Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Andy Palmer, approaching thirty, narrates from Palm Springs, California, where he lives in a rented bungalow and works as a bartender. He recalls flying alone at fifteen to Manitoba, Canada, to witness a total solar eclipse, an experience that left him with a lasting sense of "darkness and inevitability and fascination" (1). He shares a run-down courtyard of bungalows with his two closest friends: Dag Bellinghausen, a Canadian expatriate who also bartends at Larry's Bar, and Claire Baxter, a former garment buyer from Los Angeles who now works a department store cosmetics counter. All three have abandoned conventional careers to live cheaply in the desert, taking low-wage service jobs they call McJobs. Claire insists their purpose is to tell stories: "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them" (6).

Andy devises a storytelling ritual modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous meetings: no interruptions, no criticism. One afternoon, the three picnic at West Palm Springs Village, a failed 1950s housing development, and begin sharing their stories.

Dag recounts how he ended up in Palm Springs. He once worked in marketing in Toronto, trapped in a cramped cubicle he called the veal-fattening pen. After his boss screamed at him for anonymously calling a health inspector, Dag erupted with a tirade about generational inequity. In the cafeteria afterward, he cynically challenged a coworker to name one famous person whose fame did not involve money. A quiet colleague named Charlene answered Anne Frank, deflating him instantly. Dag walked out and never returned, descending into depression in Buffalo, New York, where he lived with his brother, drank gin alone, and developed agoraphobia. Eventually he drove to Palm Springs seeking a clean slate.

Andy recounts meeting Claire, who arrived on a Mother's Day weekend when some believed Nostradamus had predicted the apocalypse. Her superstitious father imported the Baxter clan to a Palm Springs resort where Andy was bartending. Claire, bored by her family's compulsive chatter about celebrity death, confided her theory that God assembles families by randomly selecting strangers from the phone book and wanted somewhere quiet. Andy suggested Palm Springs. That evening she sat at the edge of a mineral pool, apologizing to the setting sun for any pain humanity had caused it, and Andy knew they were friends for life.

Claire tells a bedtime story set in Texlahoma, a mythic everyplace the friends invented where the year is permanently 1974. An astronaut named Buck crash-lands and tells each of a family's three sisters that a woman's love can power his ship, but she will die from lack of oxygen after takeoff. The eldest and youngest refuse. The middle sister, Serena, an aspiring painter, agrees. Her love powers the engines, and she glimpses the earth against the heavens before dying. The remaining sisters acknowledge Buck's promise of revival was false, yet one admits she is jealous.

Andy shares a story from his time at a teen magazine in Tokyo. Japan named its disaffected young shin jin rui, meaning new human beings, while North America had no label for what Andy calls an X generation, purposefully hiding itself. An elderly executive named Mr. Takamichi revealed his most prized possession: a sexually explicit 1950s photograph of Marilyn Monroe he had taken as a newspaper stringer. Andy sensed Mr. Takamichi had mistaken this trophy for the deeper truth everyone carries inside, and panicked that he might make the same mistake. He fled and moved to Palm Springs. Dag closes the picnic with a second-person apocalypse story: As nuclear war destroys a supermarket, the narrator's best friend kisses them, saying, "There. I've always wanted to do that" (64).

Five days later, Dag disappears and returns looking wired, giving Claire a jar of Trinitite, green glass beads formed when the first nuclear test melted desert sand. When Andy asks if it is radioactive, Dag drops the jar, scattering beads everywhere. Claire declares her bungalow contaminated and moves into Andy's place. Tobias, Claire's romantic obsession, arrives from the East Coast, good-looking and employed in finance. Claire's mysterious friend Elvissa also visits. By the pool, the group shares their most cherished memories of earth. Claire chooses a snowflake melting in her eye at age twelve. Dag recalls his father telling him to smell spilled gasoline because it smelled "like the future" (94). Andy describes a rare morning when his entire family was kind to each other.

Elvissa tells the story of Curtis, a childhood love she rediscovered in Palm Springs, now scarred from mercenary fighting in Central America. He wept about losing his companion Arlo, then vanished during the night. Elvissa soon departs for a gardening job at a nunnery in Santa Barbara. Tobias also leaves.

Dag accidentally sets fire to an expensive Aston Martin convertible. Upset by losing both Tobias and Elvissa, Claire follows Tobias to New York despite her doubts. Andy flies to Portland, where Christmas with his parents is suffocating. On Christmas morning, he covers every surface with hundreds of lit candles, briefly stunning his family, but reflects that being middle class means "history will ignore you" (147). His younger brother Tyler, five years his junior, confesses he would give up his contented life "in a flash if someone had an even remotely plausible alternative" (150).

Claire calls from New York. At the Metropolitan Museum, Tobias admitted he only pursued her because he believed she possessed the courage to quit everyday existence, a quality he wanted but could never achieve. On Fifth Avenue, Claire found a Y-shaped branch she recognized as a dowsing rod, a folk instrument used to find underground water. She told Tobias that whoever she found doing the same thing in the desert would be the person she fell in love with. Later, she discovered evidence Tobias had been seeing Elvissa and left without confrontation, feeling released.

On New Year's Eve, Andy and Dag bartend a party hosted by Bunny Hollander, the owner of the burned Aston Martin. When police arrive looking for Dag, he flees to a cement pipe in a desert wash, where he kisses Andy on the mouth, echoing his own supermarket apocalypse story: "There. I've always wanted to do that" (168). He then returns to face the police.

On New Year's Day, Andy finds a note: Claire and Dag have reconciled and driven to San Felipe, Mexico, to buy the small hotel Dag has long dreamed about. A message from Dag reveals that the Skipper, a local hobo Dag and Andy ran into the night of the fire, was hit by a car; threatening letters in his pockets cleared Dag of suspicion. Andy empties his savings and drives toward Mexico.

Driving through Imperial County, Andy crests a hill and sees what appears to be a thermonuclear mushroom cloud on the horizon. He panics, but the source is mundane. Farmers are burning field stubble, producing a vast black column of smoke. The charred fields draw crowds of stopped cars. A van arrives carrying teenagers with intellectual disabilities, supervised by a patient, red-bearded man. They fall silent as a white egret circles the black field, then swoops over the crowd. The bird grazes Andy's scalp with its claw, drawing blood. A girl in a blue calico dress grabs Andy around the waist and gently pats his wound. Other teenagers pile on, hugging him with overwhelming, uncritical force. The chaperone moves to pull them away, then stops. Andy cannot explain that the pain does not matter, that this crush of love is unlike anything he has ever known. The man removes his hands from the teenagers and pretends to watch the white bird feeding in the black field.