Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories

by Douglas Coupland

  Just into the band’s second set, while rinsing from his face a film of concert dope smoke, Speck can see under the Coliseum’s harsh bathroom lighting that his looks are fading quickly. The bloom is off. Today is his twenty-fifth birthday. His freshness is being replaced with a hardness. Speck, a tough critic of bodies, can see his tightening facial structure making him now appear sullen, possibly over-sexed, worst of all, possessing a past. Speck figures that although he’ll still be able to coast on his appearance, the calculated boyish insouciance that carried him to twenty-five will no longer be viable.

  Earlier on that same day, Alice took Speck for a birthday lunch at Chez Panisse on Shattuck Avenue. “The Cheese Penis,” she called it at lunch—the dirtiest words Speck had ever heard Alice speak in public. Speck, hard to shock, was shocked. In attendance for the meal were two of Alice’s heavy-sweatered 300-IQ friends, Isabel and Lorraine. Main subjects of conversation were changes in the global weather patterns and the separation of church and state (“Sunday shopping—is that it?” asked Alice).

  Alice, Isabel and Lorraine seemed to enjoy Speck’s comments, and he enjoyed being appreciated for his mind. He told them of his theory of how the world seems to be running out of animals now, just about the same time Detroit has run out of animal names for new car models. “A coincidence?” he asked to a flutter of indulgent titters.

  He then mentioned the places he thought would be the worst in which to live when the oil runs out completely: Honolulu, New England, the Canadian Maritimes. He mentioned the worst place to live when the electricity stops: the Sun Belt with all those air conditioners. And he mentioned the worst place to live when the weather finally collapses: “Just about anywhere except the Pacific Northwest.”

  Isabel and Lorraine tried to stroke Speck’s ego, make him feel more dangerous—and feed Alice’s rough-trade fantasy. Speck loved the attention. He informed the table of his idea for custom license plates for the Mazda Miata Alice sometimes talks about: his blood type, ORH-. “So that when I crash,” he said, “the paramedics won’t lose any time trying to type my blood.” Isabel and Lorraine’s feigned shock made Alice blush gratifyingly. Or maybe the table’s giddiness was a result of ions in the air from the rain. Alice looks out the window; such a rainy day. The drought of years is over.

  Tonight, roaming the bleary, enthusiastic mob at the Grateful Dead concert, Speck is glad to be in a more hip place with hipper people. He now seeks out what he has come to find: a blond Samoyed-eyed seventeen-year-old nubeling in need of spiritual guidance and a post-concert escort to the BART station.

  These Dead shows. They used to be a drag when he attended them in his teens—Hell’s Angels and scraggly hippie types. But recently, with the invasion of the MTV kids, concerts are more like those Woodstock photos he’s seen—peace, love and understanding—except everybody’s had a bath now. So many lovely young things.

  But Speck could do without all the skeletons that permeate the concert’s environment—skeletons on T-shirts, skeletons on stickers, skeletons on hats and jewelry. The skeletons remind him of a set of Huron Indian bones wired together back home in Michigan—in Ypsilanti near Dearborn—in a waiting room he once inhabited for endless after-school hours as a child while his father cleaned a medical-dental complex.

  Maybe if he understood the significance of all these skeletons, Speck could connect with the evening’s abundant crop of clear-skinned young girls—girls for whom sex hasn’t yet been converted into a series of mechanical, non-procreative collisions. Speck sure needs help tonight—for whatever reason, connections just aren’t happening. He wonders if the stress from seeing his aging face in the mirror has psyched him out and made him start to transmit bad vibes to strangers. He must seem so used-up to these girls with their fuzz-cheeked boytoys. He must seem terrifying to these youngsters, the way the hippie survivors and casualties with the shrunken apple-head faces who punctuate tonight’s concert seem terrifying to him. Or even worse, maybe Speck himself is projecting that same brutal scariness, like those gristled leathery bachelors and stewardesses he sees in the gyms and the airport bars—the straw-permed sex androids from Planet 1971—a Marina del Rey limbo where the postcoital omelettes and mushroom soup stopped a decade ago.

  Speck decides to pack in the nubes for the night. He strolls out onto the floor, out past the annoying twirling Deadheads, cursing, “Hey, buddy—it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”

  He strolls down the side aisles, and then he sees her—gyrating in her pinafore and singing with her eyes closed, a rope of pearls clacking sideways—it’s Alice. Speck freeze-frames; Alice’s body is languid and flowing. She is no longer a wobbling spinster but a vision of something fine.

  Speck unlocks; he doesn’t say hello. Instead he races out to the parking lot and fetches his pickup and speeds up the 880 to Berkeley, to the University off-ramp and up the hill, up to the house on Hearst.

  There, he enters his downstairs room, appreciating the silence, deriving extra pleasure from knowing the concert continues at that very moment.

  He sits on his bed. Alice has lit a large rainbow-layered candle, which awaits him there on his Shaker side table. “You wingy California chick,” he says to himself.

  Rain falls on the panes of his window. He can hear himself breathing. For the first time he notices the size of a grandfather sugar pine growing outside his window. He walks across the room, straightens out his barbells, then returns to his bed. He leans over his side table and warms his hands over Alice’s candle. “Hey,” he says, “I think I’ll stay here awhile.”

  Neil Summers Collection/Archieve Photos

  8

  YOU CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT YOU CHOSE TO FORGET

  SOFTWARE HAS RAINED MONEY ON BEN. HE HAS AMASSED A CALIFORNIA FORTUNE that hums like crickets on Ronald Reagan’s ranch on a hot summer day. Thank you, Bendix. Thank you, Morton Thiokol. Thank you, GE, Bechtel, Raytheon, Amana, Honeywell and Motorola.

  Ben can even forget about the pair of $650 Bally Suisse brogues ruined waiting in line for tonight’s concert, shoes he purchased just this afternoon in San Francisco after sifting through his T-bills in the Bank of America VIP vault. He should have known better. Last night, flying in from Boston, the pilot had asked the passengers to pray for rain—an odd intrusion of the mystical world into the secular. The pilot said that a storm dallying off the coast was trying to make up its mind whether to swing inland.

  Because of the rain and his wet shoes, Ben can now de-sock with the rest of the Deadheads without feeling guilty—guilty that his wealth precludes his continued membership in the sixties culture of his youth, an era he now views through an AT&T commercial soft-focus lens: a mutt puppy chewing Crazy Susan’s shawl outside the Avalon Ballroom; sunsets over Daly City viewed from San Bruno, with microdot-freak chatter inside the bus sounding like Charlie Brown’s teachers; nibbling daisy petals in mellow Leandra’s polished redwood Edwardian Kleenex box of a house in Menlo Park; getting naked on Muir Beach.

  Dead concerts. Without them, the sixties would be extinct. Ben has used his money to follow the Dead around the world over the past years: Cairo, Dijon, Lille, Boulder, Rotterdam…pursuing that era, refusing it permission to die.

  Ben remembers an old science-fiction movie he once saw, Silent Running, in which Earth had been been nuked and a spaceship—an ark—loaded with seeds and trees, traveled the universe in search of a new planet to call home. Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum tonight feels like that spacecraft—the 1960s being the dead planet and the young Deads, the seeds.

  Ben scans the freaks. Koo-koo survivors. Casualties. Ben doesn’t consider himself a casualty, but he knows a fraction of his linear thinking capacity has been lost because of his tripping. But maybe nonlinearity has helped him with his defense-related computer work. Ben’s daughter, Skye, says he’s a spaz. “You can’t be your age, go to Dead shows and not be a broken person,” she says. Nineties children are so hard.

  Ben, like most of the older Deadheads at
tonight’s concert, is wearing a genuine article of 1960s culture, a T-shirt saying HELLO SAN FRANCISCO—PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF. No need for anybody here to know he has bank accounts in Luxembourg.

  Skye says hippies dress randomly, like drifters or bag people. “Scary. If you have to wear that sixties hippie shit, coordinate it, please.” Skye’s own neo-sixties fashion theories of calculated randomness purchased from the local mall seem to have strayed from the true essence of hippie couture.

  “The sixties were about who you were,” Ben told Skye, “not about what you looked like.”

  “Take a bath, Dad.”

  At the suggestion she attend tonight’s show, Skye rolled her eyes and plunked a new Pet Shop Boys CD into her CD-Man, then elevatored down to the Mark Hopkins lobby in search of celebrities. So instead, Ben attended the concert with Allan, an old pal from the Fillmore West era now working as a vascular surgeon in Millbrae. Allan left at halftime: “Great show, Ben. Have to split, though—replacing an alcoholic’s veins in the morning. Call you soon.”

  Sigh. Even the bikers are gone these days, and Skye was right—the aging holdouts are starting to look like cartoonified versions of themselves—Freak Brother-esque beards and vests and denims; Mansonian love-god pantaloons with tattoos and rainbow-wear. “Dead Shows are like a theme park, Dad,” Skye says. “GroovyWorld.”

  And everybody’s so poor these days, too. It was so popular for decades to bash the middle class and then suddenly, pffft, the middle class evaporated, and now Ben misses it dreadfully. Nonetheless, just because other people are poor doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to hang on to one’s own wealth. Let’s be sensible. Ben gives to panhandlers, even though they seem more like moochers these days. Just when and how did the world become so polarized?

  Another sigh. Dope, not acid for Ben this evening, and not much dope at that. A triangle call with Dresdner Bank is scheduled tomorrow at 6:30 A.M. plus an interview with Skye’s teachers at 8:00 P.M. back in Massachusetts.

  A lonely gulp of cola.

  Strange how when you’re young you have no memories. Then one day you wake up and, boom, memories overpower all else in your life, forever making the present moment seem sad and unable to compete with a glorious past that now has a life of its own.

  Skye says, “Dad, you always complain people my age never protest about anything, but the first moment we even try to make a peep, you ex-hippies are the first to slam us, saying we’re nowhere near as passionate or effective as you were in those fucking sixties. Make up your minds. Stop making us have to subsidize your disillusionment with the way you turned out.”

  Ouch.

  Ben reclines and watches galaxial splashings of Bic lighters span the darkened Coliseum’s seats. He knows the music will be ending soon. And he wonders—with fear and confusion and a sense of loss—about the alien planet on which tonight’s spaceship will be landing.

  9

  TECHNOLOGY WILL SPARE US THE TEDIUM OF REPEATING HISTORY

  ERIK AND JAMIE WERE GOING TO GO SWIMMING TONIGHT, THEN HEAD TO LEON’S house for coffee where the suitably postmodern theme for the evening was to be “Commercials We Hate and the People Who Love Them.” Jamie was going do her imitation of Suzanne Sommers using a ThighMaster, and Erik his impersonation of Ann B. Davis selling Minute Rice. But just as they were headed out the door, Sherrilyn, “the Krazy Hippie Broad from 2-B,” ran up the stairway, handed Jamie two Grateful Dead tickets, gibbered, “A miracle is yours,” then charged off, peeling down Bancroft Way in her Celica to visit her mother at the Blue Cross hospital in Sacramento.

  “Why not?” they said, dashing back inside for a costume change, hoping to construct an appropriately Summer-of-Love getup, eventually cobbling together a slightly oversanitized and possibly “too Gappy” version of drugged hippie abandon: 501s, desert boots, beat-up sweatshirts, baggy sweaters and, of course, love beads.

  That was hours ago. Now the concert is nearly over, and Erik and Jamie are fleeing the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum a few songs before the show ends.

  “I grew up thinking hippies would destroy the world,” Erik says. “And I still do.”

  Jamie adds, after a pause, “Well…at least the place was mercifully free of mimes.”

  The two dash through the parking lot’s rainy darkness, past the cold, moist Deahheads who didn’t receive the miracle of free tickets and who still party forlornly, out to Elvis, the 1975 Pacer with the Switzerland-clean interior that Jamie bought for $900 last summer.

  “You didn’t eat anything back there, did you, Jamie?” asks Erik, opening the door. “Those people stick acid in everything. I don’t want you jumping out the window, thinking you can fly.”

  Jamie says, “I felt like Andy Warhol in there—when he’d visit Fire Island with speed freaks in the sixties, eating only candy bars and soda pop so he wouldn’t get dosed.” She changes the subject. “Does anybody make laptop microwave ovens? We could have brought Lean Cuisines.”

  The car starts.

  “Put in a tape. Quick,” pleads Jamie.

  “Which tape?”

  “Songs about robots—written by cash registers. Anything to counteract that hippie noise.”

  New Order saturates the warming car. Erik and Jamie have returned to a future they can live with: spare, secular, coherent and rational—a future reflecting their almost puritanical belief that excess is its own punishment.

  Yet while Erik and Jamie are relieved to return to a familiar world, and all too ready to tease the world they have recently vacated, they are also feeling a sense of being let down—as though, however accidentally Erik and Jamie might have arrived at the Coliseum, tonight’s concert offered a promise that was not delivered. They had presupposed that such a radically different Deadhead way of life would offer constructive new hints on how to deal with the new thought-based economy the world is plunging toward. It didn’t.

  “And, Jesus, what’s with all those skeletons those people worship, anyway?” asks Erik rhetorically. To Erik, skeletons equal death: first strikes; X rays; rot; Biafra; poisoned milk. “Bloody creepy. Nothing cute or lovable about them. Brrrr…” The only positive image of skeletons Erik can conjure is an old David Bowie song, “Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family,” a quirky bit of padding from the Diamond Dogs album—an essentially wordless song that evokes in Erik’s head images of jets filled with skeletons forever circling the world. Erik tells this to Jamie; he analogizes the image of skeletons riding in planes to vaccines: “Glossy protein shells—the jet’s metal body—filled with dead core ribonucleic acid—skeletons inside.” Erik’s superstition is that as long as 747s circle Earth, humanity remains immune to an unknown scourge that would cast it back into the mud.

  “You know what tonight reminded me of?” asks Jamie. “That cartoon we saw in grade school—of a modern nuclear family trapped back in prehistoric time that befriends a caveman family. One week the cave family would learn about, say, toasters and then the next week the teenage cavegirl would learn about, say, dating. It’s like, Deadheads aren’t from now—they’re from someplace else—they’re that cave family. They’re just improvising with whatever’s lying around here—school buses et cetera, waiting until they die. They have no commitment to where and when they are, to the society we live in.”

  Erik shoots back: “You’re just projecting your worry about eroding social commitment in general.”

  “I guess.”

  The car pulls out of the lot, past Deadheads holding cardboards begging for rides to faraway places: to Wisconsin, to Kamloops, to Morristown. “Sorry, guys,” says Erik. They wait at the red stoplight.

  “I bet,” says Jamie, “if we did acid, we could understand what Deadheads are all about.”

  “Hey, babe—you go first. And write me a postcard and tell me what it’s like.”

  “No, you go first.”

  “No, you go first.”

  “No, you go first.”

  “No, you go first.”

  The ligh
t turns green and Jamie drives on, turning left heading toward the 880 on-ramp. The car windows have steamed up. Erik wipes his window with his sweater and sees a bright light up in the sky over to the left. He rolls down the window a fraction and focuses on the light’s source. There to the west over an Oakland industrial park, ascending the sky above the Unisys tower, what he had thought was the moon is a jet.

  Brooks Kraft/Sygma

  10

  HOW CLEAR IS YOUR VISION OF HEAVEN

  THE BABIES ARE STARING AT THE RAIN.

  Columbia, clutching her three-week-old Logan to her breast, says, “Come on, Luke. Shasta honey—inside now,” but the twins dawdle outside the 1971 Econoline van’s rusted doors, tentatively splashing their chubby toes in cold puddles. California babies, at the age of four they have lived through dust storms and a hundred salty fogs but have never seen a true rain.

  Columbia lugs her children up into the van and places them on their foam pads next to the resting German shepherds, Kashmir and Vanilla. Columbia is confused by their fascination. Rain is something that is just, well, there—it’s not something you’re supposed to remember seeing for a first time, like a dead body or a house on fire. She wonders if her children’s infatuation with the novelty of rain indicates a mistake she’s somehow made in raising them.