t l y e n o u g h , I h o p e , 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 compli-mentary 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 build ing, 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 t o o m u c h h i s t o r y t h e r e f o r m e . T h a t I n e e d e d
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 t h a t c a c t u s a n d t h a t r o c k . A n d t o t r y a n d r e a d t h e l e t t e r i n s i d e m e . "

* *

"I've got an end of the world story," says Dag, finishing off the remainder of the iced tea, ice cubes long melt e d . H e t h e n t a k e s o f f h i s s h i r t , revealing his somewhat ribby chest, lights another filter-tipped cigarette, a n d c l e a r s h i s t h r o a t i n a n e r v o u s g e s t u r e .

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 a d o , h e b e g i n s :

"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?'

w h i c h m a d e y o u r b e s t f r i e n d , w h o w a s s i t t i n g i n t h e p a s s e n g e r s e a t looking through the box of cassette tapes, curl up their toes inside their r u n n i n g s h o e s . A n d y o u s e n s e y o u ' v e s a i d s o m e t h i n g t h a t ' s s t r u c k a n e r v e a n d i t w a s f u n , s o y o u pushed things further: 'For that matter,'

SURVIVULOUSNESS: The

tendency to visualize oneself

y o u s a i d , ' y o u d o n ' t s e e n e a r l y a s m a n y
b i r d s
these days as you used enjoying being the last remaining

t o , d o y o u ?
A n d ,
you know what I heard the other day? That down in person on earth.
"I'd take a

helicopter up and throw

the Caribbean, there aren't any shells left anywhere because the tourists
microwave ovens down on the

took them all.
And,
haven't you ever wondered when flying back from
Taco Bell."

Europe, five miles over Greenland, that there's just something, I don't know—
inverted
—about shopping for cameras and scotch and cigarettes
PLATONIC SHADOW: A

nonsexual friendship with a

u p i n o u t e r s p a c e ? '

member of the opposite sex.

"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 rea
lis
tic 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

MENTAL GROUND ZERO:

The location where one

stomach that's quilted and acidic with pissed-offedness, and your best visualizes oneself during the

friend sitting out in the car, pointedly avoiding you and sulkily listening dropping of the atomic bomb;

to big band music on the A.M. radio station that broadcasts ice rink frequently, a shopping mall.

music down valley from Cathedral City.

"But a part of you is also fascinated with the cart contents of the by-any-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.

"The manager is heard through a bullhorn, asking shoppers to

calmly vacate, but no one's paying much attention. Carts are left in the aisles and the bodies flee, carrying and dropping looted roast beefs and bottles of Evian on the sidewalk outside. The parking lot is now about as civilized as a theme park's bumper cars.

"But the fat man remains, as does the cashier, who is wispily blond, with a bony hillbilly nose and translucent white skin. They, your best friend, and you remain frozen, speechless, and your minds become the backlit NORAD world map of mythology—how cliche! And on it are

the traced paths of fireballs, stealthily, inexorably passing over Baffin Island, the Aleutians, Labrador, the Azores, Lake Superior, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Puget Sound, Maine . . . it's only a matter of moments now, isn't it?

" 'I always promised myself,' says the fat man, in a voice so normal as to cause the three of you to be jolted out of your thoughts, 'that when this moment came, I would behave with some dignity in whatever time

remains and so, Miss—' he says, turning to the clerk in particular, 'let me please pay for my purchases.' The clerk, in the absence of other choices, accepts his money. "Then comes The Flash.

" 'Get down,' you shout, but they continue their transaction, deer transfixed by headlights. 'There's no time!' But your warning remains unheeded.

"And so then,
just
before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet—the surface of a swimming pool during a

high dive, as seen from below—

"—And
just
before you're pelleted by a hail of gum and mag-azines—

"—And
just
before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in sus-pended animation and bursts into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward—

"Just
before all of this, your best friend cranes his neck, lurches over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, 'There. I've always wanted to do that.'

"And that's that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you've been imagining since you were six, it's all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by regret. A lot like life, wouldn't you say?"

PART TWO

NEW ZEALAND

GETS

NUKED,

TOO

Five days ago—the day after our picnic—Dag disappeared. Otherwise

the week has been normal, with myself and Claire slogging away at our M c j o b s —me tending bar at Larry's and maintaining the bungalows (I get reduced rent in return for minor caretaking) and Claire peddling five-t h o u s a n d -dollar purses to old bags. Of couse we wonder where Dag went, but we're not too worried. He's obviously just Dagged-out some place, possibly crossing the border at Mexicali and off to write heroic c o u p l e t s o u t a m o n g t h e

saguaro, or maybe he's in

L.A., learning about

CAD systems or making

a black-and-white super-8 movie. Brief creative

bursts that allow him to

endure the tedium of real

work. HAnd this is

fine. But I wish he'd

g i v e n s o m e a d v a n c e n o -tice so I wouldn't have to knock myself out cover-ing his tail for him at

work. He knows that Mr. MacArthur, the bar's owner and our boss, lets him get away with murder. He'll make one quick joke, and his absence will be forgotten. Like the last time: "Won't happen again, Mr. M. By t h e w a y , h o w m a n y l e s b i a n s d o e s i t t a k e t o p u t i n a l i g h t b u l b ? " Mr.

MacArthur winces. "Dagmar,
shhh!
For God's sake, don't irritate the clientele!" On certain nights of the week Larry's can have its share of s t o o l-throwing aficionados. Bar brawls, although colorful, only up Mr.

M.'s Allstate premiums. Not that I've ever seen a brawl at Larry's. Mr.

M. is merely paranoid.

"Three—one to put in the light bulb and two to make a documentary about it."

Forced laughter; I don't think he got it. "Dagmar, you are very f u n n y , b u t p l e a s e d o n ' t u p s e t t h e l a d i e s . "

"But Mr. MacArthur," says Dag, repeating his personal tag line,

"I'm a lesbian myself. I just happen to be trapped in a man's body."

This, of course, is an overload for Mr. M., product of another era, a depression child and owner of a sizable collection of matchbook folders from Waikiki, Boca Raton, and Gatwick Airport; Mr. MacArthur who,

with his wife, clips coupons, shops in bulk, and fails to understand the concept of moist microheated terry towels given before meals on airline flights. Dag once tried to explain 'the terry-towel concept' to Mr. M.:

"Another ploy dreamed up by the marketing department, you know—let the peons wipe the ink of thriller and romance novels from their fingers before digging into the grub.
Très
swank. Wows the yokels." But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.

But life goes on.

W h e r e a r e y o u , D a g ?

* * * * *

Dag's been found! He's in (of all places) Scotty's Junction, Nevada, just east of the Mojave Desert. He telephoned: "You'd love it here, Andy.

Scotty's Junction is where atom bomb scientists, mad with grief over t h e i r s p a w n , w o u l d c o m e a n d g e t s l o s h e d i n t h e F o r d s a l o o n c a r s i n which they'd then crash and burn in the ravines; afterward, the little desert animals came and ate them. So tasty. So biblical. I
love
desert justice."

"You dink. I've been working double shift because of your leaving u n a n n o u n c e d . "

" I h a d t o g o , A n d y . S o r r y if I left you in the lurch."

" D a g , w h a t t h e
h e l l
a r e y o u d o i n g i n N e v a d a ? "

" Y o u w o u l d n ' t u n d e r s t a n d . "

"Try me."

"I don't know—"

"Then make a
story
out of it. Where are you calling from?" "I'm inside a diner at a pay phone. I'm using Mr. M.'s calling card number. He

won't mind."

"You really abuse that guy's goodwill, Dag. You can't coast on your charm forever."

CULT OF ALONENESS:

The need for autonomy at all

"Did I phone Dial-a-Lecture? And do you want to hear my story

costs, usually at the expense of

or not?"

long-term relationships. Often

Of course I do. "Okay, so I'll shut up, already. Shoot." I hear gas brought about by overly high

expectations of others.

station dings in the background, along with
skreeing
wind, audible even from inside. The unbeautiful desolation of Nevada already makes me feel lonely; I pull my shirt up around my neck to combat a shiver.

Dag's roadside diner smells, no doubt, like a stale bar carpet.

Ugly people with eleven fingers are playing computer slots built into the counter and eating greasy meat by-products slathered in cheerfully tinted condiments. There's a cold, humid mist, smelling of cheap floor cleaner, mongrel dog, cigarettes, mashed potato, and failure. And the patrons are staring at Dag, watching him contort and die romantically into the phone with his tales of tragedy and probably wondering as they view his dirty white shirt, askew tie, and jittery cigarette, whether a posse of robust, clean-suited Mormons will burst in the door at any moment, rope him with a long white lasso, and wrestle him back across the Utah state line.

"Here's the story, Andy, and I'll try and be fast, so here goes: once upon a time there was a young man who was living in Palm Springs and minding his own business. We'll call him Otis. Otis had moved to Palm Springs because he had studied weather charts and he knew that it

received a ridiculously small amount of rain. Thus he knew that if the city of Los Angeles over the mountain was ever beaned by a nuclear

strike, wind currents would almost entirely prevent fallout from reaching his lungs. Palm Springs was his own personal New Zealand; a sanctuary.

Like a surprisingly large number of people, Otis thought a lot about New Zealand and the Bomb.

"One day in the mail Otis received a postcard from an old friend who was now living in New Mexico, a two-day drive away. And what

interested Otis about this card was the photo on the front—a 1960s

picture of a daytime desert nuclear test shot, taken from a plane.

"The post card got Otis to thinking.

CELEBRITY

"Something
disturbed him about the photo, but he couldn't quite
SCHADENFREUDE:

Lurid

figure out
what.

thrills derived f rom talking about

celebrity deaths.

"Then Otis figured it out: the scale was wrong—the mushroom

cloud was
too small.
Otis had always thought nuclear mushroom clouds occupied the
whole
sky, but this explosion, why, it was a teeny little road flare, lost out amid the valleys and mountain ranges in which it was detonated.

"Otis panicked.

" 'Maybe,' he thought to himself, 'I've spent my whole life worrying about tiny little firecrackers made monstrous in our minds and on TV.

Can I have been
wrong
all this time? Maybe I can free myself of Bomb anxiety—'

"Otis was excited. He realized he had no choice but to hop into his car, pronto, and investigate further—to visit
actual
test sites and figure out as best he could the size of an explosion. So he made a tour of what he called the Nuclear Road—southern Nevada, southwestern

Utah, and then a loop down in to New Mexico to the test sites in

Alamogordo and Las Cruces.

"Otis made Las Vegas the first nighl. There he could have
sworn
he saw Jill St. John screaming at her cinnamon-colored wig floating in a fountain. And he
possibly
saw Sammy Davis, Jr., offer her a bowl of nuts in consolation. And when he hesitated in betting at a blackjack table, the guy next to him snarled,
''Hey, bub
(he actually got called

"bub"—he was in heaven),
Vegas wasn't built on winners?
Otis tossed the man a one-dollar gaming chip.

"The next morning on the highway Otis saw 18-wheel big rigs aimed at Mustang, Ely, and Susanville, armed with guns, uniforms, and beef, and before long he was in southwest Utah visiting the filming site of a John Wayne movie—the movie where more than half the people involved in its making died of cancer. Clearly, Otis's was an exciting drive—exciting but lonely.

"I'll spare the rest of Otis's trip, but you get the point. Most im-portantly, in a few days Otis found the bombed New Mexican moon-scapes he was looking for and realized, after a thorough inspection, that his perception of earlier in the week was correct, that yes,
atomic bomb
mushroom clouds really are much smaller than we make them out to be
in our minds.
And he derived comfort from this realization—a silencing of ihe small whispering nuclear voices that had been speaking continually

in his subconscious since kindergarten. There was nothing to worry about after all."

"So your story has a happy ending, then?"

"Not really, Andy. You see, Otis's comfort was short lived, for he soon after had a scary realization—a realization triggered by shopping malls, of all things. It happened this way: he was driving home to

California on Interstate 10 and passing by a shopping mall outside of Phoenix. He was idly thinking about the vast, arrogant block forms of shopping mall architecture and how they make as little visual sense in the landscape as nuclear cooling towers. He then drove past a new

yuppie housing development—one of those strange new developments

with hundreds of blockish, equally senseless and enormous coral pink houses, all of them with an inch of space in between and located about three feet from the highway. And Otis got to thinking: 'Hey! these aren't houses at all—these are
malls in disguise.'

"Otis developed the shopping mall correlation: kitchens became the Food Fair; living rooms the Fun Center; the bathroom the Water

Park. Otis said to himself, 'God, what goes through the
minds
of people who live in these things—are they
shopping?"

"He knew he was on to a hot and scary idea; he had to pull his
THE EMPEROR'S NEW

car over to the side of the road to think while freeway cars slashed past.

MALL:
The popular notion that

"And that's when he lost his newly found sense of comfort.
'If
shopping malls exist on the

insides only and have no exterior.

people can mentally convert their houses into shopping malls,' he

The suspension of visual belief

thought, 'then these same people are just as capable of mentally equating engendered by this notion allows

atomic bombs with regular bombs.'

shoppers to pretend that the

large, cement blocks thrust into

"He combined this with his new observation about mushroom

their environment do not, in fact,

clouds: 'And once these people saw the new, smaller
friendlier
explosion exist.

size, the conversion process would be irreversible. All vigilance would disappear. Why, before you knew it you'd be able to buy atomic bombs over the counter—
or free with a tank of gas!
Otis's world was scary once more."

* * * *

"Was he on drugs?" asks Claire.

"Just coffee. Nine cups from the sound of it. Intense little guy." "I think he thinks about getting blown up too much. I think he

needs to fall in love. If he doesn't fall in love soon, he's really going to lose it."

"That may be. He's coming home tomorrow afternoon. He's got

p r e s e n t s f o r b o t h o f u s h e s a y s . "

"Pinch me."

MONSTERS

EXIST

Dag has just driven in and looks like something the doggies pulled out of the dumpsters of Cathedral City. His normally pink cheeks are a dove gray, and his chestnut hair has the demented mussed look of a random sniper poking his head out from a burger joint and yelling, "I'll never surrender." We can see all of this the moment he walks in the door—he's totally wired and he hasn't been sleeping. I'm concerned, and from t h e w a y C l a i r e n e r v o u s l y c h a n g e s h e r hold on her cigarette I can tell she's worried, too. Still,

Dag looks happy, which

is all anyone can ask for,

b u t w h y d o e s h i s h a p p i-ness look so, so—suspicious? I/
think I
know why.
l've seen

this flavor of happiness

before. It 's of the same

phylum of unregulated

relief and despondent

giggliness I've seen in the

faces of friends returning

from half-years spent in

Europe—faces showing relief at being able to indulge in big cars, fluffy white towels, and California produce once more, but faces also gearing up for the inevitable "what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life?" semiclinical depression that almost always bookends a European pilgrimage. Uh
oh.