Gen X Goes Searching for Itself
Gabriela Frank
I’ve slunk back into Tucson like a junkyard mutt wriggling beneath a chainlink fence. I shake dirt from my coat, sniff the alkaloid air, listen for the master’s steps. After eighteen years in the misty Pacific Northwest, the desert sky assaults my eyes with merciless blue, a glare that reduces me to squinting. I pull on my sunglasses and step towards the past, memories shimmering imminently out of reach.
More cars than pedestrians pass me on the dusty streets. I forgot: no one really walks in Arizona. Still, this city has changed, its energy hopeful—progressive, even. There’s an air-conditioned streetcar and new steel-and-glass buildings the locals call high-rises though they’re only twelve stories. For Tucson, they’re tall enough to unnerve the elderly residents who grumble, We left the city to move here; now, the city is following us.
The cafes I frequented in my college days are boarded shut. In between the darkened storefronts, bougie boutiques sell $250 T-shirts. A shop owner with blunt-cut bangs catches me fingering a tag. “Those are imported from Bulgaria,” she calls across the empty store.
I wonder how she stays in business, then I remember the tributaries of wealth that trickle through Tucson: retirees, professors, physicians, athletes, university administrators. The real estate developers I used to work for. The shop walls, plastered in bone-white cocciopesto, are decorated with air plants and ocotillo branches hung on silver wire—Southwest decor in the Southwest—not kitschy but minimalist and sleek. The general public has a better design sense today than in the seventies and eighties when I grew up. I think it’s Instagram. We’ve learned to compose, frame and share—to elevate—the everyday things we encounter, as if strangers care, but they do. A well-lit serving of flan topped with a lavender sprig on a turquoise plate can garner a hundred likes. #dessert #classic #fiestaware #nomnomnom
My childhood was knotted with desire for less lovely things. My mother’s chunky Beef Stroganoff made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. Gold corduroy jackets. Pink Jellies dingy with foot sweat. I remember working for weeks, vacuuming, dusting, picking up dog poop in our backyard, washing my mom’s Grand Prix and my dad’s TransAm to save up for the soundtrack to Annie. My mother kept the LP in plastic on the top shelf of her closet until I earned out the consignment.
Today, we wait for nothing. Case in point, I bought my plane ticket to Tucson the moment it hit me: in two months, I will turn forty-five, the age at which my mother died.
I’m staying in Armory Park, a neighborhood founded during the Presidio days as a home for the military. Saguaros shrug while I duck as Air Force jets thunder overhead. Armory Park edges on the barrio, an area I avoided in my twenties. Today, Armory Park is on trend. I've rented a room at The Downtown Clifton, a remodeled ‘40s drive-in motel with “an eclectic, electric western vibe.” What it really is: old cinderblock walls, high-thread-count sheets, a firm mattress, chipped bathroom tiles, pulp novels on the nightstand. Mom would have dug the orange linen curtains and matching lampshades. Very retro. Very on trend.
Sighs from down-on-their-luck former tenants echo in the weak, wheezy A/C, as does the stale specter of their Camels and Kools encapsulated in the walls, painted over a hundred times. Across the street is the Barrio Viejo. A COMING SOON sign for $400,000 condos stands in a weedy lot where people used to get knifed at night. A few blocks south is Five Points Market, recommended by the woman who checked me in. I plan to walk there for lunch, to walk everywhere, the way I did as a student when life lay ahead in bulk, curled up thick like new carpeting.
En route to Five Points, I pass a boutique called Bon whose hand-thrown pottery festoons a window of tastefully-styled modern wares. Browsing inside, I fall in love with a chambray apron, glass vessels for air plants, and a $350 organic cotton shirtdress handwoven in Hungary, according to the label.
“We just got those in,” the shopgirl calls.
Unlike my mother at forty-five, I can afford a $350 Hungarian shirtdress, but I hesitate. The idealized version of me looks like Audrey Hepburn in the voluminous architectural garment; the actual me will resemble Venus of Willendorf draped in a tarp. I don’t have time to exercise much these days. Work follows me home at night and on weekends, thanks to email and texts. I’ve joined the ranks of middle-aged women at my firm who fret over their lumpy bodies and shrug, What can you do? We have no energy for Zumba or yoga, let alone cooking or cleaning. We self-medicate with wine, cheese, and dinners out.
I want to believe the shirtdress will make me look chic, but I know it’ll become another regrettable outfit that hangs, unused, in my closet. To the shopgirl, I beam confidence (Your store is gorgeous) and escape to Five Points, snagging the last outdoor table with an umbrella. The temperature peeks above eighty; my weather app says it’s forty-two and pissing rain in Seattle. It feels like I’m getting away with something—my husband, Michael, is at home, miserable, in the damp gray—but when I invited him to come, he scoffed, “What’s there to do in Tucson?”
After nine years of living here, I had no good answer to this question. I left in 2001.
The server—tattooed arms, cropped jeggings, giant black-rimmed spectacles—leaves a menu that highlights homemade chive-and-cheddar biscuits, locally grown arugula, and huevos rancheros made with farm-fresh organic eggs. Dishes are handcrafted, ingredients artisanal and heirloom. When the manic pixie dream waitress delivers my hand-squeezed lemonade in a Ball jar with fresh thyme and a pink paper straw, my belly flutters with panic. At that moment, I know: my lunch will be pretty enough to post on Instagram.
Fuck, I think. Tucson has become like everywhere else.
Gone are Eegee’s sandwiches with shredded iceberg lettuce and mystery meat on a white-flour hoagie. Gone are greasy hangover breakfasts at The Cup and sweaty dancing days at Club Congress. Gone are air hockey games and hot dogs served in coffee filters at The Buffet Bar and Crockpot. Gone is the yearning to ditch this sleepy college town for Seattle’s art and culture scene, its flannel-clad philosophers and dirtbag clubs where Pearl Jam played live and Rainier Beer flowed on tap. I admit, I came back expecting to find Tucson untouched—quaint, boring, and behind the times, as I left it. I thought I could strip off my raincoat and stalk these sandy streets, tripping along with the tumbling tumbleweeds, as if eighteen years hadn’t passed and I wasn’t in middle-aged hell.
After lunch, I wander into Cartel, a hip coffee bar. The long tables are made from hot-rolled steel, the seats vintage-modern with polished chrome frames. Reclaimed barbershop chairs cluster in the corner near a turntable and a stack of records that will never be played. Their purpose is atmosphere, like the rotary dial phone and manual typewriter in the window display. It pisses me off, that the primitive equipment of my childhood has become the retail decor of Generations Y and Z. I wonder, angrily, where time went.
My first reaction to managing millennials at work was irritation. They expected frequent praise, quick promotions, and jobs that aligned with a higher sense of purpose. I was raised to believe that pointless toil yielded its own reward—namely, character—that good workers suffered silently and proved their mettle over time until someone noticed. At first, I played the curmudgeonly Gen Xer, begrudging the iGens the advantages of growing up with undying parental support and digital technology that yielded easy access to opportunities I would’ve killed for at their age. It took time to warm up to being their teacher, to be more gracious to them than some of my mentors were to me. The truth is, I envy what the iGens possess, meaning time. I can’t remember when someone last assured me, “Don’t worry, you have plenty of years ahead.” The transformation from miss to ma’am happened sooner than I was ready. Now, my bosses in their fifties and sixties treat me like a compadre because, scarily enough, I am.
Oh, how I miss the analog days of youth, patently opaque and frustrating. It’s embarrassing, really, that my generation relied on phone books and encyclopedias for “current” information. Privilege allowed me to think everyone in America grew up as I did: struggling, yes, but on an open playing field. I was raised to believe that sweat effort, eventually, conferred reward; I didn’t expect to be promoted to director after six months. As much as I fought my own headwinds of class—I was a first-gen college student on both sides—I was blind to the tailwind of identity as a cis-het white girl that nudged me forward.
The iGens grew up more worldly than my generation. I envy them, lined up at Ace Hotels the world over, the freedom of freelancing with their sleek laptops out and wireless earbuds in, sporting fashionable eyeglasses, watchman caps, and skinny jeans, sipping espresso and blogging til midnight. They work as lifestyle consultants and brand advocates. They glamp, they forage, they trek through rainforests and write articles about the life-changing magic of unplugging while documenting their #vanlife. It looks fun from a distance. When I took time to ask, some millennials confided that they don’t feel carefree despite photo and video evidence otherwise. They matured in a world with little separation between work and life, between social media and socialization. The sharing and promoting of one’s self-brand means the camera is always on. The freedom of the gig economy allows employers to evade paying full-time benefits without which it’s difficult for millennials to start a family or afford a home. They grew up lashed to praise for simply showing up yet, as young adults, they are untethered to security or solvency. I suppose I’m happy, then, to have grown up in an era when kids could be bored and forgotten, roam unmonitored, and do things in private for fun rather than likes.
Walking down Broadway, I admire colorful murals that adorn the low-rise brick buildings. In the nineties, these were cracked parking lots. Today, plant-lined bistros spill out onto sidewalks next to sun-drenched co-working spaces with natural wood floors and giant roll-up doors. Tucson pulses with hygge even though I’m standing in the American Southwest rather than fucking Scandinavia. This brave new world is globalist yet contextual, connected by democratizing technology that seeks to make every city the same—clean and soulless; bright, safe, and visually appealing.
The mercury edges above ninety. I rest in the shady courtyard behind historic Hotel Congress and order a club soda, draining the glass in three sips. I request another. The waitress brings me a lime wedge with the next. I sip and wade in memories of Nick, a boy I crushed on for years. In the nineties, our tight-knit circle of friends saw how much Nick and I wanted to fuck each other—that is, except my husband, who I met at twenty-one and married at twenty-five. I wanted it both ways, the safety net of settling down with a nice guy and the bad-boy thrill my young heart craved on the side. I pushed the line of flirting with Nick as far as I could without breaking, believing intimacy and passion were mutually exclusive.
At Hotel Congress, I’m relieved to find familiar sights: the neon cowgirl sculpture next to the outdoor stage, the open-air bar with the same plastic chairs that stick to my thighs. On starry summer nights, Nick and I got drunk in this courtyard waiting for our favorite bands to play. In winter, we froze our asses off standing in line for the tiny dance club, Club Congress—crowded, sweltering, dark. Inside, the DJ spun Depeche Mode, The Cure, INXS, Nine Inch Nails. Beneath the spinning disco ball I soaked in the energy of the capacity crowd, my head dizzy from cheap well liquor, my sex throbbing between my thighs. When my husband waded off the dance floor to buy another round of whiskey-Cokes, I threw myself against Nick’s sweaty chest, the sonorous bass thudding in my ribs, a lick of salt from his neck on my tongue. There was no Instagram, no Twitter, no Facebook to give us away. Body to body, deafened by music, I drank and danced until I felt free.
I stare into these sand-blasted transgressions, sensing the edges of a midlife crisis.
I’m stuck in middle management, sleepless and twenty pounds heavier than when I took my current job. These days, no one hears me speak. Male colleagues repeat my ideas and get credit, which I can’t point out without being labeled argumentative. I feel ignored and misunderstood, frustrated enough to pummel someone, knowing I can’t act out without jeopardizing my career. Middle age is like being a teenager again: I don’t control much nor do I possess language to describe my anger—and, if I did, my complaints would sound petty.
Now on my second marriage and second house, my career is faltering and my flabby, aching body suffers from degenerative injuries. Most of my friends are busy with babies, a few quite recently since forty-five is the common cutoff for fertility clinics. Life hasn’t turned out as I imagined, yet I have too much invested to walk away. I am trapped in a strangely comfortable cage of my own making. Part of me likes the illusion of permanence—the predictable drudgery at work, a house that always needs fixing, a husband I yearn to spend more time with, friends I love yet rarely see—I could dump everything and run, but where would I go? What would I do?
My parents said I could make anything happen if I worked hard enough. Thus went the plot of movies I loved: Back to the Future, The Secret of My Success. I grew up believing the worthy trophies were ones just out of reach. I believed power and possessions would ground my self-worth, that wealth would cement my self-confidence and quell my fear of never being good enough. Acquisition as healing was the anthem of my generation—the latch-key kids, the Ferris Buellers, the Brantley Fosters—who grew up being urged to win at all costs. The problem was, we also believed in rules for, without a ceiling to break, how would we know which way was up? Gen X became the gatekeepers we despised because we couldn’t imagine a world without them. In our rebellion against Boomer authority, we learned to excel in everything except compassion, especially for ourselves. My generation is facing its obsolescence earlier than my parents’ did, the world having dismissed the uselessness of our slacker cynicism. When I said I missed the opaque, frustrating experience of childhood, what I mean is, I long for a time when winning seemed possible, when the bullheadedness of youth blinded me to its complications, when the burdensome flaws of third-wave feminism hadn’t yet dawned.
In middle age, I know the stakes of taking chances, having started over a couple times, including a divorce in my early thirties. The prospect of beginning again in my fifties or sixties isn’t freeing, it’s scary. With age, everything slows. That’s how habits set, how experience makes familiar misery more attractive than the illusory freedom of escape.
I don’t want to be that middle-aged cliche.
I leave a tip for the server and scamper past clusters of men camped on cardboard along Congress Avenue. I take a right beneath the shady underpass where windswept piles of trash collect in corners. I take another right on weedy Ninth Street, past a crumbling stucco bunker with KEEP OUT signs. I feel light-headed; my heart throbs from the heat. Step by step, The Buffet Bar and Crockpot’s sign—a buffalo—comes into view.
The tan brick facade is as weathered and faded as I remember it. Four big-bellied bikers step out front to smoke. The guy with the girthiest beer gut beneath his black leather vest hawks a loogie at my feet. I pretend not to notice, tiptoe through the carpet of broken glass, and pull open the ancient, gouged door. Me entering The Buffet in capris and a cardigan is the equivalent of a soccer mom downing a cold forty in her minivan at noon. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, for my ears to identify Tom Petty twanging on the jukebox. I scamper to a high-backed stool at the knuckle of the bar where a crumpled PBR lays, defeated, on the counter. “This seat taken?” I ask the grizzled geezer to my right.
I aim for casual. It comes out breathless.
He shrugs.
“Thanks,” I say, sliding into the cracked red seat.
On the wall hangs the taxidermied buffalo head with yellow sunglasses that we used to toss our Wonderbras over. A faded U of A “Bear Down” flag is tacked to the ceiling. Neon signs for Maker’s Mark and Blue Moon glow in the dim, dusty air. I try to read the graffiti carved and written on every surface of the wooden bar, some of which might still be mine. Two decades ago, I downed my first shot here. Got so drunk one night I danced on top of the bar until the bartender yelled at me to climb down or she’d break me in two. I used to know all the bartenders by name, but I don’t recognize the one on duty. Thick-waisted, hair pulled into a butt-skimming braid, she’s got meaty triceps and tattooed sleeves.
“Something to drink, hon?” she squawks.
“I’ll have a Pacifico. And a club soda. Please.”
I could keep drinking and never stop being thirsty.
She leans into the reach-in, grabs a cold beer with her right hand, smashes a lime into the neck while pouring club soda with her left. She slings both in front of me in under a minute. I swallow a mouthful of beer pitted with lime, noting the bartender’s space is cramped yet efficient mise en place: soda cans and beer bottles stacked by brand; platoons of clean pint glasses, napkins, coffee filters; red straws sorted into large, medium, swizzle. A handwritten sign advertises $2 Jell-O shots (orange, pineapple, Mexican candy, cucumber lime). Above the bar, four security camera feeds display the back, front, and sides of the building.
The message: YOU ARE BEING WATCHED.
I came to the University of Arizona in 1992 to study molecular and cellular biology. My plan was to graduate, attend medical school, and become a wealthy surgeon, a path I was socially and intellectually unprepared to navigate. I soldiered on in pre-med until senior year when I changed my major to English. I had always wanted to be a writer despite my parents’ admonitions that writers didn’t make any money. Since I was paying for my own education, I figured I didn’t have to do what my parents said.
The joke was on me: after graduation, I couldn’t even find a low-paying writer job. I took what I could get—receptionist work at $21,000 a year—which barely covered rent, utilities, and high-interest student loans. The rest of my life ran on credit. It wasn’t my dream, but I dug in and worked hard, thinking, at some point, writing would come. One job progressed to another, never as a writer, but consistently upwards in something called the business world. It took until age forty to pay off what became $100,000 of loans and debt.
While I enjoy a more comfortable life than my folks did at my age, I’ve amassed decades of experience not doing what I love. Sitting at The Buffet, it sinks in: forty-five is the Rubicon between the life my parents ushered me towards and a life I might choose for myself. My senior year of college on repeat. That’s why I’ve come back: to ponder my next step, because Tucson represents a time before—before I began working in an office, before email, before cell phones became sleek slabs of glass surgically attached to us—when AOL was social media and you had to pay for dial-up. When I sat arm-to-arm at this bar with Nick, dreaming of possibility: I would become a novelist, he a graphic designer.
I’m tempted to snap photos of The Buffet for him to show it’s exactly as we left it, but that would break the spell. It’s the faultiness of memory, its grainy dissolution, that has suspended both Tucson and Nick in a warm halo of my affection. I know I’ve romanticized them both, thinking of them better than they were, and that’s okay. I want neither to become perfectly lit ghosts on my phone.
I sip my beer, imagining the iGens working nearby in airy cafes and co-working spaces and wonder: is there room for a dinosaur like me at their live-edge communal table, the one with succulents in bell jars and kombucha on tap? The truth is, I hope it’s not too late to make something worthwhile of my life, as cringingly optimistic as that sounds.
A pony-tailed guy in a Panama hat feeds a dollar into the jukebox. It takes three times before the bill’s sucked in. He punches black buttons, clunk-clunk-clunk, and “Old Time Rock and Roll” blares on the speakers. The hardcores in the corner let out a collective whoop at the opening piano riff, which takes me back, too. I feel Nick’s hands wrapped around my much-skinnier waist, pulling me close. How delicious, to be so in love I felt dizzy. I realize, leaving Tucson without consummating our infatuation wasn’t a missed opportunity but a gift: an untried, unspoiled flame whose amber-hued possibilities, long past, retain a sense of promise.
The truth is, my memories contain a false bottom.
In 1992, I came to Tucson in crisis. My mother had died of brain cancer when I was sixteen. In the four years prior to her death, she endured invasive medical treatments and surgery for metastatic breast cancer—chemotherapy, radiation, radical mastectomy. Her death marooned me in an abusive home where she had been the buffer between my father and me. After she died, things got worse, but I held on until I turned eighteen. I moved out two days after while Dad was at work, taking what I could in a few suitcases and boxes. Despite my fear that he’d hurt me or my grandmother, who helped me escape, I didn’t want him to worry when he came home and discovered me gone. I left a note. In response to my betrayal, as he called it in an ugly message on his mother’s answering machine, he disowned me.
We were dead to each other.
Though I was accepted by other colleges, I couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition on my own. I enrolled at U of A, thanks to my grandmother, who dipped into her savings to pay $1,000 for my fall semester. I was alone and terrified of the future. My home life looked vastly different from that of my peers whose parents moved them into their dorm rooms, who phoned each week and sent care packages, who offered them a place to sleep and do laundry over the holidays.
I worried constantly about how I would survive. I maxed out my student loans and got an on-campus job to cover tuition, shelter, and food. That’s where my upbringing paid off. I hunkered down and took pride in every mile I belly-crawled, celebrating what the machine of late capitalism made of me: I was a high-strung, self-centered, Type-A cynic elbowing her way up the ladder of success. The problem was, I didn’t know what success meant. I only knew my miserable working-class parents suffered from brittle finances and few choices, so I pursued a different life and expected happiness.
Here, Nick and I understood each other completely. His father left when he was a kid. His five siblings and mother turned to Nick, the responsible middle child, for steadiness. Their dependence made him resilient in a way my mother’s death—her unwitting abandonment of me—cultured my mettle. Because Nick grew up younger than most, he had the capacity to see me in a way others didn’t. This made our attraction tantalizing and risky, something to keep at a distance. My first husband, who came from a well-off, educated, loving family, didn’t have a clue. He could never know what I went though. With him, I could safely bury that part of myself where he’d never look. I spent our seven-year marriage passively punishing him for his lack of understanding, though what ached was actually a deficiency in me. In visiting Tucson, I came to collect that girl I shoved, shuddering, into a dark closet, so we could both move on.
I’ve made my adult life predictable by building fortresses of obligation—marriage, work, routine. I’ve defended myself against loss with skepticism and distance, an outlook I’ve long blamed my parents for, yet the wounds I need to heal I’ve delivered to myself. A year from now, when I finally quit the job I dread, when panic attacks and arrhythmia outweigh financial rewards, when I leave a workplace whose tricky emotional dynamics and impossibly high standards eerily resemble my childhood, I will reflect on this moment at The Buffet and know it was the turning of the tide.
Stepping away from harm isn’t the same as giving up, though I’ve confused the two most of my life. When my mother pushed me towards academic achievement and a white-collar career, she did so not for the sake of my acquiring wealth but what wealth afforded: agency. When I was three, she left my father, but found she couldn’t make it financially, so she—we—went back. It’s hard to admit I’ve been angry at her this whole time for not being strong enough to divorce him, knowing she suffered an excruciating, untimely, and unfair death. In failing to follow my dream of becoming a writer—a shortcoming whose set-up I’ve held her responsible for—I wasn’t selling out, as my generation called it, I was surviving the best I could.
Like my mother did.
No one can lock in youth or security. The essence of the human condition is fluctuation and change. Alternate paths—the might-have-beens—aren’t cure-alls and rarely does a single decision determine or damn an entire lifetime. Instead, it’s the accumulation of choices and small details that, step by step, bend a path toward its destination. Becoming a writer would’ve still involved trade-offs, and a writing career wouldn’t have magically solved everything.
My existence is an end-cap of miners, mechanics, and farmers engaged in bodily labor, of immigrant Jews and Italians who relinquished language, tradition, and culture to “work hard” in America so their progeny could one day labor in the mind. I inherited the responsibility to make this future happen, taking class-rising as my quest without grasping the cost of the striving my ancestors and I committed. Our lifetimes of physical and mental busy-ness yielded little opportunity to interrogate the value or impact of our work—who actually benefitted from it and who we harmed in the process. Distraction is the point, the intentional design of capitalism, the cage we can’t see how to leave.
In middle age, unsettling tendrils begin to unfurl. Hardness isn’t mettle. Power isn’t strength. Mindless toil isn’t a test of worth. Tenderness isn’t weakness but, in fact, a sign of resilience. Growing up, I assumed Everyman meant everyone, that the “universal” role model—the white, cis-het male—was my aim, too, because equality meant women were as good as men, right? The potency of the midlife fracture resides in the pivot. Mine has proven I cannot meet this standard or become that thing. More importantly, I don’t want to, and not-wanting-to isn’t failure. It’s shown me that dominance isn’t universality but oppression, which, by my own work I’ve upheld. At midlife, we face a choice: double-down on beliefs that have both harmed and helped us, that have made us who we are, or consider other options. For me, it’s becoming less American, if citizenship is defined by possessions, titles, and crowns. I find myself longing for what used to scare me: connections, complexity, bands of gray. The life I’m drawn to asks and seeks more than tells or knows. American capitalism insists there’s no room for this because it’s harder to describe or measure, quantify or count. Such an existence is easier to dismiss because it isn’t about numbers or control but depth and space, not sentimentality but a means of expressing—unapologetically—the stunning capacity of the human heart in relationship with nature and peoples of the world.
I knock back the last warm mouthful of beer and call it good.
When I push open the door of The Buffet, the old men playing pool groan and shrink back, raising wrinkled hands against a shard of late afternoon sunlight. One grumbles, “Tonta guera,” and instead of feeling ashamed or enraged, I laugh.
He’s right. I have, indeed, been stupid in countless ways.
Gabriela Denise Frank is a Pacific Northwest writer, editor, and creative writing instructor whose formative years were spent in the Southwest. Her essays and short fiction have been published in True Story, HAD, Hunger Mountain, Tahoma Literary Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the author of Pity She Didn’t Stay ’Til the End (Bottlecap Press). www.gabrieladenisefrank.com