Revisit Joan Didion’s sweeping profile of a town in California that fell under the sway of the Spur Posse, a group of teens accused of sexually assaulting several of their female classmates. NewYorkerArchive
“I don’t get—I don’t understand what she’s saying,” Chris Albert at first said, letting his jaw go slack, as these boys tended to do when confronted with an unwelcome, or in fact any, idea.“What education does she have?” Chris Albert then snarled, and tensed against his chair, as if trying to shake himself alert. “Where do you work at? McDonald’s? Burger King?” A third Spur tried to interrupt, but Chris Albert, once roused, could not be deflected: “$5.25? $5.
“He cornered me and he tried to kiss me, then he started taking off my pants,” a sweet-faced seventeen-year-old told us, first on “20/20” and then on “Montel Williams.” “He did his business and stood up, began to walk away. And I sat there crying, scrounging for my pants, and he says, ‘Don’t say you didn’t want to’ and he walked away.” “They were downright crude,” a girl in a wig and dark glasses told us on “Donahue.” “They did not want to date me. They did not want to get to know me. . . .
Much of what got talked about was, for a while, less actionable than plain troubling. Young children in Lakewood had come to know among themselves whom to avoid in those thirty-seven playgrounds, what cars to watch for on those hundred and thirty-three miles of No. 2 macadam. There had been threats, bullying 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.
Most people to whom I talked at first said that the issue had been raised by one of the parents, specifically by a mother whose son had told her that one of his friends had committed rape, but those who said this had not actually been present at the meeting.
“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 of the Spurs told David Ferrell, of the Los Angeles. “My regards go out to the family.” As far as Lakewood High was concerned, Mike Escalante said, it was time to begin “the healing process.
The youngest Belman, Kristopher, who graduated from Lakewood High this June, was one of the boys arrested and released without charges in March. “I was crazy that weekend,” his father told me in April. “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.
“Golden Land” does not entirely hold up, nor, I suppose, will it ever stand among the best Faulkner stories. Yet it retains, for certain Californians, a nagging resonance. I grew up in a California family that had been, as Ira Ewing’s mother said, “born here for generations,” in my case six. “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.
Some of this is romantic , some washed in a slightly falsified golden glow. Most of these paintings, though, 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.
Woo happened to be a Democrat, Riordan happened to be a Republican. This was, however, neither a partisan election nor one that broke naturally along party lines. Woo had asked for and finally received President Clinton’s endorsement, but the endorsement was notably neutral, not least because a significant part of the 1992 Clinton-Gore California campaign apparatus was running the Riordan campaign.
From a certain angle, it might have been the best of years: the intensity and length of the rains that broke the most recent of the droughts had rendered even the meaner streets drenched, clean, glittering. Roses threw off bloom after bloom. Lawns stayed green all year. The jacaranda came in April, when there was still wild mustard on the hills, an intense blue haze against the translucent yellow of the mustard.
I recall being told, by virtually everyone to whom I spoke in Los Angeles during the few months after the 1992 riot, how much the riot had “changed” the city. Most of the people who said this had lived in Los Angeles during the 1965 Watts riot, as I had, but 1992, they assured me, had been “different,” 1992 had “changed everything.” The words people used seemed overfreighted, words like “sad” and “bad.
People who work on the line in the big aerospace plants constituted, until recently, 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 F-89 line out to watch Little League. These people might move among the half-dozen or so major suppliers but almost never outside them.
The perfect circularity of the enterprise, one in which politicians controlled the letting of government contracts to companies that in turn utilized the contracts to employ potential voters, did not encourage natural selection.
Of the remaining employees at McDonnell Douglas’s Long Beach plant, the plant on the Lakewood city line, eight thousand seven hundred are working right now on the C-17. What those eight thousand seven hundred workers will be doing next month or next year remains an open question since, even as the Air Force was demonstrating its resolute support of its own program, discussions had begun about how best to dispose of it. There were a number of options under consideration.
One day at the mall, I went into 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 per cent off the ticket price.
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