Generation X (5 page)

22

GENERATION X

QUIT

YOUR

JOB

" I deflected her question. I like Margare t. She tries hard. She's older,

a n d attractive in a hair-spray-and-shoulder-pads-twice-divorced

survivor

of way. A real bulldozer. She's like one of those little rooms you

only in Chicago or New York in superexpensive downtown apartments—small rooms painted intense, flaring colors like emerald or

raw beef to hide the fact that they're so small. She told me my

s e a s o n

o n c e , too: I'm a summer. " 'God, Margaret. You really have to wonder

why we even bother to get

up
in the morning. I

mean, really:
Why work?

Simply to buy more

stuff? That's just not

enough. Look at us all.

W h a t ' s t h e c o m m o n a s -s u m p t i o n t h a t g o t u s a l l from here to here? What

makes us
deserve
the ice

cream and running shoes

and wool Italian suits we

have? I mean, I see all of

u s t r y i n g s o h a r d t o a c -quire s o m u c h
stuff,
but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit i t , t h a t .. ." 'But Margaret cooled me right there. Putting down her mug, she said that before I got into one of my Exercised

Y o u n g M a n s t a t e s , I s h o u l d r e a l i z e t h a t t h e o n l y r e a s o n w e a l l go to work in the morn ing is because we're terrified of what would happen if we
stopped. We
're not built for free time as a species.

We think we are, but we aren't.' Then she began almost talking to

h e rself. I'd gotten her going, She was saying that most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting

moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that at the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of those moments connect together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting.

SICK BUILDING

"Well. You can see that morbid and self-destructive impulses were
MIGRATION:
The tendency of

overtaking me that morning and that Margaret was more than willing to younger workers to leave or avoid

sweep her floor into my fireplace. So we sat there watching tea steep jobs in unhealthy office

environments or workplaces

(never a fun thing to do, I might add) and in a shared moment listened affected by the Sick Building

to the office proles discuss whether a certain game show host had or had Syndrome.

not had cosmetic surgery recently.

" 'Hey, Margaret,' I said, 'I bet you can't think of one p e r s o n i n
RECURVING:
Leaving one job

to take another that pays less but

the entire history of the world who became famous without a whole lot places one back on the learning

o f c a s h c h a n g i n g h a n d s a l o n g t h e w a y . '

curve.

" S h e w a n t e d t o k n o w w h a t t h i s m e a n t , s o I e l a b o r a t e d . I t o l d h e r that people simply don't . . .
c a n ' t
become famous in this world unless a lot of people make a lot of money. The cynicism of this took her aback, but she answered my challenge at face value. 'That's a bit harsh, Dag.

What about Abraham Lincoln?'

" 'No go. That was all about slavery and land. Tons-o'-cash hap-pening there.'

"So she says, 'Leonardo da Vinci,' to which I could only state that he was a businessman like Shakespeare or any of those old boys and

that all of his work was purely on a commission basis and even
worse,
h i s r e s e a r c h w a s u s e d t o s u p p o r t t h e m i l i t a r y .

" ' W e ll, Dag, this is just the
s t u
pidest argument I've ever heard,' s h e s t a r t s s a y i n g , g e t t i n g d e s p e r a t e . ' O f c o u r s e p e o p l e b e c o m e f a m o u s without people making money out of it.' ' 'So name one, then.'

"I could see Margaret's thinking flail, her features dissolving and reforming, and I was feeling just a little too full of myself, knowing that other people in the cafeteria had started to listen in on the conversation.

I was the boy in the baseball cap driving the convertible again, high on his own cleverness and ascribing darkness and greed to all human

endeavors. That was me.

' 'Oh, all right, you win,' she says, conceding me a pyrrhic victory, and I was about to walk out of the room with my coffee (now the Perfect-But- Somewhat-Smug Young Man), when I heard a lit t l e v o i c e a t t h e back of the coffee room say 'Anne Frank.' "Well.

"I pivoted around on the ball of my foot, and who did I see, looking quietly defiant but dreadfully dull and tubby, but Charlene sitting next
0 Z M 0 SIS:
The inability of

to the megatub of office acetaminophen tablets. Charlene with her trailer-one's job to live up to one's self-image.

park bleached perm, meat-extension recipes culled from
Family Circle
magazine,
and neglect from her boyfriend; the sort of person who when
POWER MIST: The

you draw their name out of the hat for the office Christmas party gift, tendency of hierarchies in office

y o u s a y , ' W h o ? '

environments to be diffuse and

' 'Anne Frank?' I bellowed, 'Why of
course
there was money there, preclude crisp articulation.

why . . .' but, of course, there was no money there. I had unwittingly declared a moral battle that she had deftly won. I felt awfully silly and awfully mean.

"The staff, of course, sided with Charlene—no one sides with

scuzzballs. They were wearing their 'you-got-your-comeuppance' smiles, and there was a lull while the cafeteria audience waited for me to dig my hole deeper, with Charlene in particular looking righteous. But I just stood there unspeaking; all they got to watch instead was my fluffy white karma instantly converting into iron-black cannon balls acceler-ating to the bottom of a cold and deep Swiss lake. I felt like turning into a plant—a comatose, nonbreathing, nonthinking entity, right there and then. But, of course, plants in offices get scalding hot coffee poured into their soil by copier machine repair people, don't they? So what was I to do? I wrote off the psychic wreckage of that job, before it got any worse. I walked out of that kitchen, out the office doors, and never bothered to come back. Nor did I ever bother to gather my belongings from my veal-fattening pen.

" I f i g u r e i n r e t r o s p e c t , t h o u g h , t h a t i f t h e y h a d
a n y
wisdom at all at the company (which I doubt), they would have made Charlene clean out my desk for me. Only because in my mind's eye I like to see her standing there, wastepaper basket in her plump sausage-fingered hands, sifting through my rubble of documents. There she would come across my framed photo of the whaling ship crushed and stuck, possibly forever, i n t h e g l a s s y A n t a r c t i c i c e . I s e e h e r s t a r i n g a t t h i s p h o t o i n m i l d confusion, wondering in that moment what sort of young man I am and possibly finding me not unlovable.

"But inevitably she would wonder
why
I would want to frame such a strange image and then, I imagine, she would wonder whether it has a n y f i n a n c i a l v a l u e . I t h e n s e e h e r c o u n t i n g h e r l u c k y s t a r s t h a t s h e doesn't understand such unorthodox impulses, and then I see her throw-

ing the picture, already forgotten, into the trash. But in that brief moment of confusion . . .
that brief moment
before she'd decided to throw the photo out, well . . . I think I could almost love Charlene then.

"And it was this thought of loving that sustained me for a long while when, after quitting, I turned into a Basement Person and never went in to work in an office again."

OVERBOARDING:
Overcom-

"Now: when you become a Basement Person, you drop out of the system.

pensating for fears about the

You have to give up, as I did, your above-ground apartment and all of future by plunging headlong into

the silly black matte objects inside
as well as
the meaningless rectangles a job or life-style seemingly

unrelated to one's previous life

of minimalist art above the oatmeal-colored sofa and the semidisposable interests; i.e., Amway sales,

furniture from Sweden. Basement People rent basement suites; the air aerobics, the Republican party,

above is too middle class.

a career in law, cults, McJobs.

. . .

"I stopped cutting my hair. I began drinking too many little baby coffees as strong as heroin in small cafes where sixteen-year-old boys
EARTH TONES:
A youthful

and girls with nose rings daily invented new salad dressings by selecting subgroup interested in

vegetarianism, tie-dyed outfits,

spices with the most exotic names
('Oooh!
Cardamom! Let's try a tea-mild recreational drugs, and spoon of
that
!'). I developed new friends who yapped endlessly about good stereo equipment.

South American novelists never getting enough attention. I ate lentils.

Earnest, frequently lacking in

humor.

I wore llama motif serapes, smoked brave little cigarettes
(Nazionali's,
from Italy, I remember). In short, I was earnest.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The

"Basement subculture was strictly codified: wardrobes consisted tendency of young people to live

primarily of tie-dyed and faded T-shirts bearing images of Schopenhauer in emotionally demonstrative,

more unrestrained ethnic

or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, all accessorized with Rasta doohickeys neighborhoods:
"You wouldn't

and badges. The girls all seemed to be ferocious dykey redheads, and
understand it there, mother
—the boys were untanned and sullen. No one ever seemed to have sex,
they
hug
where I live now."

saving their intensity instead for discussions of social work and gener-ating the best idea for the most obscure and politically correct travel destination (the Nama Valley in Namibia—but
only
to see the daisies).

Movies were black and white and frequently Brazilian.

"And after a while of living the Basement life -s t y l e , I b e g a n t o adopt more of its attitudes. I began occupational slumming: taking jobs so beneath my abilities that people would have to look at me and say,

'Well of course he could do
better.'
I also got into cult employment, the