All the Wild Children (16 page)

“Fuck you.”  Lark cocks the revolver.

“Money, money?  I got... shit...”

“I don’t need this.”  Lark drops the hammer on the .38 and tosses it to me.  “This fucking guy.”  And he starts in punching and kicking and tearing up the dealer.  We leave him crying like a bitch on the hood of his Porsche.  Starsky and Hutch are on the roll.

When Lark graduates from Ravenswood he wears a black satin suit, a silver shirt, a chrome snake belt and a matching nickel plated snub nose .38 revolver.  When I graduate Paly I take Lark as my date.  We leave the guns at home.  We don’t need them there.  We are packing attitude, it is all we need with this crowd.

Blue and his jock pals all sit at a table drinking hidden sips of whiskey and staring daggers at us.  Then a slow dance comes on.  I extended my hand and lead my brother onto the dance floor.  We waltzed around that gym in blatant mockery of all that those high school superstars hold sacred.  Lark spins and dips me in front of their table.  Veins pop on Blue's neck, but not one of them moves.

We end up on Page Mill, parked at an overlook.  The bay and the city lights stretch out at our feet.  Lark takes a big hit off the Bacardi and passes it.

“Where the fuck am I?”

“The Bonneville.”

“Why is it so dark?”

“You're on the floor.”

“Fucking right I am.”  Larkin pulls himself up onto the seat.  Lights the filter end of a Kool.

“Bro.”

“What, oh fuck.”  He grinds the cig out and gets one going the correct direction.  He passes me the pack.  Not a real fan of menthol, I don’t care.  I fire up. 

“Those fucking jocks... Right JJ, fucking jocks.  Nobody fucks with the Stallings brothers..
.
No.  Bod
y
.”  Actually it feels like everybody fucks with us, but I’m too wasted to argue the point.  Instead we smoke and listen to Rod Stewart sing about a dirty old town he was going to burn down.

“You know something JJ?”

“What’s that Larkin?” 

“Someday... someday, this is going to read much better than it lived.”

G-STRINGS AND ORGANIC GARDENING

My sister Lilly is the oldest of us.  I watched her from four years away.  The time, like a gauze curtain, made the lights around her halo and her world soft and rich.  The other source of our distance was Lark, we both wanted to be with him.  My mother didn’t aid in this, she had a habit of giving boy toys and girl toys.  Lark and I got Johnny West dolls.  Shaun and Lilly got Little House on the Prairie dolls.  This worked out for me and Lark, but with six years separating the girls it must have been a drag.  Chores were divided the same sexist way.  My parents came of age in the early 50’s, they were as progressive as they could find their way to be. 

Do you know what?  That’s a lie, I’m afraid my mother will read this, so I’m being an apologist.  Truth is my mother has real problems with internalized sexist views. 

Lill
y
is a soil scientist, she packs a Ph.D.  Lilly is a doctor of dirt.  The state of California pays her to assess environmental impacts, they pay her to build wetlands.  But on the almond ranch she and my mother owned for a time, my mother would take the word of their Mexican handyman before she’d listen to Lilly about soil amending.  I’m sure he was a smart man, a good man.  But I don’t think having a penis is a qualifier for soil knowledge.  The weird part is, Mom also thinks most men are idiots, just idiots with better opinions than another woman's.  My mother's own opinion trumps all.  Even on subjects she knows nothing about. 

Most I know of my big sister is mythic in nature.  She is not unlike my father, only he
r
self-inflicted acceptance of traditional gender role
s
never allowed her to have his confidence.  I’ve seen her kneel at an asshole's feet.  Men not fit to clean her house.  And she kneels, hanging on their every word. 

“I don’t know how to work a cell phone, hehe.”  A scientist.  Right? 

She plays the blonde card way past the age that it is cute.  She never allows herself the gravitas age brings.  The women in my family cling to youth like a life raft on the Titanic.  Their white knuckles leave marks on their faces and those around them.  Wrinkles are a badge of courage.  Wrinkles say you survived.  Grandma Stallings looked like Georgia O’Keefe, deep furrows marked her body. 

A map of all she had been. 

All she had gone through. 

All she had survived. 

Grandpa Stallings was a stone fox at fifty.  Lark and I favor him, so I always knew I would like being fifty.  Admittedly, it sucks to be an aging woman in the US at the beginning of the twenty first century.  But the women in my family didn’t need to buy in so fully.  My sister Lilly was always snarky about Ingrid.  She said she didn’t know why I said Ingrid was beautiful. 

Ingrid is round, and curvaceous.  Ingrid likes French food and butter and cheese.  Ingrid is Bridgett Bardot and Bernadette Peters rolled together.  When I pick her up for a date, she comes to the door, and takes my breath away.

But she wasn’t skinny.

That was a crime.  Weight gain and loss define beauty.  It really is that narrow.  When I gain weight my mother and Lilly are sure to point it out.  They are sad for me.  They can’t understand I am not defined by my weight.  I’m a fucking big man, a Viking.  Hagrid to my nieces and nephews.

My baby sister, sweet Shaunton stuck her finger down her throat to stay thin.  By thirteen she already knew the deal on weight.  From mother to daughter.  Sad part is, I watched my baby sister her whole life, and she is lovely, she is beautiful.  Always has been.  I saw how boys looked at her.  And not even for one minute could she see what I saw.  I have come to see that the most beautiful women in the world never know they are.  And the women who think they are beautiful, most often aren’t. 

I am 7, my mother is trying to get me to read.  She is using Playboy as a primer.  I guess she thinks airbrushed tits will keep me focused, she’s right.  It is the 60’s and we are all so open about sex.  Well except my mom never spoke about being molested as a girl.  My dad never talked about being molested as a boy.  He never said that when a woman kissed him he felt like he was going to suffocate.  Having an old man force you to blow him will do that. 

When I have kids of my own, he says “There comes a point where you have to decide if you're going to fuck your children, you know what I mean?”  I’m too dumbfounded to say anything.  I take the coward's way, and nod weakly. 

My mother wears a leopard pink bikini to the river.  Young men stare at her cleavage.  She is proud I think.  It creeps me out.  My parents never make love with the lights on.  But it is the 60’s and we are all so open about sex. 

The second time Hannah and I make love she has a toe curling orgasm.  She tells me it is the first time she’s cum while making love.  I’m fifteen, and proud.

“Tssss, Josh, all girls say that.  They all fake it.  They all say you’re the first.”  For years I thought about that statement.  I thought I must be naïve, self-delusional.  Lilly’s statement didn’t jive with what I experienced.  Looking back now I can see it said so much more about her than Hannah or me.  Her distain for other women reads crystalline from this distance.

“When a woman speaks at a conference of scientists, it is like a dog has spoken.  They don’t listen to what you said, they are just impressed you spoke at all.”  Lilly tells it like a joke.

“When I was teaching at Chico, I discovered that women have voices pitched too high for male colleagues to hear.”  Lilly plays this off as a joke too.  She is too guileless to work the system, to play dumb for profit.  No, that’s a card she saves for lovers.  She hopes passion and a dreamy optimism will pull her through any situation.  And I’m not sure she’s wrong. 

I am 15 and my sister works at The Streaker.  It’s a low rent strip joint on the El Camino.  I am in the dressing room.  There are three near naked girls lounging around.  They are my big sister's age.  Back stage they turn all the flirt off.  There is no sexual tension in the air.  That is a fantasy men who weren’t there write about.  The truth is different.  Or it is to me.  I’m on the floor playing with Lilly’s German shepherd. 

“Want some boo, JJ?”  Lanese is tall dark and silly.  She and Lark will hook up.  They will break several beds in Monterey where they go for the jazz festival.

“Sure.”  I suck the sweet smoke in.  I love the cool mellow that comes with pot.  I lean back, and rest my head on the dog.  He growls once, then accepts me using him as pillow. 

Martha and the Vandellas.  Muffled, through the wall.  All bass and thump. 
Heat Wave
.  Motown.  Good shit.  I close my eyes and listen.  I feel the dog’s heart beat.  The song ends.  I can’t hear what the DJ is saying.  He sounds like the teacher in Peanuts,
waa wa waa wa
.  The next song starts, some Southern cracker band. 

Lilly comes off the stage, sweating.  She has only her G-String on.  Her dance outfit is in her arms.  A wad of dollar bills are in her hands.  She has eight inch heels.  I smile dopily up at her.  She smiles and takes her drink from the dressing table.  She swallows half of it in a gulp. 

The hardest thing about stripping is the shoes and shitty stages.  Do it long and you will get shin splints.  The hardest part for my sister, is that it is part of her story.  She can’t recognize it’s just something she did, not something she was.
 
Hell
,
we all did funny things back then. 

I am 50.  I am on my cell phone.  Lilly gets rabid abou
t
Britney Spear
s
and how over sexualized young women are. 

“OK, maybe that’s true.  And?”

“It causes rape.”

“No, assholes rape women.  Blaming Britney is the same as saying, she was asking for it.”  I can’t believe I am defending Britney Spears.

“I read a book, on the internet, men get off watching women get shit on.”

“Sick men.  Sick men get off on that.”
             

“What does it say about how we value women, where does it end?”

“How’s the Sacramento River job coming?”  I want to say it ends nowhere.  It ends in snuff films.  Fuck if I know.  Most of it is just people doing people things.

Nothing is as wicked as another couple's sex life, or as justifiable as your own. 

Shaun told me that. 

Give that girl a cigar. 

On second thought don’t.

It is 1974.  We fuck who we want.  We fuck friends.  We take our clothes off for money.  We run wild in the street.  David Nolland is becoming Nola, one bit at a time.  He is taking estrogen, he is growing breasts.  He wears his purple lame jumpsuit skintight.  He has budding cleavage.  He likes fucking girls.  He is Hannah’s boyfriend for a while.  Best I know, he isn’t gay. 

It is 1974, all bets are off. 

It is 1970.  Lilly has spent all spring growing this amazing vegetable garden for the family.  Our mother says Lilly never does anything around the house.  Lilly uproots rows of corn.  She uproots rows of spinach, lettuce, carrots, peppers.  Tears are streaming down her face.  She's an organic Medea, killing her children to spite our mother.  Mud cakes her fingers.  Blood seeps from cracked nails.  She will leave soon.  She will have had enough.  She will not share a home with our mother for another thirty-two years.

Lilly hates surprises.  Actually all the kids of chaos hate surprises.  But she really, really does.  So when she comes home on her tenth birthday to find her friends in the living room, her response is to run to the big lake and jump in with all her clothes on.  In a nutshell that is my sister.  That perfect balance of the dramatic and the absurd.  She is a master samurai clown.  She is my sister.  Mad as a hatter at times, brilliantly lucid at others.  She surfs epilepsy and mania and depression and ADD and whatever else comes her way with panache.  She drives me crazy.  Sometimes I duck her calls.  Sometimes I can’t wait to speak to her.

I am 50, riding in her car.  “Got the finish on the Watchmen trailer.  I was up against six other trailer companies.  It was a big deal.”

“A big deal in a very small business.”  Snap goes my ego.  I am the one who always says I am a big fish in a small pond.  But I am unaccustomed to having a sibling go after me.  Generally in my family we leave the ego crushing to our parents.  I guess things change.  I now protect myself from her as well as Mom and Pops. 

I am 15 and stoned and drinking Cokes with a bunch of funny strippers and my sister.  She tells me stories of hanging out with Iggy Pop and Jonathan Richman.  She lived in a factory with a mountain lion she raised.  She makes puppets that are so beautiful and tragic they will break your heart.  She turned me on to Bowie.  She may be the coolest person going. 

I am 15 and laughing my ass off.  It is the 70’s and all bets are off.

MOTHER'S DAY

1870 –The first Mother's day -

              Arise then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: 'We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own, it says "Disarm! Disarm!" The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.'