LEONARD KRIEGEL
73
Island or Westchester. One of them tells me of a 1980s California re–
union of alumni of De Witt Clinton, a Bronx high school. From San
Diego and Sacramento, hundreds of middle-aged men converge on a
posh Beverly Hills hotel - lawyers, writers, physicians, actors, perfumers,
fashion designers, comedians - once of the Bronx and now of the
golden land .
The wages of success are sin in California. Or at least the prospect of
sin. They had left the Bronx to find success in the golden land, but it
wasn't high school days they wanted to celebrate. It was their own
£light into America, measured not by distance but by the spiritual gap
between coasts. Here was the graph on which they might display the
psychological light years they had traveled. "De Witt
C. ..
!" the mid–
dle-aged men sang - only the C was for California, not De Witt
Clinton.
Those of us who didn't migrate to California shared the assumptions
of those who did. If we mocked them, our envy was always greater than
we could admit. Maybe that's what disturbs us about California's de–
cline. Maybe that's why, despite our scorn, we never believed the party
would end.
In the summer of 1977, I was living in New Mexico. I used to ex–
plore its dark mountains, driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe or
Chimayo or into one of the small Hispanic villages peppering northern
New Mexico like chiles hung out to dry on the stucco walls. One after–
noon, on a twisting mountain road ncar Taos, I spotted a car with a
bumper sticker that read, "Don't Californianate Colorado!"
A puzzling notion - the idea of re-making Colorado into L.A. or
San Francisco or Eureka. Was there a nation-wide plot to
"Californianate" Aspen or Steamboat Springs? I doubt it. There was
only California matched against American paranoia. People in Denver
(and Racine and Butte and Eugene) envied the ease with which
Californians accepted their own primacy. The state assumed its ascen–
dancy was as natural as coastal fog or desert sun. It wasn't Colorado
alone that would turn California into the new American whipping boy.
The sole virtue of L.A., mocked New York's Woody Allen, was
to
permit a right turn on a red light. We snickered as we told each other
Woody was right, L.A. wasn't a " real" city. No neighborhoods, no
sense of community. All California cities (except San Francisco, which
we New Yorkers romanced into a vision of our own lost paradise in the
1950s) were lifeless and plastic. How could anyone live in a state where
the salads were more "creative" than the people?
A puzzle to those who had gone west. As Marx and James and
