Shampoo Planet

Tyler Johnson is a twenty-year-old MTV child. Once a baby raised in a hippie commune, he now sells fake Chanel T-shirts, collects shampoo and studies hotel/motel management in a small northwest city saddled with a dying mega-mall and a collapsed nuclear industry. An ambitious Reagan Youth, Tyler dreams of escape and a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed.Tyler's soon-to-be-single mother is the fortysomething Jasmine, a "hippie chick" with a Woodstock heart full of love--but also full of confusion because her 1960s dream has turned sour. Burdened with two failed marriages, three kids at home, and job layoffs, Jasmine wonders if the 1960s dream alone can protect her from the 1990s. "Shampoo Planet's" six month chronicle of Tyler's life takes us from his Washington State hometown to the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison's Paris grave, to a wild island in British Columbia, to the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, to a cheesy Hollywood, to ultramodern Seattle, and then back home. On the way we meet a constellation of other characters: Anna-Louise, Tyler's post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder; Neil, Tyler's Deadhead dope-ranching biological father; Daisy, his neo-hippie sister; Murray, her dreadlocked boyfriend; and Harmony, a rich computer hacker with a fetish for "Star Trek" and the medieval.