The breakdown of history into arbitrary, discrete segments called decades or centuries seems silly and misleading. The Sixties didn’t start on January 1st, 1960 and end on December 31st, 1969, after all. Everyone knows they started when Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles on February 9th, 1964 and ended when the Hells Angels sacrificed a young, black man at the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Altamont on December 6th, 1969. Though some argue they started when Sputnik flew on October 4th, 1957 and ended when man last walked the moon on December 14th, 1972. Each of these delineations may be ridiculous. Yet we know what we’re talking about when we talk about the Sixties. Or the Eighties, or the Thirties. Each of us has a clear mental picture, informed by a lifetime of schooling and media consumption, of what each era signifies.

But maybe it’s not so arbitrary. Maybe we don’t, in hindsight, read a pattern in a few signal events that happen to have occurred in the same decade, or century, and interpret that pattern to “mean” something, and attribute that meaning to the entire period. Something else is at play. We are conscious of these periods as we live them, and to some degree we behave—think, believe, act—in accordance to what we believe to be the prevailing spirit of the time. In other words, people did things in the Sixties—drop acid, listen to rock music, protest against the war—not just because that’s where the currents of history had carried them but because they were conscious that they were living in the Sixties and that doing those things, and feeling the way they felt, is what was expected of them as “citizens” of the decade. And when it became the Seventies—on January 1st, 1970, or at least within a few weeks of then—people started to do the sorts of things we now identify with the Seventies—snort coke, listen to disco, swap spouses—because they knew it was the Seventies.

President Obama will be remembered for having dragged the United States—much of it kicking and screaming—into the 21st century.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 16

Dinner was silent, though not solemn. Forks and plates clinked. We passed the blue-flowered Pyrex casseroles, butter, salt and dinner rolls with practiced efficiency and muttered courtesies. It was all about eating. Nobody cared about anything else.

When it was over sis and I dutifully cleared the table and scraped our scraps into the sink. I was old enough to switch on the garbage disposal and it still gave me a thrill. The momentary choke. Then the sucking pulverization of our refuse as it vanished into the unseen underworld, perhaps to feed some ever-hungry beast.

We scooped Sealtest Heavenly Hash ice cream into bowls and drizzled fanciful patterns of Hershey's Chocolate Syrup on top. Mom and Dad hovered patiently, waiting to mix another round of drinks.

As dusk gave way to night we went down to the rec room to settle into our habitual spots, our unspoken assignments from time immemorial: sis and me on the beanbag chair, Mom and Dad on the couch. Left-right, left-right. Dad turned on the TV. After a few commercials the title came up on the screen, in orange letters and quotation marks over an aerial shot of a five-lane asphalt highway cooking in the California sun:

"CHiPs"

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 15

Here's what was for dinner: meatloaf with barbecue sauce, instant mashed potatoes, Bird's Eye French green beans with toasted almonds, Pillsbury crescent rolls, Duncan Hines yellow cake with buttercream fudge frosting, tuna rice royal, hamburger and macaroni stew, zucchini bread, artichoke hearts and peas, chicken Kiev, pineapple upside-down cake, enchilada casserole, corn and hamburger pie, quiche lorraine, peas with mushrooms and pearl onions, green beans au gratin, chicken a la king, glazed ham, Dinty Moore beef stew, buttered peas, raisin slaw, ambrosia salad, succotash, salmon crepes, Rice-A-Roni, Noodle Roni, zucchini tortilla casserole, Pillsbury dinner rolls with Land-O-Lakes salted butter, spaghetti primavera, broccoli with Velveeta sauce, rice imperatrice, Pepperidge Farm garlic bread, tuna surprise, applesauce cake; tossed salad with iceberg lettuce, garlic croutons, Bac-O-Bits and Good Seasons Italian dressing; green bean and mushroom casserole, chicken aloha, fiesta rice, tuna linguine casserole, sloppy joes on Wonder rolls, baked ziti, Salisbury steak, herbed potato salad, cherry cobbler, bibb lettuce with Wish-Bone ranch dressing, fettuccine alfredo, Jell-O salad, Swedish meatballs, pork chops and apple sauce, beef strogonoff, Pillsbury chocolate macaroon bundt cake, Jolly Green Giant canned corn, Hamburger Helper and impossible pie.

Mom and Dad would forgo alcohol for the time it took to eat. Mom drank Tab. Dad and Sis and I drank Coca-Cola.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 9

Harry and I went out back to burn some things. We each had a fistful of soldiers, the kind you stand up on their flat, plastic perches before you knock 'em down. I had the matches. Harry had model cement and a roll of caps. He knelt down and placed it upright on a top stone of the garden wall.

"Let's get a hammer," I said.

"No."

Harry dislodged a jagged rock, just small enough to hold, from the middle of the wall. He smashed it onto the caps with all his might. Bang! went the caps. Harry lifted the rock and we peered at the smoking remains with consternation. The top of the wall was darkened at the point of impact and crimson flakes of paper had peeled off the coil, but most of the caps were evidently intact.

"That sucked," I said.

"That was gay," said Harry.

"I wanna burn it."

I got down on one knee and took out a match. Surely fire itself would cause the thin bubbles of gunpowder to burst, gloriously, like fireworks; each explosion would intensify the next and build a beautiful inferno, flames creeping toward the eaves.

Harry grabbed at my arm. "You're not supposeta burn 'em! You're supposeta pop 'em!"

"Fuck off." I shoved Harry with my elbow and tremblingly struck my match. I held it under the half-charred roll, trying not to twitch my hand away in trepidation. It seemed to be taking a long time to light.

"It's not even gonna catch fire," said Harry. "There's not enough oxygen."

"Fuck you!"

"You're stupid!"

Just then the outermost band of caps sputtered aflame, the ink burning a pale green. I rocked back up on my feet and moved a step or two away.

Fizzzzzussh, went the first cap. Fizzzzzussh, went the second. Fizzzzzussh, fizzzzzussh, fizzzzzussh. The cap roll sat serenely on the wall, quietly aflame, watched over by a patch of marjoram.

"You're a wimp," asserted Harry.

Fizzzzzussh.

"God fucking dammit," I hissed through my humiliation.

"Told you so! Retard!"

Harry walked up and absently drizzled the pitiable conflagration with cement. Fire flashed all over the stone and down the wall, and climbed back up the strands of glue nearly to his knuckles. Then he stepped on the caps with the heel of his shoe, putting out the fire just as whimsically as he had fed it. There remained a smoldering husk of charred paper with a coiled core of pristine, unfired caps.

"I have to go home," I said.

"We have to burn some soldiers," Harry said emphatically, as though it were incontestable that his statement would trump mine.

We set our soldiers down on adjacent stones and arranged them in slapdash formation, instinctively in opposition. We showered them with model airplane glue and set the scene ablaze. We stood and watched as the soldiers melted, perhaps imagining their screams. Unnerved by my earlier failure, I picked up one of mine. Its head and shoulders were on fire but its base was untouched and cool. Suddenly he buckled at the waist, dipping his rifle to his feet. His head melted onto the knuckle of my thumb. I threw down the soldier and yelped in pain, clutching my stricken hand against my abdomen. There was now a patch of military green plastic seared into my flesh.

"Are you OK?" asked Harry wearily.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"Boys! Time for lunch!" Harry's mom yelled from the kitchen door.

We walked back in and sat at the kitchen table. My finger throbbed, half-numb, half-burning. Harry's mom poured us skim milk and I pressed the back of my thumb to the cold and dewy surface of the glass. She made us peanut butter and honey sandwiches with that bland and clumpy peanut butter from the health food store, with the separated oil. On frozen Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread. They kept their bread in the freezer so that it would last for months. They never bothered to defrost it. Take it out of the freezer, make a damn sandwich and be done. I lifted it to my mouth and felt the slices cold and rubbery in my hands. I peered down at the top slice as it approached. A spongy, gray-brown expanse riddled with sparkling crystals of frost. I bit into it and felt a styrofoamy crunch; the bread bent unwillingly between my teeth. At least there was honey.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 8

The tanks emit a somber purr that rises to a growl when they maneuver. A dry pop when they fire. Then ascending, beeping tones as the missile, a point faint and fleeting as a shooting star, caroms in the maze. This is the sound of Japan.

When your tank gets hit it explodes with a staticky roar, a shaming noise, full of anger and reproach. Hchrrrrrrrrrr! Your tank is prone, humping the mouth of an L-shaped obstacle like a dog; you try to turn it around but the joystick won't respond. You know death is coming. Hchrrrrrrrrrr!

When your tank gets hit it vanishes and reappears, spinning, a little farther back, looking like an animated swastika.

Hchrrrrrrrrrr!

Harry's parents were obsessed with health food and books and exercise and living right. The Atari in the living room was their only concession to the frivolous desires of children, a sacrifice to the gods of junk so that they may continue to compost their garbage and watch Masterpiece Theater.

Every night at dinner Harry's dad placed a ramekin of vitamin and herbal supplements beside everybody's place. Grape seed with its naturally occurring bioflavonoids, garlic to ward against infection and cholesterol, cod liver oil for essential fatty acids, elderberry for the immune system and a big, grainy multivitamin with minerals. The family took them ritually before eating, in place of grace. Harry went through the motions of placing the pills in his mouth and taking sips of water, but he tucked each one in turn inside his cheek until he could safely spit them out into his napkin.

"Why don't you swallow your pills?" I asked him.

"I don't know," he said.

A minute passed. Then Harry cast his joystick aside, mid-game.

"Check something out!" he said.

I followed him to his bedroom, where he pulled a shoebox out from under his bed and opened the lid. Inside were hundreds of pills: white ones, red ones, green ones, amber gels and two-tone capsules, some gummy and discolored.

"Why do you keep them?" I asked.

"I don't know."

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 7

Mom would always barge in during the last or second-to-last show of the morning, "Fat Albert," "Space Academy," always at the most frustrating moment, after we were full but before we were sated. We dreaded her intrusions so much that we were unable to enjoy the last hour or so of television, instead pretending to pay attention as we seesawed from guilt to fear.

"C'mon kids. Out of the house."

"Mom!"

"But Mom!"

"Up, up, up, up, up! Get some fresh air."

No one cared where their kids went or where they were back then. Everybody's door was always open, mothers high on coffee buzzing through the neighborhood like bees, children tromping through kitchens with their muddy feet, mothers stronger than dirt, filling up another bucket. Is it wet, Mr. Clean? You're soaking in it.

I rode my banana-seat bicycle down Harvard to Dartmouth and up to Harry's house. He was out front on his bike, jumping a little bump in the packed dirt where the yard met the street. He caught a little air and landed wobblingly, pedaling up to me and stopping with a squeal and a skid.

"Wanna play Atari?" I asked.

"Yup," he said.

We dumped our bikes in the driveway and went inside. Harry was my best friend. I hated him.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 6

For the next four hours we inhabited an amplified and manic world, full of rocket ships and cannonballs, chases and escapes; the personification of things and creatures into caricatures of longing and of fear. A ceaseless refrain of noise and pain sung by nemeses trapped in hopeless, eternal conflict. Cartoons taught us to identify with protagonists, sure, but they indoctrinated us into tragedy and futility too. Who among us has not rooted for the Coyote?

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 5

The remote control was in my sister's hands. She held it to her chest, preciously, and without hesitation I grabbed for it, trying to gain purchase on a corner of the black rectangle edged in chromed plastic, prying at her damp and dirty fingers, surprisingly tenacious, the golden retriever Alex peering at us, tongue extended; I was about to give up when it broke free and fell softly in the burgundy shag. We scrambled for it, exclaiming angry nonsense, cries of ill will and dismay: Give it! Give it! Give it! No! No! No!

It was never over until someone got hurt. Pain was the solemn and incontestable signal to progress to the next step in a program of events, the chime in the filmstrip of our lives. If no one got hurt, nothing new would ever happen. Often there were tears. Sometimes there was blood. So it was that my sister konked me on the side of the skull with the flat of the remote. It was OK. It was over now. It was time to watch TV.

She pointed the remote with an overhand dipping motion, like a magic wand. A tiny dot appeared in the middle of the emptiness, a singularity. In an instant, light and color and form and motion expanded to the edges of the screen, and words and music burst forth, too. It was 7:59 am, the penultimate. The last commercial before the show.

A boy and a girl riding skateboards; the girl complains she's "getting hot and thirsty."

They cry out into the void: "Hey Kool-Aid!"

Their savior appears at once, bursting through a wooden fence and past astonished workmen, lumbering down a hill, an enormous jug with legs and cartoony feet. He bears a real jug of purple drink in his rubbery paw. Glasses filled with ice have materialized in the children's hands. Kool-Aid Man fills them up and the kids quench themselves greedily.

"Tastes great! Our friend's cool," says the girl.

"Our friend's Kool-Aid," says the boy.

"Kool-Aid brand soft drink mix!" says the girl.

Oh yeah, Kool-Aid's here bringin' you fun
Kool-Aid's got thirst on the run
Get a big, wide, happy, ear-to-ear Kool-Aid smile!

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 4

I'd go down to the paneled rec room and take my place beside my sister on the purple beanbag chair, perched on my belly like a sniper on a rock. The television not five feet away, the twenty-six inch screen of miraculously curved gray glass in an ostentatious dark-veneer cabinet of neoclassical design, the Zenith: a magnificent totem, in apotheosis, toward which every object in its vicinity was turned. It seemed more powerful when it was off and sat brooding, mysterious. When the television was off, it was watching us.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 3

To recognize that another might impede one's progress – is that not respect? To deflect them, to wrestle them aside – that's how we acknowledge each other's existence and thus our shared humanity.

And so it was that if I met my older sister in the hallway, we'd shove each other to the wall. Automatically, almost listlessly. It was a gesture of greeting more than anything else.

I'd go downstairs and to the kitchen pantry to examine the glorious row of fortified sugary cereals occupying nearly an entire shelf: Apple Jacks, Froot Loops, Peanut Butter Crunch, Franken Berry, Trix, Cap'n Crunch, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Pebbles, Boo Berry, Honeycomb, Crunch Berries, Count Chocula and Fruity Pebbles in magnificent, cartoon fluorescence: screaming orange, purple, lime-green, lipstick pink and thousand-flushes blue. It was all so beautiful I was often at a loss for what to do. I'd try combining cereals, but the result was always somehow less than the sum of its parts. It left behind a murky pool of milk not rainbow-hued but gray-brown-blue, the color of space-age toxic waste. I'd lift the bowl to my lips and drink it dutifully, like a sacred elixir, and feel the unholy solution of vitamins and minerals and artificial flavors and colors, the red 40, the niacinamide, the pyridoxine hydrochloride, the blues 1 and 2, the sulfiting agents, the annato color, the BHT, the trisodium phosphate, the tricalcium phosphate, the yellows 5 and 6 all the rest of it penetrate each and every molecule of my being.

And yet I was not happy. It began to dawn on me that every waking hour of the day deepened my indoctrination into American dissatisfaction: to have it all and then some but to still crave more.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 2

My family was trained to indulge and we were utterly unashamed of our abilities. Every day was a manic and relentless parade through deep-junk Americana; harrowing, psychedelic, wonderful. I had a Batman bedspread and Aquaman pajamas; I opened my dream-distracted eyes to a poster of a mounted cowboy in a rubbly valley, mesas in the distance. He wore spurs and chaps and a red shirt with a black vest and a white hat and he brandished a pistol as he rode.

I wanted that gun more than anything.

My room was strewn with toys: G.I. Joe, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys and a Rubik's Cube. An Etch-A-Sketch, a skateboard. A real football and a fake one made of foam. A lime-green water pistol, Beretta-style. A Millenium Falcon, tilted like a pot lid, gradually shedding brittle fragments into the deep hairs of my purple shag. Belts of orange Hot Wheels track drooping from the windowsill, winding under chair and desk, some connected by dark green plastic tabs and others solitary, double dead ends in the wasteland.

On Saturday mornings I'd awake of my own volition, stumble through the debris, walk down the hall to the bathroom and brush my teeth with Aim. Because I was supposed to take aim against cavities.

What I Remember from the 1977 Guinness Book of World Records

1

There was some miser, Hetty Green? Meanest woman in the world. She parlayed two scraps of soap into an incalculable fortune; a sum to rival any captain of industry's.

There she was walking across the gunmetal cobblestones of some Manhattan alley. Corseted and severe. Her grim and unforgiving mouth curled by the faintest trace of terror.

What was a miser, in fact? I had no idea.

She seemed to know she was despised. Yet in her pride she could not fathom why.

2

A man in the shade of a fairground tent hung his head over a paper plate splattered with ropes of spaghetti. He ate more of it in 21 seconds, or something, than any man before him.

His head hung like a penitent's, or like a hajji's, finally arrived. Bowing tremulously to pray.

Beside the plate was a paper cup bearing the Coca-Cola ribbon. I imagined the sweet, cold and dark liquid flowing over my tongue. Soaking my thirsty throat in prickly bubbles.

3

A tiny man on a massive rock formed like a bridge, somewhere in the West.

4

The fattest man in the world who had to be buried in a piano case. Three questions nagged me:

What did he do before he died?

Who came to the funeral?

What did they do with the piano?