It Chooses You - Miranda July [9]
Miranda:
Right before his big tour.
Raymond:
That’s my generation.
Miranda:
How old are you?
Raymond:
I’m thirty-nine.
Miranda:
I’m thirty-five.
Raymond:
So it’s our generation.
Miranda:
Right.
It was a relief, meeting someone whom I had anything at all in common with. Michael and Primila and Pauline had exhausted me with their openness and their quaint inefficiency, but Raymond and I were the same generation; we both knew how to click on things, we both had a version of our name with @ in it. As I left his room I said something like “Maybe I’ll see you around,” as if our generation all liked to congregate at one coffee shop.
But the moment I got back in my car I knew I would never see him again, ever. It suddenly seemed obvious to me that the whole world, and especially Los Angeles, was designed to protect me from these people I was meeting. There was no law against knowing them, but it wouldn’t happen. LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling to myself as I text them back.
Not that I was meeting one kind of person though the PennySaver, or that they all sold things for the same reason. Michael was poor, Pauline was lonelier than she was poor, Primila was just old-fashioned. But so far there was one commonality, something so obvious it had taken me a moment to notice. In the process of trying to reassure the people I was calling, I would occasionally mention that I was somewhat established – not a student, but a published writer. Google “Miranda July,” I’d suggest (I do it all day long!). But they weren’t googlers. People who place ads in the print edition of the PennySaver don’t have computers – of course they don’t, or they’d just use Craigslist.
And as I circled and crossed out ads, the newsprint booklet itself began to seem like some vestigial relic. On one future Tuesday the number of computerless people would become too small, and the booklet would simply not arrive. This made me a little anxious, so I called up PennySaver headquarters and asked them if they would be around forever. “The PennySaver in concept will be here forever,” said Loren Dalton, the president of PennySaver USA (which actually serves only California), “but not necessarily in print. That’s why we’ve made pretty heavy investments on the digital side – internet, mobile, we’re getting ready to do some things with the iPad.” But he assured me that nothing would happen right now, not during the recession. The PennySaver has always been strongest when the economy is the weakest; the first issue was printed during the Great Depression in someone’s garage. The word was never trademarked, so the PennySaver Maryland is unaffiliated with PennySaver Florida and PennySaver Nevada. They’ve all started online versions of themselves in the last decade, and the print versions of all of them will be discontinued within the next decade.
So this recession was perhaps the last hurrah for the PennySaver. The internal slogan of the company in 2009 was “Now Is Our Time.” This seemed like a pretty upbeat approach to the crisis. Just claim it! Own it. Dibs on the recession! The PennySaver catered to people for whom ten dollars was worth some trouble – people who saved pennies. Which, right now, was a lot of people.
ANDREW
–
BULLFROG TADPOLES
$2.50 EACH
–
PARAMOUNT
–
Now when friends asked me about how my script was going, I responded with the good news about my new job as a reporter for a newspaper that didn’t exist, interviewing people I found through a soon-to-be-extinct piece of junk mail. And because I was refused by the majority of people I called, the ones I met with did not feel random – we chose each other.
Paramount was completely outside my understanding of LA. I just did what the