Generation X (6 page)

best form of which was tree planting in the interior of British Columbia one summer in a not unpleasant blitz of pot and crab lice and drag races i n b e a t u p s p r a y p a i n t e d o l d C h e v e l l e s a n d B i s c a y n e s .

"All of this was to try and shake the taint that marketing had given me, that had indulged my need for control too bloodlessly, that had, in some way, taught me to not really
like
myself. Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think
MID-TWENTIES

they're still getting real food. It's not creation, really, but theft, and
no
BREAKDOWN:
A period of

one
ever feels good about stealing.

mental collapse occurring in

"But basically, my life -s t y l e e s c a p e w a s n ' t w o r k i n g . I w a s o n l y one's twenties, often caused by

using the
real
Basement People to my own ends—no different than the an inability to function outside of

school or structured

way design people exploit artists for new design riffs. I was an imposter, environments coupled with a

and in the end my situation got so bad that I finally had my Mid-twenties realization of one's essential

Breakdown. That's when things got pharmaceutical, when they hit
bot-
aloneness in the world. Often

marks induction into the ritual of

tom,
and when all voices of comfort began to fail."

pharmaceutical usage.

Ever notice how hard it is to talk after you've eaten lunch outside on a s u p e r-hot day? A real scorcher? Shimmying palm trees melt in the d i s t a n c e ; I a b s e n t m i n d e d l y s t a r e a t t h e r i d g e s i n m y f i n g e r n a i l s a n d wonder if I'm receiving sufficient dietary calcium. Dag's story continues.

I runs in my head w h i l e t h e t h r e e o f u s e a t l u n c h . " B y t h e n i t w a s winter. I moved in with my brother, Matthew, the jingle writer. That res in Buffalo, New York, an hour south of Toronto, and a city which

• once read had been la -beled North America's

first 'ghost city' since

a sizable chunk of its

c o r e b u s i n e s s e s h a d j u s t

up and left one fine

1970s day. "I remem-ber watching Lake Erie

freeze over a period of

days from Matthew's

apartment window and

thinking how corny but

a p t t h e s i g h t w a s . M a t -thew was out of town fre-quently on business, and I'd sit by myself in the middle of his living r o o m floor with stacks of pornography and bottles of Blue Sapphire gin and the stereo going full blast and I'd be thinking to myself, 'Hey!

I'm having a party!' I was on a depressive's diet then—a total salad bar of downers and antidepressants. I needed them to fight my black

thoughts, was convinced that all of the people I'd ever gone to school with were headed for great things in life and that I wasn't. They were having more fun; finding more meaning in life. I couldn't answer the t e l e p h o n e ; I

seemed unable to achieve the animal happiness of people on TV, so I had to stop watching it; mirrors freaked me out; I read every Agatha Christie book; I once thought I'd lost my shadow. I was on automatic pilot.

"I became nonsexual and my body felt inside-o u t —covered with ice and carbon and plywood like the abandoned mini-malls, flour mills, and oil refineries of Tonawanda and Niagara Falls. Sexual signals became omnipresent and remained repulsive. Accidental eye contact with 7- Eleven grocery clerks became charged with vile meaning. All looks with strangers became the unspoken question, 'Are
you
the stranger who will rescue me?' Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

" I s t a r t e d t o f i n d h u m a n i t y r e p u l s i v e , r e d u c i n g i t t o h o r m o n e s , flanks, mounds, secretions, and compelling methanous stinks. At least in this state I felt that there was no possibility of being the ideal target market any mo re. If, back in Toronto, I had tried to have life both ways by considering myself unfettered and creative, while also playing the p a t s y c o r p o r a t e d r o n e , I w a s c e r t a i n l y p a y i n g a p r i c e .

"But what really got me was the way
young
people can look into your eyes, curious but without a trace of bodily hunger. Early teens and
SUCCESSOPHOBIA: The

younger, who I'd see looking envy-makingly happy during my brief

fear that if one is successful,

agoraphobia-filled forays into the local Buffalo malls that were still open.

then one's personal needs will be

forgotten and one will no longer

That guileless look had been erased forever in me, so I felt, and I was have one's childish needs

convinced that I would walk around the next forty years hollowly acting catered to.

out life's motions, while listening to the rustling, taunting maracas of youthful mummy dust bounce about inside me.

"Okay, okay. We all go through a certain crisis point, or, I suppose, or we're not complete. I can't
t e l l
you how many people I know who claim to have had their midlife crisis early in life. But there invariably comes a certain point where our youth fails us; where college fails us; where Mom and Dad fail us. Me, I'd never be able to find refuge again in Saturday mornings spent in rumpus rooms, itchy with fiberglass in-sulation, listening to Mel Blanc's voice on the TV, unwittingly breathing xenon vapors from cinder blocks, snacking on chewable vitamin C tab-lets, and tormenting my s i s t e r ' s B a r b i e s .

"But my crisis wasn't just the failure of youth but also a failure of c l a s s a n d o f s e x a n d t h e f u t u r e a n d I
s t i l l
don't know what. I began to pee this world as one where citizens stare, say, at the armless Venus de Milo and fantasize about amputee sex or self-righteously apply a fig leaf to the statue of David, but not before breaking off his dick as a souvenir.

A l l
events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

"So the point of all of this was that I needed a clean slate with no on e to read it. I needed to drop out even further. My life had become a series of scary incidents that simply weren't stringing together to make an interesting book, and
God,
you get old so quickly! Time was (and is) running out. So I split to where the weather is hot and dry and where the cigarettes are cheap. Like you and Claire. And now I'm here."

So now you know a bit more about Dag (skewed as his narrative pre

sentation of his life may be). But meanwhile, back at our picnic on this throbbing desert day, Claire is just finishing her mesquite chicken, wiping off her sunglasses, and replacing them with authority on the b r i d g e o f h e r n o s e i n d i c a t i n g t h a t s h e ' s g e t t i n g r e a d y t o t e l l u s a story. HA bit about Claire here: she has scrawl handwriting like a taxi driver. She knows how to fold Japanese paper cranes and she actually l i k e s t h e t a s t e o f s o y a

burgers. She arrived

in Palm Springs on the

hot, windy Mother's Day

weekend that Nostrada-mus (according t o some

interpretations) had pre-dieted would be the end

of the world. HI was

t e n d i a far more lofty

n g t h e p o o l s i d e b a r

a resort complete

at La Spa de Luxembourg

then,

place than lowly Larry's

and

w i t h n i n e b u b b l i n g h e a l t h p o o l s a n d p a t t e rned imitation silver knives and forks for outdoor use. Weighty stuff, and it always impressed the guests. Anyhow, I remember watching Claire's incalculably numerous

and noisy siblings, half-siblings, step-siblings chatter incessantly out in the sun by the pools, like parakeets in an aviary while a sullen, hungry tomcat prowls outside the cage's mesh. For lunch they would only eat fish, and only tiny fish at that. As one of them said, "The big fish have been in the water a bit too long, and God only
knows
what they've had

a
chance to eat." And talk about pretense! They kept the same unread
SAFETY NET-ISM: The

copy of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
lying on the table for three belief that there will always be a

d a y s r u n n i n g . I t e l l y o u .

At a nearby table, Mr. Baxter, Claire's father, sat with his glistening I TRY TO IMAGINE

MYSELF IN THIS

and be-gemmed business cronies ignoring his progeny, while Mrs. Scott- I SAME JOB ONE

YEAR FROM NOW...

Baxter, his fourth (and trophy) wife, blond and young and bored, glow-

J U S T N O T

ered at the Baxter spawn like a mother mink in a mink farm, just waiting SEEING ANY

PICTURES

for a jet to strafe the facility, affording her an excuse to feign terror and eat her young.

The whole Baxter clan had
en masse
been imported from L. A. that we e k e n d b y t h e h i g h l y s u p e r s t i t i o u s M r . B a x t e r , a N e w A g e c o n v e r t (thanks to wife number three), to avoid a most certain doom in the city.

Shakey Angelinos like him were luridly envisioning the strangely large I houses of the valley and canyons being inhale d into chinks in the earth financial and emotional safety net

to buffer life's hurts. Usually

with rich glottal slurps and no mercy, all the while being pelleted by parents.

rains of toads. A true Californian, he joked: "Hey, at least it's visual."

Claire, however, sat looking profoundly unamused by her family's

DIVORCE ASSUMPTION:

spirited, italicized conversations. She was idly tethering her paper plate A form of
Safety Net-ism,
the

belief that if a marriage doesn't

loaded with a low-calorie/high fiber lunch of pineapple bean sprouts and work out, then there is no

skinless chicken to the outdoor tabletop while forceful winds, unsea-problem because partners can sonably fierce, swept down from Mount San Jacinto. I remember the

simply seek a divorce.

morbid snippets of chitchat that were being prattled around the table by the hordes of sleek and glamorous young Baxters:

"It was
His
ter, not
Hitler,
Nostradamus predicted," one brother, Allan, a private school Biff-and-Muffy type, yelled across a table, "and h e p r e d i c t e d t h e J F K a s s a s s i n a t i o n ,
t o o . ' "

"I don't remember the JFK assassination."

"I'm wearing a pillbox hat to the end of the world party at Zola's, tonight. Like Jackie. Very historical."

" T h e h a t w a s a H a l s t o n , y o u k n o w . "

" T h a t ' s
s o
Warh ol."

"Dead celebrities are, de f a c t o amusing."

"Remember that Halloween a few years ago during the Tylenol

tampering scare, when everyone showed up at parties dressed as boxes of Tylenol . . . "

". . . and then looked hurt when they realized they weren't the only ones who'd come up with the idea."

"You know, this is
s o
s t u p i d b e i n g h e r e b e c a u s e t h e r e a r e t h r e e

34

GENERATION X

earthquake faults that run right through the city. We might as well paint •gets on our shirts."

"Did Nostradamus ever say anything about random snipers?"

" C a n y o u m i l k h o r s e s ? " " W h a t ' s
t h a t
g o t t o d o w i t h a n y t h i n g ? "

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes

s o unding like the remains of the English language after having been
ANTI-SABBATICAL: A

h a shed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years. But then job taken with the sole intention

their words so strongly captured the spirit of the times, and they remain of staying only for a limited

my mind:

period of time (often one year).

The intention is usually to raise

"I saw a record producer in the parking lot. He and wifey were enough funds to partake in

h e a d i n g t o
Utah.
T h e y s a i d t h i s p l a c e w a s a d i s a s t e r a r e a , a n d another, more personally

only

meaningful activity such as

watercolor sketching in Crete or

Utah was safe. They had this really hot gold Corniche, and in the trunk designing computer knit

they had cartons of freeze-dried army food and bottled water from Al-sweaters in Hong Kong.

berta. Wifey looked really scared."

Employers are rarely informed of

intentions.

"Did you see the pound of plastic lipofat in the nurse's office? Just Eke the fake fo o d i n s u s h i r e s t a u r a n t w i n d o w s . L o o k s l i k e a d i s h o f ra spberry kiwi fruit puree."

"Someone turn off the wind machine, for Chrissake, it's like a fa s h i o n s h o o t o u t h e r e . "

"Stop being such a male model."

"I'll hum some Eurodisco."

(Paper plates loaded wit h beef and chutney and baby vegetables w ere, at that point, gliding off the bright white tables, and into the pool.)

"Ignore the wind, Davie. Don't cosign nature's bullshit. It'll go a way."

"Hey . . . is it possible to damage the sun? I mean, we can wreck just about anything we want to here on earth. But can we screw up the sun if we wanted to? I don't know.
Can
we?"

"I'm more worried about computer viruses."

Claire got up and came over to the bar where I was working to pick

up her tray load of Cape Cods ("More Cape than Cod, please") and made s h r u g g i n g ,
"My family, zheeesh!"
g e s t u r e . S h e t h e n w a l k e d b a c k t o t h e table, showing me her back, which was framed by a black one-piece swimsuit —a pale white back bearing a Silly Putty-colored espalier of cars. These were remnants, I discovered later on, of a long-past child-hood illness that immobilized her for years in hospitals spanning from Brentwood to Lausanne. In these hospitals doctors tapped vile viral syrups from her spine and in them she also spent the formative years of her life conversing with healing invalid souls —institutional borderline cases, the fringed, and the bent ("To this day, I prefer talking with incomplete people; they're more complete").

But then Claire stopped in midmotion and came back to the bar,

where she lifted her sunglasses and confided to me, "You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you have nothing in common and don't even
like
each other.

And,
should you not feel yourself caring about any of this group of strangers,
even for a second,
you will feel just
dreadful."1
That's what /

t h i n k . W h a t a b o u t
y o u ? "

History does not record my response.

She delivered the drinks to her family, who delivered a chorus of

"Thanks, Spinster,"
and then returned. Her hair then, as now, was cut short and Boopishly bobbed, and she wanted to know what on earth I

was doing in Palm Springs. She said that anyone under the age of thirty living in a resort community was on the make somehow: "pimping, dealing, hooking, detoxing, escaping, scamming, or what have you." I obliquely told her I was merely trying to erase all traces of history from my past, and she took that at face value. She then described her own job in L. A. while sipping her drink, absentmindedly scanning her com-plexion for
arriviste
pimples in her reflection in the mirrored shelf be-hind me.

"I'm a garment buyer—daywear" she fessed up, but then admitted that fashion was only a short -term career. "I don't think it's making me a better person, and the garment business is so jammed with dishonesty. I'd like to go somewhere rocky, somewhere Maltese, and just empty my

brain, read books, and be with people who wanted to do the same thing."

This was the point where I planted the seed that soon bore such

unexpected and wonderful fruit in my life. I said, "Why don't you move
here.
Quit everything." There was a friendliness between us that made me wordlessly continue: "Clean your slate. Think life out. Lose your unwanted momentums. Just think of how therapeutic it could be, and

there's an empty bungalow right next to my place. You could move in tomorrow and I know
lots
of jokes."

"Maybe I will," she said, "maybe I will." She smiled and then swung to look at her family, as ever preening and chatting away, arguing about the reported length of John Dillinger's member, discussing the d e m o n i c a s p e c t s o f C l a i r e ' s s t e p s i s t e r J o a n n e ' s p h o n e n u m b e r—which c o n tained three sixes in a row—a n d m o r e a b o u t t h e d e a d F r e n c h m a n Nostradamus and his predictions.

"Look at them, will you? Imagine having to go to Disneyland with 11

of your brothers and sisters at the age of twenty-seven. I can't
believe
let m y s e l f g e t d r a g g e d i n t o t h i s . I f t h e w i n d d o e s n ' t k n o c k t h i s p l a c e d own first, it'll implode from a lack of hipness. You have bro thers and sisters?"

I explained that I have three of each.

" S o y o u
k n o w
what it's like when everyone starts carving up the future into nasty little bits. God, when they start talking like that—you know all of this sex gossip and end-of-the-world nonsense, I wonder if they're really only confessing something else to each other." "Like?"

"Like how scared sick they all are. I mean, when people start

talking seriously about hoarding cases of Beef-a-Roni in the garage and get all misty-eyed about the Last Days, then it's about as striking a confession as you're ever likely to get of how upset they are that life isn't working out the way they thought it would."

I was in heaven! How could I
not
be, after finding someone who likes to talk like this? So we continued o n i n t h i s v e i n f o r a n h o u r , maybe, interrupted only by my serving the occasional rum drink and

Allan's arrival to grab a dish of smoked almonds and to slap Claire on t h e b a c k : " H e y , M i s t e r—i s S p i n s t e r p u t t i n g t h e m a k e o n y o u ? "

"Allan and my family consider me a freak because I'm not married yet," she told me and then turned to pour her pink Cape Cod cocktail d o w n h i s s h i r t . " A n d s t o p u s i n g t h a t a w f u l n a m e . "

Allan didn't have time to retaliate, though. From Mr. Baxter's table t h e r e a r o s e a c o m m o t i o n a s o n e o f t h e s e a t e d b o d i e s s l u m p e d a n d a flurry of middle-age men with tans, paunches, and much jewelry crossed t h e m s e l v e s a n d g a t h e r e d a r o u n d t h a t s l u m p e d b o d y —Mr. Baxter with a hand clutched to his chest and eyes wide, resembling those of Cocoa, the velvet painting clown.

" N o t
a g a i n , "
said Allan and Claire in unison.

"You go this time, Allan. It's
y o u r
turn."

Allan, dripping juice, grudgingly headed over toward the com-

motion, where several people were claiming to have already alerted the paramedics.

"Excuse me, Claire," I said, "but your father looks like he's had a h e a r t a t t a c k o r s o m e t h i n g . A r e n ' t y o u b e i n g s l i g h t l y , o h , I d o n ' t know . . .
b l o o d l e s s
a b o u t t h e m a t t e r ? "

"Oh, Andy. Don't worry. He does this three times a year—just as l o n g a s h e h a s a b i g a u d ience."

I t w a s a b u s y l i t t l e s c e n e , t h a t p o o l s i d e , b u t y o u c o u l d t e l l t h e Baxters amid the chaos by their lack of concern with the excitement, pointing languidly toward the hubbub when the two paramedics and their trolley (a familiar sight in Palm Springs) arrived. There, they loaded Mr.

Baxter onto the trolley, after having told a novice Mrs. Scott-Baxter to stop trying to stuff quartz crystals into his hand (she was a New Ager, too), carted him away, only to hear loud clanging sounds that stopped the whole poolside crowd in their tracks. Looking over toward the cart they saw that several stems of tableware had fallen out of Mr. Baxter's pocket. His ashen face looked mortified and the silence was both in-c a n d e s c e n t a n d p a i n f u l .

"Oh,
D a d , "
said Allan, "How could you embarrass us like t h i s ? " he then said, picking up a piece and looking at it appraisingly.

"It's obviously only
plate.
Haven't we trained you properly?"

The taut cord of tension broke. There were laughs, and Mr. Baxter

w a s c a r t e d a w a y , o n l y t o b e t reated for what turned out in the end to be a genuinely perilous heart attack after all. Claire meanwhile, I noticed peripherally, sitting over on the edge of one of the ocher-silted mineral pools, her feet dangling in the honey-colored murk of water and staring at the sun, now almost set over the mountain. In her small voice she was talking to the sun and telling it she was very sorry if we'd hurt it or caused it any pain. I knew then that we were friends for life.