Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  SEMI-DISPOSABLE SWEDISH FURNITURE

  ARCHITECTURAL

  INDIGESTION: The almost obsessive need to live in a 'cool' architectural environment. Frequently related objects of fetish include framed black-andwhite art photography [Diane Arbus a favorite); simplistic pine furniture; matte black high-tech items such as TVs, stereos, and telephones; low-wattage ambient lighting; a lamp, chair, or table that alludes to the 1950s; cut flowers with complex names.

  JAPANESE

  MINIMALISM: The most frequently offered interior design aesthetic used by rootless career-hopping young people.

  "Well, Dag," I ask, reaching for his paper bags, "What did you get me?"

  "Hands off the merchandise, please!" Dag snaps, adding quickly, "Patience. Please." He then reaches into the bag and then hands me something quickly before I can see what it is. "Un cadeau pour toi."

  It's a coiled-up antique bead belt with GRAND CANYON written on it in bead-ese.

  "Dag! This is perfect! Total 1940s."

  "Thought you'd like it. And now for mademoiselle—" Dag pivots and hands Claire something: a de-labeled Miracle Whip mayonnaise jar filled with something green. "Possibly the most charmed object in my collection."

  "Mille tendresses, Dag," Claire says, looking into what looks like olive-colored instant coffee crystals, "But what is it? Green sand?" She shows the jar to me, then shakes it a bit. "I am perplexed. Is it jade?"

  "Not jade at all."

  A sick shiver marimbas down my spine. "Dag, you didn't get it in New Mexico, did you?"

  "Good guess, Andy. Then you know what it is?"

  "I have a hunch."

  "You kittenish thing, you."

  "Will you two stop being so male, and just tell me what this stuff is?" demands Claire. "My cheeks are hurting from smiling."

  I ask Claire if I can see her present for a second, and she hands me the jar, but Dag tries to grab it from me. I guess his cocktail is starting to kick in. "It's not really radioactive, is it Dag?" I ask.

  "Radioactive!" Claire shrieks. This scares Dag. He drops the jar and it shatters. Within moments, countless green glass beads explode like a cluster of angry hornets, shooting everywhere, rattling down the floor, rolling into cracks, into the couch fabric, into the ficus soil— everywhere.

  "Dag, what is this shit? Clean it up! Get it out of my house!"

  "It's Trinitite," mumbles Dag, more crestfallen than upset, "It's from Alamogordo, where they had the first N-test. The heat was so intense it melted the sand into a new substance altogether. I bought a bottle at a ladies auxiliary clothing store."

  "Oh my god. It's plutonium! You brought plutonium into my house. You are such an asshole. This place is a waste dump now." She gathers breath. "I can't live here anymore ! I have to move! My perfect little house—I live in a toxic waste dump —" Claire starts dancing the chicken in her wedgies, her pale face red with hysteria, yet making no guilt inroads on a rapidly fading Dag.

  Stupidly I try to be the voice of reason: "Claire, come on. The explosion was almost fifty years ago. The stuff is harmless now—" "Then you can harmless it all right into the trash for me, Mr. Know

  Everything. You don't actually believe all of that harmless talk, do you? You are such a victim, you pea-brained dimwit—no ones believes the government. This stuffs death for the next four and a half billion years."

  Dag mumbles a phrase from the couch, where he's almost asleep. "You're overreacting, Claire. The beads are half-lived out. They're clean."

  "Don't even speak to me, you hell-bound P.R. Frankenstein monster, until you've decontaminated this entire house. Until then, I'll be staying at Andy's. Good night."

  She roars out the door like a runaway train car, leaving Dag near comatose on the couch, condemned to a sleep of febrile pale green nightmares. Claire may or may not have nightmares, but should she ever come back to this bungalow, she'll never be able to sleep there quite perfectly ever again.

  Tobias arrives to visit Claire tomorrow. And Christmas with the family in Portland soon. Why is it so impossible to de -complicate my life?

  DON'T

  EAT

  YOURSELF

  An action-packed day. Dag is still asleep on Claire's sofa, unaware of how deeply he has plunged on her shit list. Claire, meanwhile, is in my bathroom, dolling herself up and philosophizing out loud through a steamy Givenchy scented murk and amid a counterload of cosmetics and accessories I was made to fetch from her bungalow that resembles the emptied-out contents of a child's Halloween sack: 'Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. offs who mows your lawn White Shoulders who library—a stranger who, and find a message from machine saying 'Drop Come away with me now

  Maybe it's the kid in cutor the woman wearing stamps your book at the if you were to come home them on your answering everything. I love you. to Florida,' you'd follow

  them. 'Yours is the blond checkout clerk at Jensen's, isn't it? You've told me about as much. Dag's is probably Elvissa" (Elvissa is Claire's good friend.) "—and mine, unfortunately," she comes out of the bathroom head cocked to one side inserting an earring, "is Tobias. Life is so unfair, Andy. It really is." UTobias is Claire's unfortunate obsession from New York, and he's driving in from LAX airport this morning. He's our age, and Biff-and-Muffy private schoolish like Claire's brother Allan, and from some eastern white bread ghetto: New Rochelle? Shaker

  BREAD AND CIRCUITS: The electronic era tendency to view party politics as corny—no longer relevant or meaningful or useful to modern societal

  issues, and in many cases

  dangerous.

  VOTER'S BLOCK: The attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.

  Heights? Darien? Westmount? Lake Forest? Does it matter? He has one

  of those bankish money jobs of the sort that when, at parties, he tells you what he does, you start to forget as soon as he tells you. He affects a tedious corporate killspeak. He sees nothing silly or offensive in frequenting franchised theme -restaurants with artificial, possessive-case names like McTuckey's or O'Dooligan's. He knows all variations and nuances of tassel loafers. ("I could never wear your shoes, Andy. They've got moccasin stitching. Far too casual.")

  Not surprisingly, he's a control freak and considers himself in formed. He likes to make jokes about paving Alaska and nuking Iran. To borrow a phrase from a popular song, he's loyal to the Bank of America. He's thrown something away and he's mean.

  But then Tobias also has circus freak show good looks, so Dag and I are envious. Tobias could stand on a downtown corner at midnight and cause a traffic gridlock. It's too depressing for normal looking Joes. "He'll never have to work a day in his life if he doesn't want to," says Dag. "Life is not fair." Something about Tobias always extracts the phrase, 'life's not fair' from people.

  He and Claire met at Brandon's apartment in West Hollywood a few months ago. As a trio, they were all going to go to a Wall of Voodoo concert, but Tobias and Claire never made it, ending up instead at the Java coffee house, where Tobias talked and Claire stared for the night. Later on, Tobias kicked Brandon out of his own apartment. "Didn't hear a word Tobias said the entire evening," Claire says, "He could have been reading the menu backward for all I know. His profile, I tell you, it's deadly."

  They spent that night together, and the next morning Tobias waltzed into the bedroom with one hundred long-stemmed roses, and he woke Claire up by gently lobbing them into her face, one by one. Then once she was fully awake, he heaped blood red Niagaras of stem and petal onto her body, and when Claire told Dag and me about this, even we had to concede that it was a wonderful gesture on his part.

  "It had to be the most romantic moment of my life," said Claire, "I mean is it possible to die from roses? From pleasure? Anyhow, later that morning we were in the car driving over to the farmer's market at Fairfax for brunch and to do the L.A. Times crossword puzzle with the pigeons and tour
ists in the outdoor area. Then on La Cienega Boulevard I saw this huge plywood sign with the words 700 Roses only $9.95 spray painted on it, and my heart just sank like a corpse wrapped in steel and tossed into the Hudson River. Tobias slunk down in his seat really low. Then things got worse. There was a red light and the guy from the booth comes over to the car and says something like, 'Mr. Tobias! My best customer! You're some lucky young lady to always be getting flowers from Mr. Tobias here!' As you can imagine, there was a pall over breakfast."

  Okay okay. I'm being one-sided here. But it's fun to trash Tobias. It's easy. He embodies to me all of the people of my own generation who used all that was good in themselves just to make money; who use their votes for short -term gain. Who ended up blissful in the bottomfeeding jobs—marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money brokering. Such smugness. They saw themselves as eagles building mighty nests of oak branches and bullrushes, when instead they were really more like the eagles here in California, the ones who built their nests from tufts of abandoned auto parts looking like sprouts picked off a sandwich—rusted colonic mufflers and herniated fan belts—gnarls of freeway flotsam from the bleached grass meridians of the Santa Monica freeway: plastic lawn chairs, Styrofoam cooler lids, and broken skis — cheap, vulgar, toxic items that will either decompose in minutes or remain essentially unchanged until our galaxy goes supernova.

  Oh, I don't hate Tobias. And as I hear his car pull into a stall outside, I realize that I see in him something that / might have become, something that all of us can become in the absence of vigilance. Some thing bland and smug that trades on its mask, filled with such rage and such contempt for humanity, such need, that the only food left for such a creature is their own flesh. He is like a passenger on a plane full of diseased people that crashes high in the mountains, and the survivors, not trusting each other's organs, snack on their own forearms.

  "Candy, 6oby!" Tobias bellows mock heartily, slamming my screen door after finding Claire's place empty save for a heap of Dag. I wince, feigning interest in a TV Guide and mumbling a hello. He sees the magazine: "Bottom feeding, are we? I thought you were the intellectual."

  "Funny you should mention bottom feeding, Tobias —" "What's that?" he barks, like someone with a Sony Walkman going full volume being asked for directions. Tobias doesn't pay any real attention to objects not basking entirely in his sphere.

  "Nothing, Tobias. Claire's in the bathroom," I add, pointing in that

  ARMANISM: After Giorgio Armani: an obsession with mimicking the seamless and (more importantly) controlled ethos of Italian couture. Like Japanese Minimalism, Armanism reflects a profound inner need for control.

  POOR BUOYANCY: The realization that one was a better person when one had less money.

  direction the exact moment Claire rounds the corner chattering and putting a little girl's barrette in her hair.

  "Tobias!" she says, running over for a little kiss, but Tobias is nonplussed by finding her so intimate in my environment and refuses a kiss.

  "Excuse me," he says, "Looks like I'm interrupting something here." Claire and I roll our eyes at the whole notion that Tobias sees life as a not-very-funny French-restoration comedy aimed solely at him. Claire reaches up and kisses him anyway. (He's tall, of course.)

  "Dag spilled plutonium all over my bungalow last night. He and Andy are going to clean it up today, and till then, I'm camped out here on the couch. Soon as Dag detoxes, that is. He's passed out on my couch. He was in New Mexico last week."

  "I should have guessed he'd do something stupid like that. Was he building a bomb with it?"

  "It wasn't plutonium," I add, "It was Trinitite, and it's harmless." Tobias ignores this. "What was he doing in your place, anyhow?" "Tobias, what am I, your heifer? He's my friend. Andy's my friend. I live here, remember?"

  Tobias grabs her waist—looks like he's getting frisky. "Looks like I'm going to have to fillet you right down the middle, young lady." He yanks her crotch toward his, and I am just too embarrassed for words. Do people really talk like this? "Hey, Candy—looks like she's getting uppity. What do you say—should I impregnate her?"

  At this point Claire's face indicates that she is well aware of feminist rhetoric and dialectic but is beyond being able to extract an appropriate quote. She actually giggles, realizing as she does so that that giggle will be used against her in some future, more lucid, less hormonal moment. Tobias pulls Claire out the door. "I vote that we go to Dag's place for a while. Candy—tell your pal not to disturb us for a few hours should he decide to rise. Ciao."

  The door slams once more, and, as with most couples impatiently on their way to couple, there are no polite good-byes.

  EAT

  YOUR

  PARENTS

  We're hoovering plutonium out from the floorboards of Claire's living room. Plutonium—that's our new hipster code word for the rogue, pos sibly radioactive Trinitite beads. 'Feisty little buggers," blurts Dag as he thwacks a nozzle at a problematic wood knot, in good cheer and far more himself after twelve hours of sleep, a shower, a grapefruit from the MacArthur's tree next door—a tree we helped string with blue Christmas lights last week—as well as the Dagmar Bellinghausen secret hangover cure (four Tyof Campbell's Chicken beads are like killer bees, everything." I spent arranging and being precoming trip to Portland to Claire and Dag both say lenol and a lukewarm tin & Stars soup). "These the way they invade the morning on the phone occupied with my upsee my family, a trip that is making me morbid.

  "Cheer up. You have nada to worry about. Look at me. I just made someone's apartment uninhabitable for the next four and a half billion years. Imagine the guilt / must feel." HDag's actually being generous about the plutonium matter, but he did have to make a psychic tradeoff, and now he has to pretend he doesn't mind Claire and Tobias copulating in his bedroom, staining his sheets (Tobias brags about not using condoms), dealphabetizing his cassette tapes, and looting his Kelvinator of citrus products. Nonetheless, the subject of Tobias is on Dag's mind: "I don't trust him. What's he up to?"

  "Up to?"

  "Andrew, wake up. Someone with his looks could have any bimbette with a toe separator in the state of California. That's obviously his style. But then he chooses Claire, who, love her as much as we do, chic as she may be, and much to her credit, is something of a flawed catch by Tobias standards. I mean, Andy, Claire reads. You know what I'm saying."

  "I think so."

  "He's not a nice human being, Andrew, and he even drove over the mountains to see her. And pllll-eeze don't try to tell me that somehow it's love."

  "Maybe there's something about him we don't know, Dag. Maybe we should just have faith in him. Give him a reading list to help him better himself—"

  A frosty stare.

  "I think not, Andrew. He's too far gone. You can only minimize the damage with his type. Here —help me lift this table."

  We rearrange the furniture, discovering new regions the plutonium has colonized. The rhythm of detoxification continues: brushes, rags, and dustpans. Sweep, sweep, sweep.

  I ask if Dag is going to go visit his somewhat estranged parents in Toronto this Christmas. "Spare me, Andrew. This funster's having a cactus Christmas. Look," he says, changing the subject, "—chase that dust bunny."

  I change the subject. "I don't think my mother really grasps the concept of ecology or recycling," I start to tell Dag, "At Thanksgiving two years ago, after dinner, my mother was bagging all of the dinner trash into a huge nonbiodegradable bag. I pointed out to her that the bag was nonbiodegradable and she might want to consider using one of the degradable bags that were sitting on the shelf. She says to me, 'You're right! I forgot I had them!' and so she grabs one of the good bags. She then takes all of the trash, bad bag and all, and heaves it into the new one. The expression on her face was so genuinely proud that I didn't have the heart to tell her she'd gotten it all wrong. Louise Palmer: Planet Saver."

  I flop down on the cool soft couch while Dag continues cleaning: "You
should see my parents' place, Dag. It's like a museum of fifteen years ago. Nothing ever changes there; they're terrified of the future.

  Have you ever wanted to set your parents' house on fire just to get them out of their rut? Just so they had some change in their lives? At least Claire's parents get divorced every now and then. Keeps things lively. Home is like one of those aging European cities like Bonn or Antwerp or Vienna or Zurich, where there are no young people and it feels like an expensive waiting room."

  "Andy, I'm the last person to be saying this, but, hey—your parents are only getting old. That's what happens to old people. They go cuckoo; they get boring, they lose their edge."

  "These are my parents, Dag. I know them better than that." But Dag is all too right, and accuracy makes me feel embarrassingly petty. I parry his observation. I turn on him: "Fine comment coming from someone whose entire sense of life begins and ends in the year his own parents got married, as if that was the last year in which things could ever be safe. From someone who dresses like a General Motors showroom salesman from the year 1955. And Dag, have you ever noticed that your bungalow looks more like it belongs to a pair of Eisenhower era Allentown, Pennsylvania newlyweds than it does to a fin de siècle existentialist poseur?"

  "Are you through yet?"

  "No. You have Danish modern furniture; you use a black rotary-dial phone; you revere the Encyclopedia Britannica. You're just as afraid of the future as my parents." Silence.

  "Maybe you're right, Andy, and maybe you're upset about going home for Christmas—"

  "Stop being nurturing. It's embarrassing."

  "Very well. But ne dump pas on moi, okay? I've got my own demons and I'd prefer not to have them trivialized by your Psych 101-isms. We're always analyzing life too much. It's going to be the downfall of us all. "I was going to suggest you take a lesson from my brother Matthew, the jingle writer. Whenever he phones or faxes his agent, they always haggle over who eats the fax—who's going to write it off as a business expense. And so I suggest you do the same thing with your parents. Eat | them. Accept them as a part of getting you to here, and get on with life. i Write them off as a business expense. At least your parents talk about