Life: Part 1
LIFE: A Novel of the Baby Boom
by
Nowick Gray
Prologue
You were so anxious to leave your comfortable womb, your nameless void. But did you really think this thing through?
It seemed so easy, I know.
You began with a point. Out of nothing, non-being, the potential became the real. It happens. We all come from there.
(And return: some, like I, all too quickly. Three days of hospital half-life, one lung stuck shut and the other feebly flapping back into darkness like a black stork on one wing in the night . . .) But this story I'm about to begin is not mine, big bro'; it's yours.
Precious life in the offing . . . and you were so impatient! Eight months of preparation seemed perfectly sufficient. There was a slight hitch, in that you'd been promised to your sister for her seventh birthday, three weeks hence. But you had no intention of being somebody's doll-fantasy. And you'd had your fill already of second-hand nicotine and alcohol streaming through your veins -
So you kicked and squirmed and broke the waters. Something had to give. You made your entrance.
Blinding light, cold air, rough hands pulling . . . for a moment there is shock, fear, even, might I say, indignant anger.
You watch in breathless wonder as the cord is cut from the center of your being. Snip! - just like that. Then - Wham! comes the doctor's hand on your little red bottom. Wham! Wham!
You screamed - our mother would tell you much later - "like the dickens." They calmed you down with a little suckie, your first and only.
Then, of course, comes the stinging silver in the eyes, that's okay you'll thank us later; a slice off your penis you're too young to feel anyway; aw shut up kid we'll have a bottle ready for you in a jiffy. Now - say bye to Mom.
And don't expect no more spongy breast, either: it's off the to incubator for you, the plastic coffin for rude little brats who need to learn how to wait their turn. You're on your own now, boy. The closed loop broken, now be prepared to learn the principles of autonomous throughput: pulsing lips, the anal sphincter, your own thoughts to kill.
I'll say this for you: at least you knew your rights to complain, and exercised them to the hilt. But rest easy, now, awhile.
Truly, brother, for you it will all be worth it in the end.
One word of advice: get used to moving on.
Soon you'll stand with a red dog beside a For Sale sign on another surrendered territory, the printed oilcloth in kitchen nook of chocolate cake already a memory. You'll spend, remember, in another house somewhere, a repeatable number of dreamy afternoons watching the Indian in the oil painting on your bedroom wall turn into something else.
Be forewarned: one day, in dusty afternoons to come, you'll fly to star-dreams in old attic boxes, your visored space helmet hiding broken front teeth; or you'll fall unconscious with a dropped pass at a pine tree trunk, your father standing by helpless.
See, if you count chickens with huskies around, you'll just have to do it over again. And if Esso or Tenneco gives the word, you'll have to learn the dialect of Mamaroneck or Atlanta; but that's no problem, your restless cells know the routine.
Just go with the flow, baby. There is always, in your heart of hearts, a place called home.
By the time you were thirty-six you would still make rare visits back home. But your mother would muse, to your new wife, "Goodness, sometimes I have to wonder, is this really my child? Where did this guy come from, anyway?"
The question has two answers. One says, "My end point was contained in my starting point: the germ in the seed. Where I am now is where I was headed all along." This is the voice of predestination, calling free will an illusion. Always pushing from behind is the pattern taken till now, giving direction forward from its deep-worn ruts. The program continues to play itself out. From now, with my sights set forward, I might think I can choose where to go and what to do. But at some later end point, I will look back saying, "How naive. It could only have happened in this way."
"Mere rationalization," argues the second voice. "Now look at the facts. Granted, given a particular genetic heritage, along with your parents' inclinations toward how you should turn out, a plausible scenario might be drawn up for how your life will develop. But along the way you'll have your own ideas. You'll rebel. And you'll turn the thing askew, in directions totally unforeseen."
There is more than a bipolar dynamic at work here. It's not as simple as pitting a deterministic fate against a whimsical free will. Free will can also be the administrator of order and routine; and fate can throw the random wrench in the works.
Ultimately free will and my fate are partners, complementing each other. Each presents aspects of fixity, and each has qualities of change. Together they move in a fractal dance. There is a set rhythm to follow; and on any given beat, the feet can say something new.
But I am not out to prove this or that theory: only to show such a life as you have lived, striving toward utopia. It promised to be a long, questing journey, given the 1950 hospital America you chose to be born to.
Your generation: demographers say it spreads from '46 to '64, but you know that's stretching it. You had to be a teenager during the sixties to ride the real action - the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream and Jimi Hendrix. Elvis was just the prototype, the seventies (Elton who?) a washout . . .
But wait - we're getting ahead of ourselves again. We have to start at square one: 1950. Even that's a little premature, because it's relevant to mention that our father fought in World War Two, and was stationed in Korea when you were an infant. Both of our parents spent their teen years in the Depression. By the half-century mark things were looking up, and you were ready to give life a go.
Where you came from, in the era you came of age, it was like this:
Tacky rowhouses block upon block crawl the hills of the bright morning backyard clothes-on-the-line city, little dogs running and air conditioners humming, smokestacks fuming over the steelyards, traffic winding its way over the boulevards, faces locked in step with their next appointments past the glassy storefronts stocked with synthetic goods of all description. By virtue of awe-inspiring statistical projection and the sheer engineering sophistication of it all stretching into the next millenium, everyone but the odd beatnik agrees maybe this is the Millenium foretold as the Great Society of the New Jerusalem of the City of God made flesh, the sun at its zenith in the bright blue sky of this unparalleled epoch of progress and imperial preeminence, rival business nations still groveling in the last war's rubble while American minds are open to receiving signals from a cute new transistorized technology, all subject to figuring out and duplicating and inspiring new, ever more complex schemes; while you meanwhile spiritually, so to speak, goes churning in your traces like the whirling dynamos of the factories forever, with visions of unlimited future power for all your gratifications made possible through the mind-made miracles of mathematical physics, all this better living generated, as the ad-man says, "through chemistry."
You ride that wave because it brought you here to earth; but as it subsides a half-century later you wonder what new, dark shore this is, where you've been deposited, like so much storm-wrack. What went wrong?
You readjust your set.
Now what's all this fuss in the streets, you ask, where do all those black faces come from and what do they want? Something's burning . . . did somebody do something wrong? Surely the Government . . . but have they come to the limit of their abilities to rectify, having once or once too many times welched on a promise or a debt? It doesn't quite add up, since you've been (and hasn't everyone been) taught (by them) to do the best you can because that's your purpose on earth?
In the ultrahigh frequency band, miniature angels are trembling with anticipation, afraid and yet excited as they're about to explode into focus.
...My Generation: A Novel within a Novel
...more Prefaces and Introductions (without end)...
