Generation X (12 page)

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

BREAD AND CIRCUITS:

The electronic era tendency to

few months ago. As a trio, they were all going to go to a Wall of Voodoo view party politics as corny —no

concert, but Tobias and Claire never made it, ending up instead at the longer relevant or meaningful or

useful to modern societal

Java coffee house, where Tobias talked and Claire stared for the night.

issues, and in many cases

Later on, Tobias kicked Brandon out of his own apartment. "Didn't hear dangerous.

a w o r d T o b i a s s a i d t h e e n t i r e e v e n i n g , " C l a i r e s a y s , " H e c o u l d h a v e been reading the menu backward for all I know. His profile, I tell you, it's
VOTER'S BLOCK: The

attempt, however futile, to

deadly."

register dissent with the

They spent that night together, and the next morning Tobias waltzed current political system by

simply not voting.

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

h a d t o c o n c e d e t h a t i t w a s a w o n d e r f u l g e s t u r e o n h i s p a r t .

"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 tourists 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 bottom-feeding jobs—marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money b r o k e r i n g . S u c h s m u g n e s s . T h e y 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.

O h , I d o n ' t h a t e T o b i a s . A n d a s I h e a r h i s c a r p u l l i n t o a s t a l l 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, n o t t r u s t i n g e a c h o t h e r ' s o r g a n s , s n a c k o n t h e i r o w n f o r e a r m s .

"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."

" F u n n y y o u s h o u l d m e n t i o n b o t t o m f e e d i n g , T o b i a s —"

"What's that?" he barks, like someone with a Sony Walkman going full volume being asked for directions. Tobias doesn't pay any real a t t e n t i o n t o o b j e c t s n o t b a s k i n g e n t i r e l y i n h i s s p h e r e .

"Nothing, Tobias. Claire's in the bathroom," I add, pointing in that 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 ARMANISM: After Giorgio

kiss.

Armani: an obsession with

"Excuse
me,"
he says, "Looks like I'm interrupting something mimicking the seamless and

here." Claire and I roll our eyes at the whole notion that Tobias sees (more importantly)
controlled

ethos of Italian couture. Like

life as a not-very-funny French-restoration comedy aimed solely at him.

Japanese Minimalism, Armanism

Claire reaches up and kisses him anyway. (He's tall, of course.)

reflects a profound inner need

"Dag spilled plutonium all over my bungalow last night. He and for control.

Andy are going to clean it up today, and till then, I'm camped out here
POOR BUOYANCY:
The

on the couch. Soon as Dag detoxes, that is. He's passed out on
my
realization that one was a better

couch. He was in New Mexico last week."

person when one had less

"I should have guessed he'd do something stupid like that. Was money.

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 Ty-lenol and a lukewarm tin

of Campbell's Chicken

& Stars soup). "These

beads are like killer bees,

the way they invade

everything." I spent

the morning on the phone

arranging and being pre-occupied with my up-coming trip to Portland to see my family, a trip that

Claire and Dag both say

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 trade-off, 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 Kel-vinator 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.

B u t t h e n h e c h o o s e s C l a i r e , w h o ,
l o v e
h e r a s m u c h a s w e d o ,
c h i c
as she may be, and
much
to her credit, is something of a flawed catch by Tobias standards. I mean, Andy, Claire
reads.
You
k n o w
what I'm saying."

"I think so."

" H e ' s n o t a n i c e 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, a n d d u s t p a n s . S w e e p , s w e e p , s w e e p .

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
d u s t b u n n y . "

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 t r a s h i n t o a h u ge nonbiodegradable bag. I pointed out to her that the bag was nonbiodegradable and she might want to consider using one of t h e d e g r a d a b l e b a g s t h a t w e r e s i t t i n g o n t h e s h e l f . S h e s a y s t o m e ,

' Y o u ' r e r i g h t ! I f o r g o t I h a d t h e m ! ' a n d s o s h e g r a b s o n e o f t h e g o o d b a g s . S h e t h e n t a k e s a l l o f t h e t r a s h , b a d b a g a n d a l l , a n d h e a v e s i t 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."