Generation X

You might say that Mel Torme just fell into his new role as a hero of Generation X. Like Tony Bennett before him, Torme has developed a new audience among the MTV generation, in part from his appearances on the music video channel. The biggest attention grabber, however, has been a soda-pop commercial in which Torme, singing a slight variation on the Cole Porter hit "I Get a Kick Out of You," takes a daredevil dive from the roof of a Las Vegas hotel.

The biggest generation in American history is not the baby boom, but rather what many call the baby bust. That, at least, is the against-the-grain contention of two historians who wrote two well-respected works on American generations, "Generations" (Quill, 1991) and "13 Gen" (Vintage, 1993). Boomers Neil Howe and Bill Strauss will argue till facial blueness that this is the case--even against a tide of inconsistent media generalizations about these generations.

Westwood attorney Tom Dempsey thought he had them pegged. He was arguing a personal injury case on behalf of a middle-aged woman who had wrecked her shoulder bouncing down an inner tube ride at a Palm Springs water park. In the jury box sat a couple of Generation Xers--barely into their 20s, not exactly fresh-faced and eager, but still ready to try their hand at this civic duty thing.

Nobody sets out to be a literary groupie. You just read something you like, tell all your friends and hope to get some credit for discovery in a hip, high-brow way. Problem comes when tastes converge. It's highly embarrassing, not to mention cruelly ironic, when the same writer strikes a critical mass of people--especially people in your demographic group--and you find that you've not so much unveiled a new voice as perpetrated a fad.

At age 3, Tom Taulli realized he didn't want to work for anyone else. As a child, playing with toy dump trucks meant pretending he owned his own trucking business. Last year Taulli started a custom software company and designed a program to help law students study for the bar examination. His company, Talan Inc. in Monrovia, took in $43,000 in its first year.

With job security a thing of the past, it's no wonder that baby boomers are having anxiety attacks. But what have the waves of layoffs and corporate restructurings meant for the group behind them--the so-called Generation X? Of the 48 million people born between 1964 and 1977, more than 40 million are already active in the work force, according to Rainmaker Inc., a New Haven, Conn., company that studies the working lives of that generation.

With her purple mohawk and pierced eyebrows, nose and lip, Marina Vainshtein is not, at first glance, your average young Jewish woman. But look further and you'll find evidence of Marina's obsession with the history of her people: a star of David tattooed on her inner left arm, a tattooed armband in Hebrew on her right wrist that reads, "And now we are the last of many."

At 21, Yoshiyuki Tenmei feels his life is over. He just spent a grueling year sending out hundreds of job applications, being grilled by personnel experts and taking a battery of tests. Now, in this nation where company affiliation defines status, identity--one's very life--he is about to graduate from college as the embodiment of social failure: He is a man without a meishi, or business card. "I feel like a complete social dropout," confessed the young man in black. Tenmei is not alone.

Marlon Brando was a geek and Peter Fonda was dumb. But the bikes, now the bikes were cool. That's what Franklin Perez thinks. At least that's what he's saying, perched low on his Norton motorcycle rumbling near the Seal Beach pier. Perez, the sun glinting off his wraparound shades and the bike's chrome, frowned while recalling Brando in "The Wild One" and Fonda in "Easy Rider," two of the best-known biker flicks ever.

The personals looked scary. Dating services seemed impersonal. Her philosophy on bars: Most people there are already on dates and if you can't meet someone sober, what's the use? Yet Dusdianna Fisette, 21, thought MTV's new dating game looked like fun. She said she was hot 'n' spicy, not cool and mild. She was more of a mezzanine than a penthouse or basement, when it came to height. She described her chest as full cups versus cups runneth over.