Yuppies? No thanks.

One of Saipan’s attractions is our lack of yuppies. When I lived in Los Angeles, the yuppies were as thick as maggots on a carcass, which seems a fitting analogy for the total rot we see in American society.

When I was a penniless wretch in college, my buddies and I subsisted on happy hours, because upscale joints would put on free buffets with which to lure the after-work yuppies. We’d graze at the Red Onion restaurant and bar in Marina Del Rey (near Los Angeles). The Red Onion was meta-yuppie, and something of an upscale lounge lizard venue for lonely hearts in the thirtysomething years of age category–which is, frankly, a profoundly depressing and pathetic sight.

Sometimes, after scarfing all the free eats we could at the buffet (generally skipping lunch on these days so we could milk the situation for maximum advantage), if any of us had much money we’d hang on for a few hours until the lights went down, the music cranked up, and the L.A. lonelyhearts yuppie scene began. We were the only light and lively clique in the place, while we watched the office workers and condo dwellers desperately seeking soul mates amongst the soulless. My friends and I agreed that if the Ruskies were going to nuke us into oblivion, a 20-megaton air burst over Marina Del Ray wouldn’t really be such a bad thing. It would be an
act of supreme mercy to the inhabitants.

There is a wide gulf indeed between college students reveling in the promise of bright futures, and the walking casualties of urban professional life who never quite could pull it all together. Our raiding parties on the Red Onion provided not only food for dinner, but food for thought as well. “Man, I don’t want to wind up like these sad mooks,” was the observation my pals and I would always exchange. Was there a pang of fear that fate could turn cruel and in a decade we, too, would wind up slinking to the Red Onion on Friday nights in a leased BMW, with breath mints in our pockets, and a condom or two stowed in the wallet “just in case”? Perish the thought.

Worse yet, the 1990’s yuppie scene is even grimmer because of the androgynous mutation in mainstream America: the men are geldings, the women want to be men, and nobody seems to be worth a bucket of warm spit. No wonder the country is producing so many wild-eyed homicidal geek lunatics from nominally “normal” neighborhoods and homes. American society has run itself off the rails.

Better to watch that stuff from a safe distance. Ah, Saipan: To sip a cold one and stand vigil with the coconut trees waiting for the sunset’s green flash…there are far worse ways to spend an hour after work. Not everyone is so blessed. Let the yuppies keep their Red Onion blues.