“What difference does the colour make?”
“A woman cares about colour. A woman cares about a lot of things you might not think a woman cares about.”
“Sheesh.”
“Still.”
“Yeah still.” I washed down a swallow of cabernet. “Why am I always the one yakking away? Don’t you girls have anything to tell us? You can’t let us middle-aged burnouts commandeer the whole conversation.”
“Um. I don’t know …”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“You don’t know what? Why you don’t talk? Or you don’t know any talk to talk?”
“Um, it’s not something we do, like …”
“Aw c’mon now, you’re kidding, right? You mean you never just sit around and yak to your friends?”
“We text.”
“And tweet.”
“You should see my Facebook page.”
“I do all that stuff too …”
“Um, sorry to change the subject, but. I mean.” Krysta held up her fork as if hailing a cab. “This pie is so awesomely yummy.”
“You like my dessert?”
“It’s so lemonesque. How did you do that? I tried to make this once and it turned all goopy.”
“I had divine guidance. Though to be honest, I resisted the advice of my spiritual advisor and used way more lemon than the recipe called for. Maybe the altitude around here is just right, or my cornstarch was so old it overreacted. Or who knows.”
“It’s killer. I mean, I never tasted something so into the flavour, you know? It’s like there’s a can of lemon furniture polish spraying right into my mouth. Weird.”
“You make my night, Krysta. You’re welcome here anytime.”
“That’s generous. Bravo, my friend.”
“Well. Finally something turned out against anticipated results.”
“I’m still curious.” Destiny seemed to have taken no humour from the cat story. “What do you think is the source of your dysfunction?”
“The source? That sounds so social science. And dysfunction? Is it truly a fault you need to find here? Are we not talking of a simple human primal constituent? I mean, a house cat doesn’t need claws but sharpens them every scratching post chance they get …”
“Oh, cliché! You boomer boys are always falling back on some kind of organic empiricism to explain away your moral failings.”
“Boomer boys?”
“Your whole privileged generation.”
“Dems fightin’ woids, lady.”
“Ooh I’m so scared. Didn’t you say your ‘nature’ is going down? Doesn’t that include your general physical prowess? Aren’t you afraid I’ll pound the living crap out of you with this empty wine bottle?”
“I’ll ignore your profligate insults if you pour me some of that other stuff by your elbow.”
“That’s another thing. Why is your cohort such a bunch of hopeless alkies?”
“Doesn’t every human wave have its preferred intoxicant?”
“Maybe. But you guys are so grody.”
“In short, you want me to explain myself.”
“For goodness sake stop framing it and tell already. Though a full explanation would be pushing it, in view of how many times you’ve drained your wine glass.” Liza was polite but firm. “But you’re always entertaining, even drunk. So just make a stab at it. Take it in easy to swallow bites. Give us at least a semi-concise précis.”
“Well I was born in a log cabin on the shores of Georgia Straight.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“You wanted me to tell it, I’m telling it. I have to lay down the context, give you the full textual scenario.”
“Did you deliver papers as a kid?” Krysta was getting into the spirit of kidding around. It made me smile.
“As a matter of fact I did! And that reminds me. Here’s a good entrée to the story of my socio-political coming of age. Me and my friend Randy once got a tour through a 1963 Lincoln Continental.”
“Whoa.”
“And the thing that sticks with me about it, the thing that weirds me out is, my little friend and I were getting shown this brand new black land yacht. With the suicide doors that look like coffin lids and the open, vulnerable convertible top. Something you never saw in a place like Qualicum Beach. And within weeks maybe, that same year, anyway, JFK gets assassinated. Riding in a car just like this.”
“Wild.”
“Even at ten years old, I knew it was.”
“That is an odd connection to history.”
“And surreal. Standing as we were in the parking lot of the Snow White Motel.”
“What was it called?”
“Snow White. This was before you’d get sued by Disney. It’s not there anymore. It had cabins named after the Seven Dwarfs. I think it was Bashful, these folks were staying in. Friendly Californians, they were. I knew them from selling newspapers. They came up every year. Stayed in either Bashful or Doc …
“But anyway. This, believe it or not, leads onto what I’m trying to say. Our whole historical moment. Huge, wasteful cars. Political assassination. Americans. Angry conservatism. And the resultant imminent suffering of the period.”
“Suffering? You guys suffered?” Destiny looked around. “That’s really, um, far from what I would think.”
“Not all of us. A chosen terrible sample. A million or so Asians and about sixty thousand of our American cousins.”
“Oh. You mean Vietnam.”
“Imagine if you will a complicated jungle conflict rising from a civil war in a place nobody ever heard of and a bunch of World War II generals who think they can waltz in there and conquer the situation with plain ol’ American machinery and know-how and enemy body-counts in the thousands-per-battle. These clowns thought five-hundred-dead-per-week US casualties was no big deal. They create this awful Moloch—literally a young-man-eating machine—that became such an über-monster, such a mental-physical-emotional-social object of utter hatred and polarization that it caused a political schism in the collective world consciousness such that our hair and our music and our attitudes became picayune concerns in the overall miasma. And out of this massive disillusion our grand tradition of ‘live for today’, ‘share the land’, and ‘question authority’—that last one’s my favourite—became the creed of a whole statistical goliath, unstoppable and still being felt all over the world.”
I took a drink, not liking how my impassioned monologue had silenced the room. “At least it was fun while it lasted.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, the live-for-today edict morphed into a live-for-yourself mandate. You can see that in the number of SUVs my boomer mates drive instead of walking to the corner store. The share-the-land idea fell apart when the smarter hippies surreptitiously bought their communal houses, kicked out their stoned roommates, and went to law school. They made some investments, took over city government, and converted their neighbourhoods into expensive boutiques. Et cetera.” I waved my glass about to encompass the universe. “You can see how it all went.”
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“What about all the privilege you guys have?”
“Privilege? Aw man. Heh. Boy, have I got an answer for that. First of all. And most important you have to understand. Not all of us made it. Not by a helluva long way. Despite how the X and Y and Z and A, B, C, D, E, F, G generations whine about it. Sure, every generation has its cadre of losers. But mine is overlooked and that’s just my point. There’s plenty of us boomers didn’t get the jobs. Didn’t buy up the houses. Didn’t clog up the university departments and management suites. Not all of us are queued up ordering somebody younger to make us a latte.
“Most of us languished in dead-end office jobs or doing mindless manual labour. Most have trouble getting our cars fixed and can’t figure out what we’re doing in life. A lot of us tried to make lifelong friends and saw them stomp away. Lots of
us looked for love and if we found that it left us just like everything else. Many of us sat raving in mail sorting rooms, pulp mill chemical chambers, cheque-writing computer payroll sweat shops, or hanging off the sides of mansions with paint brushes in our hands. So many of us struggled with substances and madness.
“Most of us never got the attention of the world but sure as hell ended up in detox, lost and bewildered. Some of us strove to capture time and failed as we should have. I know a lot of guys like me who tried to find salvation inside a line-up of women. None of us found anything we could remember the next day.
“Most of us have nothing to show for decades of familial attempts. Our few children are hostile and disinterested. Our creativity melted into the pool of mass culture that rose along with us. It was hard to get your name in the paper other than for petty crime, like possession of marijuana or careless driving. Hell, we used to have the police after us for no good reason, before the reign of civil rights, before casual litigation. But then that was a problem, too.
“We so fear censure and social humiliation, we are cowed and walk hunched over, so weighed down are our simple social interactions with possible mine-field explosions, mystified before the courts of political correctitude. We’re the first generation, whether it’s true or not, to have to admit we can’t get a hard-on. And pretend we’re not embarrassed that there’s a whole industry to produce drugs to help us out with that.
“We do gloat, though, that the good things—our anti-war-ness, eco-consciousness, multi-culturation, and especially the music—are still current and going fine.
“But drunkards? Whew, man, you are correct in your assessment. I saw the slackest minds of my generation urinate their brains against the wall! By the way, I’m allowed to use that line because I once poured Alan Ginsburg a glass of wine while standing in Warren Tallman’s kitchen. Look it up. Sorry for the name-dropping. Anyway, I can’t speak for the women, they seemed to hold it together a lot better than the men. It’s no wonder we see the rise of the Cougar. Men their age are cancelled. Most of the guys I know got drunk around 1973 and have scarcely drawn a sober breath since. They stopped seeing, thinking, living. You can tell by their taste; the resurrection of Harley-Davison as a corporate entity? Frank Zappa album cover collages? Gortex over thready jeans and tank tops? Grey ponytails on near-bald fifty-five year-old men? Yuk.
“It’s like something out of Oliver Sacks … the guy who doctored these dozing patients into consciousness for a summer one year decades ago. They went to sleep at a certain age, were suspended, then woke up for a time. And they were oblivious, of course, to what had transpired. They had not matured, beyond where they were when they took sick. Alks are just like that, I swear … They age barely a day past the minute they take a serious drink, and then it’s curtains mentally.
“Paul once asked me, ‘How do you slow down time?’ Try quitting drinking, I told him. Sobriety slows down time to a virtual stop, pretty damn quick. It’ll arrest time in its little tracks, it will. Dead. Stopped on a nickel. Slower and deader than life inside drunkenness …
“Anyway, my generation. We wincingly tolerate one another’s drinking and driving. We quarrel over five-dollar bills and let the C-notes flow down our gullets. We fear death at the same time life bores us stupid. We tried to make our mark in the world but it was just a scuff on the floor as we went down. The ones who made it—the first five years or so of the boom—they don’t know any of this stuff and care even less than you guys do.”
“Who says we don’t care?”
“Yeah. We have to live in the world you leave us.”
“Hey, who said anything about leaving? We’re not goin’ anywhere just yet, little girl.”
“I wish you would, though. You and your sexist hardwired attitudes.”
“Yeah yeah yeah. You have to understand what we are …”
“Do you understand what you are?”
“Good question. What are we?”
“Do tell.”
“I’ll give it a go, but no guarantees … We writhe …” My head swiveled inside slightly. I regretted the volume of the wine as I knew I would. “We writhe … to understand, you might say. We hold still in staring query—this is some bad poetry I wrote about it one time—at a world which has invented us. Because we don’t know what we are. Happy cherubs at daily frolic? Wandering searchers of knowledge and peace?
“Gardener in love with every leaf? Or just a lone branch against leaden sky. Fading alarm on a stolen car. Lost parakeet yearning for a cage. Distant drone of summertime lawn mower. Crows winging nightward at flagging day. Death-in-the-family ringing midnight telephone. Unexpected kilo on a bathroom scale. Or perhaps just a loose-laced running shoe …”
Simon shifted in his chair. “Don’t forget Paul.”
“Apropos of …?”
“Nothing in particular …”
“No, I won’t forget Paul. He should be here, by the way. Dang, I wish I hadn’t frozen him out tonight.” I swilled what was left in the bottom of my glass. “Those spindly limbs, that deep-lined face and beer-bloated gut. Hanging around with boozers is fun maybe. Pathetically curious. Maybe even anthropologically interesting. But sooner or later you get stomped in a parking lot. You get carted off to detox. You get evicted from your grow house. You get ignored and become obscure. You may do badly at work and never get promoted. You might get cancer, whether you smoke or not. You forget you drink to forget you’re drinking to forget. You might philosophize but not say anything. You might live long but never grow up. You don’t understand your relatives. You can go into therapy and pour your guts out but then all you’ve got is a mess on the floor. You try to rescue your friends and fail. Your friends can’t help you either. Drugs and sex and booze don’t answer anything anymore if they ever did. You run out of money. You run out of time. All you can remember is unimportant and boring to others.
“Yeah, Paul …” I took my last drink of the night, ignoring everyone. “Mystified Paul. Abandoned Paul. Paul, hanging sideways, unconscious, in a sunken taxi-cab.”
Dennis E. Bolen is a novelist, editor, teacher, and journalist, first published in 1975 (Canadian Fiction Magazine). He holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria (1977) and an MFA (Writing) from the University of British Columbia (1989), and taught introductory Creative Writing at UBC from 1995 to 1997. He is author of six books of fiction, the most recent of which is the novel Kaspoit! (Anvil Press). He lives in Vancouver.
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