Where I Was From

1

IN the May 1935 issue of the American Mercury, William Faulkner published one of the few pieces of fiction he set in California, a short story he called “Golden Land.” “Golden Land” deals with a day in the life of Ira Ewing, Jr., age forty-eight, a man for whom “twenty-five years of industry and desire, of shrewdness and luck and even fortitude,” seem recently to have come to ashes. At fourteen, Ira Ewing had fled Nebraska on a westbound freight. By the time he was thirty, he had married the daughter of a Los Angeles carpenter, fathered a son and a daughter, and secured a foothold in the real estate business. By the time we meet him, eighteen years later, he is in a position to spend fifty thousand dollars a year, a sizable amount in 1935. He has been able to bring his widowed mother from Nebraska and install her in a house in Glendale. He has been able to provide for his children “luxuries and advantages which his own father not only could not have conceived in fact but would have condemned completely in theory.”

Yet nothing is working out. Ira’s daughter, Samantha, who wants to be in show business and has taken the name “April Lalear,” is testifying in a lurid trial reported on page one (“April Lalear Bares Orgy Secrets”) of the newspapers placed on the reading table next to Ira’s bed. Ira, less bewildered than weary, tries not to look at the accompanying photographs of Samantha, the “hard, blonde, and inscrutable” daughter who “alternately stared back or flaunted long pale shins.” Nor is Samantha the exclusive source of the leaden emptiness Ira now feels instead of hunger: there is also his son, Voyd, who continues to live at home but has not spoken unprompted to his father in two years, not since the morning when Voyd, drunk, was delivered home to his father wearing, “in place of underclothes, a woman’s brassiere and step-ins.”

Since Ira prides himself on being someone who will entertain no suggestion that his life is not the success that his business achievement would seem to him to promise, he discourages discussion of his domestic trials, and has tried to keep the newspapers featuring April Lalear and the orgy secrets away from his mother. Via the gardener, however, Ira’s mother has learned about her granddaughter’s testimony, and she is reminded of the warning she once gave her son, after she had seen Samantha and Voyd stealing cash from their mother’s purse: “You make money too easy,” she had told Ira. “This whole country is too easy for us Ewings. It may be all right for them that have been born here for generations, I don’t know about that. But not for us.”

“But these children were born here,” Ira had said.

“Just one generation,” his mother had said. “The generation before that they were born in a sod-roofed dugout on the Nebraska wheat frontier. And the one before that in a log house in Missouri. And the one before that in a Kentucky blockhouse with Indians around it. This world has never been easy for Ewings. Maybe the Lord never intended it to be.”

“But it is from now on,” the son had insisted. “For you and me too. But mostly for them.”

“Golden Land” does not entirely hold up, nor, I would guess, will it ever be counted among the best Faulkner stories. Yet it retains, for certain Californians, a nagging resonance, and opens the familiar troubling questions. I grew up in a California family that derived, from the single circumstance of having been what Ira Ewing’s mother called “born here for generations,” considerable pride, much of it, it seemed to me later, strikingly unearned. “The trouble with these new people,” I recall hearing again and again as a child in Sacramento, “is they think it’s supposed to be easy.” The phrase “these new people” generally signified people who had moved to California after World War Two, but was tacitly extended back to include the migration from the Dust Bowl during the 1930s, and often further. New people, we were given to understand, remained ignorant of our special history, insensible to the hardships endured to make it, blind not only to the dangers the place still presented but to the shared responsibilities its continued habitation demanded.

If my grandfather spotted a rattlesnake while driving, he would stop his car and go into the brush after it. To do less, he advised me more than once, was to endanger whoever later entered the brush, and so violate what he called “the code of the West.” New people, I was told, did not understand their responsibility to kill rattlesnakes. Nor did new people understand that the water that came from the tap in, say, San Francisco, was there only because part of Yosemite had been flooded to put it there. New people did not understand the necessary dynamic of the fires, the seven-year cycles of flood and drought, the physical reality of the place. “Why didn’t they go back to Truckee?” a young mining engineer from back East asked when my grandfather pointed out the site of the Donner Party’s last encampment. I recall hearing this story repeatedly. I also recall the same grandfather, my mother’s father, whose family had migrated from the hardscrabble Adirondack frontier in the eighteenth century to the hardscrabble Sierra Nevada foothills in the nineteenth, working himself up into writing an impassioned letter-to-the-editor over a fifth-grade textbook in which one of the illustrations summed up California history as a sunny progression from Spanish Señorita to Gold Miner to Golden Gate Bridge. What the illustration seemed to my grandfather to suggest was that those responsible for the textbook believed the settlement of California to have been “easy,” history rewritten, as he saw it, for the new people. There were definite ambiguities in this: Ira Ewing and his children were, of course, new people, but so, less than a century before, had my grandfather’s family been. New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.

Californians whose family ties to the state predate World War Two have an equivocal and often uneasy relationship to the postwar expansion. Joan Irvine Smith, whose family’s eighty-eight-thousand-acre ranch in Orange County was developed during the 1960s, later created, on the twelfth floor of the McDonnell Douglas Building in Irvine, a city that did not exist before the Irvines developed their ranch, the Irvine Museum, dedicated to the California impressionist or plein air paintings she had begun collecting in 1991. “There is more nostalgia for me in these paintings than in actually going out to look at what used to be the ranch now that it has been developed, because I’m looking at what I looked at as a child,” she told Art in California about this collection. Her attraction to the genre had begun, she said, when she was a child and would meet her stepfather for lunch at the California Club, where the few public rooms in which women were at that time allowed were decorated with California landscapes lent by the members. “I can look at those paintings and see what the ranch was as I remember it when I was a little girl.”

The California Club, which is on Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles, was then and is still the heart of Southern California’s old-line business establishment, the Los Angeles version of the Bohemian and Pacific Union Clubs in San Francisco. On any given day since World War Two, virtually everyone lunching at the California Club, most particularly not excluding Joan Irvine, has had a direct or indirect investment in the development of California, which is to say in the obliteration of the undeveloped California on display at the Irvine Museum. In the seventy-four paintings chosen for inclusion in Selections from the Irvine Museum, the catalogue published by the museum to accompany a 1992 traveling exhibition, there are hills and desert and mesas and arroyos. There are mountains, coastline, big sky. There are stands of eucalyptus, sycamore, oak, cottonwood. There are washes of California poppies. As for fauna, there are, in the seventy-four paintings, three sulphur-crested cockatoos, one white peacock, two horses, and nine people, four of whom are dwarfed by the landscape and two of whom are indistinct Indians paddling a canoe.

Some of this is romantic (the indistinct Indians), some washed with a slightly falsified golden light, in the tradition that runs from Bierstadt’s “lustrous, pearly mist” to the “Kinkade Glow.” Most of these paintings, however, reflect the way the place actually looks, or looked, not only to Joan Irvine but also to me and to anyone else who knew it as recently as 1960. It is this close representation of a familiar yet vanished landscape that gives the Irvine collection its curious effect, that of a short-term memory misfire: these paintings hang in a city, Irvine (population more than one hundred and fifty thousand, with a University of California campus enrolling some nineteen thousand students), that was forty years ago a mirror image of the paintings themselves, bean fields and grazing, the heart but by no means all of the cattle and sheep operation amassed by the great-grandfather of the founder of the Irvine Museum.

The disposition of such a holding can be, for its inheritors, a fraught enterprise. “On the afternoon of his funeral we gathered to honor this man who had held such a legacy intact for the main part of his ninety-one years,” Jane Hollister Wheelwright wrote in The Ranch Papers about the aftermath of her father’s death and the prospect of being forced to sell the Hollister ranch. “All of us were deeply affected. Some were stunned by the prospect of loss; others gloated, contemplating cash and escape. We were bitterly divided, but none could deny the power of that land. The special, spiritually meaningful (and often destructive) impact of the ranch was obvious. I proved it by my behavior, as did the others.”

That was 1961. Joan Irvine Smith had replaced her mother on the board of the Irvine Company four years before, in 1957, the year she was twenty-four. She had seen, a good deal more clearly and realistically than Jane Hollister Wheelwright would see four years later, the solution she wanted for her family’s ranch, and she had seen the rest of the Irvine board as part of the problem: by making small deals, selling off bits of the whole, the board was nibbling away at the family’s principal asset, the size of its holding. It was she who pressed the architect William Pereira to present a master plan. It was she who saw the potential return in giving the land for a University of California campus. It was she, most importantly, who insisted on maintaining an interest in the ranch’s development. And, in the end, which meant after years of internecine battles and a series of litigations extending to 1991, it was she who more or less prevailed. In 1960, before the Irvine ranch was developed, there were 719,500 people in all of Orange County. In 2000 there were close to 3 million, most of whom would not have been there had two families, the Irvines in the central part of the county and the inheritors of Richard O’Neill’s Rancho Santa Margarita and Mission Viejo acreage in the southern, not developed their ranches.

This has not been a case in which the rising tide floated all boats. Not all of Orange County’s new residents came to realize what would have seemed the middle-class promise of its growth. Not all of those residents even had somewhere to live: some settled into the run-down motels built in the mid-1950s, at the time Disneyland opened, and were referred to locally, because they had nowhere else to live and could not afford the deposits required for apartment rental, as “motel people.” In his 1986 The New California: Facing the 21st Century, the political columnist Dan Walters quoted The Orange County Register on motel people: “Mostly Anglo, they’re the county’s newest migrant workers: instead of picking grapes, they inspect semiconductors.” This kind of week-by-week or even day-by-day living arrangement has taken hold in other parts of the country, but remains particularly entrenched in Southern California, where apartment rents rose to meet the increased demand from people priced out of a housing market in which even the least promising bungalow can sell for several hundred thousand dollars. By the year 2000, according to The Los Angeles Times, some hundred Orange County motels were inhabited almost exclusively by the working poor, people who made, say, $280 a week sanding airplane parts, or $7 an hour at Disney’s “California Adventure” park. “A land celebrating the richness and diversity of California, its natural resources, and pioneering spirit of its people,” the web site for “California Adventure” read. “I can look at these paintings and look back,” Joan Irvine Smith told Art in California about the collection she bought with the proceeds of looking exclusively, and to a famous degree, forward. “I can see California as it was and as we will never see it again.” Hers is an extreme example of the conundrum that to one degree or another confronts any Californian who profited from the boom years: if we could still see California as it was, how many of us could now afford to see it?

2

LAKEWOOD, California, the Los Angeles County community where in early 1993 an amorphous high school clique identifying itself as the Spur Posse achieved a short-lived national notoriety, lies between the Long Beach and San Gabriel Freeways, east of the San Diego, part of that vast grid familiar to the casual visitor mainly from the air, Southern California’s industrial underbelly, the thousand square miles of aerospace and oil that powered the place’s apparently endless expansion. Like much of the southern end of this grid, Lakewood was until after World War Two agricultural, several thousand acres of beans and sugar beets just inland from the Signal Hill oil field and across the road from the plant behind the Long Beach airport that the federal government completed in 1941 for Donald Douglas.

This Douglas plant, with the outsized American flag whipping in the wind and the huge forward-slanted letters MCDONNELL DOUGLAS wrapped around the building and the MD-IIS parked like cars off Lakewood Boulevard, was at the time I first visited Lakewood in 1993 the single most noticeable feature on the local horizon, but for a while, not long after World War Two, there had been another: a hundred-foot pylon, its rotating beacon visible for several miles, erected to advertise the opening, in April 1950, of what was meant to be the world’s biggest subdivision, a tract larger in conception than the original Long Island Levittown, 17,500 houses waiting to be built on the 3,400 dead-level acres that three California developers, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart and Louis Boyar, had purchased for $8.8 million from the Montana Land Company.

Lakewood, the sign read at the point on Lakewood Boulevard where Bellflower would become Lakewood, Tomorrow’s City Today. What was offered for sale in Tomorrow’s City, as in most subdivisions of the postwar period, was a raw lot and the promise of a house. Each of the 17,500 houses was to be 950 to 1,100 square feet on a fifty-by-hundred-foot lot. Each was to be a one-story stucco (seven floor plans, twenty-one different exteriors, no identical models to be built next to or facing each other) painted in one of thirty-nine color schemes. Each was to have oak floors, a glass-enclosed shower, a stainless-steel double sink, a garbage disposal unit, and either two or three bedrooms. Each was to sell for between eight and ten thousand dollars. Low FHA, Vets No Down. There were to be thirty-seven playgrounds, twenty schools. There were to be seventeen churches. There were to be 133 miles of street, paved with an inch and a half of No. 2 macadam on an aggregate base.

There was to be, and this was key not only to the project but to the nature of the community which eventually evolved, a regional shopping center, “Lakewood Center,” which in turn was conceived as America’s largest retail complex: 256 acres, parking for ten thousand cars, anchored by a May Company. “Lou Boyar pointed out that they would build a shopping center and around that a city, that he would make a city for us and millions for himself,” John Todd, a resident of Lakewood since its beginning and later its city attorney, wrote of the planning stage. “Everything about this entire project was perfect,” Mark Taper said in 1969, when he sat down with city officials to work up a local history. “Things happened that may never happen again.”

What he meant, of course, was the perfect synergy of time and place, the seamless confluence of World War Two and the Korean War and the G.I. Bill and the defense contracts that began to flood Southern California as the Cold War set in. Here on this raw acreage on the flood plain between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers was where two powerfully conceived national interests, that of keeping the economic engine running and that of creating an enlarged middle or consumer class, could be seen to converge.

The scene beneath the hundred-foot pylon during that spring of 1950 was Cimarron: thirty thousand people showed up for the first day of selling. Twenty thousand showed up on weekends throughout the spring. Near the sales office was a nursery where children could be left while parents toured the seven completed and furnished model houses. Thirty-six salesmen worked day and evening shifts, showing potential buyers how their G.I. benefits, no down payment, and thirty years of monthly payments ranging from $43 to $54 could elevate them to ownership of a piece of the future. Deals were closed on 611 houses the first week. One week saw construction started on 567. A new foundation was excavated every fifteen minutes. Cement trucks were lined up for a mile, waiting to move down the new blocks pouring foundations. Shingles were fed to roofers by conveyer belt. And, at the very point when sales had begun to slow, as Taper recalled at the 1969 meeting with city officials, “the Korean War was like a new stimulation.”

“There was this new city growing — growing like leaves,” one of the original residents, who with her husband had opened a delicatessen in Lakewood Center, said when she was interviewed for an oral history project undertaken by the city and Lakewood High School. “So we decided this is where we should start…. There were young people, young children, schools, a young government that was just starting out. We felt all the big stores were coming in. May Company and all the other places started opening. So we rented one of the stores and we were in business.” These World War Two and Korean War veterans and their wives who started out in Lakewood were, typically, about thirty years old. They were, typically, not from California but from the Midwest and the border South. They were, typically, blue-collar and lower-level white collar. They had 1.7 children, they had steady jobs. Their experience tended to reinforce the conviction that social and economic mobility worked exclusively upward.

Donald J. Waldie, while he was working as the City of Lakewood’s public information officer, wrote an extraordinary book, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, published in 1996, a series of interconnected essays about someone who, like their author, lived in Lakewood and worked at City Hall. “Naively, you could say that Lakewood was the American dream made affordable for a generation of industrial workers who in the preceding generation could never aspire to that kind of ownership,” he said one morning when we were talking about the way the place was developed. “They were fairly but not entirely homogenous in their ethnic background. They were oriented to aerospace. They worked for Hughes, they worked for Douglas, they worked at the naval station and shipyard in Long Beach. They worked, in other words, at all the places that exemplified the bright future that California was supposed to be.”

Donald Waldie grew up in Lakewood, and, after Cal State Long Beach and graduate work at the University of California at Irvine, had chosen to come back, as had a striking number of people who lived there. In a county increasingly populated by low-income Mexican and Central American and Asian immigrants and pressed by the continuing needs of its low-income blacks, almost sixty thousand of Lakewood’s seventy-some thousand citizens were still, in the spring of 1993, white. More than half had been born in California, and most of the rest in the Midwest and the South. The largest number of those employed worked, just as their fathers and grandfathers had, for Douglas or Hughes or Rockwell or the Long Beach naval station and shipyard or for the many subcontractors and vendors that did business with Douglas and Hughes and Rockwell and the Long Beach naval station and shipyard.

People who lived in Lakewood did not necessarily think of themselves as living in Los Angeles, and could often list the occasions on which they had visited there, to see the Dodgers play, say, or to show a relative from out of state the Music Center. Their apprehension of urban woes remained remote: the number of homeless people in Lakewood either in shelters or “visible on street,” according to the 199 °Census, was zero. When residents of Lakewood spoke about the rioting that had begun in Los Angeles after the 1992 Rodney King verdicts, they were talking about events that seemed to them, despite the significant incidence of arson and looting in such neighboring communities as Long Beach and Compton, to have occurred somewhere else. “We’re far away from that element,” one woman to whom I spoke said when the subject of the riots came up. “If you’ve driven around …”

“Little suburbia,” a neighbor said.

“America U.S.A., right here.”

The neighbor’s husband worked at a nearby Rockwell plant, not the Rockwell plant in Lakewood. The Rockwell plant in Lakewood had closed in 1992, a thousand jobs gone. The scheduled closing of the Long Beach naval station would mean almost nine thousand jobs gone. The Federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission had granted a provisional stay to the Long Beach naval shipyard, which adjoined the naval station and employed another four thousand people, but its prospects for survival remained dim. One thing that was not remote in Lakewood in 1993, one thing so close that not many people even wanted to talk about it, was the apprehension that what had already happened to the Rockwell plant and would happen to the Long Beach naval station and shipyard could also happen to the Douglas plant. I recall talking one day to Carl Cohn, then superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District, which included Lakewood. “There’s a tremendous fear that at some point this operation might go away entirely,” he said. “I mean that’s kind of one of the whispered things around town. Nobody wants it out there.”

Douglas had already, in 1993, moved part of its MD-80 production to Salt Lake City. Douglas had already moved part of what remained of its C-17 production to St. Louis. Douglas had already moved the T-45 to St. Louis. In a 1992 study called Impact of Defense Cuts on California, the California Commission on State Finance had estimated nineteen thousand layoffs still to come from Hughes and McDonnell Douglas, but by 1992 there had already been, in Southern California, some twenty-one thousand McDonnell Douglas layoffs. According to a June 1993 report on aerospace unemployment prepared by researchers at the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Planning, half the California aerospace workers laid off in 1989 were, two years later, either still unemployed or no longer living in California. Most of those who did find jobs had ended up in lower-income service jobs; only seventeen percent had gone back to work in the aerospace industry at figures approaching their original salaries. Of those laid off in 1991 and 1992, only sixteen percent, a year later, had found jobs of any kind.

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.

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 his 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 manufacturing 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.”

According to the Commission on State Finance in Sacramento, which monitors federal spending and its impact on the state, some 800,000 jobs were lost in California between 1988 and 1993. More than half the jobs lost were in Los Angeles County. The commission’s May 1993 report estimated the further loss, between 1993 and 1997, of another 90,000 aerospace jobs, as well as 35,000 civilian jobs at bases scheduled for closure, but warned that “the potential loss could be greater if the defense industry continues to consolidate operations outside California.” The Bank of America estimated six to eight hundred thousand jobs lost between 1990 and 1993, but made an even more bleak projection: four to five hundred thousand more jobs lost, in the state’s “downsizing industries,” between 1993 and 1995. This was what people in Los Angeles were talking about when they talked about the 1992 riot.

5

PEOPLE who worked on the line in the big California aerospace plants had constituted, in the good years, a kind of family. Many of them were second generation, and would mention the father who worked on the Snark missile, the brother who was foreman of a fabricating shop in Pico Rivera, the uncle who used to get what seemed like half the A-4 line out to watch Little League. These people might move among the half dozen or so major suppliers, but almost never outside them. The conventions of the marketplace remained alien to them. They worked to military specifications, or “milspec,” a system that, The Washington Post noted, provided fifteen pages of specs for the making of chocolate cookies. They took considerable pride in working in an industry where decisions were not made in what Kent Kresa, then chairman of Northrop, dismissed as “a green eyeshade way.” They believed their companies to be consecrated to what they construed as the national interest, and to deserve, in turn, the nation’s unconditional support. They believed in McDonnell Douglas. They believed in Rockwell, Hughes, Northrop, Lockheed, General Dynamics, TRW, Litton Industries. They believed in the impossibility of adapting even the most elementary market principles to the manufacturing of aircraft. They believed the very notion of “fixed price,” which was the shorthand contractors used to indicate that the government was threatening not to pay for cost overruns, to be antithetical to innovation, anathema to a process that was by its own definition undefined and uncertain.

Since this was an industry in which machine parts were drilled to within two-thousandths or even one-thousandth of an inch, tolerances that did not immediately lend themselves to automation, the people who worked in these plants had never, as they put it, gone robotic. They were the last of the medieval hand workers, and the spaces in which they worked, the huge structures with the immaculate white floors and the big rigs and the overhead cameras and the project banners and the flags of the foreign buyers, became the cathedrals of the Cold War, occasionally visited by but never entirely legible to the uninitiated. “Assembly lines are like living things,” I was once told by the manager of assembly operations on the F/A-18 line at Northrop in El Segundo. “A line will gain momentum and build toward a delivery. I can touch it, I can feel it. Here on the line we’re a little more blunt and to the point, because this is where the rubber meets the road. If we’re going to ship an airplane every two days, we need people to respond to this.” Navy Pilots Are Depending On You, a banner read in the high shadowy reaches above the F/A-18 line. Build It As If You Were Going to Fly It, another read. A toolbox carried this message: With God & Guts & Guns Our Freedom Was Won!

This was a world bounded by a diminishing set of coordinates. There were from the beginning a finite number of employers who needed what these people knew how to deliver, and what these people knew how to deliver was only one kind of product. “Our industry’s record at defense conversion is unblemished by success,” Norman Augustine, then the chairman and CEO of Martin Marietta, told The Washington Post in 1993. “Why is it rocket scientists can’t sell toothpaste? Because we don’t know the market, or how to research, or how to market the product. Other than that, we’re in good shape.”

Increasingly, the prime aerospace contractors had come to define themselves as “integrators,” meaning that a larger and larger proportion of what they delivered, in some cases as much as seventy-five percent, had been supplied by subcontractors. The prime contractors were of course competitive with one another, but there was also an interdependence, a recognition that they had, vis-à-vis their shared principal customer, the federal government, a mutual interest. In this spirit, two or three competing contractors would typically “team” a project, submitting a joint bid, supporting one another during the lobbying phase, and finally dividing the spoils of production.

McDonnell Douglas had been the prime contractor on the F/A-18, an attack aircraft used by both the Navy and the Marine Corps and sold by the Air Force to such foreign users as the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, Spain, and Kuwait. McDonnell Douglas, however, teamed the F/A-18 with Northrop, which would every week send, from its El Segundo plant, two partial airplanes, called “shipsets,” to the McDonnell Douglas facility in St. Louis. Each Northrop shipset for the F/A-18 included the fuselage and two tails, “stuffed,” which is what aircraft people say to indicate that a piece of an airplane comes complete with its working components. McDonnell Douglas would then assemble the shipsets with the wings and other components, and roll the finished F/A-I8s off its own line. Northrop and McDonnell Douglas again teamed on a prototype for the YF-23 Advanced Tactical Fighter, but lost the contract to Lockheed, which had teamed its own ATF prototype with Boeing and General Dynamics. Boeing, in turn, teamed its commercial 747 with Northrop, which supplied several 747 shipsets a month, each consisting of the center fuselage and associated sub-assemblies, or stuffing. General Dynamics had the prime contract with the Navy for the A-12 attack jet, but had teamed it with McDonnell Douglas.

The perfect circularity of the enterprise, one in which politicians controlled the letting of government contracts to companies which in turn utilized the contracts to employ potential voters, did not encourage natural selection. When any single element changed in this hermetic and interrelated world, for example a shift in the political climate enabling even one member of Congress to sense a gain in questioning the cost of even one DOD project, the interrelatedness tended to work against adaptation. One tree falls and the food chain fails: on the day in 1991 when Richard B. Cheney, then secretary of defense, finally canceled the Navy’s contract with General Dynamics for the A-12, thousands of McDonnell Douglas jobs got wiped out in St. Louis, where McDonnell Douglas had been teaming the A-12 with General Dynamics.

To protect its headquarters plant in St. Louis, McDonnell Douglas moved some of the production on its own C-17 program from Long Beach to St. Louis. To protect the program itself, the company opened a C-17 plant in Macon, Georgia, what was called in the industry a “double-hitter,” situated as it was in both the home state of Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the home district of Rep. J. Roy Rowland, a member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “It was smart business to put a plant in Macon,” a former McDonnell Douglas executive told Ralph Vartabedian of The Los Angeles Times. “There wouldn’t be a C-17 without Nunn’s support. There is nothing illegal or immoral about wanting to keep your program funded.”

The C-17 was a cargo plane with a capacity for landing, as its supporters frequently mentioned, “on short runways like in Bosnia.” It entered development in the mid-1980s. By the time the first plane was delivered in 1993 the number of planes on order from the Air Force had dropped from 210 to 120 and the projected cost of each had risen from $150 million to $380 million. The C-17, even more than most programs, had been plagued by cost overruns and technical problems. There were flaws in the landing gear, a problem with the flaps, trouble meeting range and payload specifications. One test aircraft leaked fuel. Another emerged from a ground strength-certification test with broken wings. Once off the ground, the plane showed a distressing readiness to pitch up its nose and go into a stall.

On June 14, 1993, the day the Air Force accepted delivery of its first C-17 Globemaster III, the plane was more than a year behind schedule, already $1.4 billion over budget, and not yet within sight of a final design determination. Considerable show attended this delivery. Many points were made. The ceremony took place at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, the home state of Senator Strom Thurmond, then the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as well as of Representatives Floyd Spence, John M. Spratt, Jr., and Arthur Ravenal, Jr., all members of the House Armed Services Committee. Some thirty-five hundred officials turned out. The actual aircraft, which was being delivered with 125 “waivers and deviations” from contract specifications and had been flown east with a load of ballast positioned to keep the nose from pitching up, was piloted on its delivery leg by General Merrill McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff. “We had it loaded with Army equipment … a couple of Humvees, twenty or thirty soldiers painted up for battle,” General McPeak reported a few days later at a Pentagon briefing. “And I would just say that its a fine airplane, wonderful capability when we get it fielded, it will make a big difference to us in terms of the global mobility requirement we have, and so I just think, you know, it’s a home run.”

At the time General McPeak pronounced the plane a home run, 8,700 of the remaining employees at McDonnell Douglas’s Long Beach plant were working on the C-17. What those 8,700 employees would be doing the month or the year after that remained, at that time, an open question, since even as the Air Force was demonstrating support of its own program, discussions had begun about how best to dispose of it. There were a number of options under consideration. One was to transfer program management from McDonnell Douglas to Boeing. Another was to further reduce the number of C-17S on order from 120 to as few as 25. The last-ditch option, the A-12 solution, was to just pull the plug. The Long Beach plant was the plant on the Lakewood city line, the plant with the American flag whipping in the wind and the forward-slanted logo and the boarded-up motel with the marquee that still read “Welcome Douglas Happy Hour 4–7.” This was what people in Lakewood were talking about when they talked about the Spur Posse.

6

OF the eighty-nine members of the Lakewood High School Class of 1989 who had responded, a year after graduation, to a school district questionnaire asking what they were doing, seventy-one said that they were attending college full or part time. Forty-two of those were enrolled at Long Beach Community College. Five were at community colleges in the neighboring communities of Cerritos and Cypress. Twelve were at various nearby California State University campuses: Fullerton, Long Beach, San Diego, Pomona. Two had been admitted to the University of California system, one to Irvine and one to Santa Barbara. One was at U.S.C. Nine were at unspecified other campuses. During the 1990–91 school year, 234 Lakewood High students were enrolled in the district’s magnet program in aerospace technology, which channeled into Long Beach Community College and McDonnell Douglas. Lakewood High’s SAT scores for that year averaged 362 verbal and 440 math, a total of ninety-five points below the state average.

This was not a community that pushed its children hard, or launched them into the far world. Males were encouraged to continue, after graduation and indeed into adulthood, playing ball (many kinds of ball, all kinds of ball) in the parks and on the schoolgrounds where they had grown up. Females were encouraged to participate in specific sports of their own, as well as to support the team activities of the ball players. Virtually everyone to whom I spoke in the spring of 1993 mentioned the city’s superior sports program. “It’s been a very clean community,” I was told by John Todd, who had been instrumental in the city’s 1954 incorporation and had served as city attorney ever since. “The people that made it up were sound American citizens. We were oriented to our schools and churches and other local activities. We have a tremendous park and recreation program here in Lakewood. And it tended to keep people here.” Another longtime resident, whose oldest son worked for McDonnell Douglas and whose other grown children were all in school nearby, echoed this: “It’s just a mass recreation program to keep them all busy.”

People in Lakewood often mentioned to me how much there was going on in the area. There were the batting cages. There was bowling. There were many movies around. There was, nearby in Downey, the campaign to preserve the nation’s last operating original McDonald’s, a relic of 1953 at the corner of Lakewood Boulevard and Florence Avenue. “If they’re going to tear this down, they might as well tell Clinton please take your business to Taco Bell,” one observer told the Press-Telegram. And there was, always, the mall, Lakewood Center, the actual and figurative center of town. During the days I spent in Lakewood I had occasion to visit the mall now and then, and each time I found it moderately busy, the fact that its sales figures had decreased every quarter since 1990 notwithstanding. There was a reflecting pool, a carousel, a Burger King, a McDonald’s, if not an original McDonald’s. There was a booth offering free information on prescriptions. There was another displaying photographs of houses for sale. I said to a woman leafing through the listings that I had not before seen houses for sale in a mall. “H.U.D. and V.A. repos,” she said.

One day at the mall I walked over to the freestanding Bullock’s, which, because it was about to close its doors for good, was in the process of selling everything in the store at thirty-five percent off the ticket price. There were women systematically defoliating the racks in the men’swear department, women dropping discards and hangers in tangles on the floor, women apparently undiscouraged by the scrawled sign warning that register lines were “currently in excess of 3+ hours long,” women who had already staked out positions for the wait, women curled with their children on the floor, women who had bulwarked their positions with forts of quilts, comforters, bedspreads, mattress pads, Cuisinarts, coffee makers, sandwich grills, Juice Tigers, and Heart Wafflers. These were the women and the daughters and granddaughters of the women who had seen the hundred-foot pylon in 1950 and decided that this was the place to start. The clerks and security personnel monitoring the register lines were men. These were the men and the sons and grandsons of the men who used to get what seemed like half the A-4 line out to watch Little League.

7

“WE want great cities, large factories, and mines worked cheaply, in this California of ours!” That was Henry George, in “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” rhetorically setting forth what was in 1868 popular local sentiment. Then he proceeded to count the cost:

Would we esteem ourselves gainers if New York, ruled and robbed by thieves, loafers and brothel-keepers; nursing a race of savages fiercer and meaner than any who ever shrieked a war-whoop on the plains; could be set down on our bay tomorrow? Would we be gainers, if the cotton-mills of Massachusetts, with their thousands of little children who, official papers tell us, are being literally worked to death, could be transported to the banks of the American; or the file and pin factories of England, where young girls are treated worse than even slaves on southern plantations, be reared as if by magic at Antioch? Or if among our mountains we could by wishing have the miners, men, women and children, who work the iron and coal mines of Belgium and France, where the condition of production is that the laborer shall have meat but once a week — would we wish them here?

Can we have one thing without the other?

In those towns off the San Diego Freeway that had seemed when times were good to answer Henry George’s question in the affirmative, 1993 was a sullen spring. In April, about the time the Lakewood Center Bullock’s was selling the last of its Heart Wafflers, the ten-year-old girl who said that she had been assaulted by a Spur Posse member gave her first press conference, in Gloria Allred’s office. Her mother had been seen, on Donahue, The Home Show, and 20/20, but the child, by that time eleven, had not. “I have been upset because I wanted to be on TV,” she said at her press conference. “To show how I feel. I wanted to say it for myself.” Also in April, Spur Posse members approached various talent agencies, trying to sell their story for a TV movie. An I.C.M. agent asked these Spurs if they were not concerned about how they might be presented. Their concern, they told him, was how much money they would make. I.C.M. declined to represent the Spurs, as did, it was later reported, C.A.A., United Talent Agency, and William Morris.

It was April, too, at the Douglas plant on the Lakewood city line, when Teamsters Local 692 went on strike, over the issue of whether or not Douglas could contract out work previously done by union members. “They can’t do that to people after twenty-seven years,” the wife of one driver, for whom the new contract would mean a cut from $80,000 to $35,000 a year, told the Press-Telegram. “It’s just not right.” It was in April, again, that Finnair disclosed discussions about a switch from its mostly Douglas fleet to buying Boeing. It was in May that Continental, just out of bankruptcy reorganization, ordered ninety-two new planes, with options for ninety-eight more, all from Boeing.

In a town where it was possible to hear, unprompted, a spirited defense of the DC-10 (“Very quiet plane,” John Todd told me, “nice flying plane, compared to those Boeings and those other airplanes it makes about half as much noise”), the involvement with Douglas went deeper than mere economic dependence. People in Lakewood had defined their lives as Douglas. I had lunch one day with a 1966 graduate of Lakewood High who had later spent time in the Peace Corps. It seemed that somewhere in the heart of Africa, he had hopped a ride on a DC-3. The DC-3 had a plate indicating that it had come off the Long Beach line, and he had thought, There it is, I’ve come as far as I can go and it’s still Douglas. “It’s a town on the plantation model,” he said to me at lunch. “Douglas being the big house.”

“They’re history,” an aircraft industry executive said that spring to The Washington Post. “I see a company going out of business, barring some miracle,” Don E. Newquist, chairman of the International Trade Commission, said at a hearing on commercial aerospace competitiveness. Each was talking about Douglas, and by extension about the plant on the Lakewood city line, the plant with the flag and the forward-slanted logo and the MD-IIS parked like cars and the motel with the marquee that still read “Welcome Douglas Happy Hour 4–7.” “It’s like a lifetime thing,” one Lakewood High graduate said on Jane Whitney, trying to explain the Spur Posse and what held its members together. “We’re all going to be friends for life, you know.”

It was 1997 when Douglas was finally melted into Boeing, and the forward-slanted letters reading MCDONNELL DOUGLAS vanished from what was now the Boeing plant on the Lakewood city line.

It was 1999 when Boeing shut down Douglas’s MD-90 program.

It was 2000 when Boeing shut down Douglas’s MD-80 program, 2001 when Boeing shut down Douglas’s MD-II program.

It was 2000 when Boeing began talking about its plan to convert two hundred and thirty acres of what had been the Douglas plant into non-aircraft use, in fact a business park, “PacifiCenter,” with its own condominium housing and the dream of attracting, with what inducements became increasingly unclear as the economy waned, such firms as Intel and Sun Microsystems.

It was 2002 when Boeing obtained an order from the Pentagon for sixty additional C-17S, another temporary stay of execution for what had been the Douglas program, which had been scheduled for closure in 2004. “It’s a great day,” the manager on the program told employees on the day he announced the order. “This is going to keep you employed through 2008, so rest tonight and start on sixty more tomorrow.”

It was also 2002 when the first stage of a multi-billion-dollar public works project called the “Alameda Corridor” was completed, a $2.4 billion twenty-mile express railway meant to speed freight containers from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to inland distribution points. This “Alameda Corridor” had been for some years a kind of model civic endeavor, one of those political mechanisms designed to reward old friends and make new ones. During the period when the Alameda Corridor was still only an idea, but an idea moving inexorably toward a start date, its supporters frequently framed it as the way to bring a “new economy” to the twenty-six “Gateway Cities” involved, all of which had been dependent on aerospace and one of which was Lakewood. This “new economy” was to be built on “international trade,” an entirely theoretical replacement for the gold-standard money tree, the federal government, that had created these communities. Many seminars on “global logistics” were held. Many warehouses were built. The first stage of the Alameda Corridor was near completion before people started wondering what exactly these warehouses were to bring them; started wondering, for example, whether eight-dollars-an-hour forklift operators, hired in the interests of a “flexible” work force only on those days when the warehouse was receiving or dispatching freight, could ever become the “good citizens” of whom Mark Taper had spoken in 1969, the “enthusiastic owners of property,” the “owners of a piece of their country — a stake in the land.” California likes to befooled, as Cedarquist, the owner in The Octopus of the failed San Francisco iron works, told Presley at the Bohemian Club.

In 1970 I was working for Life, and went up to eastern Oregon to do a piece on the government’s storage of VX and GB nerve gas on twenty thousand acres near Hermiston, a farm town in Umatilla County, population then 5,300. It seemed that many citizens wanted the nerve gas, or, in the preferred term, “the defense material,” the storage of which provided 717 civilian jobs and brought money into town. It seemed that other citizens, some of whom lived not in Hermiston but across the mountains in Portland and Salem, making them members of what was referred to in Hermiston as “the academic community and Other Mothers for Peace or whatever,” saw the presence in Oregon of VX and GB as a hazard. The story was routine enough, and I had pretty much wrapped it up (seen the mayor, seen the city manager, seen the anti-gas district attorney in Pendleton, seen the colonel in charge of the depot and seen the rabbits they left in the bunkers to test for leaks) before I realized that the situation had for me an actual resonance: since well before Elizabeth Scott was born, members of my family had been moving through places in the same spirit of careless self-interest and optimism that now seemed to be powering this argument in Hermiston. Such was the power of the story on which I had grown up that this thought came to me as a kind of revelation: the settlement of the west, however inevitable, had not uniformly tended to the greater good, nor had it on every level benefitted even those who reaped its most obvious rewards.

One afternoon in September of 2002 I drove the length of the Alameda Corridor, north from the port through what had been the industrial heart of Southern California: Carson, Compton, Watts. Lynwood, South Gate. Huntington Park. Vernon. It was a few weeks before that fall’s dockworkers’ strike shut down Pacific trade, and I saw that afternoon no trains, no containers, only this new rail line meant to carry the freight and these new warehouses meant to house the freight, many of them bearing for-lease signs. On the first hill north of Signal Hill there was what appeared to be a new subdivision, with a sign, “Vista Industria.” Past the sign that read Vista Industria there were only more warehouses, miles of warehouses, miles of empty intersections, one Gateway City after another, each indistinguishable from the last. Only when the Arco Towers began emerging from the distant haze over downtown Los Angeles did I notice a sign on a warehouse that seemed to suggest actual current usage. 165,000 Square Feet of T-Shirt Madness, this sign read.

Save the Aero — See “Tadpole.” This was the sign on the Aero Theatre on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica in September of 2002. The Aero Theatre was built in 1939 by Donald Douglas, as recreation for his workers when Douglas Aircraft was Santa Monicas biggest employer. During the ten years when I was living not far from the Aero, 1978 to 1988, I never saw anyone actually enter or leave the theatre. Douglas built Santa Monica and then left it, and the streets running south of what had been the first Douglas plant were now lined with body shops, mini-marts, Pentecostal churches and walk-in dentists. Still, Santa Monica had its ocean, its beaches, its climate, its sun and its fog and its climbing roses. The Gateway Cities will have only their warehouses.