Coupland Douglas-Generation X

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ST. MARTIN'S PRESS

NEW YORK

DON'T WORRY,

M O TH E R ...IF THE

MARRIAGE

D O ESN'T

W ORK OUT, W E CAN

A L W A Y S GET

DIVORCED

G E N E R A T ION X

TALES

F O R

ACCELERATED

CULTURE

D O U G L A S C O U P L A ND

"Her hair was totally 1950s Indiana Woolworth perfume

clerk. You know—sweet but dumb—she'll marry her way

out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was

early '60s Aeroflot stewardess—you know—that really sad

blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to

buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo

caps. And such make-up! Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with

these little PVC floral applique earrings that looked like

antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa

1956. She really caught the sadness—she was the hippest

person there. Totally."

T R AC E Y ,2 7

"They're my children. Adults or not, I just can't kick them

out of the house. It would be cruel. And besides—they're

great cooks."

H E L E N, 52

PART ONE

THE SUN

I S

YOUR

ENEMY

Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny

I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Bran

don, Manitoba, deep in the Canadian prairies, to witness a total eclipse of

the sun. I must have made a strange sight at my young age, being pencil

thin and practically albino, quietly checking into a TraveLodge motel

to spend the night alone, happily watching snowy network television

offerings and drinking glasses of water from glass tumblers that had been

washed and rewrapped in paper sheaths so many

times they looked like they had been sandpap-

ered. But the night soon ended, and come the

morning of the eclipse, I eschewed tour buses and

took civic bus transporta- tion to the edge of town.

There, I walked far down a dirt side road and into

a farmer's field — some sort of cereal that was

chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper

burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when

the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay

myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks

and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing

a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely—a mood

of darkness and inevitability and fascination— a mood that surely must

have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they

have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky

go out.

* * * * *

WHILE YOU

CAN

One and a half decades later my feelings are just as ambivalent and I

sit on the front lanai of my rented bungalow in Palm Springs, California,

grooming my two dogs, smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snap-

dragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine that drift in from

the courtyard while I wait for dawn.

I look east over the San Andreas fault that lies down the middle

of the valley like a piece of overcooked meat. Soon enough the sun will

explode over that fault and into my day like a line of Vegas showgirls

bursting on stage. My dogs are watching, too. They know that an event

of import will happen. These dogs, I tell you, they are so smart, but

they worry me sometimes. For instance, I'm plucking this pale yellow

cottage cheesy guck from their snouts, rather like cheese atop a micro-

waved pizza, and I have this horrible feeling, for I suspect these dogs

(even though their winsome black mongrel eyes would have me believe

otherwise) have been rummaging through the dumpsters out behind the

cosmetic surgery center again, and their snouts are accessorized with,

dare I say, yuppie liposuction fat. How they manage to break into the

California state regulation coyote-proof red plastic flesh disposal bags

is beyond me. I guess the doctors are being naughty or lazy. Or both.

This world.

I tell you.

From inside my little bungalow I hear a cupboard door slam. My

friend Dag, probably fetching my other friend Claire a starchy snack or

a sugary treat. Or even more likely, if I know them, a wee gin and tonic.

They have habits.

Dag is from Toronto, Canada (dual citizenship). Claire is from Los

Angeles, California. I, for that matter, am from Portland, Oregon, but

where you're from feels sort of irrelevant these days ("Since everyone

has the same stores in their mini-malls," according to my younger

brother, Tyler). We're the three of us, members of the poverty jet set,

an enormous global group, and a group I joined, as mentioned earlier,

at the age of fifteen when I flew to Manitoba.

Anyhow, as this evening was good for neither Dag nor Claire, they

had to come invade my space to absorb cocktails and chill. They needed

it. Both had their reasons.

For example, just after 2:00 A.M., Dag got off of shift at Larry's

Bar where, along with me, he is a bartender. While the two of us were

walking home, he ditched me right in the middle of a conversation we

were having and darted across the road, where he then scraped a boulder

across the front hood and windshield of a Cutlass Supreme. This is not

the first time he has impulsively vandalized like this. The car was the

color of butter and bore a bumper sticker saying WE'

RE SPENDING OUR

CHILDREN'

S INHERITANCE, a message that I suppose irked Dag, who

was bored and cranky after eight hours of working his Mcjob ("Low pay,

low prestige, low benefits, low future").

I wish I understood this destructive tendency in Dag; otherwise he

is such a considerate guy— to the point where once he wouldn't bathe

for a week when a spider spun a web in his bathtub.

"I don't know, Andy," he said as he slammed my screen door,

doggies in tow, resembling the lapsed half of a Mormon pamphleting

duo with a white shirt, askew tie, armpits hinged with sweat, 48-hour

stubble, gray slacks ("not pants, slacks") and butting his head like a

rutting elk almost immediately into the vegetable crisper of my Frigidaire,

from which he pulled wilted romaine leaves off the dewy surface of a

bottle of cheap vodka, "whether I feel more that I want to punish some

aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I'm just upset that

the world has gotten too big— way beyond our capacity to tell stories

about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and

snippets on bumpers." He chugs from the bottle. "I feel insulted either

way.

So it must have been three in the morning. Dag was on a vandal's

high, and the two of us were sitting on couches in my living room looking

at the fire burning in the fireplace, when shortly Claire stormed in (no

knock), her mink-black-bob-cut aflutter, and looking imposing in spite

of her shortness, the effect carried off by chic garnered from working

the Chanel counter at the local I. Magnin store.

"Date from hell," she announced, causing Dag and I to exchange

meaningful glances. She grabbed a glass of mystery drink in the kitchen

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-

prestige, low-dignity, low-

benefit, no-future job in the

service sector. Frequently

considered a satisfying career

choice by people who have never

held one.

POVERTY JET SET: A

group of people given to chronic

traveling at the expense of long-

term job stability or a permanent

residence. Tend to have doomed

and extremely expensive phone-

call relationships with people

named Serge or llyana. Tend to

discuss frequent-flyer programs

at parties.

and then plonked herself down on the small sofa, unconcerned by the

impending fashion disaster of multiple dog hairs on her black wool dress.

"Look, Claire. If your date was too hard to talk about, maybe you can

use some little puppets and reenact it for us with a little show."

"Funnee, Dag. Funnee. God. Another bond peddler and another

nouvelle dinner of seed bells and Evian water. And, of course, he was

a survivalist, too. Spent the whole night talking about moving to Montana

and the chemicals he's going to put in his gasoline tank to keep it all

from decomposing. I can't keep doing this. I'll be thirty soon. I feel like

a character in a color cartoon."

She inspected my serviceable (and by no means stunning) furnished room,

a space cheered up mainly by inexpensive low-grade Navajo Indian

blankets. Then her face loosened. "My date had a low point, too. Out on

Highway 111 in Cathedral City there's this store that sells chickens that

have been taxidermied. We were driving by and I just about fainted from

wanting to have one, they were so cute, but Dan (that was his name) says,

'Now Claire, you don't need a chicken,' to which I said, That's not the

point, Dan. The point is that I want a chicken.' He thereupon commenced

giving me this fantastically boring lecture about how the only reason I want

a stuffed chicken is because they look so good in a shop window, and that

the moment I received one I'd start dreaming up ways to ditch it. True

enough. But then I tried to tell him that stuffed chickens are what life and

new relationships was all about, but my explanation collapsed some-

where— the analogy became too mangled— and there was that awful woe-

to-the-human-race silence you get from pedants who think they're talking

to half-wits. I wanted to throttle him." "Chickens?" asked Dag. "Yes,

Chickens." "Well." "Yes."

"Cluck cluck."

Things became both silly and morose and after a few hours I retired

to the lanai where I am now, plucking possible yuppie fat from the snouts

of my dogs and watching sunlight's first pinking of the Coachella Valley,

the valley in which Palm Springs lies. Up on a hill in the distance I can

see the saddle-shaped form of the home that belongs to Mr. Bob Hope,

the entertainer, melting like a Dali clock into the rocks. I feel calm

because my friends are nearby.

"Polyp weather," announces Dag as he comes and sits next to me,

brushing sage dust off the rickety wood stoop.

"That is just too sick, Dag," says Claire sitting on my other side

and putting a blanket over my shoulders (I am only in my underwear).

"Not sick at all. In fact, you should check out the sidewalks near

the patio restaurants of Rancho Mirage around noon some day. Folks

shedding polyps like dandruff flakes, and when you walk on them it's

like walking on a bed of Rice Krispies cereal."

I say, "Shhhh . . . " and the five of us (don't forget the dogs) look

eastward. 1 shiver and pull the blanket tight around myself, for I am

colder than I had realized, and I wonder that all things seem to be from

hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather. . . . Could the situation

be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were

all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't

help but suffer in comparison.

Maybe someone got cheated along the way. I wonder.

You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know.

But I have always wondered if there is something either mechanical or

malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped

up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as

I sit with the two of them. It is the realization that the smiles that they

wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who

have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public

and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because

of social convention to show their anger, who don't want to look like

poor sports. The thought is fleeting.

The first chink of sun rises over the lavender mountain of Joshua,

but three of us are just a bit too cool for our own good; we can't just let

the moment happen. Dag must greet this flare with a question for us, a

gloomy aubade: "What do you think of when you see the sun? Quick.

Before you think about it too much and kill your response. Be honest.

Be gruesome. Claire, you go first."

Claire understands the drift: "Well, Dag. I see a farmer in Russia,

and he's driving a tractor in a wheat field, but the sunlight's gone bad

on him— like the fadedness of a black-and-white picture in an old Life

magazine. And another strange phenomenon has happened, too: rather

than sunbeams, the sun has begun to project the odor of old Life mag-

azines instead, and the odor is killing his crops. The wheat is thinning

HISTO RICAL

UNDERDOSING:

To live in a

period of time when nothing

seem s to happen. Major

s ym pto m s include addiction to

n ew s pa pers, magazines, and TV

n ew s broadcasts.

HIS TORICAL

OVERDOSING:

To live in a

period of time when too much

seem s to happen. Major

s ym pto m s include addiction to

newspapers, magazines, and TV

n ew s broadcasts.

as we speak. He's slumped over the wheel of his tractor and he's crying.

His wheat is dying of history poisoning."

"Good, Claire. Very weird. And Andy? How about you?"

"Let me think a second."

"Okay, I'll go instead. When I think of the sun, I think of an

Australian surf bunny, eighteen years old, maybe, somewhere on Bondi

Beach, and discovering her first keratosis lesion on her shin. She's

screaming inside her brain and already plotting how she's going to steal

Valiums from her mother. Now you tell me, Andy, what do you think

of when you see the sun?"

I refuse to participate in this awfulness. I refuse to put people in my

vision. "I think of this place in Antarctica called Lake Vanda, where the

rain hasn't fallen in more than two million years." "Fair enough.

That's all?" "Yes, that's all."

There is a pause. And what I don't say is this: that this is also the

same sun that makes me think of regal tangerines and dimwitted but-

terflies and lazy carp. And the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood

seeping from skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branch next

door— drops that hang like rubies from their old brown leather source,

alluding to the intense ovarian fertility inside.

The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks

the silence by saying that it's not healthy to live life as a succession of

isolated little cool moments. "Either our lives become stories, or there's

just no way to get through them."

I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left

our lives behind us and came to the desert— to tell stories and to make

our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.

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ST.MARTIN'SPRESSNEWYORKDON'TWORRY,MOTHER...IFTHEMARRIAGEDOESN'TWORKOUT,WECANALWAYSGETDIVORCEDGENERATIONXTALESFORANACCELERATEDCULTUREDOUGLASCOUPLAND"Herhairwastotally1950sIndianaWoolworthperfumeclerk.Youknowsweetbutdumbshe'llmarryherwayoutofthetrailerparksomedaysoon.Butthedresswasearly'60sAeroflots...

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