James Dean All Over Again

By Steve Lopez/San Fernando Valley

It's been 43 years since James Dean turned to his nemesis in Rebel Without a Cause, right before each got behind the wheel of his car in a race that would send one of them to the boneyard, and asked a simple question: "Why do we do this?"

"You have to do something," the lost soul replied.

Yes, you do, and if you live in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, a sort of national sanctuary for cars, the options have grown somewhat in 43 years. But the kids still race, and the cops still chase, and one side almost always wins.

Just before midnight on a Saturday, Erica Morehouse, 18, pulls into the McDonald's lot at the Roxford exit of the Golden State Freeway. She's in a nail-polish-red 1989 Camaro with her friend Lisa Montes, 17. It's Thelma and Louise right here in hot-rod central, and they'll race anyone foolish enough to take them on.

"I want to be a professional driver," says Erica, a blond senior at Valencia High School. She's usually the only girl out here, and you can see that's part of the thrill--to draw in some slacker with nothing but an art-project hairdo and more hormones than r.p.m. and then smoke him. A slack-eyed Fonz named Marcus gets out of a car and spins over to impress Erica with how many times he can say cool in a sentence, a rebel without a clue. She isn't here to talk.

By 12:15 a.m., the lot is filled with 20 or so Japanese and American cars modified to blow off the doors and pin back the ears. It's a mix of black, white and Hispanic kids with one language: words like slicks and tranny, struts and squeeze. Someone says, "Let's go," and they pull out single file, sucking oil wells dry as they caravan toward the drag strip--a remote industrial stretch in the nothing-else-to-do town of Sylmar.

Before everyone has come to a stop on the flat, four-lane straightaway, a Toyota and a Honda have nosed up to an invisible starting line. A fat kid in a ball cap stands between them and raises his arms, then drops them. Engines scream and rubber burns. Speeds approach 100 m.p.h., and 1,320 ft. later, the Toyota's rear lights flash, signaling the winner.

"It's such a rush," Erica says as the tires of her 350 V-8 paw the starting line and a kid maybe 20 draws up next to her in a Thunderbird. They look at each other only briefly, then punch it. "She's got him," Kevin Brown says, watching with his buddy John Mackey. And just after he calls it, Erica's lights are flashing.

"I've seen people race for money and [wager their cars]. I've seen wrecks. Someone died right there a couple of months ago," says Mackey, 19, pointing to a tree. "Some people do stupid things."

Just being out here qualifies, if you ask Los Angeles police captain Ron Bergmann, who says more kids than ever are racing. The night of that November crash, he says, police were headed north on San Fernando Road when they saw racers, four abreast, bearing down on them at about warp 6. A 19-year-old Pasadena boy in an '89 Mustang convertible spun around and fled, but his car found a tree.

"We've tried helicopters, unmarked cars, plainclothes officers, everything," Bergmann says. "We once wrote 100 citations, and we've called parents from up to 100 miles away to come get their kids. But none of it has an effect. I don't have the manpower to send someone out there every night."

Erica, fresh from her victory, races a guy in a black Monte Carlo and leaves him in the dust too. But now her engine is smoking. If she weren't here, Erica says, popping the hood, she'd probably be crashing motel parties. But there's no comparison because "this is like, it's, like, duuuuuude."

Where have you gone, James Dean?

Kevin Brown has the best scam going. He comes out here in his mother's '94 Chevy Astrovan, goosed with nitrous-oxide carburetion. Looks like a tank, goes like a rocket. "You wanna race for money?" he asks an unsuspecting mark. Ten bucks, the other kid says warily. "One fifty," Brown responds, and the kid drives away. Slow night at the races, but they'll all be back, and not necessarily because Mom and Dad are tearing them apart, as James Dean wailed.

"I do worry about the danger," says Kevin's mother Marie, 38, who used to watch the races as a teen. "But at least I know where he is and that he's not out drinking and doing drugs," she says by phone. She'd even like to come out with Kevin some night, she adds.

Bergmann, who would like to start impounding cars in a losing battle a half-century old, has two words for that: "Good grief."