The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty Page B

epic struggles reduced to splintered glimpses of modern American tragedies.
    And, in part, her evolving imagination had to do with the adolescent’s penchant for thrills. Donner Pass had become a popular spot for juicing and joyriding. At fifteen and a half, Didion earned her learner’s permit, attacking the roads in an old Army jeep her father had gotten at auction. On weekends, she’d drive friends up switchbacks in the Sierra, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and back again, six or seven hours, buzzed by alcohol and flirting, risking wrecks or DUIs. On some nights, the fog was so thick, she could see the road only if one of her friends got out and walked in front of the headlights along the highway’s white center stripe. She was experiencing a new sort of narrative: the aimless American road story.
    On simmering afternoons, she drove to the family cemetery and sat undisturbed, listening to country music on the radio, staring at the chipped monuments and dreaming up sad new stories. The boneyard was more companionable than the dusty house sickly sweet with dying flowers, her father’s legal papers scattered on tables, countertops, chairs.
    At some point during this period, the family moved into a new residence at 500 Hawthorn Road, near the present Fair Oaks Boulevard, a secluded three-bedroom house built in 1935. Didion also spent many days in her stepgrandmother’s splendid neoclassical home at 2000 22nd Street—“a great house” with “proportions … a little different” for Sacramento, she said. That is, it was extremely large and slightly off-kilter, with pedimented dormers and balustrades. Didion discovered new hangouts. The Guild Theater in Oak Park. Vic’s Ice Cream. The Crest (formerly the crumbling old vaudeville house the Hippodrome). The Woolworth on K Street, where teens gathered for food and sodas. The nation’s first Tower Records. The first Shakey’s Pizza. Boys took Good Girls—those who would “do it”—to the Starlite Drive-In. The Nice Girls went to the Senator Theater downtown. Didion loved the smell of paint in her uncle Bob’s hardware store, the Duncan yo-yos and palm-size flashlights he sold to little kids. In the rear, Rosie Clooney warbled “This Old House” on a big old radio. Occasionally, Didion and her friends sneaked over to the West Side and ate spicy tacos with their fingers.
    She loved gas stations. There was the grand old Shell at Seventh and L, the men in white uniforms and bow ties; the O’Neil Brothers’ five locations in town, offering “crankcase service” and “vulcanizing.” Okie boys, Arkies, slouched around the hot, oily lots wearing T-shirts and greasy jeans, smoking, talking cars. Scary, intriguing—the kinds of boys Bill Clinton would remind her of years later. “They had knocked up girls and married them,” Didion wrote, driving all night to Carson City for a five-dollar ceremony “performed by a justice of the peace still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles.”
    In the evenings, she liked to sit in the grass out by the Garden Highway (this area would become a primary setting for Run River ), watching the sun set over waterfront ranches. Already, she knew the ranches were about to disappear, their lots subdivided and sold.
    6
    â€œIn a gentle sleep Sacramento dreamed, until perhaps 1950, when something happened,” a young Didion wrote at the height of her place-bound romanticism. “What happened was that Sacramento woke to the fact that the outside world was moving in, fast and hard. At the moment of its waking Sacramento lost, for better or worse, its character.”
    â€œThat’s a false portrayal of the city,” Rob Turner told me. Mel Lawson, a longtime Sacramento High School teacher who knew Didion as a girl, agreed. “I don’t see any loss of character, only change,” he