You are young, fully limbed, decently educated and surrounded by millions of people who are completely complacent about everything in their lives—except sex and how much money they have. Somewhere outside of your gated community, there are more and more Mexicans around you every day, and that’s a good sign—in case you need a new cleaning lady.

You will end up on television—as an extra, a contestant on a game show, a passerby as a newscaster or host yucks it up for the camera. Your entire living room will be furnished by what your mom won in the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right in 1981. Your parents were on the Newlywed Game five years before you were born. But they got creamed, and that’s a bad sign.

There will be a black family in your neighborhood. One day, for no reason, your mom will ask if you ever hang out with the black kid. You’ll say no, and she won’t bring it up again.

There are orange trees still in your first memories, a grove adjacent to the Northridge Mall, where you’ll spend too many weekends roaming and wishing you’d been born in 1985 instead of 1975 so you wouldn’t have to grow up before kids took over the world.

One night your mom will be reading to you before bed. From somewhere in the house you hear the Happy Days theme playing. You’ll beg your mom to let you watch it. She lets you go and never reads to you again.

You’ll hear that they filmed most of the silent westerns in the hills around your house. You’ll watch Poltergeist II being filmed blocks from your house. You’ll make eye contact with that cute little girl that player the creepy little girl as she works on homework in an air-conditioned trailer. You’ll fall in love with her right then—as you will with any cute girl with whom you make prolonged eye contact with from age seven on.

You’ll get braces and glasses in the same week. Watch out, ladies.

When I Love Lucy was the most popular TV show in the world, Desi and Lucy owned a house in Chatsworth. Your brother and you will go to a school in that house for a couple of years to avoid the bussing. He’ll meet her once. She’ll come back to see the place and repeatedly say how glad she is they kept the pool. They’ll eventually get rid of the pool.

Your complete lack of culture will soon make you entirely too susceptible to, first, Gangsta Rap and, later, the poetry and prose of the Beat Generation.

The dad from Teen Wolf will live down the block from you. Once, he’ll buy a bagel from you after you convince the kids in the neighborhood to go into the bagel business with you.

The Manson Family lived in the hills nearby. You’ll never find the place they supposedly lived but you’ll hear it was one of eleven different places including in the train tunnel through to Simi Valley in the Santa Susana pass, which will never make a lick of fucking sense to you.

You’ll be an extra in TV shows for a few years before your Bar Mitzvah. You’ll get called to work on Quantum Leap, the episode where Sam is a Rabbi. They’ll come into the classroom and ask if any of the boys were told they were going to be the boyfriend of the Bat Mitzvah girl. All six of you will shake your head “no.” They’ll ask all the boys to stand and then say, “OK. Could you all take your glasses off?” You’ll all take your glasses off, and then they’ll choose you as the boyfriend. You appear in two scenes clearly and they mention your character’s name—Michael Kornbloom—another half dozen times.

In 7th grade you’ll go to a high school football game. On the way home a killer dog will chase you, and you will jump over a fence for the first time. You will be with the two toughest kids in school, who have befriended you when they realized that you have the same complete lack of supervision afforded by a mom who is always on a date

You’ll have your first orgasm while watching Moon Over Parador on HBO. Thankfully, Richard Dreyfus will not be in the scene.

You will only kiss girls when you are at Jew camp.

You will not read anything other than textbooks, biographies of John Lennon, baseball books and the encyclopedia until you are sixteen. Then you will get a job at the movie theater and meet a bunch of kids who all attend a “Philosophy Magnet” somewhere in the middle of the Valley.

You’ll hear about Camus and Hume. You’ll walk around with Satre’s What is Existentialism? for months and no one at your school will ever ask you what Existentialism is.

You’ll wear the same flannel every day for a year the year that Grunge gets popular.

No matter what you do you are a stereotype of a nerdy, smart-mouthed kid to every one you know.

The only girls who will like you are the ones who transfer in during the middle of the semester.

You’ll never, in your first eighteen years, have an epiphany, a transcendental experience, or an interesting reversal of fortune.

Somehow you’ll get into the college you want a hundred miles away and never live in the Valley again. Whenever you drive through the place, you’ll get the creeping feeling that there’s something on TV you’re missing.

Drawing by Jeff Hurlow.

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