Polaroids From the Dead

by Douglas Coupland

  On the way back at the side of the track we found a stick of dynamite, a red M-2000 used by the railway companies for blasting granite. It looked like cartoon dynamite, like from an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. We were going to pick up the stick, but then I realized the nitroglycerine inside might explode. So we did a totally stupid thing and threw big rocks at it to try to make it blow up. Nothing happened—and because dynamite isn’t really the sort of thing one is allowed to pack in one’s luggage on transatlantic flights, we decided to just leave it alone and not take it as a souvenir.

  But if we ever need a stick of dynamite, we know where to find one. This is not a bad thing to know.

  And then we both got really dozy, and we drove into a small redneck town called Squamish and sat in a coffee shop and watched pickup trucks cruise by. After an hour we drove back into Vancouver and stopped at my apartment for me to pick up my messages and to change clothes. For a souvenir I gave the German reporter an old white T-shirt that I asked him to put on. Then, with a thick Sharpie permanent black felt-tip marker I wrote on it the corrected wording of the Truman Capote quote I had written incorrectly earlier in my note pad. I wrote:

  As for me

  I could leave the world

  with today

  in my eyes.

  —t.c.

  We had a late dinner with my friend James, one of the smartest people I know. We discussed the notion of “being real” with him—and of being “hyper-real” and “post-human” and I don’t think we arrived at any definite answer, but it’s important to know people who think about these things.

  At 11:30 P.M. I dropped the German reporter off at the Hyatt. He had to be awake at 4:30 A.M. to go to the airport. He was gracious and thanked me for my time over the past few days, but instead I thanked him.

  Days.

  We lose our days—and our ability to retrieve them—and yet there are some days that should never be lost.

  I left the German reporter, this younger ghost of myself, probably forever, on the Hyatt doorstep. My sense of time felt, if not healed, then reconciled. I don’t know about his.

  It was prom night in Vancouver, and the hotel’s front area was a sea of limousines and high school graduates: children—babies, really—dressed in their finest ball gowns and tuxedos, all of them flush with the knowledge that tonight was supposed to be the best night of their life, that tonight was the night they would take with them to the grave.

  The German reporter and I were invisible to these teenagers because we did not belong in their universe of extreme youth. And I remembered my own prom night—my Peter Frampton hairdo, my light-blue tuxedo and the cars that would also take me off into the night.

  Oh, how I wish those children could read those words I felt-penned on the German reporter’s chest—those words that forever lie behind Superman’s written “S”—those words I had written in a permanent ink that soaked through the T-shirt’s old cotton fabric and through his foreign skin and into his bloodstream—and, I would hope, into the heart of this ghost of my earlier self.

  FPG

  13

  POSTCARD FROM THE FORMER EAST BERLIN

  (CIRCUS ENVY)

  BERLIN, MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1994, FIVE YEARS AFTER THE WALL THING HAPPENED. Shopping is a joke; consumption has not nourished. Five years later the marketplace is a bore. And the Walled landscape—once overwhelmingly tragic and melancholic—is now overwhelmingly ironic and frantic and just plain sad. But then does this come as news?

  A free Elton John concert is scheduled for the Brandenburg Gate on October 3. The Gypsy Kings, Paul Young and the Leningrad Cowboys will also be there. Karl Marx Allee is peppered with posters for Barry Manilow and liberal SDP candidate Rudolf Scharping.

  Wordless Helmut Kohl posters feature a beaming Kohl as Santa-Claus-minus-the-beard flanked by smiling young people. A local artist has placed UNITED COLORS OF BENNETON stickers atop the Kohl posters, and there is no sense of incongruity or any seeming alteration of meaning.

  The Saturday afternoon before October 3, I was at a MusicCity in the Alexanderplatz, a former ideological showplace where isotopes of Socialist Modernism compete for Miss Uncongeniality, where plaza sculptures of almost-indescribable dreariness make one ache for the whimsical frivolity of a Richard Serra or a Donald Judd. I asked a salesclerk politely enough, “Hello, do you have the new R.E.M. album?” and was rebuffed with a bored, contemptuous, “Nein.”

  Okayyyyyy.

  Meanwhile, sitting beside this clerk stood a stack of the same aforementioned R.E.M. album, Monster. So I said to the gentleman, “Hmmm, well, in that case, I’ll have one of those instead.”

  With a gesture blending loathing, ennui, disgust and patronization, the album was hurled onto the counter, the clerk then bracing his arms across his chest in a listless, disengaged challenge.

  I handed over my VISA card, only to be rewarded with a withering, “VISA?…Nein.”

  Cash was proffered and the Monster album and the mingiest of plastic bags thrown into my face. Back in the ex-DDR, the retail concept is still, five years later, something that might need just the smallest splash of Total Quality Management.

  When I mention this incident to West Berlin friends, they roll their eyes and say “DDR.” As an adjective describing service, “DDR” combines Fawlty Towers with Stalinism.

  A mile west, at the corner of Unter den Linden begins the Friedrichstrasse reconstruction—a dead showcase neighborhood transformed once again into a newer showcase neighborhood for a new regime: six square blocks made over with untold billions of Deutsch marks. Signs EIN LUXURY HOTEL; French superstar architect Jean Nouvel has designed a new Galeries Lafayette, nearly completed and hemmed at the bottom with strips of marigold, navy and aubergine.

  In a continent that seems at best hesitant to generate new skylines, the thin chopstick-like forms of the construction cranes over Friedrichstrasse become what skyline there will be in this decade, at least. It is a post-national architec-turescape that contrasts vividly with what filled the neighborhood before. The streets are rife with the lawnmower rumbles of Trabants and Wartburgs that compete with the thrums of South Beach aqua-colored Toyota Supras.

  In this epicenter of irony, Havana-caliber consumer time-technology collisions occur every three feet. Along nearby Unter den Linden, ex-Stasi members driving Korean-built taxis gaze longingly at the ex-Stasi disco, which is now a T.G.I. Fridays and a Radisson Hotel Plaza. One can only imagine earnest mid-western Radisson executives refitting the hotel and discovering cobwebbed Soviet Beta recording cameras behind cobwebbed bedroom mirrors. The nearby Palast der Republik, resembling a failed entry for an LBJ Library design competition and where Erich Honnecker pursued his private realms, is quarantined because of asbestos poisoning and is locally named “der Asbesthaus.”

  Friedrichstrasse’s newly constructed landscape is one of infrastructural pornography. Aboveground water pipes punctuate the landscape like the Mad Mouse at the local Fun World; pools of silicon resin drip into the sandy Prussian soil like a thousand breast implants fallen off the back of a truck.

  An Apple computer training school overlooks workers in orange and blue overalls who weld I-beams while Saran-Wrap’ing dead socialist architecture in green net veils like the scarves around Grace Kelly’s neck. Furukawa backhoes excavate piles of soil of varying historical molarity. There are stacks of gas cylinders and cable spools; on Französischestrasse, black telecom cables coil beneath one’s feet as they descend into the earth. Stacks of Crisco-smooth Kalksandstein bricks, like Joseph Beuys sculptures, rest beside hexagon-shaped dumpsters filled with dead rusty rebar and sandy, asbestos-choked Eastern bloc cement. Modular preassembled window components are lifted into the air by cranes with names like Liebherr. Fresh black pavement is stained with splashes of lime. There are Dixi portable toilets and random sewage odors. Jackhammers drill away at statist architecture; polyurethane foam extrudes from underneath wood planks above the U-Bahn.

  Back at the hotel, like any g
ood pop-music enthusiast, I listened to my new album several dozen times while reading the wrapper notes, in this case a special 48-page mini-book. My favorite song on the tape is one called “Circus Envy,” a roaring, secret-agent-feeling number describing jealousy—a monster whose symbol is a headless bear that appears on the mini-book’s cover. The title song contains the line, “Here comes that awful feeling again,” which resonates for me the rest of my stay, reinforced by the image of the bear cub, which is the civic emblem of the city of Berlin.

  The citizens of former East Berlin have had to make the leap from 1945 to 1995. They never had a 1960s, ’70s, ’80s or even a ’90s. They want what the West has, and they think that they are slowly, grudgingly and surely joining the West every day. Acid-wash denim clothing is seen as a symbol of shooting too far too quickly and has been banished from the landscape, due, no doubt, for a revival in ten minutes or so.

  But there is no language in the East to make sense of Friedrichstrasse’s Deutsche Interhotel GmbH, minibars, non-smoking attitudes, baby vegetables or movie-studio-style politics. The people of the East think they are entering the West, but they are actually entering the era of the transnational. It is a mistake to confuse the amoral forces of transnationalism with the West. The instantaneous transfer of capital from one node to another is not what the West was ever about.

  The Ossis, the ex-Easterners, greet you, a Wessi, almost invariably with “Hello, I’m confused.” The Ossis recognize their own crisis, but explain to them that the West is in crisis as well—a crisis more sublime because the West has already seen a world of desire based purely on consumption—and they know the hollowness lying at its core.

  Ossis want what the Wessis have—that’s obvious. But try and tell Ossis that what they now think they desire is something pointless, and they will accuse you of trying to deny them the plunder of consumption sheerly out of spite. Try to tell people that they can’t have what they think they really want—that just won’t work.

  A big political question currently facing Germany, if not the entire West, is, What is it we can now desire now that things, objects—stuff—has failed us? The engineering of sustaining, nourishing new models of desire: that is the new issue. Even the East Germans express fear about the Chinese manufacturing a people’s car—a current event that like no other pinpoints the unsustainability of the dream of consumption.

  Does the ghost of post-WWII-reconstructionist Konrad Adenauer walk amid this Friedrichstrasse landscape—a landscape more reminiscent of Orange County than that of Frederick the Great? Has the emblematic bear cub of Berlin turned into the bear of the California Republic?

  No, Konrad Adenauer would not walk here. A spectating ghost would have to be the ghost of somebody transnational, somebody as yet undefined—a Beast whose aesthetic is one of absolute function and absolute function only. A creature of Facadism, of instantaneous transglobal currency transfers—a creature who is hostile to culture and who gives us entry into the realms of surrealism without providing any underlying subconscious. A headless bear of jealousy that slouches through the Brandenburg Gate, not knowing what it wants, only that it wants more.

  Here comes that awful feeling again.

  Ed Sirrs/Retna Pictures

  14

  LETTER TO KURT COBAIN

  [WHAT’S ON YOUR POWERBOOK? THE FOLLOWING PIECE, MINUS THE LAST TWO paragraphs, was written in early March 1994, when Kurt Cobain entered the American Hospital in Rome. The small final addendum was added in April upon news of the discovery of his body at his home in Bellevue, Washington.]

  Friday, April 8, 1994

  Dear Kurt,

  I was in Seattle, March 4, 1994, when I heard the news—that you were in Rome—that you drank too much champagne, took too many sedatives, Rohypnol—had the flu. Whatever. You were in a coma. I once lived in Italy in 1984, and I remember that the pharmacists there dispense downers like they were Pez. So the news sounded believable.

  Representatives of David Geffen’s record company kept giving out the same story over the wires—semi-news: Kurt has opened his eyes—Kurt squeezed his hand in response to his name. But nobody in Seattle felt as if they knew any real news. One is either in a coma or one is not in a coma.

  Apocrypha and half-truths breezed through the city. In the end it was always the same: No, Kurt’s still in a coma…we think. Reuters admitted that previous reports of your being out of the coma were incorrect.

  Everyone’s reflexive response was to make a joke about it all, but in the end we couldn’t. Inside us there are 331/3 records, and to make a joke about you would have been to scratch a needle across that record; irony was jettisoned. We made jokes instead about record companies and about Italian ambulances and about hospital food, but never about you. The radio station played your songs over and over, always with the same news story—no news.

  Around 3:00 I had to drive from downtown along Interstate-5 to Kent, past the KingDome, where I once went to see Paul McCartney and Wings back in the 1970s. And just then the radio played your song, “Dumb,” and I saw a clump of cherry trees that had been tricked by an early spring into blooming, and I started to cry.

  It had been raining in Seattle for weeks.

  The day you went into your coma was the first day the sky had even considered clearing up. It was one of those can’t-make-up-its-mind days. Storm clouds brooded over Elliot Bay and Lake Washington, yet it was also sunny—or kind of sunny—over the Boeing fields and south toward Tacoma. The sky over Seattle became the city’s heart that day—it felt as though the sky were trying to decide whether to shine or whether to forget.

  In Kent, I drove past a hotel project that had failed, and its tar-papered walls had unraveled like mummy’s cloth and were flapping in the wind, like a hotel covered in bandages; it had no windows. In the middle of a plowed field I saw a rhododendron in bloom. Pink.

  The radio still had no news. Along Interstate 5 the arbutus trees rustled in the wind, and the undersides of their leaves—the sides that gather oxygen—were flashing sage-colored against the freeway’s embankment. And I remembered being younger and visiting Seattle from Vancouver—my most compelling memory of that city was of a half-completed freeway that led off into nowhere.

  And I kept thinking of some of the fields I had just seen, now barely turning to green, and how these fields reminded me of fears I had when I was younger—fears that nature might simply decide not to wake up one year. Nature would open her eyes, go back to sleep, and never return.

  I drove up to the University District where the students were in a sort of fog. The guy at the counter at the record shop didn’t know anything. I began seeing only symbols that fit the situation: I saw a young woman standing on a corner in a floral dress and army boots taking Polaroids of nothing; on Denny Way I saw a bike courier pulling an empty bike alongside him; back at the hotel I lost a pair of nine-dollar sunglasses through a hole in my pocket—glasses I had always liked because they made the sky seem bluer than it really is.

  On KIRO-TV, on the 6:30 news broadcast they showed the ambulance taking you away to the American Hospital.

  Italy.

  You, this child of here, of newness, lost in the oldest of cities. It seemed cruel.

  Later that night there was still no real news. But at least it seemed as though you were out of your coma. But then a new dread emerged, one so bad that we couldn’t even talk about it directly, as though the words would give the dread life of its own—the dread that you might emerge from your coma…brain dead. So instead my friends and I talked about the weather. We tried to establish if, in fact, the sky that day had been sunny or rainy. It was such a close call that nobody could say for sure. Night had fallen before it could be made conclusive, before we could be totally sure that the sun had won.

  You were apparently fine the next day. At the hospital you asked for a strawberry milkshake when you woke up. You were not brain dead. Or so it seemed. And the world went on.

  But I also remember noting that I n
ever saw a picture of you after that day—not even a shot of you leaving Europe, leaving the past—or a shot of you flashing the peace sign for the press. And then yesterday I heard Nirvana had pulled out of the Lollapalooza Tour. And I figured something was up.

  And now you are dead.

  I was in San Francisco, driving up the 101 past Candlestick Park when the news came over the radio, LIVE 105—the news that you had shot yourself.

  A few minutes later I was in the city and I pulled the car over and tried to figure out what I felt.

  I had never asked you to make me care about you, but it happened—against the hype, against the odds—and now you are in my imagination forever.

  And I figure you’re in heaven, too. But how, exactly does it help you now, to know that you, too, as it is said, were once adored?