Terry McDermott

 
BERKELEY -- In the photograph that dominates the lobby of Sproul Hall at the University of California, a throng of students marches through Sather Gate, the university's southern entrance. The students carry a banner proclaiming "Free Speech."
They are en route to a Board of Regents meeting to demand just that and they are blessed. The photo was taken on a cool November afternoon in 1964 and the day's angled autumn light bathes them in a Hollywood glow of goodness, the kind of light reserved for second comings.
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was a harbinger, even an instigator, of a huge wave of social protest that upended American culture so completely that it hasn't been put back together since. Beyond the momentous occasion the photo commemorates, there are a few peculiarities about it worth noting.
First, it hangs in the most prominent place in the most prominent building on the campus, an odd spot to put something that memorializes the overthrow of the duly constituted authority of the university.
Second, the rebelling students look anything but rebellious. The girls wore dresses and low heels. The boys wore suits and ties.
Third, the man in the middle of the photograph, the one wearing the best suit, is not a student at all, but a young assistant professor of philosophy named John Searle. That Searle would end up in the middle of a pack of rebellious students was prophetic.
Searle's concerns at the time had little to do with university reform. He was teaching, trying to finish his first book, and feeding a wife and two small sons. He did have a genuine concern for free speech--mainly, he says, the free speech of young assistant professors.
Still, ending up in the middle of a demonstration demanding it would seem out of character if Searle hadn't gone on to build a career composed mainly of jumping into the middle of places he had no apparent reason to be and turning them upside down.
He's now 66, established as one of the most influential thinkers of the late 20th century, noted for his ruthless disregard of affectation and his celebration of common-sense solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The subject himself of scholarly conferences, he is a key figure in at least three disciplines: the philosophy of language, artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness. And in all of them he has at various times caused more ferocious international intellectual debates than he has had time to manage.
He spends weekends in the deep powder of the Sierra. When he isn't skiing, he might be sailing with his San Francisco socialite pals, the Gettys, or buying Persian rugs with Hollywood buddies Billy Friedkin and Sherry Lansing, or tasting big reds from the little boutique winery he advised for decades. Or he is writing yet another article for a scholarly journal or the New York Review of Books, or pushing to finish his 11th book and contemplating another hundred he has on his list to write.
"I go to the library to get a book on symbolic logic and I find myself reading about the war in the desert or the development of ceramics in Europe. One of my problems," he says, with a degree of understatement, "is that everything interests me."
School's Contentious History
The University of California has been a bellwether of the state's culture for the last 50 years. Many of the debates about what sort of place California ought to be, and subsequently the nation, played out here: the marches of the '60s, the Reagan and Brown tug-of-war in the '70s, Proposition 13-induced retrenchments of the '80s, and the fierce battles over race, ethnicity and their roles in the social order still ongoing.
All that notwithstanding, the construction of the University of California, and the system that grew around it, is regarded as among the most remarkable achievements in a California century stuffed full of remarkable achievement. No educational undertaking like it has ever been achieved, and seldom attempted, in so short a time span anywhere on Earth.
The development of so rich and vast an intellectual infrastructure joined with the state's magnificent physical endowment to create a place where almost everything seemed possible, and sometimes was. The scope of achievements of UC researchers, teachers and students--from the invention of the transistor to the creation of television game shows--is stunning.
Searle is representative of UC and its rise to preeminence among world universities. With little or no expectation, propelled mainly by the force of will and fearless intellect, he grew to prominence out of what had been a philosophical backwater and has resolutely remained at the top. When Searle told his fellow dons at Oxford that he was going to leave for California, they were incredulous. One asked, seriously, "But whom could you possibly talk to?"
One might argue that the dons wouldn't have been so self-assured if Oxford hadn't had a 600-year head start. The University of California barely existed as a serious educational institution even 100 years ago; it was a single, threadbare little school on the grounds of a small private college with which it had merged. An ambitious building program brought the central Berkeley campus into being over the next 20 years.
The system eventually grew to include 10 campuses, including professional schools for medicine and law and specialized schools of astronomy and oceanography. During its most expansionist phases, whole new universities at San Diego, Irvine and Santa Cruz were created out of empty fields, seemingly overnight. Recruiters cruised through the established campuses looking to hire away whole departments.
When Searle arrived from Oxford in 1959, Berkeley was at the onset of a remarkable era. Earlier goals of becoming the best public university in the country were being challenged by ambitious faculty who wanted the school to be the best university of any kind anywhere, with the best department in every discipline. This seems in retrospect either frightening in the arrogance of its scope or endearing in its naivete. To Searle, the sense of "California exceptionalism" seemed exactly right.
"The idea was the sky's the limit," Searle said. "This is where the intellectual challenge is. There was a sense of possibility. I liked that; I liked the ambition."
One reason the goal seemed to make so much sense to Searle is that it mirrored his intentions for his own work. He was setting out on an overarching program of explaining the relationship of human beings to the universe they occupy.
"The physical world is a perfectly natural place. It consists of particles organized into systems, some of which have evolved consciousness and intentionality. That's where I come in," Searle said. "My major project has always been fitting human beings into that physical world."
This involves in large part explaining what human beings are and how they work: how they think, how they manufacture meaning out of the nonsense vibration of vocal cords, how they experience and come to know the world. These are, as the philosophers say, nontrivial questions. Philosophically, Searle wanted it all.
Street Sensibility, Physical Energy
Searle is of a piece. He thinks like he walks, as if he knows exactly where he is going. In motion, he's a battering ram on legs. Leaning forward, head tilted slightly down, he walks as if gathering speed for a run at a brick wall. You get the impression that if he actually hit the wall, the wall would know it before he did.
His hair has gone white and is beginning to get wispy. His features are thick, not shy or refined. He has high cheeks, raccooned eyes. He's compact, solidly put together. Overall, he's considerably less tucked in than in the pictures of him from the '60s. The English suits are history, long since replaced by professorial sweaters and khakis. He juggles reading and seeing glasses, the wrong pair of which always seems to be tied around his neck.
His demeanor, his whole way of talking, has about it, one friend says, a street sensibility. And for an eminently serious man, there's a rascally quality about him, as if the moment you turn your back he might stick out his tongue. It's a part of his natural, apparently bottomless exuberance.
Searle is an easy guy to argue with and contrarily an easy guy to like. He's blunt, funny and omnivorous in conversation.
"Just knowing him has enriched my life," said Friedkin, the movie director.
"I'm not subtle," Searle says. "The English hill country? Blah. I like the Grand Canyon at sunset, San Francisco Bay at dawn. No chamber music, thanks. I want Beethoven's Ninth. Give me the whole goddamned thing."
Searle is the son of a physician and an electrical engineer, two professions governed very much by things in the world of the everyday. He came to spend a career in the much thinner air of philosophy almost by accident.
He grew up in Denver, New York City and Wisconsin, where he finished high school and started college.
"After my sophomore year I wangled my way onto a boat and worked my way to Europe. When the summer ended I didn't want to go back," he said. So he searched for scholarships that would let him continue his education somewhere, anywhere, in Europe. In an unusual coup for an undergraduate, he won a Rhodes scholarship and, at 20, arrived in Oxford.
It was, he said, "a dream of intellectual life," rooted in a group of what were called analytical philosophers, "the best collection of philosophers in one place at one time since Greece."
Analytical philosophy was a then recent development in the ancient practice of searching for life's meanings. It centered on the notion that many if not most philosophical problems could be resolved by looking for the underlying logic of the language with which they are expressed. It is, essentially, a search for the true meaning of words and what they imply. Searle stumbled into this nest of intellect and ego and thrived.
"It was tremendously exciting," he said. "The most important questions were philosophical questions, and we had the feeling that we had connected them all to linguistics."
He took undergraduate and graduate degrees, and met and married his wife, Dagmar, a fellow philosophy student.
The principal means of doing philosophy at Oxford was through discourse. You talked. Or--and maybe this was where Searle inherited his traditional approach to teaching--you listened. Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher of science regarded as one of history's great talkers, "would give 20-minute disquisitions that ranged over the history of man and would include your work and seem to include you but you never talked." John Austin was the opposite, seizing on the smallest thing, and attacking.
Eventually, though, Searle grew tired of England and of being an outsider.
"I loved those people, but it's not my sensibility," he said. "I told myself, 'I'm going to get off this goddamned island.' I told them, too. They didn't take it seriously . . . The idea that you would voluntarily leave was incomprehensible. That you would go back to America was insane."
Offending Almost Everyone
At Berkeley, Searle began his teaching and writing career within the relatively conventional confines of the philosophy of language, work that was interrupted by the Free Speech Movement. Mario Savio, the movement's student leader, was one of his students and Savio's future wife, Suzanne, was his teaching assistant. Searle became directly involved when he was prohibited by university administrators from giving a speech attacking the Communist witch hunts of the era.
"I had a wife 1/8in law school 3/8 and two small children. I didn't want a revolution," he said. "Most forms of social change I regarded as vulgar and stupid."
The movement, however, was not content with its early victories and went into areas far beyond Searle's interest or agreement. When the university administration was toppled, the new campus authorities approached Searle to help put things back together as an assistant to the chancellor.
As a result, his philosophical work was delayed for years, and he managed to offend just about everybody. "I had no friends on the right to begin with. And the left, they all felt I betrayed their cause."
Following that came the Vietnam War, with almost continual protests roiling campus life. It was almost impossible to teach, Searle said. Those years left him with a fervent disregard for politics. "If you're a serious intellectual, you should not be comfortable on the left-right spectrum. The right's so stupid it's not even worth discussing. But the left is evil," he said.
When Searle finally did get back to work, he wrote a series of books that set out new theories of language and meaning. The work was initially rejected as being neither philosophy nor linguistics, but proved to be hugely influential in both fields. The books--"Speech Acts," "Expression and Meaning" and "Intentionality"--are now standard texts.
Searle remained substantially unknown outside the academy until 1972 when he began contributing to the New York Review of Books, which became the forum for many of the great debates he would have later.
In the meantime, the technology revolution was underway, and with it people began seeing the computer as a powerful new way of viewing the human mind. The mind really is just a computer, they said; it just happens to be located in the brain. If minds are computers, the thinking went, then computers are minds. We can create machines that think.
This gave rise to a new science called artificial intelligence, a group of whose practitioners invited Searle to Yale to discuss their work. Because he knew next to nothing about artificial intelligence, Searle took a book on the subject along to read en route. He was shocked to learn that the people he was going to see believed there was virtually no distinction between a computer and a human thinker.
He later devised and published a famous thought experiment that sought to refute this. It goes like this: A man who does not speak Chinese is put into a room with a bunch of pieces of paper on which are Chinese symbols. He is told people outside the room will pass to him other Chinese symbols and he is given a sheet of instructions specifying which of his Chinese symbols to pass back in correspondence with the ones he receives.
The man does this so well that it seems to people outside the room he must understand Chinese. But he is merely manipulating the symbols according to the instructions he was given. He understands nothing.
The man in the room, Searle said, corresponds to the computer, which also understands nothing and just manipulates symbols. To say such manipulation is thinking is silly, he said.
In publishing the Chinese Room argument in 1980, he sought to eliminate artificial intelligence as a serious enterprise. It is, he said, "a major intellectual disgrace." The retaliatory attacks were vociferous and still are. Searle is blithe about it.
"I don't know why people make dumb mistakes," Searle said. "I do what I can to correct them."
People have always used machine metaphors to explain the brain, he said. They have likened it to looms, telephones and telegrams. The Greeks compared it to a catapult. The important thing to remember is that these are all metaphors, not to be mistaken for the thing itself.
"Look," Searle said, "if we make a perfect computer simulation of digestion nobody thinks, 'Let's run out and buy a pizza and stuff it in the computer.' It's just a model, a picture.
"Here's the ironic thing. The brain is a machine. It's not that the computer is a machine and therefore can't think; it's that the computer is not enough of a machine."
Boxing With Words
The syllabus for a recent East Coast university introductory philosophy course displayed, just beneath the course title, pictures of three philosophers: Rene Descartes, David Hume and John Searle.
Searle's response was classic Searlean: "Who are those other two guys?" He was joking, of course, but he has won the right to make the joke mean something.
Searle is one of the few people who can list in his curriculum vitae not only books by himself, but also books about himself. When he goes to academic conferences now, he is as likely to be the content of the conference as one of many speakers.
This past summer, for example, one such meeting in Belgium was titled, "Hommage a John Searle."
The best thing about them, apart from the sheer flattery of it, Searle said, is that it gathers your enemies all in one place and, likely as not, pretty soon they'll forget all about you and start screaming at one another.
"I absolutely love it. I've got 'em outnumbered," Searle said.
That's the good part. The bad part is that you have to feign interest in what they say.
"Normally, when you go to these things, you don't have to pay all that much attention. You can listen if you want, fall asleep, or go have a beer. You can't do any of that if it's all about you. You have to pretend to pay attention."
Philosophy is boxing with words, a slugfest of minds. It can be bookish and cerebral and conducted in refined, often abstruse, language. This is true. It is also true that the goal is to beat the other guy's brains out. The object is to win.
Like boxing's weight divisions, philosophy is carefully stratified into divisions. The philosophers of language fight in this corner. In that one, the philosophers of science. Those unruly looking guys there are the realists.
John Searle is the Sugar Ray Robinson of philosophers. He fights across classes, even those he has no right being in. The Chinese Room is but one example. Growing out of his bouts with the computer people, his work moved more and more toward the philosophy of mind and consciousness theory.
"I got interested in the brain. I read all the stuff on brain science. My friends said, 'What are you doing? You haven't even read Plato,' " he said.
The nature of human consciousness has always been a particularly foggy intellectual terrain, a place where every weird theory imaginable has flourished, mainly because there was no way to refute them.
Now, neuroscientists were plumbing the biology of the brain, destroying many fuzzier conceptions. In Searle, they found a philosophical ally who came to view the activities within the brain as the natural result of brain functions. No mind independent of the brain, no spiritual intervention, just simple neural firing.
Searle is so adamant that consciousness is a physical creation of the brain that people like Daniel Dennett, a leading cognitive scientist at Tufts University, accuse him of pigheadedness. Said Dennett: "Self-confidence is an important virtue in philosophy, as in all other fields, but in overdose it can be crippling. Searle is often--maybe even usually--right in his shoot-from-the-hip reactions to the complexities of the world, but when he's wrong, he's incorrigible. He just can't take the other side seriously enough to see what they are saying."
Dennett's own theory of consciousness is less definite, but seems to deny that it exists at all. Searle said most cognitive scientists, Dennett included, are "regrettable deadbeats."
To which Dennett replied:
"For a detailed analysis of the embarrassments in Searle's position, see my review of 1/8Searle's book 3/8."
Searle shrugs: So many critics, so little time. He's already moved on to the questions of free will and rationality, he says; consciousness is solved as a philosophical problem and has become a matter of science.
"Let the brain stabbers figure out how it works," he said.
An Academic's Paradise
Berkeley sits on a gently sloped plain rising to the east from San Francisco Bay. The land climbs steadily in elevation for two miles to the University of California campus. The roads from the university's neighborhood wind up through some of the most prized neighborhoods in NorRhern California, known collectively as the Berkeley Hills.
Searle and his wife, a retired lawyer, live here in a picture book professor's house that sits on three-quarters of an acre, tumbling from one room to another, filled with nooks and crannies and books and fine rugs and wines.
Searle has two offices here, two more down on campus plus a table outside in the garden where he wrote his first book, with the help of his young sons who counted the words on each page to make sure he met his daily quota. When the Searles leave home they might go to another house at Half Moon Bay, or a condo at Squaw Valley, or sailing on the Gettys' yacht.
Asked how he has come to know people like the Gettys, he said: "I just happen to know a lot of people who like to give parties. And I like to go."
Searle is aware that he has almost inexplicably won some kind of hidden lottery. He is paid, he says, very well these days, and enjoys the results. "This is paradise," he said. "All this crap about getting kicked out of the garden. I don't get it. This is paradise. A great university, great skiing. Nowhere else in the world do you get that combination."
The great promise of the California dream is that it incorporates highs and lows. From surf bums to Nobel economics, it's all here somewhere. There is a strain, though, between the fantastic success of individuals at the high end and the progress of the whole society. Does the promise still exist if not everyone can have it; or does it at some point become a poison?
Asked about this, about the continuing viability of the dream, Searle said: "We filled up," for a moment at least acknowledging that even paradise has limits.
The next day, though, Searle is talking about what he really likes about Berkeley. Unlike many renowned professors, he actually enjoys teaching and carries a full load. He was just named UC teacher of the year, a tribute to his unflagging energy and the evident relish with which he attacks his lectures.
His lectures--from the barest of notes--are wild rides with references scattered like mileposts barely glimpsed as you whiz by. A recent undergraduate lecture mentioned two Ludwigs--his dog and Wittgenstein--Chomsky, Freud, flying rabbits, deep powder skiing, UCLA's assumed inferiority and natural foods. It's entertaining, a kind of performance, but at a very high plane. There are tough ideas flying, too, the kind that flit in and out of comprehension for the uninitiated.
The kids get it, though, asking tough questions, laughing at the jokes and self-deprecation. He loves them for it. He says when he teaches elsewhere, he misses his Berkeley students, and has to first teach his new students to think like Californians.
He tells a story. A young student came to see him in great distress, explaining that his father was a physicist and his mother a chemist. This meant they were working in two utterly different, even contradictory realms. The theory of relativity, physics at the cosmic scale, are in conflict with quantum mechanics, the laws of the microscale at which chemistry happens.
I have to solve quantum mechanics, he told Searle, unifying it with relativity. And I can't do it by myself. I need you to help.
Searle was silent and the boy, thinking he knew the reason behind the hesitation, said: Of course, we'll share the Nobel.
"That's what I love about Berkeley: the students, kids like that," Searle said. "He was so confident he could do it, he was already divvying up the prize."
Searle scoffs at any notion of lowering sights set that high.
"Berkeley has become content to be the world's best public university," he said. "That's not good enough. I didn't come here for that."
Searle says this by way of explaining that limits are there to be ignored, that California is exceptional, or at least ought to think itself so.
*
Previous stories in this California Century series are available on The Times' Web site: http://www.latimes.com/dream

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The secret to life in America, Manuel Garcia says, is credit. He slaps the dash and says it emphatically: "Cheap credit."
The dash is attached to a 1998 Freightliner Classic Raised Roof SleeperCab with 13 forward gears, two backward and 410 horses under its canary-yellow hood.
It's an early evening dressed in warm light and long shadow. The dash, the Freightliner and Manuel are southbound on Interstate 5, climbing the hill out of La Jolla, pulling a load of Lompoc broccoli and lettuce.
He grins across the gloaming. Once you've seen Manuel Garcia smile you can't help but be struck by the appearance of his face when he doesn't. It seems to belong to someone else. It's a face of flat, implacable planes that betray nothing of what goes on behind them. The relationship of his grinning face to this one is that of a child skipping to an old man standing stock still.
Right now, Manuel is skipping down the highway.
"This truck?" he says and slaps the dash again, "Zero down!"
"The house?"
Slap.
"FHA!" he shouts.
"Zero down!"
This then is Manuel Garcia's California, a land rich with contradiction and very many confusions but, oh yes, some significant satisfactions. Manuel and his wife, Ana, arrived in Los Angeles from El Salvador a decade ago with five children and little more than the clothes on their backs.
In addition to the Freightliner, the Garcias have since accumulated two subcompact cars, a Toyota Sienna minivan, two houses, two dogs and a squawking parrot. If this isn't some version of the California Dream, it's hard to imagine what is. And Manuel Garcia's explanation of his road to these riches--zero down!--is as powerful an empirical account as we are likely to get.
Amid all its inequities, one of the geniuses of latter-day American life is the gradual extension to the poor some privileges of the rich. Chief among these is capital.
Give me a lever, Archimedes said, and I'll move the Earth. Cheap and easy credit is the leverage that moves the modern world. It creates billionaires out of other people's money. It nurtures dreams. And every once in a while it does something truly worthwhile--like give fresh purchase to a family otherwise headed over the edge.
Still, this dollars-and-cents stuff seems somehow insufficient. Manuel Garcia just doesn't seem like the kind of man who could be made to smile with mere money.
A Port of Entry
The United States, it is forever said, is a nation of immigrants. To a large extent it's the reason the country was formed in the first place--to provide a place for people to go when they didn't like the place they were in. Being a destination for the discontented and ambitious is a central part of the country's definition of itself.
American immigration has occurred in four waves. The first three were overwhelmingly European. The first occurred just after the country broke from Great Britain, the second prior to the Civil War. The third and biggest influx came around the turn of the 20th century, comprising 18.5 million people, a huge amount in a country of fewer than 100 million.
The third wave didn't end until the U.S. virtually closed its door in 1924. By the time the door reopened in 1965, the world had changed. Europe was enjoying prolonged economic growth. Asia and Latin America were not. These were the areas where the fourth wave of immigration originated. And as the origin of migrants moved, so did their destination.
For its first 120 years, most of California's steady stream of new residents came from other states in the union, mainly the Midwest, hence those stories of picnics for native Iowans drawing 60,000 people in Long Beach.
This has changed utterly. During much of this decade, California actually lost population to other states. But this was more than made up by international immigration. More than half of all current Californians were born outside the state, and roughly half of those were born outside the country. California has suddenly became what William Clark, a UCLA geographer, calls the nation's port of entry.
According to data compiled in Clark's book "The California Cauldron," California now receives nearly three times as many immigrants as New York, the state with the next largest total. One of five foreign-born residents of the United States now lives in California. A quarter of all Californians are immigrants, the highest percentage of any state. California, in fact, has as many foreign-born residents as the next four largest destination states combined.
California is home to the largest (fill-in-the-blank) population outside the (fill-in-the-blank) country of origin--the most Koreans, most Guatemalans, most Iranians, most Vietnamese, most Armenians.
In the case of Mexico, Los Angeles has more Mexicans than every city in the world except Mexico City itself. By some estimates, fully 10% of the entire population of El Salvador has emigrated, half of it to Los Angeles.
Madness in El Salvador
Madness must lay buried in the earth, ready. With the least fissure, it rises. Loosed, it commands the landscape, taking what it wants, retreating when and only if it will.
For much of the last three decades it engulfed El Salvador. Death disguised as ideology visited every corner of the tiny country. During most of that reign, Manuel Garcia's family remained remarkably untouched. They lived in the shade of coffee trees in Santa Ana. Manuel was a bus driver, Ana a shopkeeper. They lived in relative ease compared to many of their countrymen.
While a civil war sputtered and smoked and occasionally blew up around them, their house was a refuge. The Garcias concentrated on raising their family, which grew to include four daughters and a son. Out of devotion and paternal protectiveness, Manuel drove the children wherever they had to go. When the war was at its worst, he made the children lie on the floor of the bus for safety.
"Dad took me to school every day. Sometimes, we would see dead people along the road," said Ruth, Ana and Manuel's oldest girl.
Government soldiers often commandeered Manuel and his bus, demanding he take them wherever they wanted to go. This did not escape the attention of the guerrillas who opposed the government. They made similar demands and asked which side Manuel was on.
Eventually, as it had to, the madness came calling at Manuel and Ana Garcia's front door. It took the form of two masked men with a proposal for blackmail. They gave Manuel a note demanding money in exchange for the safety of the four Garcia sisters--Ruth, Karina, Yeni and Marta--and their brother, Juan. The men gave Manuel a month to come up with the money.
As it happened, Manuel and Ana's life savings amounted to about the amount the men demanded. It was also virtually the exact amount it would cost to buy seven airplane tickets to America.
So it was that two mornings before the money was due, the Garcias told the children they were all going to visit the United States, where there was an amusement park with many rides and a mouse named Mickey. They dressed the four daughters and one son in matching outfits, each of which proudly featured shirts with the script "El Salvador" embroidered across the chest. They packed two suitcases for the family; each child brought a teddy bear. A cousin drove them down to the capital and the El Salvador International Airport. Armed with tourist visas, they boarded a plane to Los Angeles. Upon arrival, 5-year-old Juan wondered why people talked to him in strange words he couldn't understand while the family ate doughnuts for dinner.
That was in the fall of 1988. Today, Ruth is about to be a senior at USC, Karina a Cal State Los Angeles junior, Yeni an honors sophomore at Cal State Fullerton. Marta is in middle school, where she was recently honored for finding and returning a wallet with several hundred dollars in it. Juan is a high school junior with his eye on an old Camaro he wants to rebuild.
Becoming American
At some levels, or at one level, anyway, that being the level of a parent, the world is not a complicated place. There's safety and there's danger. What does a parent want? It's simple, right? You choose safety.
Even if it means giving up what you thought your life would be, you choose for the children.
When the blackmail threat was delivered, the Garcias had no choice but to believe it. "Probably it was true. Probably it was not," Manuel said. "We couldn't know. We had to make a decision."
A friend, blackmailed for $200, didn't pay. He was killed.
"I said to my wife, 'This is no life.' That's when we started talking about coming here," Manuel said. "It's something crazy. We don't even know how to leave."
"In El Salvador," said Ana, "you just live day to day and hope that it will get better the next day. Then the next day it's worse. We didn't know what to expect when we came. We just go to whatever's there."
Manuel had a sister in Gardena; the family camped there in one room of her two-room apartment.
"There was one sofa bed for all of us," Ruth said.
"We have to start here next to zero. We were sleeping on the floor," Manuel said.
The vacation myth the Garcias had given their children disappeared when they enrolled them in L.A. schools. Within a year of arrival, Yeni won a third-grade reading contest and Ruth won a trip to Washington, D.C., for an essay on how to make the world a better place. Karina knew exactly how to make her own world a better place: by going back to El Salvador. That was out of the question. As if to repeal history, she refused to speak English for two whole years.
Manuel went to work delivering sofas and chairs for a furniture store. To get more space, the family moved in with other relatives in a small house in Echo Park. Ana worked as a maid and the kids sold homemade tamales on the street.
The first year, the family of seven earned $12,000. Still, within two years they convinced the FHA they could afford a three-bedroom house in Watts.
"Watts for me was good," Manuel says. "My neighbors would watch my house for me. When my wife would leave, she wouldn't even lock the door."
He remains happily perplexed at the ease with which he was able to buy the house.
"In my country, my father filled out long applications for credit. He owned some land. He wanted to borrow $40,000 against it. He went through interviews, filled out forms. After six months he got a letter saying he had been approved. For $1,000," Manuel said. "In this country here, if you can keep your credit clear, they don't care how much money you want to spend."
Yeni, the third daughter, said that in retrospect moving to Watts seems "kinda weird. We moved from El Salvador to get away from the war and end up with gangs shooting each other out on the street in front of the house."
In telling this, Yeni takes on a serious, furrowed look. Then she brightens and, as if to say it wasn't really so bad, adds, "There was only one day we actually saw a dead body on the ground."
Manuel and Ana never intended to stay in the U.S. permanently. One year, maybe two, until things calmed down at home. But things never calmed down.
"I discussed it with my wife and with Ruth," Manuel said. "I said, 'We have to decide where we're going to be--here or there.' "
The Garcias chose here, they said, solely out of fear. They made that argument to the U.S. Department of Justice in a request for political asylum. The request was denied. Like many refugees of the period, they were caught between their own desires for safety and the foreign policy goals of the American government, which supported the Salvadoran government and refused to acknowledge there might be reason to flee.
The Garcias filed a second application for asylum. It slogged through the government bureaucracy at about the same rate the war dragged on at home. With the assistance of a local immigrant-rights group, they made other applications under other programs. If one failed, they tried another.
Their application package contains a collection of documents describing a family almost too good to be true. The file is stuffed full of letters from bosses, co-workers, teachers, students, neighbors and grocery store checkers. There's a card identifying Manuel as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department's 77th Street Division Police Boosters Assn. There's a certificate of congratulations from President Clinton right next to a letter from the neighborhood Avon lady. One typical letter says, "Mr. Garcia is responsible, dependable and a good person." Another concludes, "They are a very charming and conservative family."
"My family is very close," Manuel wrote, arguing that whatever happened they must all stay together. "Each of us would suffer extremely were we to be separated. They are my life."
There is not in a three-foot-long box of documents a single negative fact. The government nonetheless drew its own conclusion.
"The events you describe do not constitute past persecution," the Justice Department said, denying one claim. "You did not establish the guerrillas have the inclination to harm you today should you return to your country."
The only way to establish that absolutely, of course, would have been to return to El Salvador and be harmed.
The Garcias stayed instead in a sort of limbo, not knowing when they might be told to leave. They made the best of it. Manuel took English and driving classes. He moved on from the furniture company to a trucking job. Then he decided to risk it on his own. He scraped together enough money for a down payment on a small truck. He worked and saved and traded the small truck for a bigger one. Then the Freightliner.
The only vacation he's had in 11 years came when the truck was stolen and for a week he couldn't work. When it was recovered, he went right back on the road. The truck--unlike the family's health care--was insured.
Ana gave up working and, with Manuel gone so much, devoted herself to the children, hauling them to and from their various schools, cooking and counseling. With magnet programs and study preferences, the older children all ended up at different high schools. Just driving them around is nearly a full-time job.
The children prospered. Even Karina. She eventually gave up her English boycott and became the most outgoing of all the Garcia sisters. She scandalized the family by wearing makeup, then dating.
At some point in all of this, the children quit being children and, long before their parents, quit being immigrants.
They have inexorably become American. And they act it, too.
When Ruth, the most traditional of them, gets a grade she doesn't like, she challenges it. They go dancing, to the movies and the mall. Juan studies hot-rod magazines. They earn scholarships to college. They teach catechism classes at church; when children in class talk about troubles at home, Yeni gets their parents on the phone and scolds them.
They have kept, however, some of the wide-eyed innocence of the new. They celebrate birthdays without embarrassment at Chuck E. Cheese, Dad's treat. They picnic together on the banks of the San Gabriel River. Everybody goes. Nobody complains.
The Cities In-Between
There are famous L.A.s. There is the L.A. of earthquakes and another with fantasylands and theme parks. There is Hollywood and its hinterland, the places with the brightest names and most lurid lights. There's also the place with the darkest, scariest nights, the city of gangs and guns and drugs.
Each of these L.A.s has its niche in the national consciousness. Collectively, they add up to a definition of the place, at various times one or the other putting the most colors on the page. Always obscured in the process is the place where most Angelenos spend their lives--away from the famous and infamous places, in that great flat anonymous sprawl in between.
The city of Downey is smack in the middle of the In-Between. So of the middle is it that local guides to the city begin by boasting of its quick access to freeways, telling you how easy it is once you get here to leave for somewhere else. This is perfect advice for Downey, which, like much of Southern California, is on the move.
From its whistle-stop beginnings in 1873, Downey changed little for a long time. It was hardly more than unincorporated cow pasture between the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers. If you stood on your tiptoes, you could see from one end of town to the other. World War II, and especially its Cold War aftermath, remade Downey as a center of aerospace engineering.
Downey swapped one version of iconic America for another. The hamlet was transformed into a crew-cut, All-American suburb, home of industrial ingenuity as well as one of the original McDonald's restaurants and the Carpenters.
North American Aviation built a plant in the middle of town where for 30 years missiles were designed and built. A few of them were even launched, sending Americans to the moon. At its peak, 35,000 people worked at what became the Rockwell plant.
Today, the town has lost almost all those jobs and with them some of its shine. The Rockwell plant has changed hands a couple of times and most of it is now vacant, looking for tenants.
More than the economic base is changing. The people of the In-Between, Downey included, reflect the rising fourth wave of American immigration. They paint the population in different colors. Manuel, humping produce in his Freightliner, laughs and jokes with everybody he meets along his roads--almost all of it in Spanish. Downey's population, overwhelmingly white a mere 20 years ago, is now majority Latino.
Demographers like UCLA's Clark worry that the region doesn't fully comprehend the scope of change and growth that is occurring. Four out of 10 residents of Los Angeles County were born in another country. Turn-of-the-century Los Angeles is home to a larger percentage of the nation's foreign-born population than New York City was at the height of European immigration at the turn of the last century. What will happen to all these people? Clark asks.
"It's an incredibly bifurcated story. There are a lot of people like this family, but a lot of people who aren't going to make it. Is the California dream still available? The answer is yes. But is it available to everybody?
"No. No it's not. Not at all."
The Corner House
The Garcias moved to Downey three years ago. They had no idea they would be part of an emerging majority. They just liked the house, which was a bargain.
The fancier houses are over on the west side of town, by the golf club. Here, in the elbow of the intersection of Interstates 605 and 105, the houses are mainly the small, single-story ranches laid out on strict grids when half the city's houses were built in that single boom decade of the '50s.
This one here, though, the corner house, is different, with the odd wraparound building out front forming a sort of rampart guarding a courtyard and beyond, the house where the Garcias live.
Inside they laugh at how Central American the house seems, with its gravel courtyards and birds and dogs. Inside, in fact, they laugh at a lot of things. This spring, the Garcias finally won their last appeal with the U.S. government. They were the first Salvadorans granted permanent resident status under a new law designed to account for the peculiar political circumstances of Central American refugees. They can stay as long as they want. They laugh now at the bizarre lengths to which they went to prove they deserved to be here, all the court dates, all the people they asked to write all the letters of recommendation.
Ana says they're blessed. Yeni agrees. "Sometimes I think we really are. Whenever we really need something, we seem to get it."
Manuel says, "When we got our papers, oh my God. I told my kids: 'If you want to be something, this is the place. You can be anything.' "
There's a warm glow inside the house. Maybe it's caused by something as simple and straightforward as sunlight through a high window. Maybe. Or maybe it's less easily explained. Maybe believing the sunlight causes the glow is like believing Manuel's theory that cheap credit can buy happiness. It's rational. It makes perfect sense. There is a window and light comes through it. You could measure it; maybe you could prove it. And not get halfway to the truth.
There are people who move who seem never to arrive, people who forever dwell in memories of homes that were, or dreams of homes that can never be. The true gift Manuel and Ana Garcia gave their children has nothing to do with cheap credit and a good house, although what they gave is just as fundamentally American. It is what makes the California Dream possible. The gift they gave their children was the confidence to walk in the world and be at home with themselves wherever they come to rest.

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HOLLYWOOD -- Monday: Sheila Rivera learns a producer from Martin Short's television talk show will scout her upcoming Laugh Factory performance.
This is the sort of break unknown comedians dream about. TV talk shows--even Martin Short's--are the Schwab's drugstore counters of today. They're where you go to get discovered. Network executives and sitcom creators watch these shows, or so it is imagined, searching for new talent. An appearance can make a career.
Tuesday: Rivera spends the day honing her act. Unknown comics are told they have to be more than funny--they have to be somebody. The idea is to create an image, a brand name, something to separate them from the hundreds of other aspiring comedians in Los Angeles. Rivera searches for a magical 10 minutes that will touch the most marketable bases of her biography.
She's got plenty to work with: Puerto Rican childhood, engineering degree, NASA scientist, two marriages, two kids. Reducing her complicated existence to an advertisement is not something she particularly enjoys, but the necessity has been drilled into her. Feed the beast. Give it what it wants--a package.
"Hollywood works the way Hollywood works," she says. "Comics complain, 'They want you to be this, to do that.' Hey, you don't like it, leave. Screw artistic integrity. If you have to tap-dance, you better buy the shoes."
Wednesday: She tries out new material, seeing if those new shoes fit. They don't. "I watched the tapes this morning," she says. "Believe me, it was painful." Rivera is prepared to do what it takes to make it, yet resists doing what she's told to do. It's driving her crazy.
Thursday: Showcase day, filled with questions about what to wear, what to do, what order to put things in, she spends much of the day driving around town, doing her act in the car. She spends lots of days in the car, in part because she's hyper and needs to move, but mainly to get out of the one-bedroom apartment she shares with two other comics and a driving-school instructor.
Thursday night, 9:30: The Puerto Rican rocket scientist storms the Laugh Factory stage. She's wired. Her eyes are wild. She bucks and stomps like a spooked thoroughbred. She attacks the crowd, screaming.
She bombs.
Not a huge detonation; no nuclear meltdown. The crowd, in fact, laughs. It's the television people who don't. They leave without a word.
Strange Route to L.A.
Growing up, Sheila (pronounced Shay-la) Rivera discovered she was the only person in her family who could make her mother--a formidably dour and demanding woman--laugh.
Rivera didn't think much of this at the time and certainly didn't think of it as suggesting career options.
Rivera's family moved from Puerto Rico to Texas in 1978 when she was a senior in high school, a move so frightening that she refused to go. She stayed home to finish school, then rejoined them after graduation. She spent that summer in Houston in front of the television, struggling to learn English, then went off to Texas A&M.
Her father was a salesman for IBM and urged his children into more respectable lines of work. His oldest daughter, Sheila's sister, followed his advice, becoming an electrical engineer.
"That's hard," Rivera says. "I thought, 'What's harder than that?' Rocket science, right?' So I majored in aerospace engineering."
Out of college, she went to work for McDonnell Douglas on the space shuttle program. Her job, in the orbital mechanics group, was to design a method of blowing up the shuttle's expendable fuel tanks without raining rocket debris on people below. She liked it a lot. Or thought she did.
But one morning, just weeks, actually, after she started at Douglas, she was in her mother's Chrysler Newport driving to work. As she approached the Johnson Space Center, the thought occurred to her that this was how she was going to spend every day for the rest of her life.
"And I thought, 'No, I won't.' It seemed very confining all of a sudden. That was the beginning."
She nonetheless stuck with engineering for seven years, then--desperate for more human contact--switched to sales. Impressed by super salesman Zig Ziglar, she moved into motivational speaking. She loved the thrill of being in front of a crowd, holding it in thrall.
She had always been the class clown, one of those people everybody laughed at and told, "You ought to be a comedian." In 1994, she told herself that she would at least give comedy a try.
That fall she went to a seminar for aspiring comedians and did five minutes on stage. She loved it. "This is it," she thought. "I can be completely free. I can say anything I want. It was fabulous. It was extremely natural. When I got off the stage it was, 'Ahhh, yes.' "
She was hooked. She was, as they say in Texas, by-God going to become a comedian. She built an act based on gender differences.
"I'm a sensitive woman trapped in a male ego," was how it began. Those first five minutes led to 30 minutes at a club in Austin, then a club in San Antonio. She never took another straight job.
"Of course," she says, "it doesn't pay. No one tells you that."
By this time, she had married, had two children, divorced and remarried. Her husband was supportive. He had a good job. Give it a try, he said.
Houston had four comedy clubs, so a comedian could work locally about eight weeks a year. Plus, there were lots of one-nighters within a couple-hour drive--clubs, bowling alleys, motels. Not that these were all great gigs. She was the act who went up after Monday Night Football, when the audience was likely to be three guys ticked off because their team lost.
"They didn't want to hear jokes," Rivera says. "Texas style is like, 'That's cute, honey, now take off your shirt or get off the stage.' "
She went on the road for weeks of one-nighters across Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Dakotas, playing Holiday Inns and Doubletrees, taking the 80-buck paychecks and driving all day to the next show. She played big rooms in Indian casinos, places that could seat 500, but which on a Tuesday night in February might have seven, six of them drunk, half of the drunks snoring.
Rivera prides herself on her toughness. Show business people, she says, are forced to live like roaches--that is, miserably, but for a long time. Comedians, she says, are the toughest of the tough. "There are roaches that live in trees and roaches that live in sewers. Television performers are tree roaches. Comics are down in the drink," she says.
Rivera set out to be a comedian, not an actor, but enough catcalls and sleeping audiences can drive a person to do strange things. Last fall, five years into her comedy career, Rivera packed up and moved to Los Angeles, dreams of sitcom riches dancing in her head.
It wasn't an easy decision. Her supportive husband decided maybe he'd done enough supporting and said he wasn't going along, which meant she would have no money, which meant further that her kids must stay behind. Friends wondered if she were nuts, or worse, selfish, a mother abandoning her children. Rivera loves her kids--a boy, 14, and girl, 11--and the thought of losing them wasn't something she even wanted to contemplate. The children would stay with their father in Texas only temporarily, until school let out. She gave herself nine months to make or break a career.
She packed up her car last fall and drove alone to California. Once here, she ducked down into roach survival mode. She was determined. This sewer roach wanted to move up to the trees.
Being Funny, Getting Rich
Hollywood is based on a simple equation: Dreamers in, dreams out.
While every other variety of California dream comes and goes--often with frightening speed-- Hollywood's allure continues. New tastes and technologies go boom or bust--it doesn't matter. The dream factory grows.
First came the movies, then television and the recording industry, then cable and the Internet. Whatever the medium, the global appetite for American pop culture booms.
Entertainment is widely credited with pulling Southern California out of its post-Cold War recession. Three-quarters of a million people work in the industry or in services that directly support it. Two-thirds of all the entertainment jobs in the country are in Los Angeles County, making Hollywood the capital of a new world. The rush to sit atop it is unrelenting.
This time of year, spring, the frenzy peaks in an annual exercise known as pilot season, when the networks fill the casts of new shows being considered for spots on next autumn's prime-time schedules.
Thousands of men, women and children annually stream into Southern California for this, looking for the break that will send them into the show-business stratosphere. For comics, this moment beckons with particular urgency.
Making people laugh is for the most part a terrible way to make a living.
Consider how many--or, more to the point, how few--places there are to do comedy. Most comedy is performed live in night spots of one sort or another. They could be comedy clubs, dance clubs, dinner clubs, Moose Lodges or plain old bars. Most of these places have static clienteles. Their customers don't change that much and while some people might come back night after night to hear a favorite singer sing favorite songs, no one will sit through the same jokes night after night. A song remains beautiful. A joke does not remain funny. Most comics don't have more than an hour of current material. If the material doesn't change, the audience has to. So comics move. Typically, their longest engagements are two weeks, but most are one-night stands. It's an itinerant life full of long drives, cheap hotels and mean drunks.
It used to be that people who wanted to be comedians put up with this because that was the way it was. They had no choice.
Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, stand-up comics like Robin Williams and Bill Cosby hit it big on television situation comedies. Cosby, in fact, became America's richest comic actor. Light bulbs, dim though they might have been, went on all over Hollywood. Sitcoms are a long-time staple of prime-time television. What better and easier way to create them than to build around people known to be funny: comedians.
Never mind that there might or might not be any relationship between stand-up comedy and acting, suddenly, Hollywood became the place to be if you were an aspiring comic. The lure of sitcom gold has become the governing dynamic of the comedy business.
'How Can I Be More Latino?'
Sheila Rivera got lucky. Within weeks of coming to Los Angeles, armed with introductions from friends of friends, she landed a one-time shot at the Laugh Factory, which along with the Improv and Comedy Store, forms a sort of Holy Trinity of comedy, fabled places where Williams, Jim Carrey and Steve Martin rose to prominence.
Jamie Masada, the Laugh Factory owner, liked what he saw in Rivera well enough to hire her as a regular and to become her manager. "That first time, I think she's something special," Masada says. "There's an intelligence, a wit. Plus, she's a Latino woman--crosses all the barriers."
He didn't, however, like her act well enough to tell her it was great. What he told her instead was that she needed to work on her packaging, to emphasize her Latin heritage.
Before coming to Los Angeles, Rivera had lived in only two places--Puerto Rico and Texas. In neither of those places did anybody ever tell her she needed to work on her packaging, which was, she thought, just fine.
She's 38 (but says, under instruction from Masada, she can play 25). She's mobile, lithe and quick-witted. She has light brown skin, dark eyes and hair and an elusive ethnicity.
Moods don't simply play across her face, they transform it. When pleased, she's open, playful, ready to laugh at everything; depressed, doors slam shut, she's midnight on a moonless night; angered, it's still midnight, still no moon, and the sky crackles with small-arms fire.
Rivera is an observational comic. Her hero is George Carlin, not Roseanne. She doesn't do characters and isn't keen on making herself into one. She doesn't want to bare her soul onstage.
She's more apt to do a joke about anti-lock brakes--Who wants brakes that come to a graddd-uuu-al stop?--than about Puerto Rican culture. She does Mom jokes, gym jokes, fart jokes; smart, mainstream, conventional stand-up jokes.
Too generic for Masada's tastes. He wants her to develop a look, to emphasize her background, to be the Puerto Rican rocket scientist.
She'd rather tell you about screwing up a right turn on red, but She listens to Masada, who, after all, is as plugged into the agent-producer network as anyone in town. He has nurtured other comics to success. She'd be a fool, she says, to ignore his advice. So she's written more Latino material, more rocket science stuff.
She does a bit now that starts: "I used to be a rocket scientist. I had to quit because I make mistakes. Apparently, that's not allowed.
"Everybody makes mistakes, but we're not allowed to because if you're a rocket scientist, you're supposed to know everything, some kind of brilliant super being that can program a VCR."
She says she goes home and tells her mom they've lost the Hubble space telescope.
"It's not your fault," her mother tells her. "It's those mirror people."
"But mix the reds and whites in the wash and turn somebody's underwear pink and you'll never hear the end of it. You? You call yourself a rocket scientist?"
The act has genuine potential.
The night of the showcase for the Martin Short people, she had prepared all the stuff Masada recommended--lots of Latino jokes, lots of rocket science. She went up on stage to do it. You could see the disorder in her sharp-featured face. Or maybe it was confusion.
Pretty soon, she was doing fart jokes, penis jokes and teasing the audience about who was going to do what to whom after the show. The crowd loved it, but this wasn't ideal television pitch material.
"I knew what I was doing," she said days later, when she was finally willing to talk about it. "I sabotage myself every time. My ego takes over. You're always being told your packaging isn't good enough. The Latino thing is the trigger. I'm always being told to be more Latino. How can I be more Latino? I am Latino. . . . I'm always being told, 'You're too young, too old. Too this, too that.' It's all marketing."
She complains the would-be marketeers have forgotten the essence of comedy.
"Comedy is not about a look. It's about what you are and what you say. A comedian has to have something to say. The past year, I've been trying to comply with what I was being told. Finally, I said screw it. I have to be me."
It was, she admits ruefully, an inopportune time for an outbreak of ego.
Bringing God Into the Room
People are funny. Well, some people are funny. Others aren't. This guy, right now, for example. It's another Thursday night at the Laugh Factory, a usual Thursday--pretty good crowd, pretty good bill of pretty good unknown comics dying to get on stage. A skinny little guy is up there now, all ears and eyes and really bad material.
With the competition for stage time, comics can go weeks without working and, given that comics live for laughs, when they haven't heard any for a while their self-doubt builds to levels that could be considered normal only in a psychiatric ward.
"They're strange people," says Masada. "But you got to realize where they're coming from: tragedies, bad childhoods, divorces--whatever's causing it, they're lacking love. The applause is approval. The laughter is the love. And it's so addictive. They want it. They'd shoot it up if they could.
"We had a guy in here once who beat himself up. Literally. He'd hit himself in the face. And keep hitting himself. One hand, then the other. It gets a laugh. He keeps doing it. Now they're really laughing and he's really slugging himself. He's bleeding."
This guy on this Thursday night isn't that bad. At least he's not physically beating himself. But he might as well be. He's standing there, head twisted sideways, staring down at the ground, hand on his chin, brow all knotted up.
It's uncomfortable. Off to the side of the stage, the other comics are complaining. They're mad because the guy wasn't on the bill. Masada stuck him in there and he's using up their time. The audience, though, is loving it. The guy is staring at the floor muttering inaudibly and they're happy.
The guy is Chris Rock, the hottest young comic in the world. He stopped by to try out new material and Masada let him go up. It's Masada's standard practice to let name-brand comics come in to work out new stuff. It lends an air of anticipation to every show and endears Masada to the big acts. Rodney Dangerfield, who is now 78 years old, stops by most weekends and does 10 minutes. He needs the hit.
Rock's best comedy is fueled by rage, an assault on the human condition.
Tonight, the aspect of the condition that most bothers him is marriage, specifically his own. The problem with marriage, he says, is you're not supposed to sleep with other people, which isn't exactly how he phrased it but you get the point. Rock is greatly aggrieved by this, as if somebody had pulled a fast one on him.
"Nobody tells you that," he says, his voice a low, sad complaint. This isn't on the face of it very funny, but the crowd is generous, laughing, happy to see somebody famous.
A couple nights later, Rock is back. He has tucked and trimmed and the material is starting to fit. Now, the problem of faithfulness is expressed as the glory of a first kiss, as if, he says sweetly, God were pressing two heads together.
"It's all downhill from there," he says.
The despair is still there, but it's cloaked in sympathy. He's saying we're all just clowns, falling down. One day, this is really going to be funny. It isn't yet, but nobody tells Rock he needs to repackage his act, to cut out all that depressing stuff.
"If you're known," Rivera says, "you can do anything you want and they'll laugh at you just because you're you."
If you're not, everybody gets to tell you what to do.
Rivera can be a compelling presence on stage--vibrant and sophisticated, with the liberating ability to say things you might think but won't speak. That's where the laughs come from for her.
She notices a young couple seated next to the stage one night. The woman is dressed to the nines, right down to her stiletto heels.
"Oooh, look at you, look at you," Rivera says. "Somebody's gonna get laid tonight." The crowd roars.
"You're in control of those people. In that moment, when you have it, it's yours. The payoff is right now. You get a rush," Rivera says later. "You bring God into the room. It's the feeling that everything's OK, right now. For that moment, you save people. For that time when they're laughing, they're not the person who has a mortgage, who has a life outside. Nobody's going to take them to jail."
One night after her set, a guy in a white shirt and loosened necktie wanted to talk to her. He looked enough like a show-business type, a potential contact, she let him and he launched into a spiel about an anti-gravity machine he's invented.
"Guy comics get girls," she says. "I get a guy with a UFO."
It's insult to injury. Rivera has substantially more at risk than some 22-year-old on a lark. She scattered the remains of her former life--family, friends, six-figure-income--like so much confetti on the wind. It's no fun, coming from a nice little ranch house on a suburban cul-de-sac, two-car garage and a trampoline in the backyard, the American Dream, to this:
She makes maybe $400 a month. She sleeps on a fold-out chair. Her personal area amounts to 18 inches of hanging space in a hall closet and the one-square-foot top of a stereo speaker cabinet on which to array pictures of her kids. She keeps her shoes in the trunk of her car.
"Would I go back?," she says. "No. Absolutely not. I am not ever going to do that."
It's February. Her kids are moving out when school ends in May. The clock is ticking.
One day, out of nowhere, she says: "I can't stand my act any more."
Pause.
"No, it's OK."
Pause.
"I hate it. I'm going to get a daytime job. Just something, anything.
"Anything away from the food industry. I don't want to be asking, 'Do you want fries with that?' Maybe, I'll sell jewelry. I used to sell jewelry."
Pause.
"Really, it's all right."
Long pause.
"You just gotta tell yourself, one day they'll know who you are."

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By TERRY McDERMOTT, TIMES STAFF WRITER
SONOMA, Calif. -- Thirteen years ago, Maria Lounibos, a young and not very accomplished secretary--in her own words, a flake--saw an employment ad from a realty company.
Why not? she figured. She was 28, single and bored stiff working in the office of a civil engineer in the tiny Sonoma County town of Windsor. How much worse could selling real estate be?
This was, of course, the wrong question. What Maria didn't know--could not have known--is that real estate in California is not a business; it's a belief system. She also didn't know--could not have known--that she was an ideal candidate for conversion.
She answered the ad. I will sell houses, she said.
Maria's voice, even today, has a teenage quality to it. Then, she must have sounded like a fourth-grader. The person on the other end of the phone line asked Maria how long she had had her real estate license.
License? she answered.
She was coolly informed that she would need to pass a test and obtain a license to sell real estate in California.
This was news to Maria, who was naive about many things in America. It hadn't been that long before that she had arrived in Sonoma from her native Jalisco. She came to visit her father, a worker at a local dairy. On the first visit, she fell in love with the place and decided to abandon her dead-end job in a pharmacy back home.
Like many immigrants, Maria's initial concerns were modest: getting by, not getting rich. Foremost, she spoke no English. She enrolled in secretarial school mainly to learn it, then went to work in a series of office jobs, none of which she liked.
The realty people wished Maria well without even asking her name, she recalls. She did as they said, however, and signed up for a real estate course, took the test, got the license and called back to the same Century 21 office.
"I was very successful since day one," she says. "At first I thought Hispanics would be my clients. But not really. Everybody wants to do business with you. The very first year, I made $80,000."
She flashes a smile as she says this. Then frowns.
"And spent it all," she says. "That's the problem. So I have to make more."
There are a great many dreams tangled up in real estate. Not least of them is the Realtor's own dream of independence and wealth. Many have achieved it; certainly not most.
Last year, Maria sold more real estate than all but two people in Sonoma County. She closed, on average, two transactions each week. She made $500,000. This year she expects to do better.
This is, as Maria might say with typical gusto, fabulous.
Maria uses the word fabulous a lot when speaking English. In Spanish, she often substitutes perfecto. Both come in the company of many exclamation points. She is a woman who speaks in exclamations and manages to sound sincere. In much the same way, she is a woman who can wear leopard-skin print clothing and look sensible, even sophisticated, in a pampered, feline way.
Maybe whatever she wears would seem understated compared to the exclamation points, which form an invisible cloud around her through which she calmly sails.
A Land of Plenty
In the way of few places at few times in history--cave men, perhaps, or medieval monks--contemporary California is defined by its shelter, by hillside after hillside of cookie-cutter trilevels, by sunbaked plat after sunbaked plat of cheerless bungalows, by celebrity mansions of ridiculous glory.
More than movies, more than agriculture, aerospace or computer chips, real estate is California's essential industry. It has transcended economics to become a defining part of the culture.
California has more houses than all but 10 states have people. There are more dwelling units of one kind or another just in Los Angeles County than there are in 43 states.
One of every 10 free-standing, single-family homes in the United States is in California; one of every 100 in the world. Residential real estate in California is worth more than $2 trillion, one-sixth the value of all the housing in the world.
That's an awful lot of houses and, as you might expect, it takes an awful lot of people to sell them, although not as many as it might appear.
California has 95,000 Realtors, but industry data indicate that a mere 7% of them sell 90% of the homes. That's not very attractive math for the other 93%.
Good real estate agents are nimble-minded. They do things quickly. Watch an agent walk through a house. In and out, five minutes. Tops. They do not linger. They survey, count, calculate and move on. They seldom even take notes.
They talk on the move, in passing. They talk over their shoulders, shouting questions down hallways and answers across streets.
"Are your buyers on 1865 going to qualify?" one will ask.
Or: "We close escrow on the 23rd and my buyers would like to get in and paint on the 21st. OK?"
Or: "Arnold Drive is in trouble. It only perc'd for three and they really want four."
Maybe in a slower market, agents would have time to stop and have real conversations, or at least eye contact. Maybe, in other words, if this were any time in the early 1990s, when the California real estate market tanked. It was just this past summer that prices in much of the state regained their pre-recession highs.
For reasons everyone predicted and no one truly foresaw, the housing recession ended sometime in 1998, in the spring or summer, depending on where in the state you were. Sales picked up steam through the end of that year, rolled through the next and continue to hum along, requiring agents to hum right with them.
What is most impressive about agents' shorthand conversations is the degree to which one agent knows precisely what the other is talking about. They must be mental jugglers. Maria typically has at least 20 transactions in some stage of completion, which is another way of saying she has 20 deals on the verge of falling apart. On average, even among prospective home sales that get as far as an escrow account being opened, which is when checks actually get written, about a fifth never reach completion.
Deals collapse, sure things, every day. The reasons can be as ordinary as a loan denied, as powerful as love lost.
Energy Aplenty
Maria is a woman of unanticipated discipline.
She starts her days with a single caffe latte. Any more than one, she says, would be redundant, by which she means her temperament is sufficiently, shall we say, forward, that more caffeine would best be spent on someone who needs it.
She buys her morning latte down on the Plaza, old Sonoma's town square, at the Basque Boulangerie Cafe, chatting her way in and out, talking to acquaintances, competitors, customers, former customers and, of course, future customers, which is to say, all of the above, plus everyone not in any of the other categories.
After she has her coffee, Maria, still talking, gets in her dewdrop new silver Mercedes E320 and drives three blocks to her office, which, in the morning, is a mess.
"Normally, at night I leave and leave everything in chaos," she says. "Francie [her assistant] comes in at 9 and takes over the chaos."
Maria, her husband and partner, Michael, and Francie work out of a small suite of rooms in a low-ceilinged loft above the rest of the Century 21 sales staff. Michael's office is truly tiny, about the size of a telephone booth.
Maria's is larger, but with its industrial gray-brown carpet and pale cream walls, hardly lavish. It is decorated with sales trophies and plaques and a couple of photographs of the two of them and their two children.
The office has three phones, two on her desk, one next to a computer on another desk. She has a fourth phone in her purse and a fifth built into the radio in her car. When something is ringing, it's not always immediately clear what it is.
Maria starts the day with a fresh to-do list, built as she cleans yesterday's detritus off her desk, sorting and piling and prioritizing. She has learned, she says, "to do the most important thing, not the most urgent. In my mind, the most important is new business."
One of the reasons Maria does so much business is because she doesn't wait for it to come to her. She and Michael spend a sizable part of every day calling potential customers. They prospect for customers in particular neighborhoods, or among people trying to sell their houses by themselves, or among people who other people have told them might be interested in selling or buying. They'll call anybody.
At 10:25 a.m., Maria has finally cleared her desk of yesterday's leftover business. She has an appointment at 10:45 to show a piece of undeveloped property on South Central Avenue, off Highway 12. It's 10 minutes away, which leaves 10 empty minutes. Maria starts making prospecting calls to people who are trying to sell their houses without benefit of a Realtor--For Sale By Owners, as they're known in the business.
"Hello, this is Maria Lounibos. I'm a Realtor with Century 21. Question for you: Is your property still for sale?"
"No more?" she says, her disappointment audible.
"Termites?"--oh the horror!--"naturally, a problem muy grande."
She listens. The seller pulled the property off the market when a termite infestation was discovered. The house will be back on the market.
"Oh, perfecto!"
This is delivered with a trill of excitement, as if the greatest possible thing that could ever happen to anybody would be to offer a house for sale.
"Fabulous!"
When the call is finished, Maria puts the phone down, brushes her auburn hair from her eyes and looks up. She smiles, shyly, as if caught, hand in the cookie jar. She makes a hash mark on a sheet of paper, a scorecard, and punches in the next number.
A third of her business comes from these solicitations. Michael's specialty is identifying prospects. Maria's is closing them. She is able to invest such substantial emotion into routine exchanges that they transcend the routine. She elevates the ordinary.
This is an aspect of all sales, and most salespeople fail utterly at it. Their attempts at elevation, if they make them at all, ring false. The customer sees it as a sham and is embarrassed at best, irritated at worst.
Maria passes her enthusiasm on to the other person. When she seems giddy with excitement, she is. It's not an act. Her whole body animates, even when she's talking to an answering machine.
Her husband's true love is songwriting. Maria says, "When Michael talks to me about music, I listen, but when he talks to me about real estate, I think, 'Yeah!' "
In the 10 minutes before she is supposed to leave for her appointment, she makes 11 calls. She gets three answering machines, four no answers, one wrong number, one house that has already sold, one that is still on the market, and one person who is tired of the hassle of trying to sell her own house and is willing to entertain the idea of giving the listing to Maria.
"That was a good contact," Maria says. She thinks there's a good chance she will be able to convert this prospect into a customer. She'll call back in a week.
Incoming calls stack up in a holding pattern, like jets in the fog. All the buttons on her phone are lit up. She's being paged over the office intercom. She's ecstatic.
"Do I want to do one more?" she asks. She looks at the clock. "It's time to go, huh?"
She makes one more call. No answer.
"We should probably go," she says.
She makes another call.
She reaches a seller who has taken his house off the market to make some small repairs. She immediately becomes the seller's new counselor.
"You wish you did, huh? I hear you. You got it. Do you have any other real estate needs?"
"Good lead," she says as she hangs up. "They're going to do the repairs and put it back on the market. I'll follow up. I'll follow him to death."
Old Land, New Money
Sonoma County is a 60-mile-long, wedge-shaped piece of land, lying on a northwesterly diagonal above San Pablo Bay, the northernmost extension of San Francisco Bay. It is bounded on the west by Marin County and the Pacific Ocean and on the east by the Mayacamas Mountains, a low range dividing the Sonoma and Napa valleys.
Sonoma was the birthplace of the short-lived Republic of California, the so-called Bear Flag Republic, which bridged the period between Mexican and American governance in the middle of the 19th century.
It was also the birthplace of the California wine industry, which, unlike the Republic, lasted. The long, hot summer days and cool, cloudy nights blanket the inland valleys of Sonoma Creek and the Russian River with ideal grape-growing weather.
The low yet steep Mayacamas and Sonoma mountains assure a mix in soil, exposure and elevation, making every mile a new world for a vintner.
Apart from their agricultural richness, the valleys and vine-covered hills grace the place with simple loveliness. It's a rustic charm, lower-key than the rugged beauty much of California possesses, but it wears well.
Famous past residents Luther Burbank and Jack London never tired of proclaiming the place a garden of earthly delights. Burbank, the great horticulturist, famously declared it the best-endowed place on the planet.
London, the adventure writer, was so enamored of his Glen Ellen ranch and pig farm that he told people he devoted five hours to the pigs for every hour he gave to his writing.
For most of the county's history, its country grace was its best-known feature, and agriculture was the main business, especially dairy and egg production. The big business now is telecommunications manufacturing.
A group of largely anonymous companies that make fiber-optic cables and switching devices in the past few years have colonized the southern portion of the county.
Petaluma, formerly best known as home of the annual Egg Day Parade (it once had a pharmacy devoted entirely to poultry medicines), now has one of the nation's heaviest concentrations of telecom companies, most of which are young, obscure and growing furiously.
One of these companies that no one has ever heard of bought one of the others last month for $41 billion, which on the day it was announced was more than the market value of, for example, all airline companies in the United States.
The telecom companies have done more than supplant chicken coops. Coupled with would-be exurbanites from San Francisco and Marin, they are among the big drivers of the real estate frenzy.
Whole companies have moved in almost overnight. Real estate agents with flush young engineers in tow scour the countryside looking for the perfect places to plant the new wealth.
At least, they start out looking for perfect places. They quickly discover there aren't many of them. The prices for those that do exist rise 20% and 30% at a jump. Prices for the imperfect places follow suit.
The result is that Sonoma County, relative to the income of its residents, now has among the least affordable collections of housing in the country.
Houses get offers before they go on the market. Houses are bought sight unseen. A day without an offer on a new listing is a defeat. More typical is a day with many. They come in swarms.
To handle the craziness, real estate agents have given up trying to figure out what houses are worth. Nobody can outguess the market, anyway. They hold auctions instead.
A new listing often is advertised by simply naming the address and announcing when it will be sold: "Available for viewing Monday, sealed bids opened Thursday."
The reason for the high prices is simple. The supply of people is growing much faster than the supply of houses.
Sewer and water capacities are stretched in parts of the county, making growth difficult. Renewed demands by agriculture and environmental interests have further restricted development. Every hillside seems to be planted in grapes, and those that aren't have rows of steel poles driven into them waiting for new vines to grow.
It's to the point now that the usual debate about development eating up farmland has been turned on its head. The more vociferous complaint here today is from people who say farmland is eating up room for houses.
In the United States, there is a single-family, detached house for every four people. This is the type of fact cited when people try to itemize the elements of the American Dream.
Houses, though, have not always been assumed as part of the catalog. Their availability is a product of industrialization, specifically of what is often called the second industrial revolution.
The first began with the invention in Europe of the steam engine in 1776. Its chief feature was the mechanization of work. The second revolution--mass production--didn't occur for another century and was of American origin, typified by Henry Ford's use of interchangeable parts on an assembly line.
The result was as much social as technological: Mass production induced mass consumption, and a new world was created.
It took a while for housing to be much affected by this. What, after all, does an assembly line have to do with building a house? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Houses aren't built in factories, but the pieces of them are.
The great event, little noted then or since, in making housing a mass consumer good was the institution in 1924 of standardized measures for construction lumber. The Henry Ford of housing was something called the American Lumber Congress. The humble two-by-four was its Model T.
Building housing had always been expensive, custom work. Most American housing was built of wood. Each timber mill cut wood to local specifications. If you didn't have a local mill, houses were built of stone or mud or not at all.
The development of national standards allowed lumber to be shipped anywhere with confidence that it would be usable. It cut housing construction loose from timber supplies, making possible the development of great residential areas hundreds or thousands of miles from the nearest timber supplies: Phoenix, say, or Los Angeles.
Aside from this convenience, standardization democratized housing, cutting costs enormously. In the process, it created the notion that anybody could afford one. The two-by-four stud-wall system of construction underwrote the post-World War II housing boom that redefined--for better or worse--urban America.
Sonoma County reflects this. With the exception of the old town centers of Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, Sonoma and Petaluma, most housing is in undistinguished tract developments.
Some of it looks as if it could have been built in a day. Some was. The developer of a 2,400-home subdivision in Santa Rosa once built a house in an hour. It was a publicity stunt, but also a celebration of the possibilities of development, and America.
Rohnert Park, the county's second-largest city, was conceived as "a country club for the working class." Inspired by Levittown, N.Y., it was an attempt to marry the virtues of mass production to the amenities of upper-class life.
Laid out in the 1950s over a treeless swamp, the town is now a leafy retreat of cul-de-sacs and middle-class comfort. Every house is within walking distance of a park and a school. The experiment worked so well that the cheapest houses in town are creeping up to the $400,000 range, if you can find one. This is hardly working-class heaven.
After you've subtracted Bay Area refugees, telecom millionaires and the occasional vineyard owner, this is still small-town America.
The county seat, Santa Rosa, has a population of only 130,000 and, at that, is more than twice the size of the next biggest city. Incomes have not kept pace with housing costs. Cal State Sonoma, the local college, has invited professors to live in dormitories because they can't afford to live anywhere else.
Sonoma is hardly alone in California in this regard. There are more homeowners in California than in any other state, but high prices are making ownership less and less likely. The percentage of homeowners among state residents has declined steadily since the 1960s.
The Nature of Realty
Maria Lounibos, is, of course, late for her appointment. Her client, en route from Marin, is later yet, a little lost, in fact, as they determine over a series of cell phone calls.
Maria arrives at the property first. It's a couple-acre lot a quarter-mile off Highway 12, the main east-west thoroughfare in south Sonoma County. Asking price is $195,000.
The parcel is a big, flat, dusty, weed-ridden rectangle. Real estate agents like to say what they're really selling are dreams. When Maria arranges to take a client to a property, she invariably says: "Bring your checkbook. You never know, you might fall in love."
It's hard to fathom what dream this bedraggled patch of ground might provoke, but since Maria put it on the market a week ago she has received two offers, both above the list price. The seller is to make a decision this afternoon.
"Ordinarily, I would not come in this late with another offer, but this is better for the seller," Maria says. "Maybe, huh?"
The customer, Katherine, eventually arrives, a young computer consultant in a BMW convertible. She surveys the weeds, the distance from the highway, a large oak at the rear of the property and the farm beyond it.
"It is what it is, isn't it?" she says.
She asks some questions. The property is not on the city sewer line, so the owner will have to install a septic system, which, as is typical in the county, is the main means of restricting how big a house can be built.
In this case, the soil will not accommodate more than a three-bedroom house. Waste water won't percolate fast enough through the soil for a bigger place. At least, that's what the county reckons.
This is a long way from computer consulting. It's confusing.
Maria explains it patiently, but it's clear that nobody is falling in love today. Maria doesn't push. Katherine's husband is coming up from the city within the hour. They're very eager to make a move. They'll be in touch.
Much of the rest of Maria's day is filled with appointments: a prospective seller, a family buying a small commercial property, a young couple observing the inspection of a house they've agreed to buy.
Maria is supposed to pick up her father, who has retired to his hometown in Mexico and who is flying into San Francisco International for a family wedding. There's more going on than most people could keep track of. There are a dozen deals up in the air. She is surely going to be late getting her dad.
Later in the day, Katherine, the computer consultant, calls back. Her husband drove up from the city. They looked at the lot. It didn't compute. They make no offer.
For all the talk of dreams, a good part of the real estate business is based in tragedy and dislocation--somebody loses a job, dies or goes bankrupt. A real estate agent develops a clinical pragmatism. Maria gets excited about being in a deal, not closing it.
"I love it, but I'm not attached to it. You lose energy if you're attached to the outcome," Maria says. "I never worry about closings. They're going to close some day. Or they're not.
"When I first started, I used to take it personally. One day, a friend told me, 'You can't win them all.' It's right, you can't. So I don't let it bother me.
"That property was a cold call," Maria says. "A cold call two weeks ago, selling today. I do feel good, no?"
Amid the day's commotion, she is worried about only one thing: When can she get back to the office to make more cold calls? There are more people out there wanting to make deals than there are deals to be made. Maria has to get her share. She understands one fundamental fact of her business: Real estate is a pipeline. Her job is to keep it full.
Maria moves on.