Where I Was From

by Joan Didion

  What happened next was also unclear. Lakewood High School students recalled investigators from the sheriffs Whittier-based sex-abuse unit coming to the school, calling people in, questioning anyone who had even been seen talking to boys who were said to be Spurs. “I think they came up with a lot of wannabe boys,” one mother told me. “Boys who wanted to belong to something that had notoriety to it.” The presence of the investigators at the school might well have suggested that arrests could be pending, but school authorities said that they knew nothing until the morning of March 18, when sheriffs deputies appeared in the principals office and said that they were going into classrooms to take boys out in custody. “There was never any allegation that any of these incidents took place on school ground or at school events or going to and from school,” Carl Cohn said on the morning we talked in his Long Beach Unified School District office. He had not been present the morning the boys were taken from their classrooms in cutoffs and handcuffs, but the television vans had been, as had The Los Angeles Times and The Long Beach Press-Telegram. “Arresting the youngsters at school might have been convenient, but it very much contributed to what is now this media circus,” he said. “The sheriffs department had a press briefing. Downtown. Los Angeles. Where they notified the media that they were going in. All you have to do is mention that the perpetrators are students at a particular school and everybody gets on the freeway.”

  The boys arrested were detained for four nights. All but one sixteen-year-old, who was charged with lewd conduct against a ten-year-old girl, were released without charges. When those still enrolled at Lakewood High went back to school, they were greeted with cheers by some students. “Of course they were treated as heroes, they’d been wrongly accused,” I was told by Donald Belman, whose youngest son, Kristopher, was one of those arrested and released. “These girls pre-planned these things. They wanted to be looked on favorably, they wanted to be part of the clique. They wanted to be, hopefully, the girlfriends of these studs on campus.” The Belman family celebrated Kristopher’s release by going out for hamburgers at McDonald’s, which was, Donald Belman told The Los Angeles Times, “the American way.”

  Some weeks later the district attorney’s office released a statement which read in part: “After completing an extensive investigation and analysis of the evidence, our conclusion is that there is no credible evidence of forcible rape involving any of these boys…. Although there is evidence of unlawful sexual intercourse, it is the policy of this office not to file criminal charges where there is consensual sex among teenagers…. The arrogance and contempt for young women which have been displayed, while appalling, cannot form the basis for criminal charges.” “The district attorney on this did her homework,” Donald Belman told me. “She questioned all these kids, she found out these girls weren’t the victims they were made out to be. One of these girls had tattoos for chrissake.” “If it’s true about the ten-year-old, I feel bad for her and her family,” one Spur told David Ferrell of The Los Angeles Times. “My regards go out to the family.” As far as Lakewood High was concerned, it was time to begin, its principal said, “the healing process.”

  Donald and Dottie Belman, at the time they became the most public of the Spur Posse parents, had lived for twenty-two of their twenty-five years of marriage in a beige stucco house on Greentop Street in Lakewood. Donald Belman, who worked as a salesman for an aerospace vendor, selling to the large machine shops and to prime contractors like Douglas, had graduated in 1963 from Lakewood High School, spent four years in the Marine Corps, and come home to start a life with Dottie, herself a 1967 Lakewood High graduate. “I held out for that white dress,” Dottie Belman told Janet Wiscombe of The Long Beach Press-Telegram. “The word ‘sex’ was never spoken in my home. People in movies went into the bedroom and closed the door and came out with a smile on their face. Now people are having brutal sex on TV. They aren’t making love. There is nothing romantic about it.”

  This was a family that had been, by its own and other accounts, intensively focused on its three sons, Billy, then twenty-three, Dana, twenty, and Kristopher, eighteen, all of whom, at that time, still lived at home. “I’d hate to have my kids away from me for two or three days in Chicago or New York,” Donald Belman told me by way of explaining why he had given his imprimatur to the appearance of his two younger sons on The Home Show, which was shot in Los Angeles, but not initially on Jenny Jones, which was shot in Chicago. “All these talk shows start calling, I said, ‘Don’t do it. They’re just going to lie about you, they’re going to set you up.’ The more the boys said no, the more the shows enticed them. The Home Show was where I relented. They were offering a thousand dollars and a limo and it was in L.A. Jenny Jones offered I think fifteen hundred, but they’d have to fly.”

  During the years before this kind of guidance was needed, Donald Belman was always available to coach the boys’ teams. There had been Park League, there had been Little League. There had been Pony League, Colt League, Pop Warner. Dottie Belman had regularly served as Team Mother, and remembered literally running from her job as a hairdresser so that she could have dinner on the table every afternoon at five-fifteen. “They would make a home run or a touchdown and I held my head high,” she told the Press-Telegram. “We were reliving our past. We’d walk into Little League and we were hot stuff. I’d go to Von’s and people would come up to me and say, ‘Your kids are great.’ I was so proud. Now I go to Von’s at five a.m. in disguise. I’ve been Mother of the Year. I’ve sacrificed everything for my kids. Now I feel like I have to defend my honor.”

  The youngest Belman, Kristopher, who graduated from Lakewood High in June 1993, had been one of the boys arrested and released without charges that March. “I was crazy that weekend,” his father told me. “My boy’s in jail, Kris, he’s never been in any trouble whatsoever, he’s an average student, a star athlete. He doesn’t even have to be in school, he has enough credits to graduate, you don’t have to stay in school after you’re eighteen. But he’s there. Just to be with his friends.” Around the time of graduation, Kristopher was arraigned on a charge of “forcible lewd conduct” based on an alleged 1989 incident involving a girl who was then thirteen; this charge was later dropped and Kristopher Belman agreed to do one hundred hours of community service. The oldest Belman son, Billy, according to his father, was working and going to school. The middle son, Dana, had graduated from Lakewood High in 1991 and had been named, as his father and virtually everyone else who mentioned him pointed out, “Performer of the Year 1991,” for wrestling, in the Lakewood Youth Sports Hall of Fame. The Lakewood Youth Sports Hall of Fame is not at the high school, not at City Hall, but in a McDonald’s, at the corner of Woodruff and Del Amo. “They’re all standouts athletically,” Donald Belman told me. “My psychology and philosophy is this: I’m a standup guy, I love my sons, I’m proud of their accomplishments.” Dana, his father said, was at that time “looking for work,” a quest complicated by the thirteen felony burglary and forgery charges on which he was then awaiting trial.

  Dottie Belman, who had cancer surgery in April 1993, had filed for divorce in 1992 but for a year continued to live with her husband and sons on Greentop Street. “If Dottie wants to start a new life, I’m not going to hold her back,” Donald Belman told the Press-Telegram. “I’m a solid guy. Just a solid citizen. I see no reason for any thought that our family isn’t just all-American, basic and down-to-earth.” Dottie Belman, when she spoke to the Press-Telegram, had been more reflective. “The wrecking ball shot right through the mantel and the house has crumbled,” she said. “Dana said the other day, ‘I want to be in the ninth grade again, and I want to do everything differently. I had it all. I was Mr. Lakewood. I was a star. I was popular. As soon as I graduated, I lost the recognition. I want to go back to the wonderful days. Now it’s one disaster after another.’”

  “You saw the papers,” Ira Ewing says in “Golden Land” to the woman, a divorcée with a fourteen-year-old child of her own, who has become h
is sole consolation. “I can’t understand it! After all the advantages that … after all I tried to do for them—”

  The woman tries to calm him, offers him lunch.

  “No. I don’t want any lunch.—After all I have tried to give—”

  Which was another way of saying: “The wrecking ball shot right through the mantel and the house has crumbled.” It was 1996 when Dana Belman, convicted on three counts of burglary in the first degree, began serving a ten-year sentence at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo. It was 1999 when he was discharged from prison, and a year later when he was released from parole.

  4

  ONCE when I was twelve or thirteen and had checked the Lynds’ Middletown and Middletown in Transition out of the Sacramento library, I asked my mother to what “class” we belonged.

  “Its not a word we use,” she said. “It’s not the way we think.”

  On one level I believed this to be a willful misreading of what even a twelve-year-old could see to be the situation and on another level I understood it to be true: it was not the way we thought in California. We believed in fresh starts. We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode. We believed in the wildcatter who leased arid land at two and a half cents an acre and brought in Kettleman Hills, fourteen million barrels of crude in its first three years. We believed in all the ways that apparently played-out possibilities could while we slept turn green and golden. Keep California Green and Golden, was the state’s Smokey the Bear fire motto around the time I was reading the Lynds. Put out your campfire, kill the rattlesnake and watch the money flow in.

  And it did.

  Even if it was somebody else’s money.

  The extent to which the postwar boom years confirmed this warp in the California imagination, and in the expectations of its citizens, would be hard to overestimate. Good times today and better times tomorrow were supposed to come with the territory, roll in with the regularity of the breakers on what was once the coast of the Irvine ranch and became Newport Beach, Balboa, Lido Isle. Good times were the core conviction of the place, and it was their only gradually apparent absence, in the early 1990s, that began to unsettle California in ways that no one exactly wanted to plumb. The recognition that the trend was no longer reliably up came late and hard to California. The 1987 market crash was widely if not consciously seen by its citizens as just one more of the problems that plagued the America they had left behind, evidence of a tiresome eastern negativity that would not travel. Even when the defense plants started closing down off the San Diego Freeway and the for-lease signs started going up in Orange County, very few people wanted to see a connection with the way life was going to be lived in the California that was not immediately identifiable as “aircraft.”

  This was in fact a state in which virtually every county was to one degree or another dependent on defense contracts, from the billions upon billions of federal dollars that flowed into Los Angeles County to the five-digit contracts in counties like Plumas and Tehama and Tuolomne, yet the sheer geographical isolation of different parts of the state tended to obscure the elementary fact of its interrelatedness. Even within Los Angeles County, there had seemed no meaningful understanding that if General Motors shut down its assembly plant in Van Nuys, say, as it did in fact do in 1992, twenty-six hundred jobs lost, the bell would eventually toll in Bel Air, where the people lived who held the paper on the people who held the mortgages in Van Nuys. I recall asking a real estate broker on the west side of Los Angeles, in June 1988, what effect a defense cutback would have on the residential real estate boom then in progress. She said that such a cutback would have no effect on the west side of Los Angeles, because people who worked for Hughes and Douglas did not live in Pacific Palisades or Santa Monica or Malibu or Beverly Hills or Bel Air or Brentwood or Holmby Hills. “They live in Torrance maybe, or Canoga Park or somewhere.”

  Torrance is off the San Diego Freeway, west of Lakewood and south of El Segundo and Hawthorne and Lawndale and Gardena. Canoga Park is in the San Fernando Valley. People who worked for Hughes did in 1988 live in Torrance and Canoga Park. Five years later, after passage by the Arizona state legislature of a piece of tax-incentive legislation known locally as “the Hughes bill,” Hughes was moving a good part of its El Segundo and Canoga Park operations to Tucson, and a well-known residential real estate broker on the west side of Los Angeles was advising clients that the market in Beverly Hills was down 47.5 percent. I remember being told, by virtually everyone to whom I spoke in Los Angeles during the few months that followed the 1992 riot, how much the riot had “changed” the city. Most of those who said this had lived in Los Angeles, as I had, during the 1965 Watts riot, but 1992, they assured me, had been “different,” 1992 had “changed everything.” The words they used seemed overfreighted, ominous in an unspecific way, words like “sad” and “bad.” Since these were largely not people who had needed a riot to tell them that a volatile difference of circumstance and understanding existed between the city’s haves and its have-nots, what they said puzzled me, and I pressed for a closer description of how Los Angeles had changed. After the riot, I was told, it was impossible to sell a house in Los Angeles. The notion it might have been impossible to sell a house in Los Angeles that year for a simpler reason, the reason being that the money had gone away, was still in 1992 so against the grain of the place as to be largely rejected.

  The sad, bad times had actually begun, most people later allowed, in 1989, when virtually every defense contractor in Southern California began laying off. TRW had already dropped a thousand jobs. Rockwell had dropped five thousand as its B-I program ended. Northrop dropped three thousand. Hughes dropped six thousand. Lockheed’s union membership had declined, between 1981 and 1989, from fifteen thousand to seven thousand. McDonnell Douglas asked five thousand managers to resign, then to compete against one another for 2,900 jobs. Yet there was still, in McDonnell Douglas towns like Long Beach and Lakewood, space to maneuver, space for a little reflexive optimism and maybe even a trip to Vegas or Laughlin, since the parent corporation’s Douglas Aircraft Company, the entity responsible for commercial as opposed to defense aircraft, was hiring for what was then its new MD-II line. “Douglas is going great guns right now because of the commercial sector,” I had been told in 1989 by David Hensley, who then headed the UCLA Business Forecasting Project. “Airline traffic escalated tremendously after deregulation. They’re all beefing up their fleets, buying planes, which means Boeing up in Washington and Douglas here. That’s a buffer against the downturn in defense spending.”

  These early defense layoffs were described at the time as “correctives” to the buildup of the Reagan years. Later they became “reorganizations” or “consolidations,” words that still suggested the normal trimming and tacking of individual companies; the acknowledgment that the entire aerospace industry might be in trouble did not enter the language until a few years later, when “the restructuring” became preferred usage. The language used, like the geography, had worked to encyst the problem in certain communities, enabling Los Angeles at large to see the layoffs as abstractions, the predictable if difficult detritus of geopolitical change, in no way logically connected to whether the mini-mall at the corner made it or went under. It had been August 1990 before anybody much noticed that the commercial and residential real estate markets had dried up in Los Angeles. It had been October 1990 before a Los Angeles Times business report tentatively suggested that a local slowdown “appears to have begun.”

  Before 1991 ended, California had lost sixty thousand aerospace jobs. Many of these jobs had moved to southern and southwestern states offering lower salary scales, fewer regulations, and state and local governments, as in Arizona, not averse to granting tax incentives. Rockwell was entertaining bids on its El Segundo plant. Lockheed had decided to move production on its Advanced Tactical Fighter from Burbank to Marietta, Georgia. By 1992, more than seven hundred manufactu
ring plants had relocated or chosen to expand outside California, taking with them 107,000 jobs. Dun & Bradstreet reported 9,985 California business failures during the first six months of 1992. Analysts spoke approvingly of the transition from large companies to small businesses. The Los Angeles Daily News noted the “trend toward a new, more independent work force that will become less reliant on the company to provide for them and more inclined toward entrepreneurship,” in other words, no benefits and no fixed salary, a recipe for motel people. Early in 1991, the Arco oil refinery in Carson, near where the Harbor and San Diego Freeways intersect, had placed advertisements in The Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register for twenty-eight jobs paying $11.42 to $17.45 an hour. By the end of a week some fourteen thousand applicants had appeared in person at the refinery, and an unspecified number more had mailed in resumes. “I couldn’t get in the front gate,” an Arco spokesman told the Times. “Security people were directing traffic. It was quite a sight to see.”