The Same Air

The Same Air David Shields I feel as if I spent pretty much the entire 1970s indoors. I was the indefatigable editor of my high school newspaper (innumerable editorials in bold support of the ecology club). In coUege, I took curious pride in being the last person to leave the library nearly every night for four years. In graduate school at the University ofIowa, I hammered typewriter keys so incessantly that the landlord had trouble keeping the apartment directly below mine rented. My girlfriend Rachel and I left Iowa City shortly after Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981 to move to Los Angeles, where we Uved for a few months with her parents in their glass house overlooking the ocean. Rachel's father was a movie producer, and the first week we were in L.A. we went to a party in Malibu Colony at Walter Matthäus house. Someone asked me what I did, and I said I was a writer, and she asked me what I was writing, and I said a novel, and she said, quite curtly, "Oh, you mean a pre-movie." An odd mixture of people showed up at Rachel's parents' house: Oona Chaplin, Jean Stapleton, Henry Winkler. Rachel's mother and stepfather and stepsister were beautiful in a way that neither Rachel nor I was. In a menagerie of priceless objects, we weren't priceless objects, which caused me to feel so self-conscious and nervous that for the first and only time in my life I developed high blood pressure. Rachel's mother suggested that I try transcendental meditation, which she'd abandoned long ago but which she felt had helped her stop smoking pot. A semi-famous actress actuaUy said to Rachel that Rachel reminded her ofRachel's dog, in that physicaUy they weren't out of the ordinary but that once you got to know both of them you really admired their unique spirits. Hundred-dollar haircuts newly failed to strike me as hilarious. Dermabrasion and rhinoplasty didn't seem prima facie evidence ofself-hatred. I got contact lenses. Rachel got such a flattering haircut that her mother made 145 146Fourth Genre her promise on the spot that wherever she Uved the rest of her Ufe she'd fly back once a month and get her hair cut the same way by the same person. Rachel's parents somehow managed to make watching TV seem to be a glamorous and vital and also slightly outré activity. When Rachel and I weren't driving into Beverly Hills to go to premieres or into Westwood to see movies on the night they opened, we were watching TV or reading the L.A. Times or reading the trades or reading screenplays or teleplays. In grad school, I almost never read anything written afterWorld War II; I now had trouble reading anything that hadn't been written in the last few weeks. I was born in L.A. and am utterly uninterested in L.A. jokes. That's not what this is about. What this is about is this: other people who had been less cloistered than I may have registered the shift a little earUer, and my sudden immersion in media- and celebrity-culture was so extreme as to constitute something like shock therapy, but for me 1981 is the yearAmerica as we now know it became the America as we now know it; 1981 is the year the world changed forever; 1981 is the year everyone suddenly started breathing the same air. L·! ...