Apartment

by Teddy Wayne

Should previous decades be defined by an article of clothing and an intoxicant—a gray flannel suit and a martini, tie-dye and marijuana, bell-bottoms and hallucinogens, shoulder pads and cocaine—the mid-nineties were relaxed-fit Gap jeans and light beer.

It fell under the film critic Manny Farber’s rubric of “termite art,” a small-canvas work that methodically eats at its own borders, saying more in its straitjacketed space than a bloated saga ever could with its boldfaced Important Themes.

That pragmatic approach was how I’d sold the MFA program to my initially skeptical father, telling him, with a heaping of puffery, that most graduates became professors afterward, the next level up in the literary pyramid scheme of writers paying writers to teach them so that they, too, could eventually become the salaried teachers.

#Ether

“Nice,” I said. “This setup’s already paying off.” He opened the medicine cabinet and pointed to a small slot built into the wall. “What’s this, by the way?” “My great-aunt told me it’s to deposit used razor blades. I’ve never used it.” “How do you get them out?” “You can’t.” “They’re just stuck in the wall forever?” I shrugged. “So when they tear down this apartment, they’ll find a bunch of razor blades in the wall from nineteen-whatever?” “It was built in 1947,” I said. “So, yeah, I guess.” “Very cool,” he said. “A little time capsule.”

Young metropolitans in our demographic looked essentially of a piece then, as I suppose they always do, a refined conformity with grace notes of distinction always being au courant—jeans of mildly varying cut and wash, grungy flannels and Cobain cardigans, lanky locks on men, pixie cuts on women, almost to the point of gender convergence, and influenced, respectively, by the early-decade coifs of River Phoenix and Winona Ryder.

When Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” came on, we paused dancing along with the rest of the crowd, but the entire room sang along to the trifling matter of Sally’s waiting—this was all we collectively had, we knew no protest songs, had little to protest—and I felt a swelling in my chest, a surge of joy flowering out through my limbs;

Both a good line and an encapsulation of why this book felt like the wrong one to devote time to in this era.

to be on the outside of mainstream society is one thing, an admirably heroic struggle, but to be on the fringes of an already marginalized subculture is simply lonely.