Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  Outside it's raining, of course.

  In Tyler's car heading back up Burnside Avenue on the way home, I attempt to tell Tyler the story Dag told about the end of the world in Vons supermarket. "I have a friend down in Palm Springs. He says that when the air raid sirens go off, the first thing people run for are the candles."

  "So?"

  "I think that's why people were looking at us strangely back at the Durst Thriftee Mart. They were wondering why they couldn't hear the sirens."

  "Hmmm. Canned goods, too," he replies, absorbed in a copy of Vanity Fair (I'm driving). "You think I should bleach my hair white?"

  "You're not using aluminum pots and pans still, are you, Andy?" asks my father, standing in the living room, winding up the grandfather clock. "Get rid of them, pronto. Dietary aluminum is your gateway to Alzheimer's disease."

  Dad had a stroke two years ago. Nothing major, but he lost the use of his right hand for a week, and now he has to take this medication that makes him unable to secrete tears; to cry. I must say, the experience certainly scared him, and he changed quite a few things in his life. Particularly his eating habits. Prior to the stroke he'd eat like a farmhand, scarfing down chunks of red meat laced with hormones and antibiotics and God knows what else, chased with mounds of mashed potato and fountains of scotch. Now, much to my mother's relief, he eats chicken and vegetables, is a regular habitue of organic food stores, and has installed a vitamin rack in the kitchen that reeks of a hippie vitamin B stench and makes the room resemble a pharmacy.

  Like Mr. Mac Arthur, Dad discovered his body late in life. It took him a brush with death to deprogram himself of dietary fictions invented by railroaders, cattlemen, and petrochemical and pharmaceutical firms over the centuries. But again, better late than never.

  "No, Dad. No aluminum."

  "Good good good." He turns and looks at the TV set across the room and then makes disparaging noises at an angry mob of protesting young men rioting somewhere in the world. "Just look at those guys. Don't any of them have jobs? Give them all something to do. Satellite them Tyler's rock videos—anything—but keep them busy. Jesus." Dad, like Dag's ex-coworker Margaret, does not believe human beings are built to deal constructively with free time.

  Later on, Tyler escapes from dinner, leaving only me, Mom and Dad, the four food groups, and a predictable tension present.

  "Mom, I don't want any presents for Christmas. I don't want any things in my life."

  "Christmas without presents? You're mad. Are you staring at the sun down there?"

  Afterward, in the absence of the bulk of his children, my maudlin father flounders through the empty rooms of the house like a tanker that has punctured its hull with its own anchor, searching for a port, a place to weld shut the wound. Finally he decides to stuff the stockings by the fireplace. Into Tyler's he places treats he takes a great pleasure in buying every year: baby Listerine bottles, Japanese oranges, peanut brittle, screwdrivers, and lottery tickets. When it comes to my stocking, he asks me to leave the room even though I know he'd like my company. / become the one who roams the house, a house far too large for too few people. Even the Christmas tree, decorated this year by rote rather than with passion, can't cheer things up.

  The phone is no friend; Portland is Deadsville at the moment. My friends are all either married, boring, and depressed; single, bored, and depressed; or moved out of town to avoid boredom and depression. And some of them have bought houses, which has to be kiss of death, personality-wise. When someone tells you they've just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they're locked into jobs they hate; that they're broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they're fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It's profoundly depressing. And the worst part of it is that people in their houses don't even like where they're living. What few happy moments they possess are those gleaned from dreams of upgrading. God, where did my grouchy mood come from? The world has become one great big quiet house like Deirdre's house in Texas. Life doesn't have to be this way.

  PERSONALITY TITHE: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: "Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we're going to watch the

  shopping channel."

  JACK-AND-JILL PARTY: A Squire tradition; baby showers to which both men and women friends are invited as opposed to only women. Doubled

  purchasing power of bisexual attendance brings gift values up to Eisenhower-era standards.

  DOWN-NESTING: The

  tendency of parents to move to smaller, guest-room-free houses after the children have moved away so as to avoid children aged 20 to 30 who have

  boomeranged home.

  HOMEOWNER ENVY:

  Feelings of jealousy generated in the young and the

  disenfranchised when facing gruesome housing statistics.

  LESS IS A

  POSSIBILITY

  Earlier on I made the mistake of complaining about the house's lack of amusement and my Dad joked, "Don't make us mad, or we'll move into a condo with no guest room and no linen the way all of your friends' parents did." He thought he was making a real yuck.

  Right.

  As if they would move. I know they never will. They will battle the forces of change; they will manufacture talismans against it, talismans like the paper fire logs Mom makes from rolled-up newspapers. They will putter away inside the house until the future, like a horrible diseased drifter, breaks its way inside and commits an atrocity in the form of death or disease or fire or (this is what they really fear), bankruptcy. The drifter's visit will jolt them out of complacency; it will validate their anxiety. They know his dreadful arrival is invevitable, and they can see this drifter's purulent green lesions the color of hospital walls, his ward robe chosen at random from bins at the back of the Boys and Girls Club of America depot in Santa Monica, where he also sleeps at night. And they know that he owns no land and that he won't discuss TV and that he'll trap the sparrows inside the birdhouse with duct tape.

  But they won't talk about him.

  By eleven, Mom and Dad are both asleep and Tyler is out partying. A brief phone call from Dag reassures me that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Hot news for the day was the Aston Martin fire making page seven of the Desert Sun (more than a hundred thousand dollars damage, raising the crime to a felony level), and the Skipper showing up for drinks at Larry's, ordering up a storm, then walking out when Dag asked him to pay the bill. Dag stupidly let him get away with it. I think we're in for trouble.

  "Oh yes. My brother the jingle writer sent me an old parachute to wrap the Saab up in at night. Some gift, eh?"

  Later on, I inhale a box of chocolate Lu cookies while watching cable TV. Even later, going in to putz about the kitchen, I realize that I am so bored I think I'm going to faint. This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen any more—the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over. I'm left with two nice people, mind you, more than most people get, but it's time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.

  TRANS FORM

  Christmas Day. Since early this morning I have been in the living room with my candles—hundreds, possibly thousands of them—as well as rolls and rolls of angry, rattling tinfoil and stacks of disposable pie plates. I've been placing candles on every flat surface available, the foils not only protecting surfaces from dribbling wax but serving as well to double the candle flames via reflection. HCandles are everywhere: on the piano, on the bookshelves, on the coffee table, on the mantelpiece, in the fireplace, on against the par-for-the gloss of weather. On top alone, there must be at peranto family portrait of Syndicated cartoon charswirls, spokes of lemon the windowsill guarding course di
smal dark wet of the oak stereo console least fifty candles, an Es all heights and levels. acters rest amid silver and lime color. There are

  colonnades of raspberry and glades of white—a motley gridlock demonstrator mix for someone who's never before seen a candle. HI hear the sound of taps running upstairs and my Dad calls down, "Andy, is that you down there?" "Merry Christmas, Dad. Everyone up yet?" 11"Almost. Your mother's slugging Tyler in the stomach as we speak. What are you doing down there?" 'lt's a surprise. Promise me some thing. Promise that you won't come down for fifteen minutes. That's all I need—fifteen minutes."

  "Don't worry. It'll take his highness at least that long to decide

  between gel and mousse."

  "You promise then?"

  "Fifteen minutes and ticking."

  Have you ever tried to light thousands of candles? It takes longer

  than you think. Using a simple wh ite dinner candle as a punk, with a dish underneath to collect the drippings, I light my babies' wicks—my grids of votives, platoons of yahrzeits and occasional rogue sand candles. I light them all, and I can feel the room heating up. A window has to be opened to allow oxygen and cold winds into the room. I finish.

  Soon the three resident Palmer family members assemble at the top of the stairs. "All set, Andy. We're coming down," calls my Dad, assisted by the percussion of Tyler's feet clomping down the stairs and his background vocals of "new skis, new skis, new skis, new skis ..."

  Mom mentions that she smells wax, but her voice trails off quickly. I can see that they have rounded the corner and can see and feel the buttery yellow pressure of flames dancing outward from the living room door. They round the corner.

  "Oh, my—" says Mom, as the three of them enter the room, speechless, turning in slow circles, seeing the normally dreary living room covered with a molten living cake-icing of white fire, all surfaces devoured in flame—a dazzling fleeting empire of ideal light. All of us are instantaneously disembodied from the vulgarities of gravity; we enter a realm in which all bodies can perform acrobatics like an astronaut in orbit, cheered on by febrile, licking shadows.

  "It's like Paris ..." says Dad, referring, I'm sure to Notre Dame cathedral as he inhales the air—hot and slightly singed, the way air must smell, say, after a UFO leaves a circular scorchburn in a wheat field.

  I'm looking at the results of my production, too. In my head I'm reinventing this old space in its burst of chrome yellow. The effect is more than even I'd considered; this light is painlessly and without rancor burning acetylene holes in my forehead and plucking me out from my body. This light is also making the eyes of my family burn, if only momentarily, with the possibilities of existence in our time.

  "Oh, Andy," says my mother, sitting down. "Do you know what this is like? It's like the dream everyone gets sometimes—the one where you're in your house and you suddenly discover a new room that you

  never knew was there. But once you've seen the room you say to yourself, 'Oh, how obvious—of course that room is there. It always has been.' '

  Tyler and Dad sit down, with the pleasing clumsiness of jackpot lottery winners. "It's a video, Andy," says Tyler, "a total video."

  But there is a problem.

  Later on life reverts to normal. The candles slowly snuff themselves out and normal morning life resumes. Mom goes to fetch a pot of coffee; Dad deactivates the actinium heart of the smoke detectors to preclude a sonic disaster; Tyler loots his stocking and demolishes his gifts. ("New skis! I can die now!")

  But I get this feeling—

  It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it boils down to the fact that we're middle class.

  You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

  And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

  WELCOME HOME

  FROM

  VIETNAM, SON

  Time to escape. I want my real life back with all of its funny smells, pockets of loneliness, and long, clear car rides. I want my friends and my dopey job dispensing cocktails to leftovers. I miss heat and dryness and light. 'You're okay down there in Palm Springs, aren't you?" asks Tyler two days later as we roar up the mountain to visit the Vietnam memorial en route to the airport. "Alright, Tyler—spill. What have Mom and Dad been saying?" T'Nothing. They just sigh a lot. But they don't sigh over you nearly Dee or Davie." "0h?" there, anyway? You don't have any friends—" "! Tyler." "Okay, so you about you. That's all. only skimming the suras much as they do about "What do you do down have a TV. You don't do, too, have friends, have friends. But I worry You seem like you're face of life, like a water

  spider—like you have some secret that prevents you from entering the mundane everyday world. And that's fine—but it scares me. If you, oh, I don't know, disappeared or something, I don't know that I could deal with it." "God, Tyler. I'm not going anywhere. I promise. Chill, okay? Park over there—" f'You promise to give me a bit of warning? I mean, if you're going to leave or metamorphose or whatever it is you're planning to do—" "Stop being so grisly. Yeah, sure, I promise." "Just don't leave me behind. That's all. I know—it looks as if I enjoy what's going

  GREEN DIVISION: To know the difference between envy and jealousy.

  on with my life and everything, but listen, my heart's only half in it. You give my friends and me a bum rap but I'd give all of this up in a flash if someone had an even remotely plausible alternative."

  "Tyler, stop."

  "I just get so sick of being jealous of everything, Andy— " There's no stopping the boy. " —And it scares me that I don't see a future. And I don't understand this reflex of mine to be such a smartass about everything. It really scares me. I may not look like I'm paying any attention to anything, Andy, but I am. But I can't allow myself to show it. And I don't know why."

  Walking up the hill to the memorial's entrance, I wonder what all that was about. I guess I'm going to have to be (as Claire says) "just a teentsy bit more jolly about things." But it's hard.

  KNEE-JERK IRONY: The

  tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.

  DERISION

  PREEMPTION: A life -style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers.

  Derision Preemption is the main goal of Knee-Jerk Irony.

  FAME-INDUCED APATHY: The attitude that no activity is worth pursuing unless one can become very famous pursuing it. Fame-induced Apathy mimics laziness, but its roots are much deeper.

  At Brookings they hauled 800,000 pounds offish across the docks and in Klamath Falls there was a fine show of Aberdeen Angus Cattle. And Oregon was indeed a land of honey, the state licensing 2,000 beekeepers in 1964.

  The Vietnam memorial is called A Garden of Solace. It is a Guggenheimlike helix carved and bridged into a mountain slope that resembles mounds of emeralds sprayed with a vegetable mister. Visitors start at the bottom of a coiled pathway that proceeds upward and read from a series of stone blocks bearing carved text that tells of the escalating events of the Vietnam War in contrast with daily life back home in Oregon. Below these juxtaposed narratives are carved the names of brushcut Oregon boys who died in foreign mud.

  The site is both a remarkable document and an enchanted space. All year round, one finds sojourners and mourners of all ages and appearance in various stages of psychic disintegration, reconstruction, and reintegration, leaving in their wake small clusters of flowers, letters, and drawings, often in a shaky childlike scrawl and, of course
, tears.

  Tyler displays a modicum of respect on this visit, that is to say, he doesn't break out into spontaneous fits of song and dance as he might were we to be at the Clackamas County Mall. His earlier outburst is over and will never, I am quite confident, ever be alluded to again. "Andy. I don't get it. I mean, this is a cool enough place and all, but why should you be interested in Vietnam. It was over before you'd even reached puberty."

  "I'm hardly an expert on the subject, Tyler, but I do remember a bit of it. Faint stuff; black-and-white TV stuff. Growing up, Vietnam was a background color in life, like red or blue or gold —it tinted everything. And then suddenly one day it just disappeared. Imagine that one morning you woke up and suddenly the color green had vanished. I come here to see a color that I can't see anywhere else any more." "Well / can't remember any of it." "You wouldn't want to. They were ugly times—" I exit Tyler's questioning.

  Okay, yes, I think to myself, they were ugly times. But they were also the only times I'll ever get—genuine capital H history times, before history was turned into a press release, a marketing strategy, and a cynical campaign tool. And hey, it's not as if I got to see much real history, either—I arrived to see a concert in history's arena just as the final set was finishing. But I saw enough, and today, in the bizzare absence of all time cues, I need a connection to a past of some importance, however wan the connection.

  I blink, as though exiting a trance. "Hey, Tyler—you all set to take me to the airport? Flight 1313 to Stupidville should be leaving soon."

  The flight hub's in Phoenix, and a few hours later, back in the desert I cab home from the airport as Dag is at work and Claire is still in New York.