Joan Didion - Where I Was From

“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.

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.”