The Vegetable Generation

The men of Lou's Fruit Juice Bar are a sullen lot. They convene each evening after the midnight show at the Casino and scowl into vegetable desserts and think.

He said his name was George, and he had a beard. He seemed to be a Leader, for the others listened to his words, and nodded when he paused. After a mustard tomato on rye with a dash of carrot sauce, he loosened up and began to speak.

"They call us the Silent Generation," he said with a sneer. "The hydramatic men. We don't speak, we don't act, we don't create." He paused. "We are the spawn of a depression decade; we were old in the cradle."

The men mumbled their assent. George sighed. "Let me tell you," he said, "this is not a generation." He motioned about the room. "We have nothing in common."

His eyes watered slightly. "I used to think we did. A long time ago--there was a vision." The voice was harsh again. "But all that was lost in the penny arcades and wooden shooting galleries."

George snapped a carrot-stick in two. "We are the generation of tranquilizers and mushroom clouds, grunion hunters and men's magazines. We are born, we go to college, and then what? In the age of surrealistic art, in the butt-end semantics of Joyce and the discordant lilt of Stravinsky we are somehow yet conservative. We stand marking time, unimpressed, hands skin-deep in mental hip pockets."

Silence hung like a damp rag over the bar; George impaled one lima bean on a toothpick and examined it.

"Take me, for example. I wish I had a cross, just one cross, to bear. I was a little boy when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and when it was done and peace declared, I marched down Main Street banging on a pan with a tablespoon. I was taught in tickertape parades."

He loked out the plate-glass window as marquee lights winked off and Boston gathered itself into a cocoon. "No parades and no tablespoons today. Worlds revolve, nations change hands, but I just stand here, consciously dead. I crawled from loins too old with life. I am a creature of specialization, a power paddle that keeps the wheel going. I look knowledgeable; I laugh at the right jokes; I voice the proper introspective comments about the latest Book-of-the-Month Club classic. I am a vegetable."

He suspended the word in the air, limp and profound. "A vegetable," he repeated. "All I have left is a pocket of pennies, little memory pennies." A sound--almost a sob.

"You may not believe it, but I was young. I was proud. I went out on the great intellectual grunion-run, and I was diverted. I wandered through the alley-ways and knocked on brown-wood doors, and was admitted. Once inside, I watched the men speak lines and gesticulate, and somehow failed to understand. Beside a soundless stage my doubt played the part of a fool, incapable, strutting in a stupid pride, mute, dead, responding to a pair of strings attached to twitching thumbs.

"That was very long ago. The shadows on your chin are a superficial manhood. The world has tricked me. Time, that peddlerman, has done his bag of tricks, and here I am.

"Life is a big red bean bag."

And the men of Lou's Fruit Juice Bar nodded in their sad, solemn way; nodded over their cocoanut martinis and cottage cheese; nodded, and gazed into the mantlepiece mirror and watched an age spin the garment of its own mortality.