Fast Forward Kids

Ann looks around. She’s nervous. “I hate it,” Ann says. “First grade. I just hate it.”

Ann is Michelle’s mom. We are standing outside kindergarten on the last day of class. The kids are putting on paper graduation caps. Dancing around.

Ann knows she should be happy. She’s not. She’s thinking about what’s coming.

“The first grade is when L.A. starts to get to them,” she says. “They become L.A. kids.”

Ann doesn’t want her daughter to become an L.A. kid. And who could blame her? Can anyone watch their child grow beyond toddlerdom in this city and not feel the need--at least momentarily--to pick them up bodily and flee before it is too late?

It is an odd feeling, this fear that L.A. will poison our children in ways that other places don’t. You can’t define the exact nature of the poison and why it is different here. But you sense its presence all the same.

This fear, of course, has existed for decades. But now comes Lauren Greenfield to confirm our worst nightmares. Greenfield was an L.A. kid herself, having graduated from Crossroads School in Santa Monica, and thus arrives with considerable credentials.

After graduating from college in the late 1980s, Greenfield spent four years photographing a generation of L.A. kids. The result is the just-published “Fast Forward, Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood.”

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A warning: If you’re having a good day, don’t pick up this book. It will stab you in the heart. Not because it portrays sudden death from gangs or slow death from drugs. Quite the contrary. This book shows kids showered with money, lured by fame, addicted to the acquiring of things. An everyday kind of poison.

Here is Adam, for example, shown dancing at his bar mitzvah with a hired go-go dancer. “The bar mitzvah scene is really glamourous,” he says in the book. “It just so happens I had a great bar mitzvah. I had a glassblower and carnival games. I had a steel drum band during the appetizers. I felt really good after the bar mitzvah, and I was getting a lot of play with girls.”

Adam estimates the cost of a good bar mitzvah at somewhere between $15,000 and $90,000. “For kids that can’t afford it or are not as fortunate,” he says, “I guess they are ---- out of luck with a paddle.”

Or Emily, 10, shown posing in front of her hotel mirror like a model for S.I.’s swimsuit issue. Emily lives at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills with her family.

“When my friends sleep over,” she says, “we wake up at seven and go to the pool and splash around, because everybody here wakes up at twelve and has breakfast at three. They are sleepyheads.”

Or Wendy, 23, who grew up in Beverly Hills and remarks that she could never travel through Europe in youth hostels because “I’m used to nice things.”

You could argue that these precocious consumerists are simply reproductions of their own parents. Maybe so, but you see other things in this book. The eyes of these young people seem old. And they talk old.

Allison, 13, already has gone through her drug phase and her gang phase. “I mean, like last year, doing drugs was cool to me. I don’t know why. And being a gang member was so cool. To me, that is not cool anymore at all.”

What’s cool now, at least to Allison’s friends, is sex. “Everyone has sex early,” she says.

She tells the story of a girl at school who decides to lose her virginity, picks a likely male target and commences to mate with him. “Five minutes into the sex,” Allison says, “she got on the phone and called her friend and she told her friend that she lost it.”

Presumably, given the conditions, it was a call on a cell phone.

And there’s Paris, shown sitting in his father’s home recording studio in Encino. Paris says nothing, simply looks straight into the camera. He is wearing a gangbanger’s knit cap and has painted an imitation gang tattoo under his eye, a teardrop signifying time spent in prison. Paris is 8 years old.

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In the end, these kids seem strangely alone. I think that’s the real message of Greenfield’s book. Surrounded by their nannies, their ponies, their ever-competitive friends, they nonetheless feel like strangers in their own world. They jump from one indulgence to another, spending ever more money, trying to fill the alone-ness.

“You have to live here to know what it’s like,” says Allison. “Lately, I have been thinking of going to boarding school, because I really just want to get out of here.”

Do all kids want to flee L.A., as does Allison? Do all moms dread the first grade, as does Ann?

No, of course not. But there’s enough. Greenfield’s Allison and Adam and Paris have their stories to tell. And we should listen. Otherwise, the poison will keep spreading, generation to generation.