How Weird Was My Valley

People of the Valley 2: Electric Boogaloo

I’m Bryan Behar and I’m a Val-coholic. Almost 59 years. But instead of a chip, you get one Sega Center token good for a free game of Galaxians.

My piece is entitled, “How Weird Was My Valley.” That’s only because I didn’t have the balls to call it, “People of the Valley 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

If you were a Valley kid of a certain vintage and are still here, Mazel tov! 

It means you made it through the 70’s by surviving killer bees, killer whales, killer tomatoes, Bill Cosby, Jaws, Sasquatch, Skylab, the Malachi Crunch, gas lines, stagflation, mixing Pop Rocks and Coke or helping Rerun bootleg the Doobie Brothers. 

At least that yielded the greatest sentence in American literature, “Which Doobie you be?”

If you’re still here, it also means you’ve lived long enough to witness, in two generations, the Valley transform itself from orange groves to Orange Juliuses to Orange Theories. 

From a sleepy uncultured bedroom community to a congested uncultured influencer haven. 

Still no culture. Unless you count the Spearmint Rhino or pony league baseball.

But before Sportsmen’s Lodge went from fishin’ hole to Sugarfish, before Sephora swallowed Dupar’s, Joan’s replaced an aquarium store, and Tik Tokers sipped $18 Hailey Bieber smoothies instead of “making a pig of themselves at Farrell’s,” we had the janky old Valley of yore.

The grimy, smog-drenched, cruising on a Wednesday, tennis lessons from Mark, news from the Green Sheet, hotter than Tattooine’s two suns, Valley of the seventies.

A suburban Brigadoon that now exists only in memory, Valley Girl reruns, and one of every seven P.T. Anderson movies.

A town whose primary industries were smut, aerospace, corn dogs and opposing school integration.

A cosmopolitan hamlet famous for its taste and refinement.

Who the fuck am I kidding? It was known for water slides, waterbed stores, markets named Boys, boys named Leslie, baseball sleeves as evening wear, and so many Jews in Fila, you’d swear you were at a Bjorn Borg cosplay convention inside a Hadassah meeting.

In the old Valley, moms looked like Farrah Fawcett. And dads thought they looked like Burt Reynolds, but actually looked like Gabe Kaplan’s stand-in on Welcome Back Kotter.

Dads punched the clock at the Anheuser-Busch factory, the General Motors factory, and the Wiener Factory. And moms were allowed to buy yarn, I want to say?

It was a magical place where trains served hot dogs, hot dog stands had batting cages, one castle offered Chicken Lancelot, the other skee ball, the amusement park gave adults free Budweiser and every neighbor’s swim party was likely a porno shoot. 

What a time to be alive!

I know what I’m talking about. I've spent 41 of my 58 years within walking distance of a Leslie’s Pool Supplies.

You could blindfold me, spin me around, and I’d still find my way to the Gelson’s hot food bar. Next to the yentas in yoga pants. The Lululemon-heads. 

I couldn’t be more Val if I’d been born at Barone’s instead of Cedars. And the OB/GYN delivered me on a rectangular pizza tray with a side of green peppers.

I’m shocked Moon Unit hasn’t written a song about me. I’m shocked Encino Man isn’t my unauthorized biography.

Truth is, I spent decades fighting the “Val” stigma.

Now it’s such an ingrained part of my personal mythology, many believe I was found as a baby, floating down the L.A. River in a Pioneer Chicken box, like Moses of Encino.

And raised by Tom Petty in the Galpin Ford showroom. Okay, that part’s true.

It’s ironic because once I left for college, I vowed never to return.

I found the 818 soulless and banal. 

Peoria with pooka shells. Levittown on Fun Dip and low property taxes. 

Zero Michelin star restaurants but 3 million Michelin tire shops.

As a boy, I joined my library’s summer reading club. A boy reading books on purpose?

Kids acted like I’d signed up for a blow-job giving tournament.

As an adult, I vowed never to return to this backwoods shithole.

Cut to: Me reading the Westside real estate section. Once. The Valley it is!

By now, I’ve resigned myself to dying 818, buried in O.P. shorts, checkerboard Vans, and a Van Halen Fair Warning tour shirt.

Instead of covering the casket with dirt, they’ll use Tommy’s chili and sawdust from Mike’s Pizza.

Did you know that according to Wikipedia, there are 132 valleys in California alone?

Yet when we say, “The Valley,” nobody expects me to wax rhapsodic about Kern.

We’re talking about THE VALLEY. 

Rudnick’s and Flooky’s and Colonel Lee’s and Encino Bowl.

Feather-haired Hesby girls in Ditto jeans. GQ Birmingham boys in shiny new white K-Swiss.

But of all the valleys, why the disproportionate cultural attention on a place seemingly devoid of culture?

Why dedicate an evening of song and commentary to a basin whose motto could've been “ LA: Only hotter and pornier?”  Or “More racist than South Boston.”

It’s hard to believe, but for a moment in the late 70’s/ early 80’s, the Valley was the epicenter of global teen culture.

Spicolli. Kelly Leak. Daniel from Karate Kid.

I saw Fast Times in the theater where Ratner worked in Fast Times.

Before Vancouver tax incentives, you could sit in a theater in the Valley, watching a movie about the Valley, that was filmed in the Valley, featuring kids from the Valley.

That Jewy Harpo Marx kid in Bad News Bears? He didn’t just look like he could be in my Hebrew school class. He WAS in my Hebrew school class.

We didn’t know this was special. We’d never grown up anywhere else. 

I was particularly sheltered. I spent my formative years in the hills of Encino. The Jewish Alps. The Kosher Canyon. The only crime was a P.E. coach stealing your self-esteem.

My memories play like a continuous Wonder Years loop of endless sunshine and unstructured time.

There were no trigger warnings or safe spaces.

Know what was a safe space? THE ENTIRE VALLEY.

You played with whatever hesher wandered into your cul de sac. 

You frequented whatever ice cream truck drove by without fear of being abducted into sex slavery.

No one tracked your iPhone. No one cared where you were.

I could’ve kidnapped Patty Hearst. I didn’t. But you wouldn’t know that till I came home for supper. 

One summer, my brother and I ate seven consecutive lunches at the Wiener Factory. Half a fortnight. It really was our Wimbledon.

Would’ve been safer eating a plate of menthols in the Three Mile Island cafeteria.

There was no resume-building or college application-padding. 

Another summer, I took a job at the Wiener Factory. My only qualification: my bloodstream was already two-thirds red cabbage.

Great job. I lasted 3 hours. Of a 4 hour shift.

How bad do you have to be to not finish a shift? Apparently, “Bryan Behar Bad.”

I couldn't show my face there ever again. For almost a week.

That was still better than the summer I temped at Rocketdyne.

Everything was fine till I realized they made the Stealth Bomber.

I was at the height of my Brown University self-righteous sanctimonousness. Which explains why I declared, “I refuse to file anything related to the military industrial complex.”

I was a temp. Who answered phones. For a weapons-maker.

It wasn’t in the job description. It was the job description.

Nobody worried about “the future.”  We were just killing time between Giant Robot movies and Kimba the White Lion on channel 52.

Only as an adult have I considered how weird the Valley really was. 

Let’s just say, the Manson Family family didn’t choose the Apple Pan as their base of operations.

The L.A. neighborhoods still with the most strip clubs?  North Hollywood and Van Nuys. 

The only person shocked by that is named Panorama City.

Robert Redford and Susan Sontag grew up in the Valley. A fact they never mentioned again.

The Valley was only two freeway exits from the Westside, but felt galaxies away.

A part of Los Angeles and apart from it.

The North Korea of North L.A, County. 

An isolated hermit kingdom. Just one obsessed with needlepoint and muscle cars.

The Valley was decidedly not the Westside with its Montessori preschools and progressive parenting.

Liberal ideas like tolerance and diversity got stuck around Mulholland. And never rolled down the hill to the rest of us.

We were the City’s ugly stepchild. L.A.’s Cousin Oliver.

Friends on the other side of the hill had famous neighbors.

Gregory Peck. Johnny Carson. Wilt.

We had Larry from Three’s Company, Chaka from Land of the Lost, and the guy who laundered money through ZZZZ Best Cleaners.

Behind the manicured lawns, under the Jordache jeans, bizarre shit was going on.

My parents took disco lessons in a storefront behind Dupar’s.

Feral kids blew up toads behind Encino Little League and no one worried they were future serial killers.

I saw the Main Event, the Barbra Streisand boxing movie, twice in the theater and no one worried I was gay or had phenomenally bad taste.

It goes back to why people moved here originally.

For some, it was because you could buy a house for a nickel.

Others chose the Valley because it was a Republican bastion in a Democratic city. A poorer man’s Orange County. 

It wasn’t the multicultural polyglot slash cannabis dispensary it is today.

Take my Julia story: 

First day, first grade, I was sent to school with a lunchbox that featured, not Batman or Spider-Man of the Six Million Dollar Man.

But Julia– Diahann Carroll in nursing shoes.

Even kids in Strawberry Shortcake backpacks were like “Get him, he’s different.” Like mini segregation-era sheriffs.

It kicked off a homophobic firestorm that made Stonewall seem proportionate.

I could’ve driven to school in a ragtop Miata, pulled by a unicorn, buttered from the waist down, through a field of penises, and it still would’ve been considered less queer than a Julia lunchbox.

Maybe this experiment in gender non-conformity wouldn’t have flown anywhere.

But it had zero chance of working in the Baby Kentucky that was the Valley of the era.

We were ranch house rednecks. Inland interlopers. 

Remember Granny and the Clampetts rolling into Mr. Drysdale’s bank in their ‘21 Olds?

That was us going to the beach. 2 buses and a walk past future MAGAs yelling “Vals go home.”

Which was heaven compared to my posh private boys school. You’ve never seen blonder hair in your life. It was like going to junior high in the House Targaryen.

These gentile surfer boys were so old money, streets were named after their families all over LA.

If you see a street named “Behar,” send me a screenshot. It means you’ve accidentally stumbled into Downtown Istanbul.

Why do we still perseverate over our Valley past like the Zapruder film of adolescence? 

Here’s three reasons, two of which are healthy.

One: We spend our adult lives chasing that feeling. All day Marco Polo matches. Eating Bomb Pops while shirtless bike riding. Not obsessing over prescription drug costs. 

Two: It’s an underdog story. The gutty little upstarts take on the posh bullies from the other side of the hill. 

It’s like the story of Jews escaping Pharaoh. But with more guacamole and air hockey.

Three: There’s the dark side of nostalgia. 

I belong to every Valley nostalgia group Facebook ever created. They can strip-mine my data- don’t care. I like pictures of Fedco.

Unfortunately, 105% of the comments are “I hate what the Valley’s become.” 

Not in a benign way, but as an indictment of racial diversity and liberal permissiveness. Usually posted from somewhere like Aryansville, Idaho.

The Valley always had a reactionary streak. We were too busy jumping dirt bikes to notice.

Those playground kids who called us “fags” are now the aggrieved suburban white guys whose Instagram feeds are half QAnon, three-quarters pickleball.

Does that discredit our memories?

No, those were miraculous times. Simple and carefree.

We were young. Our parents were young–younger than we are now.

It was also clannish and reactionary, sold as a palm tree-lined Sherman Way to the future.

In the end, it wasn’t a safe harbor from reality.

It was a real place with real people doing the best they could.

It wasn’t an escape from reality, just a different reality.

But it was ours. And no one can take that away from us.

Unless JD Vance bans “fond memories.” Then, who the fuck knows?