Black Holes: an X

generation subgroup best known for their possession of almost entirely black wardrobes.

BLACK DENS: Where Black Holes live; often unheated warehouses with Day-Glo spray painting, mutilated mannequins, Elvis references, dozens of overflowing ashtrays, broken mirror sculptures, and Velvet Underground music playing in background.

STRANGELOVE REPRODUCTION: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

SQUIRES: The most common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their frantic attempts to recreate a semblance of Eisenhower-era plenitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job life-styles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and knickknacks.

drinks to excess, blows his salary on coke, how he's losing his looks almost daily, and how he will confide to Dave, Tyler, and me how he cheats on his wife, Lisa, whom he addresses in an Elmer Fudd cartoon voice in public. Evan won't eat vegetables, either, and we're all con­vinced that one day his heart is simply going to explode. I mean, go completely kablooey inside his chest. He doesn't care.

Oh, Mr. Leonard, how did we all end up so messy? We're looking hard for that fromage you were holding—we really are—but we're just not seeing it any more. Send us a clue, please.

Two days before Christmas, Palm Springs Airport is crammed with cranberry-skinned tourists and geeky scalped marines all heading home for their annual doses of slammed doors, righteously abandoned meals, and the traditional family psychodramas. Claire is crabbily chain­smoking while waiting for her flight to New York; I'm waiting for my flight to Portland. Dag is affecting an ersatz bonhomie; he doesn't want us to know how lonely he'll be for the week we're away. Even the MacArthurs are heading up to Calgary for the holidays.

Claire's crabbiness is a defense mechanism: "I know you guys think I'm an obsequious doormat for following Tobias to New York. Stop looking at me like that."

"Actually, Claire, I'm just reading the paper," I say. "Well you want to stare at me. I can tell."

Why bother telling her she's only being paranoid? Since Tobias left that day, Claire has had only the most cursory of telephone conversations with him. She chirped away, making all sort of plans. Tobias merely listened in at the other end like a restaurant patron being lengthily informed of the day's specials—mahimahi, flounder, swordfish—all of which he knew right from the start he didn't want.

So here we sit in the outdoor lounge area waiting for our buses with wings. My plane leaves first, and before I leave to cross the tarmac, Dag tells me to try not to burn down the house.

*****

As mentioned before, my parents, "Frank 'n' Louise," have turned the house into a museum of fifteen years ago—the last year they ever bought new furniture and the year the Family Photo was taken. Since that time, most of their energies have been channeled into staving off evidence of time's passing.

Okay, obviously a few small tokens of cultural progression have been allowed entry into the house—small tokens such as bulk and generic grocery shopping, boxy ugly evidence of which clutters up the kitchen, evidence in which they see no embarrassment. (I know it's a lapse in taste, pudding, but it saves so much money.")

There are also a few new items of technology in the house, mostly brought in on Tyler's insistence: a microwave oven, a VCR, and a telephone answering machine. In regard to this, I notice that my parents, technophobes both, will speak into the phone answering machine with all the hesitancy of a Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish making a gramophone re­cording for a time capsule.

"Mom, why didn't you and Dad just go to Maui this year and give up on Christmas. Tyler and I are depressed already."

"Maybe next year, dear, when your father and I are a bit more flush. You know what prices are like...."

"You say that every year. I wish you guys would stop coupon clipping. Pretending you're poor."

"Indulge us, Pumpkin. We enjoy playing hovel." We're pulling out of the airport in Portland and reentering the familiar drizzling greenscape of Portland. Already, after ten minutes, any spiritual or psychic progress I may have made in the absence of my family, has vanished or been invalidated.

"So, is that the way you're cutting your hair now, dear?" I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.

"So," I say, "It really is just me and Tyler at home this year?" "Seems that way. But I think Dee might come up from Port Arthur. She'll be in her old bedroom soon enough. I can see the signs."

POVERTY LURKS:

Financial paranoia instilled in offspring by depression-era parents.

PULL-THE-PLUG, SLICE THE PIE: A fantasy in which an offspring mentally tallies up the net worth of his parents.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23