The first time I played with the idea of killing myself was when I was fifteen. The tall ships were sailing into New York Harbor to celebrate the Nation’s Bicentennial, Truman Capote and Margaret Trudeau were hanging out at Studio 54 and I was staring into the bathroom mirror with a handful of my mother’s Darvons.It was a lame attempt really. I knew that all I had to do was swallow twenty or thirty of them and go back into my room and by morning I would have no more problems but I, of course, didn’t, sparing my mother the ordeal of finding my dead body the next day and, instead, went on to have a happier life than I ever could have imagined back in those hopeless days.
I was sayin’ let me out of here before I was
even born—it’s such a gamble when you get a face
It’s facinatin’ to observe what the mirror does
But when I dine it’s for the wall that I set a place
I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time.*
I was born in 1961. I don’t remember where I was when Kennedy was shot because I was two. I was three when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, I was four when LBJ escalated the Vietnam War and I was five when my parents got divorced. I was not a Baby Boomer but I drifted in the wake of their dashed hopes. No, my age group didn’t have the self-important idealism of the Boomers or , for that matter, the cynical sense of entitlement that I’ve seen with Generation X. Our particular demographic of people born in the 1960’s had something else. We had ennui. The only emotion we really respected was boredom because everything around us told us that we got to the show too late. The cities were decimated, the suburbs were stagnated and the future seemed vastly overrated. We were the little brothers and sisters picking through the rubble of our older siblings’ blowout the night before, smoking roaches out of the ashtrays and swigging potent mouthfuls of whatever was left in those sheepskin canteens. It’s a lousy claim to fame but I believe that we were, by far, the most self-destructive age group. They can’t take that away from us. We took the whole entire zeitgeist of the sixties and distilled it down to three infamous elements: sex, drugs and rock and roll.
The year after the Bicentennial of our discontent, the lingering elements of the Beat Generation’s confessional poetry and mid-sixties psychedelic garage rock coalesced into what named itself Punk. It was a complete do-it-yourself cultural movement of music, art, poetry, clothes and attitude. It was short-lived and financially unsuccessful but it will probably be remembered for a long time to come, finally considered both a byproduct and an equal of the Impressionists, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Like all things of inspiration, it was not for everyone. It was more like a big rock thrown into a placid body of water. Really only meant for the moment but with aftereffects rippling out wider and wider. I love the look on the face of tongue-pierced 20-somethings when they see footage of vintage NY punks with safety pins jammed through their cheeks. At least punks knew that everything came from somewhere else. They also knew that not only does nothing last forever, it doesn’t last for very long at all. You can see the same feeling of surrender today in the faces of people who came of age in the nineties. Idealistic techies who once foresaw a utopian global village of complete communication and unlimited growth through the promise of shared information now find themselves occupied with the more mundane (but noble) matter of simple survival.
To hold the TV to my lips, the air so packed with cash
Then carry it up a flight of stairs and drop it in the vacant lot
To lose my train of thought and fall into your arms’ tracks
And watch beneath the eyelids every passing dot
I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time.*
The Blank Generation was a song from 1977, written and performed by Richard Hell ( a.k.a. Richard Meyers) a genuine NYC poet and pivotal punk player with Television, The Heartbreakers and his own band, The Voidoids, during that high-watermark year for this new music. At the emotionally shaky age of sixteen, I knew that, while I had missed the Boomers’ Summer Of Love, I was just in time for Punk’s Summer Of Irony. Calling us the Blank Generation made perfect sense to me then and still does to this day. As we enter middle age you can still see traces of the shell-shocked children of divorce, drugs, and disillusionment in our eyes if we don’t know you’re looking. With careers, spouses and, sometimes even, children of our own, we lurch toward a preordained future that we never believed in from the start. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not all doom, gloom and alienation (although they always make us smile.) Many of us have gone on to become happy, even successful, forty year olds. Sure we have our allotment of stunted adolescents but who doesn’t. The thing that we all have in common as one mini-generation… the one thing that no one on the planet except us understands is… WE WERE THE ONE’S STANDING THERE WHEN IT ALL BLEW UP. Family, Government, Religion, Community… everything that kept order in people’s lives for centuries, turned to dust right before our young eyes just as we were to come of age. For a brief moment (1967 to 1970, it seemed like we were going to be truly blessed. We were going to inherit a brave new world of peace and love. We were to be the first beneficiaries of the revolution. But you know the story. The Boomers were rendered powerless by that new opiate of the people: MasterCard and, before they knew what hit them, they were getting back to the garden supply store to pick up some more Ortho Weed B-Gone. So as the 60’s revolutionaries quickly capitulated to a life of loose-fit jeans and cable TV, we were left to make some sense of the rubble. And so we became the first generation of diminished returns. More tough-skinned and cynical than the generations before us and less than the ones to follow.
Triangles were fallin’ at the window as the doctor cursed
He was a cartoon long forsaken by the public eye
The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first
The doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, “God’s consolation prize!”
I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time.*
* Blank Generation (R. Hell, 1976) appears on Sire/Warners: Blank Generation cd, 1990)