Generation X

DON'T WORRY,

MOTHER...IF THE

MARRIAGE
DOESN'T

WORK OUT, WE CAN

ALWAYS GET

DIVORCED

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS

NEW YORK

G

E

N

E

R

A

T

I

O

N

X

TALES

FOR

AN

ACCELERATED

CULTURE

D O U G L A S

C O U P L A N D

"Her hair was totally 1950s Indiana Woolworth perfume

clerk. You know—sweet but dumb —she'll marry her way

out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was

early '60s Aeroflot stewardess—you know—that really sad

blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to

buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo

caps.
And such make-up!
Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with

these little PVC floral applique earrings that looked like

antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa

1956. She really caught the sadness—she was the hippest

person there. Totally."

T R A C E Y , 2 7

"They're my children. Adults or not, I just can't kick them

out of the house. It would be cruel. And besides —they're

great cooks."

H E L E N , 5 2

PART ONE

THE SUN

I S

YOUR

ENEMY

Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Bran don, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of the sun. I must have made a strange sight at my young age, being pencil t h i n a n d practically albino, quietly checking into a TraveLodge motel to spend the night alone, happily watching snowy network television offerings and drinking glasses of water from glass tumblers that had been washed and rewrapped in

p a p e r s h e a t h s s o m a n y

times they looked like

t h e y h a d b e e n s a n d p a p -ered. But the night soon ended, and come the

morning of the eclipse, I

eschewed tour buses and

took civic bus transporta-tion to the edge of town.

There, I walked far down

a dirt side road and into

a farmer's field — some

sort of cereal that was

chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when

t h e a p p o i n t e d h o u r , m i n u t e , a n d s e c o n d o f t h e d a r k n e s s c a m e , I l a y myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely—a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination—a mood that surely must

have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they

have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.

* * * * *

One and a half decades later my feelings are just as ambivalent and I sit on the front lanai of my rented bungalow in Palm Springs, California, grooming my two dogs, smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snap-dragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine that drift in from the courtyard while I wait for dawn.

I look east over the San Andreas fault that lies down the middle

WHILE YOU

of the valley like a piece of overcooked meat. Soon enough the sun will explode over that fault and into my day like a line of Vegas showgirls bursting on stage. My dogs are watching, too. They know that an event of import will happen. These dogs, I tell you, they are so smart, but
CAN

they worry me sometimes. For instance, I'm plucking this pale yellow cottage cheesy guck from their snouts, rather like cheese atop a micro-waved pizza, and I have this horrible feeling, for I suspect these dogs (even though their winsome black mongrel eyes would have me believe otherwise) have been rummaging through the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center again, and their snouts are accessorized with, dare I say, yuppie liposuction fat.
How
they manage to break into the California state regulation coyote-proof red plastic flesh disposal bags is beyond me. I guess the doctors are being naughty or lazy. Or both.

This world.

I tell you.

From inside my little bungalow I hear a cupboard door slam. My

friend Dag, probably fetching my other friend Claire a starchy snack or a sugary treat. Or even more likely, if I know them, a wee gin and tonic.

They have habits.

Dag is from Toronto, Canada (dual citizenship). Claire is from Los

Angeles, California. I, for that matter, am from Portland, Oregon, but where you're from feels sort of irrelevant these days ("Since everyone h a s t h e s a m e s t o r e s i n t h e i r m i n i-malls," according to my younger brother, Tyler). We're the three of us, members of the poverty jet set, an enormous global group, and a group I joined, as mentioned earlier, at the age of fifteen when I flew to Manitoba.

Anyhow, as this evening was good for neither Dag nor Claire, they

had to come invade my space to absorb cocktails and chill. They needed i t . B o t h h a d t h e i r r e a s o n s .

For example, just after 2:00 A.M., Dag got off of shift at Larry's

Bar where, along with me, he is a bartender. While the two of us were walking home, he ditched me right in the middle of a conversation we were having and darted across the road, where he then scraped a boulder across the front hood and windshield of a Cutlass Supreme. This is not the first time he has impulsively vandalized like this. The car was the color of butter and bore a bumper sticker saying WE'RE SPENDING OUR

C H I L D R E N 'S INHERITANCE , a message that I suppose irked Dag, who was bored and cranky after eight hours of working his Mcjob ("Low pay, low prestige, low benefits, low future").

I wish I understood this destructive tendency in Dag; otherwise he

i s s u c h a c o n s i d e r a t e g u y —to the point where once he wouldn't bathe f o r a w e e k w h e n a s p i d e r s p u n a w e b i n h i s b a t h t u b .

" I d o n ' t k n o w , A n d y , " h e s a i d a s h e s l a m m e d m y s c r e e n d o o r , doggies in tow, resembling the lapsed half of a Mormon pamphleting

duo with a white shirt, askew tie, armpits hinged with sweat, 48-hour stubble, gray slacks ("not pants,
slacks")
and butting his head like a rutting elk almost immediately into the vegetable crisper of my Frigidaire, from which he pulled wilted romaine leaves off the dewy surface of a bottle of cheap vodka, "whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I'm just upset that the world has gotten too big —way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers." He chugs from the bottle. "I feel insulted either

«

way.

So it must have been three in the morning. Dag was on a vandal's

high, and the two of us were sitting on couches in my living room looking
MCJOB:
A l o w - pay, low -prestige, low -dignity, low -at the fire burning in the fireplace, when shortly Claire stormed in (no benefit, no-future job in the

knock), her mink-black-bob-cut aflutter, and looking imposing in spite service sector. Frequently

of her shortness, the effect carried off by chic garnered from working considered a satisfying career

choice by people who have never

t h e C h a n e l c o u n t e r a t t h e l o c a l I . M a g n i n s t o r e .

held one.

"Date from hell," she announced, causing Dag and I to exchange meaningful glances. She grabbed a glass of mystery drink in the kitchen and then plonked herself down on the small sofa, unconcerned by the impending fashion disaster of multiple dog hairs on her black wool dress.

"Look, Claire. If your date was too hard to talk about, maybe you can use some little puppets and reenact it for us with a little show."

"Funn
ee
, Dag. Funn
ee
. God.
Another
bond peddler and
another
nouvelle dinner of seed bells and Evian water. And, of
course,
he was a survivalist, too. Spent the whole night talking about moving to Montana and the chemicals he's going to put in his gasoline tank to keep it all from decomposing. I can't keep doing this. I'll be thirty soon. I feel like a character in a color cartoon."

She inspected my serviceable (and by no means stunning) furnished room, a space cheered up mainly by inexpensive low-grade Navajo Indian

POVERTY JET SET: A

blankets. Then her face loosened. "My date had a low point, too. Out on group of people given to chronic

Highway 111 in Cathedral City there's this store that sells chickens that traveling at the expense of long-have been taxidermied. We were driving by and I just about fainted from term job stability or a permanent

residence. Tend to have doomed

wanting to have one, they were so cute, but Dan (that was his name) says, and extremely expensive phone-

'Now Claire, you don't
n e e d
a chicken,' to which I said, That's not the call relationships with people

point, Dan. The point is that I
want
a chicken.' He thereupon commenced named Serge or llyana. Tend to

discuss frequent-flyer programs

giving me this fantastically boring lecture about how the only reason I want at parties.

a stuffed chicken is because they look so good in a shop window, and that the moment I received one I'd start dreaming up ways to ditch it. True enough. But then I tried to tell him that stuffed chickens are what life and new relationships was all about, but my explanation collapsed some-where—the analogy became too mangled—and there was that awful woe-to-the-human-race silence you get from pedants who think they're talking to half-wits. I wanted to throttle him." " C h i c k e n s ? " a s k e d D a g . "Yes, Chickens." "Well." "Yes."

"Cluck cluck."

Things became both silly and morose and after a few hours I retired to the lanai where I am now, plucking possible yuppie fat from the snouts of my dogs and watching sunlight's first pinking of the Coachella Valley, the valley in which Palm Springs lies. Up on a hill in the distance I can see the saddle -shaped form of the home that belongs to Mr. Bob Hope, the entertainer, melting like a Dali clock into the rocks. I feel calm b e c a u s e m y f r i e n d s a r e n e a r b y .

"Polyp weather," announces Dag as he comes and sits next to me, brushing sage dust off the rickety wood stoop.

"That is just too sick, Dag," says Claire sitting on my other side and putting a blanket over my shoulders (I am only in my underwear).

"Not sick at all. In fact, you should check out the sidewalks near the patio restaurants of Rancho Mirage around noon some day. Folks

shedding polyps like dandruff flakes, and when you walk on them it's like walking on a bed of Rice Krispies cereal."

I say, "Shhhh . . . " and the five of us (don't forget the dogs) look eastward. 1 shiver and pull the blanket tight around myself, for I am colder than I had realized, and I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather. . . . Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.

Maybe someone got cheated along the way. I wonder.

You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know.

But I have always wondered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but
protective.
A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realization that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who h a v e b e e n g o o d -naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because o f s o c i a l c o n v e n t i o n t o s h o w t h e i r a n g er, who don't want to look like poor sports. The thought is fleeting.

The first chink of sun rises over the lavender mountain of Joshua,