All the Wild Children (13 page)

We don’t paint houses on Sunday.
 
Sunday I swim in the lake, or fish or lay in a hammock writing Ingrid long love letters.  My
g
randmother wants me to try and be more normal.  My shaggy long hair, too tight jeans and earrings are already too much.  She invites the kid next door to come over.  I wake up looking at his bulging leopard print Speedo.  It is already 105 degrees on the sleeping porch.  Sweat is rolling off my brow.  His crotch is at eye level.  He bounces on his feet.  “Wanna go swimming?”

“Hell yes.”  And we do.  Out to the raft.  We lay on our backs feeling the dry wood on our backs and the sun on our chests.

Jimmy is on his elbows staring at me.  I open my eyes, squint up at his pursed lips.  And roll off into the water.  I swim to shore and avoid Jimmy.  I hope he will make it to NY or San Francisco.  But his intense closeted desire is more than I can handle.  Ingrid and I go dancing at The City, a huge SF gay disco.  I love it, they let us in because we're cute.  My friends there flirt with me, but never with need and intent.  Jimmy is screwed in the head, I didn’t know how to help him decompress and I don’t want to be around when he snaps. 

Walking back down the road, I feel like an asshole for ditching Jimmy.  A bunch of lake boy jocks cruise in a convertible Pontiac.  “Hey kid, you get high?”

“Hell yes he gets high, look at them earrings.”

“I heard you was from California.”  I climb in.  They pass me the roach and a Budweiser.

“Is it true all the girls out there wanna do is fuck?”  The pot is almost as bad as their conversational skills.

“So is it true?”

“No... Mostly they like to suck cock while shoving baby pacifiers up your ass.”

“Ohhh, noo, ewww...”

“Each to his own I guess.”

“That is fucking sick.”

Ahead of us three girls are walking, wigglin
g
their bikini clad
a
sses as we drive by.  The boys stand and scream and grab their crotches.  “Whoa baby I know you want a taste of this kielbasa.”  “Whooeeee!  Baby!  Want some fries with that shake?”  

I want to crawl under the seat.  I want to jump out and apologize to the girls.  I peek over the door and notice the girls are smiling at these troglodytes.

Ingrid,
I witnessed the mating rituals of lake loonmoronica today.  It seems to involve lots of demeaning talk followed by roaring away in a cloud of dust.  I wonder if the dust holds their semen, perhaps this is how they impregnate the females.  It will need further investigation.

             
                                          Love you, Josh

The next Sunday I go for a ride with the boys.  Grandmother Smith is so happy.  Finally I’m out with normal guys, maybe their normality will rub off.  The fuck it will.

“Your dope is shit.”

“Oh like you can get better.”

“I give my dog better pot than this.”  I fill my lungs to bursting with the vile stuff.  Hold it as long as possible, then just a bit more.  At least they have plenty of beer.  And I can smoke around them.  I now know their one and only rut of a routine.  Circle the lake looking for chicks to harass, I mean, um, impress.  Three joints and as many Buds, I am getting loose.

“Oh manny o man, check that out, ummm.”  The meatheads all follow my eyes towards the beach.  There is a fine looking young woman, as she turns they can see she is very pregnant.                “Yes, boys that right there is what I’m talking about.  Ummm yeah.”

“That’s sick.”

“He’s fucking with you Boon.  Right JJ, you’re fuckin with ‘em.”

“No.  She was hot.  Did you see the curves on that babe?”

“There’s something wrong with you.”  And that is the last time the meat squad takes me cruising.  OK, I was screwing with them.  But I also kinda thought the woman was hot.

From 50 I look down the line of women I have loved or at least lusted, looking for my type.  You would think a type would jump out seeing them all in one place.  Unconventional beauty sounds patronizing, like what you say to a non-beauty to make her feel better.  But when you put Jody Foster and Uma Thurman into that category you see what I mean by it.  Ingrid was round and luscious, big tits and hips that could bear a herd of children.  She was older and wilder than me.  At first she tried to palm me off on a friend of hers.  She liked to hang with me, but it wasn’t going to get romantic. 

She always dated older guys, guys with money.  Guys who took her to fancy places. 

I was not that guy.

Clearly.

My sophomore year I went to Paly, a very White and respected school across the Embarcadero from Stanford.  Mostly it was a school where no one was trying to shoot me. 

I still dressed like a glitter rock pimp.  I wore the first platforms they had seen off a stage.  I wore eight foot long scarfs and way too tight jeans.  I went commando.  M
y
first day
,
Ingrid came up to me and took me to the parking lot and showed me where to smoke.  She was a stunner in a fur lined sweater and ruby lips that matched her ruby FMP's.  By the end of week one I had five friends, all girls, combine that with the couple of Black kids who transferred from Ravenswood and called me by my nickname. 

“Yo, Pimp, what it be?” 

“Alright Pimp, looking right, Homes.”  The jocks and granola crowd took this name literally.  I didn’t correct them.  A little fear was always a good thing when you’re at a new school and your brother is in the wind.

The sum total of sex education I got was a book,
Boys and Sex
, my mother gave it to me.  Ingrid and I read it in bed and laughed.  The only fact I retained was that four out of five farm boys lose their virginity to animals.  Cows, horses, sheep and chickens.  CHICKENS???

Oh come on boys, chickens, really?

Never having fucked an animal this information did me absolutely no good.  Stay clean, stay healthy?  I never heard any of that.  It was the 70’s and for all we knew the worst case was a trip to the free clinic for some penicillin.  Birth control?  Wasn’t that her responsibility?  Isn’t that why they invented the pill?   

As far as information on building and maintaining a healthy relationship?  We got the big goose egg, zip, zilch, nada.  Like the generations that came before us, we were left to battle it out in foreign territory without any plans or back up.

Driving back from Santa Cruz with my mother and her man friend, it is cold.  Ingrid puts a blanket over us. Unzipping my pants she takes my cock out and gives me my first hand job.  All th
e
while
I
ngrid engages my mother in conversation and tries to lead the conversation to me, so I will have to speak and try to modulate my voice.  Later I laughed my ass off.  She was a wonder. 

She helps me study Shakespeare in a new technique involving small amounts o
f
fellati
o
for every right answer.  Having an older and wiser girlfriend really is a plus.  All is as well as can be expected until she goes to college. 

My junior and last year of school I am still involved with Ingrid.  We are in what she thinks is a monogamous relationship.

I am 16.

I am male.

I am finally hot for being more than Lark’s little brother. 

I am unfaithful.

I am a lair.

I am guilty.

It doesn’t stop me.

Gabrielle is a freshman with translucent skin, I can see fine blue veins on her cheek.  She adores me, looks up to me.  I know she has a massive crush on me.  And she is smart and funny.  But she is the same age as Shaun. 

Gabrielle is a virgin.  I know this because she tells me as I unzip her pants.  I have never made love to a virgin.  We are in bed, her jumper up over her head, I am kissing her small budding breasts, she is pulling me to her. 

Then it hits me.  I sit up.

The first man she sleeps with should be a better man than me.  She deserves so much more than me.  They all do.

“What are you doing?”

“Driving you home.”

“Was I doing it wrong?”

“No, I was.”  And that was it.

Hannah, I meet her on a date at the drive-ins.  She is friends with one of Lark’s girls.  I’m sure I am a disappointment, wanting to watch the film.  I don't mean it as a slight, but when a good film is flickering on the screen I can’t turn away.  At sixteen, a movie theater was as close to church as I got. 

Hannah is amazing.  Smart and wild, she is my age.  We are always the youngest in the punk glitter crowd. 

The film ends.  We drink hard.  We fuck hard. 

“Honey, wake up.”  The sun is burning a hole in my retina.  I am in my bed.  Covered in a monstrous fake fur comforter.  My mother is speaking.  My mouth tastes like a slightly over cooked gym sock.

“Honey, do you know a Hannah?”

“Ahhh... ”  I try to get any cells to fire.  “I don’t think so.”

“I’m Hannah.”  A tiny voice comes out of my comforter. 

“Your mother is on the phone.”  

Who could have imagined we would be friends and make love off and on for as long as I stayed in Palo Alto.  We even hooked up in London and visited Bath together. 

Whatever it was that made women forgive my transgressions I can only say, thank you lord.  Because I had many clumsy moves in my time.  I often said the wrong thing, made the wrong move.  I thought at the time they dug me because I was a bad boy.  Could drive fast and fight hard.  Bullshit.  A woman told me years later, “Oh Josh, we hated that macho crap, we put up with it to be with you.  Not the other way round.”

Marilyn is four foot eleven.  She is Jewish.  She is a good girl.  She has the cutest rabbit teeth.  I am 17 and going to Foothill Junior Collage.  We meet in Theater class.  She pursues me, and then I pursue her.  I take her to lunch at a deli.  I tell her about Ingrid, as if that makes it OK.  I am being honest, right?  Just not with Ingrid. 

I am 17 and Marilyn invites me to see Blondie opening for Iggy Pop with Bowie on keyboards.  We go to the after party at the Mabuhay Gardens, a tiki bar punk club.  We wind up kissing.  We wind up in my bed.  Marilyn and I are electric.  We do things that I am sure are illegal in at least seven states.  We laugh a lot and kiss for hours.  She lays on my skinny pale chest, content.

It is five in the afternoon and we stink of sex.  Marilyn puts her hair in pigtails and puts on a Mickey Mouse tee shirt that makes her look all of eleven.  Like this we go to Lyons for coffee.  When I French her they freak.  At seventeen pedophile jokes are funny.

I am 17 and it is Saturday night at a teen club my brother and sisters and I open.  Ingrid is in town, by now she is going to Berkley.  Marilyn is at the club and I leave her alone.  I let her see me and Ingrid.  I am a bastard.

Tanner sees a petite Jewish knock out, with sad eyes, and he swoops down.  He will teach her to use drugs, he will take her down to his dark places, he will make the sparkle in her wild eyes dull.  Paint it any way you want, truth is Marilyn paid the freight for a ride I put her on.

MARILYN May 5 at 1:24pm

Josh, I met Tanner at my-o-my the night your girlfriend came home to visit. I think her name was Ingrid. You and I were seeing each other. I was sitting alone and Tanner took advantage of the situation. I did become sort of involved with him. It was the biggest mistake of my life. He was like a vampire and held some kind of dark fascination for me. He got me into the hard drugs. I was not strong enough to resist. Thank God I never became an addict. You know the cliché, good girl falls for evil guy. I wish I had never met him. He would not let go of me and I kept going back on and off for a few years. Then he suddenly dropped me for a fellow junkie. She died a few years later from drugs.  I don't know what happened to Tanner and I really don't care.
             

I wasn’t the only Stallings getting laid, no not by a long shot.  My brother amazed his doctor by contracting the clap while in bed with hepatitis.  I don’t think that was what they meant by bed rest.

Lilly, not old enough to legally buy smokes, was all grown up and stripping.  And getting her swerve on with some good men and some real winners.  Arty who when running dope thin liked to punch her.  The first time, Lark and I, at our mother’s bidding, had a rather physical talk with him.  Bounced him off a couple cars, gave him a good old hillbilly talking to.  Lilly yelled at us, called us assholes and went running back to her wounded baby.

Shaun had her own wild runs, mostly with OK guys.  One loser, Chad, he pisses me off, he has a girlfriend.  Shaun is the other woman.  It makes her feel cheap.  So I have to drag him out of her bed and toss him down a flight of stairs.  The little White punk pulls a knife on me.  Brandishing it just like he’d seen in the movies.  Without thinking, Ravenswood fear kicks my adrenaline off the charts.  Everything goes into slow motion.  I stand outside my body watching it react.  My body grabs his wrist and smashes it into the banister.  My body kicks him.  My body picks his knife off the floor and grips it, point down, honed edge away from my wrist.  My body is ready to punch or stab, just like Tomas taught me.  Chad runs out and saves me from it getting any uglier.