"Valley Girl," Joan Didion, and the
California Dream

by Kathi Inman Berens

"This is so you. This is who you are," said my neighbor Tanis Mittelbach, a German girl and a golfer who understood pilgrimages to the Dinah Shore tournament in Palm Springs before it became fashionable. It was 1982. We were in junior high. Tanis twirled the single "Valley Girl" around her index finger. "You heard it?" I nodded. "I bought it for you," she said, handing it over.

She put the single in my hands. It was big around as an oversized sugar donut, same big hole in the middle. No iPods or iTunes then. I slid it out of the unadorned paper sleeve. When you played a single on a turntable, you had to pop up a little plastic cylinder that fit around the record player's nose so that your single wouldn't wobble all over the place. If you played a record enough, the needle would wear down the vinyl, distort the music. It took a lot of playing but it would happen, I knew from experience. Was "Valley Girl" destined to be distorted?

Tanis smiled wanly at me. To be called a "Valley Girl" was hardly a compliment. The song was a gag single by Moon Unit Zappa (daughter of Frank), herself a teenager. It satirized the vapid girls who lived for Pac Man, pedicures and Hot Dog on a Stick at, like, the Galleria? And it had already spawned an affected dialect, Val Speak. Girls our age imitated it like magpies, even up in Oregon, even Boring, Oregon-which was the name of our town.

Tanis and I lived in houses that hugged the north side of a lush valley. There were many, many more trees than people. Ditches snaked along the side of our road, which didn't have a yellow stripe down the middle. There were no sidewalks, no streetlights, and the nearest park, at Happy Valley Grade School, was fifteen miles away. We were valley girls, Tanis and me. But not like the girls Moon Unit crooned about, not like "Andrea Wilson." Why not? We had almost no spending money. To us, that was normal. We were nice, middle class girls. Our families belonged to the golf club that bordered on our enormous backyards. It made a real impression on me that Tanis forked over her own buck-ninety-eight for the single. It wasn't expensive, but it meant she probably wouldn't be able to buy anything else that week.

"Valley Girl" gave me my first concrete impression of Southern California. The trick of the song—the reason it shot up the Top 40 list and stayed there for a couple of weeks—is that it proffered the Seventeen version of the So Cal Good Life. We kids in Oregon had seen the movies about grown-ups with permed, frizzy hair poaching themselves in hot tubs, wearing Hawaiian shirts to work. (I remember being shocked by a throw-away scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when Terri Garr lights up a joint. Moms in station wagons smoked illegal drugs?!) A little company named Apple made a lot of money and its owner, Steve Jobs, threw an enormous party, anybody and everybody invited, called the Us Festival, which was pretty much Woodstock for the Izod set. "Valley Girl" mocked the selfishness of girls who found self-fulfillment in a dressing room. But it was also unspeakably glamorous. To give over that much thought to clothes and toenails, to worry over whether one's teeth were "too small," or whether or not one lived in "like, the good part of Encino"-well, that was a kind of indulgence.

By 1982, Vietnam was finally, resolutely over and there was no need to "Give Peace a Chance" and question authority and tune in, turn on, drop out. Hanoi Jane doffed her fatigues for mint-green leotards. She made it burn in "The Jane Fonda Workout," a series that capitalized on a new device, video tape players. Now you could crunch your bottom any time of the day or night, in the privacy of your own chrome-and-leather living room. The mood of the nation was shifting away from communitarian values, away from public space and into the home, the neighborhood, the mall. It was still cool to disdain clannishness and consumerism-the gated community was still a few years off.

I've been living in Los Angeles for six years now, and still I'm struck by how uncanny it feels: home and not home simultaneously. Thirty years ago, So Cal was rich with the best public schools in the nation, a land where even grocery workers owned homes just minutes from the sere, sandy beach.

When I first moved to California in 1992 to attend graduate school at Berkeley, I jogged in the hills blasting disco in my Walkman, so strong was my imagination of the California I'd grown up with. It was only partially my invention. "Valley Girl" and many less memorable songs, movies, and images conjured a perpetually fabulous California. In 1982, I-5 south looked to me like the yellow brick road.

Part of the allure stems from what I now recognize as a peculiar logic indigenous to So Cal. Californians seemed smarter than everybody else because they cheated common-sense accounting. They invented a whipped dessert called "fro-yo": you could eat all you want and not get fat. They approved Proposition 13, a property tax limitation, which capped the taxable value of your property at the price at which you bought it. Their exemplary public services were a marvel of social engineering—immaculate freeways (shown to advantage in the opening credits of the TV show ChiPs), an enormous police force, government assistance doled out with few questions asked, and the most elite public university system in the nation, perhaps the world. Their governor, a movie actor, was elected president by preaching to middle class families that taxation was evil, a scourge, something to be avoided like Herpes. This was just before AIDS hit, and Herpes seemed pretty bad.

President Reagan was Californian. Trickle-down economics seemed sensible, coming out of his mouth, because wasn't that just what California had done? Hadn't they spent recklessly at the malls, car lots, sub-divisions, theme parks-and just gotten richer? The kids had disco parties. The grown ups roller-skated. It was topsy-turvy, this California logic, but somehow it flowered like fuchsia bougainvillea all year long. People envied California: that's the joke of Annie Hall, which won Best Picture in 1976. In the damp valleys of Oregon and all across the nation, we saw the movies of So Cal life, the ordinary people cavorting in hot tubs. We spooned little peaked mountains of fro-yo into our mouths, mulled it over. You could have it all, and pay for nothing. It would just work out. Bitchin! I am SURE. TOTALLY.

Killing Rattlesnakes, Comparing Riots
Moon Unit Zappa's song cast the California mold, but Joan Didion's work fills it. She's got staying power, for one thing. For thirty-five years, she's been poet laureate of the California zeitgeist. The titular essay in her collection "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," for example, still speaks to us freshly about youth culture and the eroding soil of our middle class foothold. In 1967, Didion's angle was radical, prescient. She hung out in the Haight-Ashberry district of San Francisco, trailing a group of drug-addled teenagers who called themselves "Hippies," and predicted that their discontent would spill out, wash over the entire United States. She didn't know then that the riots of May, 1968 from Paris to Prague would partake of the same revolutionary cultural energy. She saw it in California first.

Didion lives in Manhattan now, but her vantage on California is no less canny. Her memoir Where I Was From (Knopf, 2003) locates its reader in several different and historically specific Californias. Where I Was From peels off the layers of shiny new paint that Californians use to coat their collective dreams every generation or so. She begins by describing the arrival of her family into the San Joaquin Valley in the middle of the eighteenth century. The family values they imparted show themselves, two hundred and fifty years later, in Didion's tussle between reserve and nostalgia. Despite the cool distance afforded by her masterful irony, we're never too far away from the pre-teen Didion who, in her eighth-grade graduation speech, exhorted her peers to "live up to our California heritage." Didion comes from hearty, unsentimental settlers. Her mother was prone to hanging up the phone without saying goodbye; her father "didn't believe in air conditioning," even (or especially) during torrid Sacramento summers.

Didion's type of Californian makes it on his own. He knows "how to lash together a corral with bark"; that one shouldn't "pick up the phone and ask for favors"; that "true children of the Valley are not comfortable until [the] temperature reach[es] three digits"; that it's one's moral obligation to kill rattlesnakes in order to make the land fit for our use. She suggests that this stoicism lies beneath all the subsequent California myths. It's the hard wood that gets the first coat of shellac in the California heritage story. Didion spends fully half of the book tracing the vanishing outlines of this heritage story. Someone, she doesn't know who, sells the family cemetery to real estate developers. When her mother dies, Didion and her daughter Quintana pack up a few cherished items and ship them to Manhattan. For Didion and other long-time natives, the legacy of California's heritage is always already lost, "buried on the trail."

Didion may be famously Californian, but she is fundamentally unlike the Californians who fascinate her. As a girl "plotting [her] escape" to New York, she swathed herself in black leotard, taught herself the distinction between drama and melodrama, read Eugene O'Neill while sitting in a tree. The bird's eye view she develops up in the tree serves her in Where I Was From as she aggregates fragments that suggest a Lost Middle Class: laid-off aerospace engineers, former high-school ballplayers who rape girls and terrorize the neighborhood, real estate developers who hustle working ranches into subdivisions and "mass recreation programs to keep [residents] busy." Didion's middle class has certain things in common with the one she saw, in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," thirty-five years ago. If anything, the aerial view from the tree branch has gotten sharper. In "Slouching," Didion had her ear to the ground. She replicated the distinctive speech of the hippies and their "publicized self-doubts: Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb." In Where I Was From , Didion takes the measure of the go-go nineties and recasts it as a punishing decade that eviscerated traditional California industries-aerospace, military bases, manufacturing. Because we were all chasing the frothy bubbles spilling out of Silicon Valley, we were too distracted to notice that it was a poor exchange. Just ask the former start-up king who's scanning your books at Borders.

When people think of social unrest in L.A. during the nineties, images from the Rodney King riots flash back: blacks in South Central Los Angeles hurtling bricks and debris at glass storefronts, torching their own neighborhood, yanking a truck driver out of his cab to pummel him. But Didion prods at us to take a wider view. She remembers the Watts riots of 1965. She asked others who also remember to describe the difference. The consensus was ominous. "1992 changed everything," they assure her. They point to that canary in a coalmine, the real estate market. It was "impossible" to sell a house in So Cal immediately after the riots. Most people assumed that it was the scary pictures flickering on television screens that dogged the housing market. But for Didion, the relevant picture isn't of rioting or looting: it's the unphotographed, unemployed thousands, hundreds of thousands, packing up their desks, leaving their suits at the drycleaners, and sending query letters from home. "According to The Commission on State Finance in Sacramento," Didion observes, "some 800,000 jobs were lost in California between 1988 and 1993. More than half of the jobs were in Los Angeles County. . . . This was what people in Los Angeles were talking about when they talked about the 1992 riot."

"A Second Story Addition and a Room for the Iguana"
In a close reading of her own novel Run River, Didion chafes under the "pernicious" nostalgia that animates that book. But nostalgia is the baking soda in the California quick bread. The myth of California's inexhaustible fecundity, and our memory of those rolling, purple-and-blue landscapes by the "California Impressionists," permit us to poison the land with jet fuel, strip it of trees, expand housing developments sixty miles from downtown into the misty northern hills of the Grapevine and the spare desert halfway to Vegas. We can do all of these things, the myth tells us, and still the land will yield. Yield? It will become more valuable, not less. Home values in Los Angeles County have improved considerably, astronomically, over the last decade. During just the last two years, the housing market in L.A. County has appreciated 35 percent—this despite the "jobless recovery" (that's lingo for "the stock market has stopped bleeding, but people still haven't found jobs"). $375,000 is the median price of a home in L.A. County. Ask anybody who's looking, however, and they'll tell you $375K will buy a tear down in an iffy neighborhood. Really. It's not hyperbole. My house has appreciated close to 70 percent. I couldn't afford to buy again in my own neighborhood.

For those who already own a home, this real estate market is the latest version of the California gold mines. Just about anybody who bought into So Cal real estate more than five, ten, forty years ago will tell you about striking the mother lode. Strangers you meet in restaurants will tell you of their good fortune. (I couldn't resist telling you about that awesome seventy percent, could I?) Buying an air filter from a vendor selling out of her home in West Hollywood, I made small talk while she filed out the paper work. "See this house?" said her hubby, gesturing around the gerbil's cage of a West Hollywood living room, "eight-hundred and sixty thousand dollars." He leveled me with a gaze. "I bought it for forty in '64." I murmur about his good fortune. With home values this good, he tells me, how could he afford not to upgrade? He gave me a tour of the ground floor, laid it all out. "A second story addition," he motioned grandly at the ceiling, "and," jerking his thumb toward a narrow hallway, "a room for the iguana."

Californians' obsessions with their homes might be unique, or at least, peculiarly acute. It is America's "Second City," a metropolis with 11 million residents, and the cultural expectation here is that one should own a little bit of terra firma. As Kevin Starr notes in Material Dreams, his history of Los Angeles through the 1920s, home ownership was a key part of boosters' strategy to entice Midwestern retirees to Los Angeles. "It was estimated that Los Angeles had some 600,000 subdivided lots standing vacant by 1925, or to put it another way, Los Angeles had subdivided itself into a city of seven million people half a century before the realities of population caught up with the speculations of real-estate investors." The Los Angeles dream is intimately bound with homeownership. But in practice for so many Angelenos these days, homeownership is the dream that keeps you up at nights.

"It's a weird thing," said my office mate the other day, "when a professor and an IT professional can't afford to buy a home." She and her husband, a systems manager, have been hunting and saving for a couple years. They recently inherited part of the modest, middle-class house the professor grew up in. They wonder if they can afford to buy out her siblings.

These last few months, we in So Cal have read headlines about the "jobless recovery," which is a concept that sounds to me like more of that topsy-turvy California logic. There's been a brouhaha about reforming Workman's Comp because the high cost of providing coverage for employees is pricing employers out of the market: garment cutters in Torrance, call center employees in Pasadena, animation artists in Burbank, hematologists in Santa Monica. It's pervasive. So many different kinds of workers are adversely affected that there has to be more at root here than Workman's Comp. Most of us who are working—and let's not be dour, there are a lot of us—get cost of living increases in the three percent range, four percent if we're lucky. (Of course, there are many, many who are less lucky. The teaching assistant at my daughter's day care center gets 1%.) It's nearly impossible to keep pace with a 35 percent spike in housing prices when cost-of-living increases fall a good 32 percent below what it would costs to get into a home.

The L.A. Times has run a lot of features lately on 3-and-2 houses, brand new, on roomy lots in Las Vegas. Photos show young couples on new sofas shaking their heads over the $800,000 2-and-1 fixer-upper in Rancho Park, or packing up the family S.U.V. with mattresses strapped on top. The California dream brought you west, always west, closer to the ocean until you could dip your big toe into it. Now it's the road east, to Vegas, to Arizona, the Joads going back to the dust bowl, desert winds blasting lava rock into the yellow brick road.

Kathi Inman Berens, a senior lecturer in the Writing Program, won the College's Advanced Writing Teaching Award for 2002-3. She directed the Undergraduate Writers' Conference in March 2004. With Norah Ashe, she is faculty co-advisor for AngeLingo. She talks a lot about hiking but rarely laces up her boots.