So What's Left?
It's tacky, very, very tacky. But, maybe I should be grateful. People tell me it used to be worse.
New Fontana commuter-resident[153]
Eat shit and die.
Reaction of old Fontana "homeboy"
After so many schemes, scandals, and sudden upheavals, what is Fontana today? Begin, arbitrarily, with its Wild West, unincorporated fringe. Follow the fire-engine-red Kenworth K600A "Anteater" pulling its shackled double reefers into the lot of "Trucktown" off the Cherry Street exit of I-10, just south of the Kaiser ghost plant. There are more than one hundred and twenty independent trucking companies based in the Fontana area, and this is their central fuel stop and oasis. Around midnight Truck-town really bustles, and rigs are often backed up to the Interstate waiting for a fuel-stop or parking berth. The biggest truckstop in the country is
just a few miles further west in Ontario, but drivers resent Union 76's private police force and stale pie.
Cherry Avenue is clearly, as they say, "west of the Pecos," and it is easier to make deals of all kinds here. Inside the care the counter is occupied by an apparition of Lee's Army after Appomattox: lean, bearded, hollow-eyed, and taciturn. There is more animation in the booths. Owner-operators wrestle with logbooks and second-driver problems; husband-wife teams have family arguments; brokers with questionable loads wrangle for haulers; outlaw bikers peddle old ladies and "Black Molly" (speed). The Cherry Avenue fringe has always accommodated illicit but popular activities. Until its recent closure by the Highway Patrol, the adjacent rest area on I-10 functioned as a girls-and-dope drive-in for morning commuters in Toyotas and tourists in Winnebagos.
Now the entire Fontana periphery (including the incorporated north-side and Rialto as well as the Cherry Street area) has become the Huallaga Valley of Southern California. Long the "speed capital of the world," its meth labs have recently diversified into the mass manufacture of "ice" (crystal, smokable speed) and "croak" (a smokable combination of speed and crack). For the most part this is grassroots narco-patriotism: drug addiction made-in-America by small-town good old boys and distributed throughout the heartland by a vast network of motorcycle gangs and outlaw truckers. From the standpoint of free enterprise economics it is also a textbook example of small entrepreneurs filling the void left by the collapse of a dinosaur heavy industry. Speed not steel is now probably Fontana's major export.
Which is not to deny that a lot of steel is still being hauled out of Fontana even if Big Bess herself was long ago melted for scrap. The multinational hybrid of California Steel Industries, just up Cherry Avenue, continues to roll Brazilian slabs into a variety of products for local markets (although the Japanese, and increasingly the Koreans, dominate the big-ticket structural items). The United Steel Workers recently attempted to organize CSI, but the campaign ended in disaster. Whether out of fear of losing their jobs again, or in resentment against the international's failure to come to their aid eight years earlier, the ex-Local 2869 men at CSI re-soundly voted the union down (88 per cent to 12 per cent).
The former primary steelworks itself looks like Dresden, Hiroshima, or, perhaps the most fitting image, Tokyo in April 1945 after three months of concentrated fire-bombing with Kaiser-made "goop" had burnt the city down to the ferroconcrete stumps of its major buildings. The wreckers long ago picked the plant clean of any salvageable metal—some of which,
reincarnated in Toyotas and Hyundais, zooms by on I-10. Meanwhile, the towering smokestacks, once visible for thirty miles, are collapsed into rubble, while only the skeletal concrete cores of the blast furnaces remain. Around the heavily guarded perimeter, Kaiser Resources leases land to a series of "mom-and-dad" scrapyards, who, having run out of Kaiser wreckage, are now happily crushing and shredding derelict automobiles. The whole scene looks like Mad Max: a post-apocalyptic society of industrial scavengers and metal vultures.
Across the road lie shadows of Fontana Farms. A ghostly vintage chicken ranch is overgrown with weeds but otherwise kept intact by its octogenarian owner who recalls the great plague of Newcastle's disease in 1971 that killed millions of Fontana hens. A few miles away in South Fontana a handful of chicken ranchers have managed to hang on and modernize their operations. Near the corner of Jarupa and Popper stands an astounding automatic chicken plant that works by conveyor belts, where one man can easily tend 250,000 hens. But the resulting accumulation of chicken manure is so vast that it has to be pushed around the ranch by bulldozers. Nearby commuter homeowners—no longer beguiled by the romance of chicken shit—are circulating petitions to close down this successful survival of the Millerian age. When the last trace of the chickens, pigs, and orchards has been removed, Fontana's remaining link to its agrarian past will be its thousands of dogs. We are not talking about manicured suburban house dogs, but old-fashioned yard dogs: snarling, half-rabid, dopey, friendly, shaggy, monstrous, and ridiculous Fontana dogs.
Fontana probably also has more wrecked cars per capita than anywhere else on the planet. The nearby Southern California Auto Auction is considered by some aficionados to be the eighth wonder of the world. More impressive to me is the vast number of dismantled or moribund cars deliberately strewn in people's yards like family heirlooms. I suppose it is a sight that blights Fontana's new image, but the junkyard sensibility can grow on you after a while (at least it has on me). The Fontana area—or rather the parts of it that are not named "Heritage" or "Eagle Pointe Executive Homes"—is a landscape of randomly scattered, generally uncollectable (and ungentrifiable) debris: ranging from Didion's creepy boulders to the rusting smudge-pots in phantom orchards, to the Burma-Shave-era motel names (like "Ken-Tuck-U-In") on Foothill Boulevard. Even crime in Fontana has a random surreality about it. There is, for instance, the maniac who has murdered hundreds of eucalyptus trees, or Bobby Gene Stile ("Doctor Feldon"), the king of obscene phone calls, who has confessed to fifty thousand dirty phone conversations over the last twenty-three years.
"Doctor Feldon" had, perhaps, wandered too far and too freely in the fleshpots of Fontana's Valley Boulevard (still, as in 1941, "Death Alley"). Just east of Cherry Avenue the boulevard is a boring repetition of adult bookstores and used truck dealerships. Closer to Sierra, however, there is a gathering sense of a mise en scène by a downhome Fellini. On one corner a hardluck cowboy is trying to sell his well-worn Stetson hat to the patriarch of a family of road gypsies—or are they Okies circa 1990?—who pile out of their converted Crown bus home. They have just left the Saturday swap meet at the nearby Belair Drive-In. Inside a lobster-faced desert "flea" from Quartzite is haggling with a trio of super-bag-ladies from the San Fernando Valley over the value of some "depression" glass saucers and an antique commode. Some local kids with "Guns and Roses" gang-bang T-shirts are listening to another grizzled desert type—this one looking like Death Valley Scotty—describe his recent encounter with aliens. A Jehovah's Witness in a maroon blazer kibbitzes uncomprehendingly.
A block away is an even more improbable sight: a circus wrecking yard. Scattered amid the broken bumper cars and ferris wheel seats are nostalgic bits and pieces of Southern California's famous extinct amusement parks (in the pre-Disney days when admission was free or $1): the Pike, Belmont Shores, Pacific Ocean Park, and so on. Suddenly rearing up from the back of a flatbed trailer are the fabled stone elephants and pouncing lions that once stood at the gates of Selig Zoo in Eastlake (Lincoln) Park, where they had enthralled generations of Eastside kids. I tried to imagine how a native of Manhattan would feel, suddenly discovering the New York Public Library's stone lions discarded in a New Jersey wrecking yard. I suppose the Selig lions might be Southern California's summary, unsentimental judgment on the value of its lost childhood. The past generations are like so much debris to be swept away by the developers' bulldozers. In which case it is only appropriate that they should end up here, in Fontana—the junkyard of dreams.