Generation X (3 page)

organization, I instigated a policy of storytelling in my own life, a policy

of "bedtime stories," which Dag, Claire, and I share among ourselves. It's simple: we come up with stories and we tell them to each other. The only rule is that we're not allowed to interrupt, just like in AA, and at the end we're not allowed to criticize. This noncritical atmosphere works for us because the three of us are so tight assed about revealing our

emotions. A clause like this was the only way we could feel secure with each other.

Claire and Dag took to the game like ducklings to a stream.

"I firmly believe," Dag once said at the beginning, months ago,

"that everybody on earth has a deep, dark secret that they'll never tell another soul as long as they live. Their wife, their husband, their lover, or their priest. Never.

"I have my secret. You have yours. Yes, you do—I can see you

smiling. You're thinking about your secret right now. Come on:
spill it
out.
What is it? Diddle your sister? Circle jerk? Eat your poo to check the taste? Go with a stranger and you'd go with more? Betray a friend?

Just tell me. You may be able to help me and not even know it."

Anyhow, today we're going to be telling bedtime stories on our picnic, and on Indian Avenue we're just about to turn off onto the Interstate 10

freeway to head west, riding in the clapped-out ancient red Saab, with Dag at the wheel, informing us that passengers do not really "ride" in his little red car so much as they "motor": "We are motoring off to our picnic in hell."

Hell is the town of West Palm Springs Village—a bleached and

defoliated Flintstones color cartoon of a failed housing development from the 1950s. The town lies on a chokingly hot hill a few miles up the valley, and it overlooks the shimmering aluminum necklace of Interstate 10, whose double strands stretch from San Bernardino in the west, out t o B l y t h e a n d P h o e n i x i n t h e e a s t .

I n a n e r a w h e n n e a r l y a l l r e a l e s t a t e i s c o v e t e d a n d d e v e l o p e d , West Palm Springs Village is a true rarity: a modern ruin and almost deserted save for a few hearty souls in Airstream trailers and mobile homes, who give us a cautious eye upon our arrival through the town's

welcoming sentry—an abandoned Texaco gasoline station surrounded

by a chain link fence, and lines of dead and blackened
Washingtonia
palms that seem to have been agent-oranged. The mood is vaguely

reminiscent of a Vietnam War movie set.

"You get the impression," says Dag as we drive past the gas station at hearse speed, "that back in, say, 1958, Buddy Hackett, Joey Bishop, and a bunch of Vegas entertainers all banded together to make a bundle o n t h i s p l a c e , b u t a k e y i n v e s t o r s p l i t t o w n a n d t h e w h o l e p l a c e j u s t died."

•

But again, the village is not entirely dead. A few people do live

there, and these few troopers have a splendid view of the windmill ranch down below them that borders the highway—tens of thousands of turbo blades set on poles and aimed at Mount San Gorgonio, one of the windiest places in America. Conceived of as a tax dodge after the oil shock, these windmills are so large and powerful that any one of their blades could cut a man in two. Curiously, they turned out to be functional as well as a good tax dodge, and the volts they silently generate power detox center air conditioners and cellulite vacuums of the region's burgeoning cos- metic surgery industry.

DECADE BLENDING:

In clothing: the indiscriminate

C l a i r e i s d r e s s e d t o d a y i n b u b b l e g u m c a p r i p a n t s , s l e e v e l e s s combination of two or more

blouse, scarf, and sunglasses: starlet manque. She likes retro looks, and items from various decades to

she also once told us that if she has kids, "I'm going to give them utterly create a personal mood:
Sheila =

Mary Quant earrings (1960s) +

retro names like Madge or Verna or Ralph. Names like people have in
cork wedgie platform shoes

diners."

(1970s) + black leather jacket

Dag, on the other hand, is dressed in threadbare chinos, a smooth

(1950s and 1980s).

cotton dress shirt, and sockless in loafers, essentially a reduction of his usual lapsed Mormon motif. He has no sunglasses: he is going to stare at the sun: Huxley redux or Monty Clift, prepping himself for a role and trying to shake the drugs.

"What," ask both my friends, "is this lurid amusement value dead cele b r i t i e s h o l d f o r u s ? "

Me? I'm just me. I never seem to be able to get into the swing of

using "time as a color" in my wardrobe, the way Claire does, or "time cannibalizing" as Dag calls the process. I have enough trouble just being
now.
I dress to be obscure, to be hidden—to be generic. Camouflaged.

* * * * *

So, after cruising around house-free streets, Claire chooses the corner of Cottonwood and Sapphire avenues for our picnic, not because there's anything there (which there isn't, merely a crumbling asphalt road being reclaimed by sage and creosote bushes) but rather because "if you try real hard you can almost feel how optimistic the developers were when they named this place."

The back flap of the car clunks down. Here we will eat chicken

breasts, drink iced tea, and greet with exaggerated happiness the pieces of stick and snakeskin the dogs bring to us. And we will tell our bedtime stories to each other under the hot buzzing sun next to vacant lots that in alternately forked universes might still bear the gracious desert homes of such motion picture stars as Mr. William Holden and Miss Grace

Kelly. In these homes my two friends Dagmar Bellinghausen and Claire Baxter would be more than welcome for swims, gossip, and frosty rum drinks the color of a Hollywood, California sunset.

But then that's another universe, not this universe.
Here
the three of us merely eat a box lunch on a land that is barren—the equivalent of blank space at the end of a chapter—and a land so empty that all objects placed on its breathing, hot skin become objects of irony. And here, under the big white sun, I get to watch Dag and Claire pretend they inhabit that other, more welcoming universe.

I

D a g s a y s h e ' s a l e s b i a n t r a p p e d i n s i d e a m a n ' s b o d y . F i g u r e
t h a t
o u t .

To watch him smoke a filter-tipped cigarette out in the desert, the sweat I on his face evaporating as quickly as it forms, while Claire teases the dogs with bits of chicken at the back of the Saab's hatch gate, you can't help but be helplessly reminded of the sort of bleached Kodak snapshots

[ taken decades ago and found in shoe boxes in attics everywhere. You

' know the type: all yellowed and filmy, always with a big faded car in the background and fash-ions that look surpris -ingly hip. When you see such photos, you can't

[ h e l p b u t w o n d e r a t j u s t

h o w s w e e t a n d s a d a n d

innocent all moments of

life are rendered by the

tripping of a camera's

shutter, for at that point

the future is still un-known and has yet to hurt

us, and also for that brief

moment, our poses are

accepted as honest. As I watch Dag and Claire piddle about the desert, I also realize that my descriptions of myself and my two friends have been slightly vague until now. A bit more description of them and myself is in order. Time for case studies. I'll begin with Dag. Dag's car

pulled up to the curb outside my bungalow about a year ago, its Ontario license plates covered in a mustard crust of Oklahoma mud and Nebraska insects. When he opened the door, a heap of clutter fell out the door and onto the pavement, including a bottle of Chanel Crystalle perfume that smashed. ("Dykes just love Crystalle, you know. So active. So sporty.") I never found out what the perfume was for, but life's been considerably more interesting around here since.

Shortly after Dag arrived, I both found him a place to live—an

empty bungalow in between mine and Claire's—and got him a job with

me at Larry's Bar, where he quickly took control of the scene. Once, for example, he bet me fifty dollars that he could induce the locals —a depressing froth of failed Zsa Zsa types, low-grade bikers who brew cauldrons of acid up in the mountains, and their biker-bitch chicks with pale-green gang tattoos on their knuckles and faces bearing the appalling complexions of abandoned and rained-on showroom dummies—he bet

me he could have them all singing along with him to "It's a Heartache,"

a grisly, strangely out-of-date Scottish love tune that was never removed from the jukebox, before the night was out. This notion was too silly to even consider, so, of course, I accepted the bet. A few minutes later I was out in the hallway making a long-distance call underneath the native Indian arrowhead display, when suddenly, what did I hear inside the bar but the tuneless bleatings and bellowings of the crowd, accompanied by their swaying beehive do's and waxen edemic biker's arms flailing arrhythmically to the song's beat. Not without admiration, then, did I give Dag his fifty, while a terrifying biker gave him a hug ("I love this guy!"), and then wa tched Dag put the bill into his mouth, chew it a bit, and then swallow.

" H e y , A n d y . Y o u a r e w h a t y o u e a t . "

* * * * *

People are wary of Dag when meeting him for the first time, in the same visceral way prairie folk are wary of the flavor of seawater when tasting it for the first time at an ocean beach. "He has eyebrows," says Claire w h e n d e s c r i b i n g h i m o n t h e p h o n e t o o n e o f h e r m a n y s i s t e r s .

Dag used to work in advertising (marketing, actually) and came to

California from Toronto, Canada, a city that when I once visited gave the efficient, ordered feel of the Yellow Pages sprung to life in three dimensions, peppered with trees and veined with cold water.

"1 don't think I was a likable guy. I was actually one of those putzes