Where I Was From

by Joan Didion

  It was the Douglas plant on the Lakewood city line, the one with the flag whipping in the wind and the logo wrapped around the building, that had by 1993 taken the hit for almost eighteen thousand of McDonnell Douglas’s twenty-one thousand layoffs. “I’ve got two kids, a first and a third grader,” Carl Cohn told me. “When you take your kid to a birthday party and your wife starts talking about so-and-so’s father just being laid off—there are all kinds of implications, including what’s going to be spent on a kid’s birthday party. These concrete things really come home to you. And you realize, yeah, this bad economic situation is very real.” The message on the marquee at Rochelle’s Restaurant and Motel and Convention Center, between Douglas and the Long Beach airport, still read “Welcome Douglas Happy Hour 4–7,” but the place was nailed shut, a door banging in the wind. “We’ve developed good citizens,” Mark Taper said about Lakewood in 1969. “Enthusiastic owners of property. Owners of a piece of their country—a stake in the land.” This was a sturdy but finally unsupportable ambition, sustained for forty years by good times and the good will of the federal government.

  When people in Lakewood spoke about what they called “Spur,” or “the situation at the high school,” some meant the series of allegations that had led to the March 1993 arrests—with requests that charges be brought on ten counts of rape by intimidation, four counts of unlawful sexual intercourse, one count of forcible rape, one count of oral copulation, and one count of lewd conduct with a minor under the age of fourteen— of nine current or former Lakewood High School students who either happened to be or were believed to be members of an informal fraternity known locally as the Spur Posse. Others meant not the allegations, which they saw as either outright inventions or representations of events open to interpretation (the phrase “consensual sex” got heavy usage), but rather the national attention that followed those allegations, the invasion of Lakewood by what its residents called “you people,” or “you folks,” or “the media,” and the appearance, on Jenny Jones and Jane Whitney and Maury Povich and Nightline and Montel Williams and Dateline and Donahue and The Home Show, of two hostile and briefly empowered arrangements of hormones, otherwise known as “the boys” and “the girls.”

  For a moment that spring they had seemed to be on view everywhere, those blank-faced Lakewood girls, those feral Lakewood boys. There were the dead eyes, the thick necks, the jaws that closed only to chew gum. There was the refusal or inability to process the simplest statement without rephrasing it. There was the fuzzy relationship to language, the tendency to seize on a drifting fragment of something once heard and repeat it, not quite get it right, worry it like a bone. The news that some schools distributed condoms had been seized in mid-drift, for example, and pressed into service as an extenuating circumstance, the fact that Lakewood High School had never distributed condoms notwithstanding. “The schools, they’re handing out condoms and stuff like that, and like, if they’re handing out condoms, why don’t they tell us you can be arrested for it?” one Spur asked Gary Collins and Sarah Purcell on The Home Show. “They pass out condoms, teach sex education and pregnancy this, pregnancy that, but they don’t teach us any rules,” another told Jane Gross of The New York Times. “Schools hand out condoms, teach safe sex,” the mother of a Spur complained on The Home Show. “It’s the society, they have these clinics, they have abortions, they don’t have to tell their parents, the schools give out condoms, jeez, what does that tell you?” the father of one Lakewood boy, a sixteen-year-old who had just admitted to a juvenile-court petition charging him with lewd conduct with a ten-year-old girl, asked a television interviewer. “I think people are blowing this thing way out of proportion,” David Ferrell of The Los Angeles Times was told by one Spur. “It’s all been blown out of proportion as far as I’m concerned,” he was told by another. “Of course there were several other sex scandals at the time, so this perfectly normal story got blown out of proportion,” I was told by a Spur parent. “People, you know, kind of blow it all out of proportion,” a Spur advised viewers of Jane Whitney. “They blow it out of proportion a lot,” another said on the same show. A Spur girlfriend, “Jodi,” called in to offer her opinion: “I think it’s been blown way out of proportion, like way out of proportion.”

  Each of these speakers seemed to be referring to a cultural misery apprehended only recently, and then dimly. Those who mentioned “blowing it out of proportion” were complaining specifically about “the media,” and its “power,” but more generally about a sense of being besieged, set upon, at the mercy of forces beyond local control. “The whole society has changed,” one Spur parent told me. “Morals have changed. Girls have changed. It used to be, girls would be more or less the ones in control. Girls would hold out, girls would want to be married at eighteen or nineteen and they’d keep their sights on having a home and love and a family.” What seemed most perplexing to these Lakewood residents was that the disruption was occurring in what they uniformly referred to as “a middle-class community like this one,” or sometimes “an upper-middle-class community like this one.” “We’re an upper-middle-class community,” I was told one morning outside the Los Padrinos Juvenile Court in Downey, where a group of Lakewood women were protesting the decision of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office not to bring most of the so-called “sex charges” requested by the sheriff’s department. “It Wasn’t The Bloods, Crips, Longos, It Was The Spurs,” the hand-lettered signs read that morning, “the Longos” being a Long Beach gang. “What If One of the Victims Had Been Your Granddaughter, Huh, Mr. District Attorney?” “It’s a very hush-hush community,” another protester said. “Very low profile, they don’t want to make waves, don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.” The following is an extract from the first page of Donald J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir:

  He knew his suburb’s first 17,500 houses had been built in less than three years. He knew what this must have cost, but he did not care.

  The houses still worked.

  He thought of them as middle class even though 1,100-square-foot tract houses on streets meeting at right angles are not middle class at all.

  Middle-class houses are the homes of people who would not live here.

  This is in fact the tacit dissonance at the center of every moment in Lakewood, which is why the average day there raises, for the visitor, so many and such vertiginous questions:

  What does it cost to create and maintain an artificial ownership class?

  Who pays?

  Who benefits?

  What happens when that class stops being useful?

  What does it mean to drop back below the line?

  What does it cost to hang on above it, how do you behave, what do you say, what are the pitons you drive into the granite?

  One of the ugliest and most revelatory of the many ugly and revelatory moments that characterized the 1993 television appearances of Lakewood’s Spur Posse members occurred on Jane Whitney, when a nineteen-year-old Lakewood High School graduate named Chris Albert (“Boasts He Has 44 ‘Points’ For Having Sex With Girls”) turned mean with a member of the audience, a young black woman who had tried to suggest that the Spurs on view were not exhibiting what she considered native intelligence.

  “I don’t get—I don’t understand what she’s saying,” Chris Albert had at first said, letting his jaw go slack as these boys tended to do when confronted with an unwelcome, or in fact any, idea.

  Another Spur had interpreted: “We’re dumb. She’s saying we’re dumb.”

  “What education does she have?” Chris Albert had then demanded, and crouched forward toward the young woman, as if trying to shake himself alert. “Where do you work at? McDonald’s? Burger King?” A third Spur had tried to interrupt, but Chris Albert, once roused, could not be deflected. “Five twenty-five?” he said. “Five fifty?” And then, there it was, the piton, driven in this case not into granite but into shale, already disintegrating: “I go to college.” Two years later Chris
Albert would be dead, shot in the chest and killed during a Fourth of July celebration on the Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach.

  3

  LAKEWOOD exists because at a given time in a different economy it had seemed an efficient idea to provide population density for the mall and a labor pool for the Douglas plant. There are a lot of towns like Lakewood in California. They were California’s mill towns, breeder towns for the boom. When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Such towns were organized around the sedative idealization of team sports, which were believed to develop “good citizens,” and therefore tended to the idealization of adolescent males. During the good years, the years for which places like Lakewood or Canoga Park or El Segundo or Pico Rivera existed, the preferred resident was in fact an adolescent or post-adolescent male, ideally one already married and mortgaged, in harness to the plant, a good worker, a steady consumer, a team player, someone who played ball, a good citizen.

  When towns like these came on hard times, it was the same adolescent males, only recently the community’s most valued asset, who were most visibly left with nowhere to go. Among the Spur Posse members who appeared on the talk shows that spring, a striking number had been out of high school a year, or even two years, but did not seem actively engaged in a next step. “It was some of the older kids who were so obnoxious, so arrogant,” one Spur father, Donald Belman, told me. “They’re the ones who were setting up talk-show appearances just for the money. I had to kick them out of my house, they were answering my phone, monitoring my mail. They were just in it for the money, quick cash.” Jane Gross of The New York Times asked one of these postgraduate Spurs what he had been doing since high school. “Partying,” he said. “Playing ball.”

  Good citizens were encouraged, when partying failed, when playing ball failed, when they finally noticed that the jobs had gone to Salt Lake or St. Louis, to see their problem as one caused by “the media,” or by “condoms in the schools,” or by less-good citizens, or non-citizens. “Orange County is using illegal aliens now as a smokescreen, as a scapegoat, because that’s the way we get the white lower-income people to jump on board and say the immigrants are the problem,” the wife of an aerospace engineer in Costa Mesa told Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times. “But we had our class differences before the immigrants. One of our sons was on the football team in the high school in Costa Mesa about twelve years ago. They had a great team and they were beating the pants off one of the schools in Newport Beach and the Newport stands started to cheer. ‘Hey, hey, that’s OK, you’re gonna work for us one day.’”

  This is what it costs to create and maintain an artificial ownership class.

  This is what happens when that class stops being useful.

  Most adults to whom I spoke in Lakewood during that spring of 1993 shared a sense that something in town had gone wrong. Many connected this apprehension to the Spur Posse, or at least to certain Spur Posse members who had emerged, even before the arrests and for a variety of reasons, as the community’s most visible males. Almost everyone agreed that this was a town in which what had been considered the definition of good parenting, the encouragement of assertive behavior among male children, had for some reason gotten badly out of hand. The point on which many people disagreed was whether sex was at the center of this problem, and some of these people felt troubled and misrepresented by the fact that public discussion of the situation in Lakewood had tended to focus exclusively on what they called “the sex charges,” or “the sexual charges.” “People have to understand,” I was told by one plaintive mother. “This isn’t about the sexual charges.” Some believed the charges intrinsically unprovable. Others seemed simply to regard sex among teenagers as a combat zone with its own rules, a contained conflict from which they were prepared, as the district attorney was, to look away. Many seemed unaware of the extent to which questions of gender had come to occupy the nation’s official attention, and so had failed to appreciate the ease with which the events in Lakewood could feed seamlessly into a discussion already in progress, offer a fresh context in which to recap Tailhook, Packwood, Anita Hill.

  What happened that spring had begun, most people agreed, at least a year before, maybe more. Much of what got talked about had seemed, at first, suggestive mainly of underemployed teenagers playing at acting street. There had been threats, bully tactics, the systematic harassment of girls or younger children who made complaints or “stood up to” or in any way resisted the whim of a certain group of boys. Young children in Lakewood had come to know among themselves who to avoid in those thirty-seven playgrounds, what cars to watch for on those 133 miles of No. 2 macadam. “I’m talking about throughout the community,” I was told by Karin Polacheck, who represented Lakewood on the board of education for the Long Beach Unified School District. “At the baseball fields, at the parks, at the markets, on the corners of schoolgrounds. They were organized enough that young children would say, ‘Watch out for that car when it comes around,’ ‘Watch out for those boys.’ I’ve heard stories of walking up and stealing baseball bats and telling kids, ‘If you tell anyone I’ll beat your head in.’ I’m talking about young children, nine, ten years old. It’s a small community. Younger kids knew that these older kids were out there.”

  “You’re dead,” the older boys would reportedly say, or “You’re gonna get fucked up.” “You’re gonna get it.” “You’re gonna die.” “I don’t like who she’s hanging with, why don’t we just kill her now.” There was a particular form of street terror mentioned by many people: invasive vehicular maneuvers construed by the targets as attempts to “run people down.” “There were skid marks outside my house,” one mother told me. “They were trying to scare my daughter. Her life was hell. She had chili-cheese nachos thrown at her at school.” “They just like to intimidate people,” I was repeatedly told. “They stare back at you. They don’t go to school, they ditch. They ditch and then they beg the teacher to pass them, because they have to have a C average to play on the teams.” “They came to our house in a truck to do something to my sister,” one young woman told me. “She can’t go anywhere. Can’t even go to Taco Bell any more. Can’t go to Jack-in-the-Box. They’ll jump you. They followed me home not long ago, I just headed for the sheriff’s office.”

  There had also been more substantive incidents, occurrences that could not be written off to schoolyard exaggeration or adolescent oversensitivity. There had been assaults in local parks, bicycles stolen and sold. There had been burglaries, credit cards and jewelry missing from the bedroom drawers of houses where local girls had been babysitting. There had even been, beginning in the summer of 1992, felony arrests: Donald Belman’s son Dana, who was generally said to have “founded” the Spur Posse, was arrested on suspicion of stealing a certain number of guns from the bedroom of a house where he was said to have attended a party. Not long before that, in Las Vegas, Dana Belman and another Spur, Christopher Russo, had been detained for possession of stolen credit cards. Just before Christmas 1992, Dana Belman and Christopher Russo were detained yet again, and arrested for alleged check forgery.

  There were odd quirks here, details not entirely consistent with the community’s preferred view of itself. There were the high school trips to Vegas and to Laughlin, which is a Nevada casino town on the Colorado River below Las Vegas. There was the question of the certain number of guns Dana Belman was suspected of having stolen from the bedroom of the house where he was said to have attended the party: the number of guns mentioned was nineteen. Still, these details seemed to go unremarked upon, and the events unconnected. People who had been targeted by the older boys believed themselves, they said later, “all alone in this.” They believed that each occasion of harassment was discrete, unique. They did not yet see a pattern in the various incidents and felonies. They had not yet made certain inductive leaps. That was
before the pipe bomb.

  The pipe bomb exploded on the front porch of a house not far from Lakewood High School between three and three-thirty on the morning of February 12, 1993. It destroyed one porch support. It tore holes in the stucco. It threw shrapnel into parked cars. One woman remembered that her husband was working the night shift at Rockwell and she had been sleeping light as usual when the explosion woke her. The next morning she asked a neighbor if she had heard the noise. “And she said, ‘You’re not going to believe it when I tell you what that was.’ And she explained to me that a pipe bomb had blown up on someone’s front porch. And that it had been a gang retaliatory thing. ‘Gang thing?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about, a gang thing?’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, Spur Posse.’ And I said, ‘Spur Posse, what is Spur Posse?’”

  This was the point at which the principal of Lakewood High School and the local sheriff’s office, which had been trying to get a handle on the rash of felonies around town, decided to ask certain parents to attend a special meeting at the high school. Letters were sent to twenty-five families, each of which was believed to have at least one Spur Posse son. Only some fifteen people showed up at the March 2 meeting. Sheriff’s deputies from both the local station and the arson-explosives detail spoke. The cause for concern, as the deputies then saw it, was that the trouble, whatever it was, seemed to be escalating: first the felonies, then a couple of car cherry bombs without much damage, now this eight-inch pipe bomb, which appeared to have been directed at one or more Spur Posse members and had been, according to a member of the arson-explosives detail, “intended to kill.” It was during this meeting that someone, it was hard to sort out who, said the word “rape.” Most people to whom I talked at first said that the issue had been raised by one of the parents, but those who said this had not actually been present at the meeting. Asking about this after the fact tended to be construed as potentially hostile, because the Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred, a specialist in high-profile gender cases, had by then appeared on the scene, giving press conferences, doing talk shows, talking about possible civil litigation on behalf of the six girls who had become her clients, and generally making people in Lakewood a little sensitive about who knew what and when they had known it and what they had done about what they knew.