Joan Didion - Where I Was From

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.