Joan Didion - Where I Was From

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.

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.”