Generation X Read Free Page A

own
    life will follow at a later
    d a t e ) , a n d I ' v e s e e n t h e
    process of onedownman-ship in action—and
    been angry at not having
    sordid enough tales of
    debauchery of my own to
    share. 'Never be afraid
    to cough up a bit of
    d i s e a s e d l u n g f o r t h e s p e c -t a t o r s , " s a i d a m a n w h o sat next to me at a meeting once, a man with skin like a half-c o o k e d pie crust and who had five grown children who would no longer return his phone calls: "How are people ever going to help themselves if they can't grab onto a fragment of your own horror? People want that little fragment, they need it. That little piece of lung makes their own fragments less scary." I'm still looking for a description of storytelling as vital as this. Thus inspired by my meetings of the Alcoholics Anonymous
    organization, I instigated a policy of storytelling in my own life, a policy

    of "bedtime stories," which Dag, Claire, and I share among ourselves. It's simple: we come up with stories and we tell them to each other. The only rule is that we're not allowed to interrupt, just like in AA, and at the end we're not allowed to criticize. This noncritical atmosphere works for us because the three of us are so tight assed about revealing our
    emotions. A clause like this was the only way we could feel secure with each other.
    Claire and Dag took to the game like ducklings to a stream.
    "I firmly believe," Dag once said at the beginning, months ago,
    "that everybody on earth has a deep, dark secret that they'll never tell another soul as long as they live. Their wife, their husband, their lover, or their priest. Never.
    "I have my secret. You have yours. Yes, you do—I can see you
    smiling. You're thinking about your secret right now. Come on: spill it out. What is it? Diddle your sister? Circle jerk? Eat your poo to check the taste? Go with a stranger and you'd go with more? Betray a friend?
    Just tell me. You may be able to help me and not even know it."

    Anyhow, today we're going to be telling bedtime stories on our picnic, and on Indian Avenue we're just about to turn off onto the Interstate 10
    freeway to head west, riding in the clapped-out ancient red Saab, with Dag at the wheel, informing us that passengers do not really "ride" in his little red car so much as they "motor": "We are motoring off to our picnic in hell."
    Hell is the town of West Palm Springs Village—a bleached and
    defoliated Flintstones color cartoon of a failed housing development from the 1950s. The town lies on a chokingly hot hill a few miles up the valley, and it overlooks the shimmering aluminum necklace of Interstate 10, whose double strands stretch from San Bernardino in the west, out t o B l y t h e a n d P h o e n i x i n t h e e a s t .
    I n a n e r a w h e n n e a r l y a l l r e a l e s t a t e i s c o v e t e d a n d d e v e l o p e d , West Palm Springs Village is a true rarity: a modern ruin and almost deserted save for a few hearty souls in Airstream trailers and mobile homes, who give us a cautious eye upon our arrival through the town's

    welcoming sentry—an abandoned Texaco gasoline station surrounded
    by a chain link fence, and lines of dead and blackened Washingtonia palms that seem to have been agent-oranged. The mood is vaguely
    reminiscent of a Vietnam War movie set.
    "You get the impression," says Dag as we drive past the gas station at hearse speed, "that back in, say, 1958, Buddy Hackett, Joey Bishop, and a bunch of Vegas entertainers all banded together to make a bundle o n t h i s p l a c e , b u t a k e y i n v e s t o r s p l i t t o w n a n d t h e w h o l e p l a c e j u s t died."

    •
    But again, the village is not entirely dead. A few people do live
    there, and these few troopers have a splendid view of the windmill ranch down below them that borders the highway—tens of thousands of turbo blades set on poles and aimed at Mount San Gorgonio, one of the windiest places in America. Conceived of as a tax