The Nineties

Some of us long for the hypocrisy again. — Arundhati Roy

We gathered in mall atriums, smudged our gum under benches. Around us, our leaders unleashed markets yearning to breathe free. I skulked outside the candle store. I wanted a boyfriend with long, straight hair like a girl, wanted punk rock and to be called feminist, not Dr. Hill’s testimony mocked by macho senators, but three chords and copyshop zines. Our history books

ended at D-Day and we made up the rest, mourned animals whose stuffed replicas cluttered our bedrooms. Some believed in the necessity of a planet, others practiced easy detachment. Our problems were one-note, easily reckoned, the poetry of CFCs and acid rain and the opaque beige skyline of L.A. We caught national abuses on video, like granular tape of police baton-beating a Black man

prone on the ground, evidence I saw and didn’t see every day. On Wall Street, extremists blasted a hole at the base of our tallest shrines, smoke twisted skyward and the tag “radical Islamic terrorists” wormed into our minds like advertising. Oh, we’d hear it again. By pen stroke our nation joined the largest free market in the world. We couldn’t see sweatshops, didn’t even try, as retail spaces filled

with bright, cheap objects. Untraveled outside our great white middle, I was impressed by unlimited salad and breadsticks. I babysat kids who raised leaden soldiers to their mouths, as our parents attended their last union meetings. At the doctor, insurance paid. Good teeth, good shoes, good psych drugs, the last mild summer before wildfire. We watched as cynics stripped the welfare state, like pulling down

the walls of someone else’s house to rip out the fixtures as they tried to live inside. I spent my grandma’s social security on compact discs and retro housewife dresses, I ate burritos and mini microwave bagels decorated to look like pizzas. No one asked more from me, yet I was dissatisfied. To live then was like hitting a drug, all consequences saved for another day. On the prairie

a veteran blew a federal building wide open, children inside. The paper printed the word ‘penis’ for the first time, and we gawped at Lorena and Tonya, aired the O.J. verdict in French class. Clerks shot up mailrooms, workplace shootings morphed into teenaged boys decked out with semiautomatics, the trench-coat myth easier to buy than the thrall of guns on tap. The dot-com

bubble became the housing bubble turned to this festering boil we live inside but haven’t named. Like some others, I had a modem that screamed into the night. In chat rooms, I told strangers my intimate personal details, spoke deeply about my core beliefs, and that benign audience, both transparently decent and brand new at this, put the data to no use. The Internet that would change

our human synapses had awakened, but this wasn’t its ascendency. Not yet, as we persisted in trading real goods, real services, real dollars. I knew how much cash I carried. The court convicted one doctor for euthanizing the ill while others delivered patients to amber-bottle narcotic death. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted to learn about Marxism at a college to bankrupt my parents. Across the world,

future autocrats scrounged blood lucre melted off colonial skeletons, flattered over caviar, dug in their heels. Always rubles and riyals to be made, always another dollar. Imagine how confident we felt in our unquestioned virtue, how we shied from the webcam, our future closer than it appeared. We hugged our own hollow surfaces. We would never be this perfect again.