Is It Really That Wacky?

By Pico Iyer

Yes, yes, we've heard all the jokes: we know that "spacy" and "flaky" seem almost to have been invented for California and that in the dictionary California is a virtual synonym for "far out." Ever since gold was first found flowing in its rivers, the Shangri-La La of the West has been the object of as many gibes as fantasies: just over a century ago, Rudyard Kipling was already pronouncing that "San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people" (others might say "insanely perfect"); and more than 40 years ago, S.J. Perelman was barreling down the yellow brick road to L.A., the "mighty citadel which had given the world the double feature, the duplexburger, the motel, the hamfurter, and the shirt worn outside the * pants." Yes, we know, all too well, that "going to California" is tantamount, for many people, to going to seed.

And yes, much of the image does fit. Returning to California recently, I picked up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and read about people attending a funeral in pinks and turquoises and singing along to Bette Midler ("Dress for a Brazilian party!" the invitation -- from the deceased -- read); about a missing cat identifiable by "a rhinestone collar w/name and electronic cat door opener"; about women from Los Angeles hiring migrant workers to wait in line for them to buy watches shaped like cucumbers or bacon and eggs. On Hollywood Boulevard I saw a HISTORIC LANDMARK sign outside the site of "The First Custom T-Shirt Shop in California," flyers on the wall promoting a group called Venal Opulence and, in a store across the street, "Confucius X-Rated Mini-Condom Fortune Cookies." No wonder, I thought, that when I tell people I live in California -- worse, that I choose to live in California -- they look at me as if I had decided not to get serious or grow up; as if I had seceded from reality.

Part of the reason for all this, no doubt, is circumstance. For one thing, California wears its contradictions, its clashing hearts, on its sleeve: even its deepest passions are advertised on bumper sticker, T shirt and vanity plate. California is America without apologies or inhibitions, pleased to have found itself here and unembarrassed about its pleasure. So too, society in California is less a society than a congregation of subcultures, many of them with a membership of one: every man's home is his castle in the air here.

In addition, California's image has been fashioned largely by interlopers from the East, who tend to look on it as a kind of recumbent dumb blond, so beautiful that it cannot possibly have any other virtues. Thus the California of the imagination is an unlikely compound of Evelyn Waugh's Forest Lawn, Orson Welles' Hearst Castle, every screenwriter's Locustland and Johnny Carson's "beautiful downtown Burbank." Nice house, as they say, but nobody's at home.

By now the notion of California as a wigged-out free-for-all has become a legend, and as self-sustaining as every other myth. If I had read about vegetable-shaped watches in the Des Moines Register, I would have taken it as a reflection not on Iowa but humanity; but California has been associated with flakiness for so long that it is only the flaky things we see as Californian. ) There are five pet cemeteries in California registered with the International Association of Pet Cemeteries (vs. eight in New York State), but it is the canine mortuaries in L.A. that everybody mentions.

When California is ahead of the world, it seems outlandish; yet when its trends become commonplace, no one thinks of them as Californian. Large-scale recycling, health clubs, postmodern enchiladas all were essentially Californian fads until they became essential to half the countries in the world. And many people do not recall that such everyday, down-to-earth innovations as the bank credit card, the 30-year mortgage and the car loan were all, as David Rieff, in a new book about Los Angeles, points out, more or less developed by that great California institution the Bank of America.

And as the California myth gains circulation, it attracts precisely the kind of people who come here to sustain it: many of the newcomers to the "end of America" are Flat Earthers, Free Speechers or latter-day sinners drawn by the lure of a place where unorthodoxy is said to be the norm. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that all the loose nuts in America end up in Los Angeles because of the continental tilt. Aldous Huxley suggested that the world resembled a head on its side, with the superrational Old World occupying a different sphere from the vacant, dreamy spaces of the collective subconscious of the West. California, he was implying, is the name we give our hopes and highest fantasies: an antiworld of sorts, governed by an antireality principle and driven by an antigravitational push. That is why he, like Thomas Pynchon and Ursula Le Guin and a hundred others, set his Utopia in California: with its deserts and rich farmland and a valley (if not a sea) named after death, California has impressed many as a kind of modern Holy Land.

California, in short, doesn't stand to reason (it doesn't even lie down to reason). "The drive-in restaurant has valet parking," notes P.J. O'Rourke, and "practically everyone runs and jogs. Then he gets in the car to go next door." There's no beach at North Beach, he might have added, and Sunset Boulevard was shot on Wilshire. William Faulkner was arrested for walking here, and teenagers look older than their parents. "The tolerant Pacific air," in Auden's words, "makes logic seem so silly." And that air of unreality is only quickened by the fact that California is the illusion maker of the world: "Everyman's Eden" has made a living almost out of living up to other people's expectations.

What tends to get forgotten in all this is that the aerospace industry is centered in Southern California. The source of the state's wealth is that least dreamy and most realpolitik-bound of industries, defense. Yes, the late Gene Roddenberry may have dreamed up Star Trek here, but he drew upon his experience in the Los Angeles police department. For every quaint, picture- book San Francisco floating in the air there is an Oakland across the bay, gritty, industrial and real; for every Zen-minded "Governor Moonbeam" there is a hardheaded Richard Nixon; for every real estate office in the shape of a Sphinx there is a man behind the desk counting dollars.

The town in which I live, the pretty, sunlit, red-roofed Mediterranean-style resort of Santa Barbara, is typical. The town prides itself on being the birthplace of hot tubs and the site of the first Egg McMuffin. There is little or no industry here, and everyone seems to be working, full time, on his life- style. Thus people from Melbourne to Marseilles tune into the Santa Barbara soap opera, and in the Kansai region of Japan, women in SANTA BARBARA sweatshirts crowd into the Santa Barbara ice-cream parlor. Yet there is a theoretical-physics institute here, and there used to be a think tank peopled by refugees from the University of Chicago.

Besides, it is in the nature of bright sunlight to cast long shadows: when Santa Barbara has hit the headlines recently, it has been because of an eight- year drought so severe that even showers were limited; a fire that destroyed 600 houses (including mine); and one of the country's most poisonous homeless battles. AIDS to the north, gang wars to the south; droughts interrupted by floods; mudslides down the coast that left 91 dead in 1969; earthquakes that bring in their wake bubonic plague (contracted by 160 people as a result of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake): California, as Christopher Isherwood saw, "is a tragic country -- like Palestine, like every Promised Land."

Not long ago in Garden Grove, just two miles south of Disneyland, where Vietnamese dentistas (SE HABLA ESPANOL, say their windows) bump against halal (Islam's equivalent to kosher) grocery stores in Spanish-style malls, I paid a visit to the Crystal Cathedral. On first encounter the area seems a vision of the cacophonous dystopia of the future in which a hundred California dreams collide and each one drowns the others out. Yet beneath the surface | there is a kind of commonness, a shared belief in all of them that the future can be custom-made. This faith is implicit in the immigrants' assumptions -- they have voted with their feet in coming here -- and it is made explicit, for longtime residents, by the Rev. Robert Schuller, who fills his sprawling Crystal Cathedral with hymns to "Possibility Thinking."

Schuller's great distinction, perhaps, is not just that he was a pioneer of the drive-in church (and his sermons are still broadcast, via a wide-screen TV, to overflow parishioners in the parking lot outside), nor that he has managed to erect a glittering monument to his "Be-Happy Attitudes," but rather that he has gathered a huge nationwide following out of preaching what is in effect Californianism. For if you look at his books (Your Future Is Your Friend, Success Is Never Ending, Failure Is Never Final), and if you walk around his church, as airy and futuristic and free of Christian iconography, almost, as a Hyatt Regency hotel, you can see that the heart of his scripture is simple optimism, on the surface scarcely different from that espoused by New Age gurus across the state (in the Bodhi Tree bookstore, Create Your Own Future tapes are on sale, made by a Stanford professor).

Faced by such unlikelihoods, one begins to see that California is still, in a sense, what America used to be: a spiritual refuge, a utopian experiment, a place plastic enough, in every sense, to shape itself to every group of newcomers. It is a state set in the future tense (and the optative mood), a place in a perpetual state of becoming. Of course it's strange: it is precisely the shape of things to come, as unexpected as tomorrow. Of course it's unsettled: it's making itself up as it goes along.