Hustle Smarter
Gen X: The Last Generation of Bad Decisions
I’m so happy with the people who have been finding this Substack. I want to thank you all for the feedback and I’ll remind you that you can always leave a comment below.
Hustle Smarter is part of a reclamation project I’ve started, going through my old blog from the mid-to-late 2000s and turning all of those first drafts into final pieces of humor.
I had announced this project earlier this year, but I realized that I wasn’t giving myself the time to really work on these and make them right. Between screenwriting, my freelance work-for-hire schedule (and yes, I am for hire), my decision to write and submit stories for literary magazines, and everything else going on in my life, I wasn’t giving myself the time to do these pieces right.
At the end of the year, I shall release a volume (or possibly two): The McEneaney Anthology of Literature. What follows is an essay from this project.
This essay is from back in the day when we had no supervision, no phones, and just enough change for a warm 40 and cold chips. We made bad choices, good stories, and lifelong friends on cracked sidewalks and in late night playground hangs. This one’s for the kids who got left alone—and somehow made something out of it.
As a role model, the kids should know that my opinion of underage drinking is this. Do not do buy or drink alcohol because you and your generation are neither smart nor slick enough to not get caught.
I am aware that my opinions on the subject tend to reveal my distinctly cranky old man tendencies. For instance, these are the first two paragraphs I originally wrote to start this final version of this essay:
It seems to be a Millennial trend on social media these days – “Look at how young we still are. Look at how old our grandparents looked at the same age.” And then a forensic search into how they could possibly look so amazing. Is it their skin care regimens? Is it the insistence on hydration to the extent that we drain natural springs for our bottled water?
In hindsight, it’s unfair that the Greatest Generation didn’t have Neutrogena, what with living through the Great Depression and serving in the Second World War while ensuring that their descendants could live lives of unprecedented prosperity. “For what profits a man if he shall gain the whole world, and have these deep and furrowed frown lines?”
This has nothing to do with the subject at hand, I suppose. But I digress and I bury those paragraphs in big words for this reason. There is no way to begin this essay but with those classic phrases that every old person knows by heart:
“Back in my day…”
”These kids today…”
And there’s no way around it. Generation X, of which I am a member, has from the beginning been a generation of elderly cranks hiding within the skins of young writers, filmmakers, cartoonists, comedians, and so on. We’ve been waiting our whole lives for our chance to tell the next generation that they are inferior, uncultured, and weak. We’ve spent decades rehearsing the day we can tell young people that they missed the very best time in history to have been young and free.
And we’re right.
II
Until I moved to Los Angeles, I had lived in one place my entire life. In Rego Park, Queens, where Queens Boulevard meets the LIE. A stately two-bedroom apartment in a state of what my former landlord would probably term “benign neglect”; he was happy to have me live in a rent-stabilized apartment as long as I liked, so long as I was happy with him never having a repair done unless ordered to by a government body.
The year before I moved to LA, I walked past the 7-11 that had moved into the neighborhood a few years previously. That was at the end of a time in the history of Rego Park, Queens, when a business that had moved in five years previously was still considered “new.” On the sidewalk was a comically diverse group of young high school students. The kind of diverse street crew that you only ever saw in 1980s PSA’s about the dangers of buying young people alcohol.
And they asked me to buy them a case of beer. And I said, “No.” And when they whined at me asking why not, I understood that it was my responsibility as an adult to explain that there is no downside to underage drinking—you’re young enough that your body can absorb the toxins easily, and adults find it funny unless you drive a car and kill somebody—but to walk in there and buy beer for these kids was to rob them of a classic and necessary coming-of-age experience.
It is very dumb and lazy for young people who are able-bodied not to walk five or six blocks into the interior of the borough where many of the neighborhood liquor stores and bodegas need money more than they need to check ID’s.
III
I was a member of the Last of the Latchkey Kids Club. My friends and I ran in the streets of the neighborhood, and the neighbors would watch us and sometimes snitch on me to my mom for using bad language. And we played Red Rover and Abraham Lincoln and a day of War that ended with a kid getting a big metal pole smashed over his back and him going home and the rest of us quietly disbanding awkwardly and never speaking of it again.
We spent a season playing in the construction site at the end of the street where the onramp to the Long Island Expressway was being built, among the construction vehicles and enormous jagged metal pieces and concrete tubes that are most famous for trapping and killing children.
There was then a candy store as “A&A grocers”, which made most of its money selling candy and cigarettes and lotto tickets and beer. When I was 13, I asked the brothers behind the counter why it was named that, and the friendlier guy behind the counter told me it stood for them: Arab & Arab. They laughed and I laughed.
Another time, he gave me a long lecture about why he doesn’t like black people coming into his store, that they steal, that they smell bad. It was the first time I’d heard an adult use the n-word. I told this to a Korean classmate, and he laughed and told me the Arab brothers were called sand-n-words.
It was this commitment to diversity that earned Queens Boulevard one of its nicknames: The Boulevard of Broken English.
IV
The A’s had left by the time I was ready to move, of course. The beauty of Queens neighborhoods like the one I grew up in was that immigrants would come, build their businesses, sell their businesses, and move onwards and upwards. It was the culmination of what we had always been told was the American dream.
And so 7-11 moved into a failed smoke shop down the Boulevard. And at the risk of finally fulfilling my destiny and sounding like an old man, I say this. In my day, a teenager without beer was a young man with no ambition, no resourcefulness, no future.
I had my first drink at a strip club when I was 14. I hung out with a loser crew who always either had alcohol or a way to get it. We were 15 and in high school and drinking at an Ozone Park pool hall, for Christ’s sake, or getting sloppy drunk off of cheap vodka in a Woodhaven playground.
When I was 17, my high school friend Bill and I split a very large bottle of Beefeaters gin and then ate Chinese food and then went to see Speed. Bill threw up all over the couple next to us, and then I got him cleaned up in the bathroom. I sent him off to find his way home on the subway while I watched the rest of the movie. I still have never seen the first fifteen minutes of Speed.
To be fair to these children, this is a tough world now. And people my age remember how close we came to getting killed by it when we were young. About the other side of drinking water from the hose, which is a strange thing to be nostalgic for – drinking disease water that tasted like rust from an unwashed tube of rubber.
So we—the generational we, I’ve never been blessed with children—protect our children from the predators who almost ran off with us, and the teachers and institutions who traumatized us, and give them cellphones to act as 24-hour tethers for those nights when your friends strand you in an odd neighborhood and there are no working payphones in sight.
I don’t buy beer for teenagers. Not because it’s wrong, but because they really do have to learn how to earn it on their own. And if I have to be a generation’s irresponsible uncle and explain how to buy beer without an ID, then I’ll do it for their sake.
Besides, underage drinking never did anything for me but give me a lifetime of stories and experiences to look back on in my old age, which as a member of Gen X, I am looking forward to with rapidity.
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Also you can buy ‘Hustle Smarter’ and ‘Shared Memories’ on t-shirts at Write Liam’s merch store.
Wow there was a major spelling or grammatical error per section. Apologies to my longtime fans who know to expect 2 or three times as many. I’ll try less hard next time.
“We made bad choices, good stories, and lifelong friends on cracked sidewalks and in late night playground hangs. This one’s for the kids who got left alone—and somehow made something out of it.” - love this and so much of this resonates. Great essay!