All the Wild Children (17 page)

             
As men have forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress not of Caesar, but of God.

             
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

1870, Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist, social activist

My mother wakes us up to Zip-a-dee-doo-dah every morning.

My mother was the Doris Day of the peace movement.             

My mother believes no is just a yes that needs convincing.

My mother is a bulldozer in a party dress.

The summer of the divorce Mom went back to school to get her Ph.D.  The timing sucked for us, but her back was to the wall, it was clear my old man wasn’t going to be knocking out the bills.  Supporting four kids on a teacher's salary was bleak at best.  So she sucked it up and climbed an impossible mountain.  Step by step she tried to pull us up from the poverty of dreadful student housing at Stanford.  She burned dinner and dulled her eyes with late night studies.  At the end of her first year, the day after her last final, she was admitted into the hospital.  I don’t remember the disease, but I know the cause.  Exhaustion.  She was in there two weeks.  Any doubt as to the root cause was removed the next year when she did the same exact thing again. 

Finally she became Dr. Stallings. 

I watched her ascent and learned two things.  Never be poor if you can help it, it sucks.  And don’t let circumstances hold you back.  Circumstances change if you push hard enough.  Give sweat, give blood, give until it hurts, give until the circumstances change.  It seems my mother believes the difference between a wall and a door is how hard you push.  I have the scarred and battered forehead to prove I follow in her footsteps.

I’m 12 and getting into a lot of fights at school.  My mom comes by to see me.  She is leaving for yet another cross-country trip.  She travels a lot.  That's her job.  And I think she likes it.  She gets, for a week, to be Janie Doctor of Education.  Without us reminding her of the job she isn’t quite getting to.

“Josh, honey, are you alright?”

“Fine.”  Why tell her, she’s leaving, I see the suitcase in her car.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I am.”

“Hmmm.  Would you like to go to Duluth with me.” 

“Where’s Duluth.”  No smile.  Not yet.  Be sure.

“It’s in Minnesota… It’ll be fun, just you and me.”  Now my freckled face is beaming.  I am joy.  I am a sunflower.  I am going to Duluth.

My memories are spotty, splashes and flashes, but not one is bad.  I wonder if this is how normal people feel when they look back on their childhoods.  Rose light sparking off the frozen waves on lake Superior.  An eight foot tall taxidermy grizzly in the hotel bar.  Riding on the back of snowmobiles at night across vast white plains.  Laughing in the hotel restaurant at some silly thing.  Seeing my mother at a school working.  So calm, so in control.  Authoritative without being authoritarian.  I saw Dr. Stallings in her element.  And she was good.  Different from the woman I grew up with.  At home she let boundaries go unobserved until she could take no more and then she would explode.  Like a crazed border guard she would gun down everything in sight.  And leave us wondering what the hell just happened. 

But in the classroom, she was clear and concise about what was expected.  I guess the cobbler's kids go barefoot, right?  My mom was a child development specialist.  An educator.  We went barefoot a lot.

I have no intention to paint her as an angel, I’ve gone way too far down this path to start lying now.  We kids paid a large part of her bill for that Dr. before her name.  Paid in growing up too fast.  Paid in being left alone to sort out their divorce.  Chaos.  Tears.  Laughter.  Life.  We had it all, only more so.  It was as Ken Bruen says -  ‘a life writ large.’  He also said, ‘alcoholism doesn't run in my family, it gallops.’  He must have been opening my mail, cause I can’t say it any better.

1972 May.  DEAR MOM - HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!  Our gift to you is this contract... We the undersigned agree to pay you 10% of our income when you are old.  NO MATTER WHAT OUR WIVES SAY -- We Love you Larkin & Josh

FACT 1 - Clearly by the time we wrote this, Hallmark had destroyed any semblance of the original Mother's day.

FACT 2 - Despite our childhood and witnessing our parent’s marriage self-destruct, Lark and I still assumed one day we would marry.

FACT 3 - It is foolish to write a contract to my mother.  Regardless of your age.

Mom is terrified of being broke.  Mom is a child of the depression.  Mom is the daughter of a once rich and grand Indiana farming family.  She saw it all disappear.  She knows how dark it can get.  How cold the Indiana winters are. 

Mom was also an illegitimate child, the only lasting sign of love between Ruthie and Mr. Swanson.  She and Ruthie were taken in by Tom Cat, Howard Smith.  A good man.  A teacher.  He fed and clothed them.  Whether or not he molested my mother is open to interpretation.  But something went down.  Something we barely discuss.  I hear of a chair wedged under a doorknob so teenage Janie sleeps at night protected from her protector.  But where are you grandma Ruthie?  He took you and your daughter in.  A woman without her own, takes what life hands her, and says thank you.

Mom learned from all this.  She hedged every bet she ever lay.  If she knew the fix was in she would back a one legged horse.  She was fierce about getting and keeping money.  She once told me that deep down the money equated to love, and she was afraid when we no longer needed her monetary help we wouldn't still love her.  I have often love
d
her in spit
e
of it.  Loved he
r
in spit
e
of the way she used money as a hold over us, bought the right to judge how we lived.  She also played a game called Money Doesn't Matter, Art is All That Counts.  Art and being true to your self.  And the rub is, the only scorecard she tallies is cash. 

By now you think, buggy bastards forgot about the Mother's Day contract.  Wrong again bucko.  Just giving you some set up.  Some understanding of this... 

From the point at which Lark and I start taking down some serious change she starts to bring up that contract, joking, right, two or three times a year.  It goes on for four years running.  Was this her joke?  Yes.  Was she reminding us of a fond memory?  Yes.  Was she sending out feelers to see if she could enforce a contract written by thirteen and fourteen year old boys?  Absa-fucking-lutely.  Truly strangest part of the whole dealio?  If she could somehow get us to kick her 10% of our income, she’d give us back more if we asked.  She just wants us to be beholden, not her.  Not ever her. 

My mother believes in personal responsibility to the tenth power.  If she gets sick she thinks it is something she did or didn’t do to cause it.  Illness is a moral failing. 

I’m 42 and have just been let go from a film ad agency, the guy who hired me had moved into a studio gig and the new bosses and I don’t see eye-to-eye.  That is largely because they are idiots.  That is not bias.  It is true.  The film business was populated by mean people when I started out, cruel and Machiavellian.  But not stupid.  Stupid got you fired.  Smart made you rich.  And then the mega corporations got control.  Merger heaven, hostile takeovers, Vendi/PepsiCo/Universal Pictures.  And out of this smoking dung pile climbed a new breed.  It was the rise of middle management.  VP is king.  No one knows shit, but damn they all give good meeting.  So I’m fired by this cunt who I wouldn’t hire as an assistant editor.  I call my mother, now get this, I am one of the top cutters in town, I call for some support.

“What did you do wrong?“

“Nothing.  Wrong company at the wrong time.”

“If you learn what you did wrong, you can do different next time.  Might they take you back if you talked to them?” 

I don’t do grovel.  I don’t do take me back.  But she wants to know, what did I do?  What did I... fucking do?  I was at the wrong shop and forgot to kiss the new pope's ring.  I bet on a horse that left for greener pastures.  Do?  My mother has never said, ‘Oh I’m sorry son, those bastards don’t deserve you.’  Naaa, it was always ‘What could you have done different.’   

It isn’t easy on her, I know.  She’s tougher on herself than any of us, and man that’s tough.  What a hard way to be, but I guess it is also freeing.  Nothing ever just happened
to my mother.  She has never been a victim of circumstances.

I’m 50, I look back at the poverty we came out of, and wonder why us?  Why did I wind up in a big house when so many of the working poor never do?  I remember as a child, fearing we would lose our home.  Fearing that there would not be enough of anything to make it around our rather full table.  But what we were given was hope.  We were never told -
this is your lot in life
.  We were told -
reach for the stars
.  Looking back in the warm light of memory I see the strength of that.

My mother is in so many ways the quintessential American.  She holds the best and some of the not so best of who we are as a people.  She can rage, oh sure she can, she has a violent streak that even the Quakers couldn’t completely erase.  She is given to excess, parties, holidays, birthdays, always just two or three ticks past prudent.  These are American traits.  But so is her huge heart.  My mother's hand is always ready to reach down to help those who need it. 

While in Russia working on a film in the early 90’s I was struck by how defeated the crew were.  To them nothing was possible.  No matter how many times I pulled off the
impossible
they always viewed it as a fluke.  I was proud in those days of our ‘can do’ spirit.  I was raised to believe the impossible was only that way until some one cracked it. 

I still think that’s true.

And I don’t.

I am 16, and graduating from high school.  My mother gives me a Bulova pocket watch, inscribed in the case is
AIM FOR THE STARS
.  I am on my way to Hollywood to make my fame and fortune as an actor.  I’m reaching.

I am 50 and I see the inherent problem with this idea, when you are told to aim for the stars and don’t make it you feel like a failure.  The American dream is a myth.  Some shit is actually impossible.  To say it’s not makes us all feel lacking for not achieving more.  How about
LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS
as an inscription.  Not as Hallmark but might lead to a more peaceful life.

YOUNG DUDES, ONE AND ALL

6:05pm Andrea - Truly amazing that we all survived our adolescence.

6:07pm Josh - I am writing about it and I have no idea how we did.

6:09pm Andrea - It makes me remember going up to Skyline with you and Tad and Tom and...who else? in the BIG WHITE Cadillac, doing a 360 coming back down...do you remember? …. I'm sure you are including your infamous birthday party. The formal wear, the Baked Alaska, the gunshot...

6:11pm Josh - Yes... I probably should give apologies for risking so many lives... I was a bit of a thug tossed in a nice Palo Alto world.

6:12pm Andrea - Not at all, you were a bit of a rock star.

6:13pm Josh - I think you may have rose colored memory.

“Tanqueray and tonic, Schweppes if you have it.”  The lads sit at the bar.The lads have lower class English accents of blurry regionalism.  A cadence gumbo of two dashes Bowie one dash Rod Stewart and just a wee pinch of Neil Innis.  The bar is just off Gerry.  The lads are Tad and Me.  The year is 1974.

The deal - they never check too closely the ID of travelers.  Clever right?  We didn’t make it up; this is an extension of a trick Lark showed me when I was fifteen.  Works like this.  Ingrid made me some Xeroxed fake student ID, said I was twenty-two.  This paper wouldn’t pass a blind clerk.  It feels wrong in your hand it has bumpy air bubbles from the home lamination kit.  With ID this bad, you had to sell them, make them want to believe it.  In The City that meant going into gay discos, boys with boys, and girls with girls.  In liquor stores, same play, different slant.

“Pin your sleeve up,” Lark is instructing, “Now walk with a limp and speak with a Puerto Rican accent.”  I have on my Travis Bickle army jacket, left arm hidden.

“I don’t know any Puerto Ricans.  Tad?”

“A lot of Mexicans.  That chick from South Africa, that doesn’t help, umm, no Puerto Ricans.  That’s a New York thing.”