Generation X (9 page)

directions were impossible. But when he asked an inhabitant where he could buy a map, the inhabitant looked at Edward as though he were

mad, then ran away screaming.

So Edward had to acknowledge that he was a country bumpkin in

this Big City. He realized he had to learn all the ropes with a ten-year handicap, and that prospect was daunting. But then, in the same way that bumpkins vow to succeed in a new city because they know they

have a fresh perspective, so vowed Edward.

And he promised that once he made his way in this world (without

getting scalded to death by its many fountains of burning perfume or maimed by the endless truckloads of angry clucking cartoon chickens that were driven about the city's streets) he would build the tallest tower of them all. This silver tower would stand as a beacon to all voyagers who, like himself, arrived in the city late in life. And at the tower's peak there would be a rooftop patio lounge. In this lounge, Edward knew that he would do three things: he would serve tomato juice cocktails with little wedges of lemon, he would play jazz on a piano layered with zinc sheeting and photos of forgotten pop stars, and he would have a little pink booth, out back near the latrines, that sold (among other things) maps.

ENTER

HYPERSPAC

" A n d y . " D a g p r o d s m e w i t h a greasy chicken bone, bringing me back to the picnic. "Stop being so quiet. It's your turn to tell a story, and do me a favor, babe—give me a dose of celebrity content." "
Do
amuse us, darling," adds Claire. "You're being
so
moody." Torpor defines my m o o d a s I s i t o n t h e c r u m b l i n g , p o x e d , a n d l e p r o u s n e v e r-u s e d macadam at the corner of Cottonwood and Sapphire avenues, thinking

my stories to myself and crumbling pungent sprigs of sage in my fingers.

"Well, my brother, Tyler,

once shared an elevator

with David Bowie."

'How many floors?"

"I don't know. All I re-member is that Tyler had

n o i d e a w h a t t o s a y t o

him. So he said nothing."

"I
have found," says

Claire, "that in the ab-snce of anything to talk

about with celebrities,

you can always say to

them, 'Oh, Mr. Celeb-ity! I've got
a l l
y o u r a l b u m s '—even if they're not musicians."

''Look—" says Dag, turning his head, "Some people are actually
driving
here." HA black Buick sedan filled with young Japanese

t o u rists—a rarity in a valley visited mainly by Canadians and West Germans—floats down the hill, the first vehicle in all the time

w e ' v e b e e n
having our picnic. 'They probably took the Verbenia Street off ramp by mistake. I bet you anything, they're looking for the cement di n o s a u r s u p a t t h e C a b a z o n t r u c k s t o p , " D a g s a y s .

"Andy, you speak Japanese. Go talk to them," Claire says. "That's a bit
LESSNESS:
A philosophy

presumptuous. Let them stop and ask directions first," which, of course, whereby one reconciles oneself

they immediately do. I rise and go to talk into their electronically lowered with diminishing expectations of

material wealth:
"I've given up

window. Inside the sedan are two couples, roughly my age, immaculately
wanting to make a killing or be a

(one might say
sterilely
as though they were entering a region of
bigshot. I just want to find

happiness and maybe open up a

biohazard) dressed in summer funwear and wearing the reserved,

little roadside cafe in Idaho."

please-don't-murder-me smile Japanese tourists in North America started adopting a few years ago. The exp ressions immediately p u t m e o n t h e
STATUS

defensive, make me feel angry at
t h e i r
presumption of
my
violence.

SUBSTITUTION:
Using an

And God only knows what they make of our motley quintet and our Okie object with intellectual or

fashionable cachet to substitute

transport sprawled with meal remains of mismatched dishes. A blue

for an object that is merely

jeans ad come to life.

pricey:
"Brian, you left your copy

I speak English (why ruin their desert USA fantasy?) and in the

of Camus in your brother's

BMW."

ensuing convulsed pidgin of hand signals and they-went-(that-aways, I discover that the Japanse
do
want to go visit the dinosaurs. And shortly, after garnering directions, they are off in a puff of dust and roadside debris, from which we see a camera emerge, out of the rear window.

The camera is held backward by one hand and a finger on top of it snaps our photo, at which point Dag shouts, "Look! A camera! Bite the insides of your cheeks, q uick. Get those cheekbones happening!" Then, once the car is out of view, Dag then jumps in on
me:
"And
what,
may I ask, was with your Arnold the Yokel act?"

" A n d r e w .
You speak lovely Japanese," adds Claire. "You could have given them such a thrill."

"It wasn't called for," I reply, remembering how much of a letdown it was for me when I was living in Japan and people tried to speak to

me in English. "But it
d i d
remind me of a bedtime story for today."

"Pray tell."

And so, as my friends, gleaming of cocoa butter, lean back and

a b s o r b t h e s u n ' s h e a t , I t e l l m y t a l e :

"A few years ago I was working at this teenybopper magazine office in Japan—part of a half-year job exchange program with the u n i v e r s i t y —w h e n a s t r a n g e t h i n g h a p p e n e d t o m e o n e d a y." "Wait,"

i n t e r r u p t s D a g , " T h i s i s a t r u e s t o r y ? " " Y e s . " " O k a y . "

"It was a Friday morning and I, being a dutiful foreign photo

researcher, was on the phone to London. I was on deadline to get some p h o t o s f r o m D e p e c h e M o d e ' s p e o p l e w h o w e r e a t s o m e h o u s e party there —an awful Eurosquawk was on the other end. My ear was glued

to the receiver and my hand was over the other ear trying to block out the buzz of the office, a frantic casino of Ziggy Stardust coworkers with everyone hyper from ten-dollar Tokyo coffees from the shop across the street.

"I remember what was going through my mind, and it wasn't my

job—it was the way that cities have their own signature odor to them.

Tokyo's street smell put this into my mind—
udon
noodle broth and faint sewage; chocola te and car fumes. And I thought of Milan's smell—of cinnamon and diesel belch and roses —and Vancouver with its Chinese roast pork and salt water and cedar. I was feeling homesick for Portland, trying to remember its smell of trees and rust and moss when the ruckus of the office began to dim perceptibly.

"A tiny old man in a black Balmain suit came into the room. His skin was all folded like a shrunken apple-head person's, but it was dark, peat-colored, and shiny like an old baseball mitt or the Bog Man of Denmark. And he was wearing a baseball cap and chatting with my

working superiors.

" M i s s U e n o , t h e d r o p -d e a d c o o l f a s h i o n c o o r d i n a t o r i n t h e d e s k next to mine (Olive Oyl hair; Venetian gondolier's shirt; harem pants I and Viva Las Vegas booties) became flustered the way a small child

d o e s w h e n p r e s e n t e d w i t h a b e a r-sized boozed-u p d r u n k u n c l e a t t h e front door on a snowy winter night. I asked Miss Ueno who this guy was and she said it was Mr. Takamichi, the
k a c h o ,
the Grand Poobah of the company, an Americaphile renowned for bragging about his golf

scores in Parisian brothels and for jogging through Tasmanian gaming h o u s e s with an L.A. blonde on each arm.

"Miss Ueno looked really stressed. I asked her why. She said she w a s n ' t s t r e s s e d b u t a n g r y . S h e was angry because no matter how hard s h e w o r k e d s h e w a s m o r e o r l e s s s t u c k a t h e r l i t t l e d e s k f o r e v e r—a c r a m p e d c l u s t e r o f d e s k s b e i n g t h e J a p a n e s e e q u i v a l e n t o f t h e v e a l fattening pen. 'But not only because I'm a woman,' she said, 'But

a l s o because I'm a Japanese.
Mostly
because I'm a Japanese. I have ambition. I n a n y o t h e r c o u n t r y I c o u l d r i s e , b u t h e r e I j u s t s i t . I murder my ambition.' She said that Mr. Takamichi's appearance

s o m e h o w s i m p l y u n d e r s c o r e d h e r s i t u a t i o n . T h e h o p e l e s s n e s s .

"At that point, M r. Takamichi headed over to my desk. I just knew this was going to happen. It was really embarrassing. In Japan you get phobic about being singled out from the crowd. It's about the worst thing that someone can do to you.

" 'You must be Andrew,' he said, a n d h e s h o o k m y h a n d s l i k e a Ford dealer. 'Come on upstairs. We'll have drinks. We'll talk,' he said, and I could feel Miss Ueno burning like a road flare of resentment next t o m e . A n d s o 1 i n t r o d u c e d h e r , b u t M r . T a k a m i c h i ' s r e s p o n s e w a s b e n i g n . A g r u n t . P o o r J a p a n e s e p e o p l e . P o o r M i s s U e n o . S h e w a s right—they're just so trapped wherever they are —frozen on this awful boring ladder.

"And as we were walking toward the elevator, I could feel everyone in the office shooting jealousy rays at me. It was such a bad scene and I could just imagine everyone thinking 'who does he think he is?' I felt dishonest.

Like I was coasting on my foreignness. I felt I was being ex-communicated from the
shin Jin rui
—that's what the Japanese newspapers call people like those kids in their twenties at the office—
new human beings.
It's hard to explain. We have the same group over here and it's just as large, but it doesn't have a name —an
X
generation—purposefully hiding itself.

There's more space over here to hide in—to get lost in —to use as

camouflage. You're not allowed to disappear in Japan. " B u t I d i g r e s s .

"We went upstairs in the elevator to a floor that required a special key for access, and Mr. Takamichi was being sort of theatrically ballsy the whole way up, like a cartoon version of an American, you know,

talking about football and stuff. But once we got to the top he suddenly t u r n e d J a p a n e s e—s o q u i e t . H e t u r n e d r i g h t o f f —like I'd flipped a s w i t c h . I g o t r e a l l y w o r r i e d t h a t I w a s g o i n g t o h a v e t o e n d u r e t h r e e hours of talk about the weather.

"We walked down a thickly carpeted hallway, dead silent, past

small Impressionist paintings and tufts of flowers arranged in vases in the Victorian style. This was the western part of his floor. And when this part ended, we came to the Japanese part. It was like entering hyperspace, at which point Mr. Takamichi pointed to a navy cotton robe for me to change into, which I did.

"Inside the main Japanese room that we entered there was a
toko
n o m a
shrine with chrysanthemums, a scroll, and a gold fan. And in the center of the room was a low black table surrounded by terra-cotta colored cushions. On the table were two onyx carp and settings for tea.

The one artifact in the room that jarred was a small safe placed in a c o r n e r—n o t e v e n a g o o d s a f e , mind you, but an inexpensive model of the sort that you might have expected to find in the back office of a Lincoln, Nebraska shoe store just after World War II—really cheap

l o o k i n g , a n d i n g r o s s c o n t r a s t t o t h e r e s t o f t h e r o o m .

"Mr. Takamichi asked me to sit down at the table whereupon we

sat down for salty green Japanese tea.

"Of course, I was wondering what his hidden agenda was in getting me up into his room. He talked pleasantly enough . . . how did I like my job? . . . what did I think of Japan? . . . s t o r i e s a b o u t h i s k i d s .

Nice boring stuff. And he told a few stories about time he had spent in New York in the 1950s as a stringer for the
Asahi
newspapers . . . about meeting Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote and Judy Holiday. And

after a half hour or so, we shifted to warmed sake, delivered, with the clapping of Mr. Takamichi's hands, by a midge of a servant in a drab brown kimono the color of shopping bag paper.

"And after the servant left, there was a pause. It was then that he a s k e d m e w h a t I t h o u g h t t h e m o s t v a l u a b l e
t h i n g
w a s t h a t I o w n e d .

"Well, well. The most valuable
thing
that I owned. Try and explain the concept of sophomoric minimalism to an octogenarian Japanese pub-lishing magnate. It's not easy. What thing could you possibly own of any value? I mean
really.
A beat up VW Bug? A stereo? I'd sooner have d i e d t h a n a d m i t t h a t t h e m o s t v a l u a b l e
t h i n g
I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored, for even further embarrassment, under a box of crumbling Christ-mas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I said, quite truthfully (and, it dawned on me, quite refreshingly), that I owned no
thing
of any value.

He then changed the discussion to the necessity of wealth being

transportable, being converted into paintings, gems, and precious metals and so forth (he'd been through wars and the depression and spoke with a u t h o r i t y ) , b u t I ' d p u s h e d s o m e r i g h t b u t t o n , s a i d t h e r i g h t t h i n g —p a s s e d a t e s t—a n d h i s t o n e o f v o i c e w a s p l e a s e d . T h e n , m a y b e t e n minutes later, he clapped his hands again, and the tiny servant in the noiseless brown kimono reappeared and was barked an instruction. This caused the servant to go to the corner and to roll the cheap little safe across the tatami mat floor next to where Mr. Takamichi sat cross-legged o n t h e c u s h i o n s .