All the Wild Children (18 page)

“Carlos is Nicaraguan, no, Salvadorian…  Manny is what?”

“Cuban.”

“Bingo buffalo, give Tad a cigar.  Manny’s Cubano.”

“Dudes, shut the fuck up, OK?”

“We’re just saying, I don’t know any Puerto Ricans.”

“Fuck the accent, just do what you do little bro.”

“OK... Fine… The limp?”

“Limp is mandatory.”

I limp into the Korean liquor store on Middlefield and grab a bottle of Bacardi 151.  I set it on the counter.  The old man looks me up and down.  Admittedly, I’m a tall motherfucker, but I do not look twenty-one.

“You need ID.”

“I-FUCKING-D?  Really?  ID?  They didn’t ask for any fucking ID when they blew my arm off in the Mei Cong delta.  Fuck no.  Keeping you safe, and you want fucking ID.” 

I whip out the Ingrid forgery.  Bam!  Slap it on the counter.  The guy looks at my ID for less than a second and rings me up. 

1975, Summer.  Tad and I are pulling into the parking lot of a teen disco down in Los Gatos.  We are getting ready to open the My-O-My, we are scouting the competition.  Tad is driving his father’s Rambler.  We have yet to explode its transmission.  Oh we will.  We will lie about how it happens.  We will not tell Tad’s rather lovely folks, that crazy Yolanda kicks the gearshift into reverse at sixty plus miles an hour.  All this won’t be tonight.  Tonight the Rambler is clanking along just fine.

“Tad?”  We stand on the pea gravel in front of the
Cherry Pit, Teen Discotheque
             

“Yo?”  Tad matches a Marlbor
o
an
d
tosses me the pack. 

“I met two girls here last night.”  I jet blue smoke out in a cool stream.  “They want to meet you.”

Tad nods, ice mother-fucking cold, like he could take trim or leave it.  He doesn’t ask if they’re cute or nothing, because...

A) In our post-feminist North Cali world, you have to pretend that that shit doesn’t matter.  We are sensitive, caring fellows, who want to bang your daughter’s brains out and not call her back unless it is some really good trim. 

And...

B) He trusts my judgment.  Maybe not in the little shit, but in the big things, like booze, drugs, driving and my ability to know bounce-able bunnies when I see them.

“One thing though.  Tiny thing, really.  Nothing at best.  A speck o-”

“What is the non problem?” 

“They kinda think we are English rock stars.”  Tad’s saucering eyes tell it all.  But give the chap credit, by the time we hit the door he’s in full blown bad cockney.

“Oh my god are you from England?”  She’s upper middle class punk.  She bought the torn Pistols shirt, push up bra, and distressed leather jacket with daddy's Visa.  Dark long hair.  She will forever be stamped on our hearts and minds as Suzy Sunnyvale.

“Naaa, were not from England,” Tad lays the accent down thick, “We’re from London.”  Wide grin.  Flash of teeth and it’s a done deal.  He has a ten foot yellow scarf draped around his neck.  He has platforms, a too tight YMCA T-shirt under the coat he stole from his mother’s closet.  We rock glitter hard. 

David Bowie.  Queen.  Roxy Music.  The Tubes.  New York Dolls.  Mott The Hoople.  They rock glitter hard.  Sticky Finger jeans tight enough to advertise our religion.  Silver lame sparkle.  Ironic kid's shirts.  We wer
e
tall, skinny, pale and proud
.
  Fuck you if you don’t believe us.  We dress like fags and fuck like studs.  Bred in the ghetto, dressed in The City we rock glitter hard core.

“Yeah... we're with the band… No, only into the weekend.”  I don’t play in any band.  Tad is the lead singer in
Idiot
so we leave them to divine what band we’re in.  If we had been con artists instead of horny teen age boys, we could have raked in a fortune.  Or gotten our legs broken in a back alley.  Girls forgive a lot if a boy is cute, funny and knows what foreplay is.

Linda Los Gatos is dark and brooding, a proclaimed lesbian. 

“I just like to get a little dick sometimes and you look like you both have little dicks so let’s roll.” 

She doesn’t smile, more of a smirk.  This chick is scary.  Crazy scary.  While Tad fishes for the key, I slip her up front next to him.  I take Suzy in the back.  Engineering a totally pussy move, I don’t jump on the exploding vagina and save my squad.  Instead I toss Tad in front of the speeding cross town vagina bus.

A group of local meathead warriors, field sport heroes watch us go.  We just creeped their girls.  Local boys didn’t even know what hit ‘em.  Two freakin Vikings swooped down, took their pick and left. 

Tad’s parents are out of town so we take them there.  We make up a lame story explaining why we were staying at a family home.  I’m on the sofa.  I have Suzy Sunnyvale’s knickers around her ankles and am showing her a little trick the local boys never thought of.  Cunnilingus.  Real men don’t eat quiche but they sure as hell eat pussy.  So Suzy Sunnyvale is calling out for the old gods.  From the bedroom I hear thumps and wumps.  Linda is going Barbarella on Tad.  She is a stone freak.  I hear the slap of flesh on flesh and a yelp.  Tad comes walking into the living room rubbing his neck.  I am now balls deep in lovely Suzy Sunnyvale.  But I feel a bit guilty for selling him out. 

S&M girl is just behind him
,
buck nekid excep
t
her boots.  She’s saying something about being a lesbian.  She had these perfect pert lil’ titties. 

“Come on bitch, not man enough to fuck like a woman?”

I had no clue what that meant, but fuck it, how rough could it get?

We did what any normal guys would do.  We switched.  I pulled out of Suzy Sunnyvale and went after Linda Los Gatos.  And a fine night was had by all. 

From:
              [email protected]

Subject: huh?

Date:               May 30, 12:51:58 AM PDT

To:  Josh

Just got off the phone with you a few minutes ago, and realized I forgot to mention that Linda Los Gatos' most memorable comment was, "C'mon, think you can fingerfuck me as good as a girl can?"

Ah, those innocent childhood days…  -Tad

Next day after we drop them off, I pull up my shirt showing Tad the scratches that laced my back.  Tad lifts his shirt grinning.  His back is laced with equally fucked up scratches.

“Well that was fun.“

“True.  Although some people think a good old fashioned rubber hose interrogation is fun.”

“Freaks, freaks think a rubber hose is fun.”

“True.  Wanna see them again?”

“Hell yes.  Those girls make some mean freaky muffins.”

OK, they never learn we’re not orphan Brit glitter rock boys.  We dodged a big bullet.  We pulled it off.
 
Only, as Tad reminde
d
me tonight on the phone, we didn’t.  My family and friends were opening a teen disco called My-O-My.  And these lovely gals would be there.  An awful lot of the staff at the club looked like me, Stallings family resemblance being what it is.  It was going to blow our cover so we cooked up a plan.  A massively over complicated plan, yes, but for a bunch of hormone crazed over self-medicated teenage boys it seemed solid.

PART 1 Setting the hook
.  Tad and I are hanging with the girls and Lark bursts in.  We get in a small argument with him.  We lead the girls to believe it’s a drug deal. 

PART 2 Reeling in
.  We drive the girls up into the mountains.  Lark arrives and runs us off the road.  We pull guns and tell the girls to hit the floor.  Only our London accents are replaced by Texas Rangers accents.  “Get down Boy.”  We yell and fire off blanks.  Lark rips a blood pack and goes down in a spray of red death. 

PART 3 Bludgeoning the fish
.  We call it in and race away, telling the girls we are sorry we had to lie to them, that we are actually undercover Texas Rangers and we are all in danger.  We drop them at a Denny’s, give them cab fare and tell them it is best if they forget this ever happened. 

The plan is overly complex, yes.  Childish, yes.  Full of opportunities to go dramatically south, hell yes.  But the other option really sucks and involves having to admit to these lovely young ladies that we are dicks.

We never got a chance to pull off the great Anglo-Texan con. 

The girls come to the club and confront us.  Rightfully calling us bastards and creeps.  It’s embarrassing.  I hate feeling like a dick.  I’m better than that, only apparently I’m not.  But really the worst part is, we never get to try the plan.  A great con is a terrible thing to waste.

I can blame the faux Englishman crap on youth.  We all do stupid shit right?  Only when Jochum, my Danish pal and I did it in L.A., I was eighteen.  The funniest part was they believed me more times than Jochum.  They said he didn’t sound very Danish.  Based on?????  Exactly.  Didn’t stop a couple from coming home with us. 

Looking back I realize they probably all knew the deal.  They came with us in spite of it.  Or maybe it was the kicker that allowed them to do what they wanted to do in the first place.  Teen psychology is way too complex for me to figure.  It has been proven that teenage brains have more in common with criminally insane brains than they do a normal adult's.  So we really were all insane.  Not an excuse I buy when I wake at 4 AM and run down a litany of my sins.  But in the court of self-reprehension I never have had a very good attorney.  We poor boys always get some overworked court appointed hack.  Just once I want Johnny Cochran to plead my case.  Just once.

I’m 50, sitting in a barber’s chair at Yoni tattoo up in Tarzana.  Julie is buzzing away on my shoulder with speed and concentration.  She only pauses to wipe the blood away.  She is carving an Aegishja into my flesh and filling the tiny wounds with black ink.  It is surrounded by Norse knot work.  It is neither my first or last ink.  I am trying to find context for these tales of my misspent youth.  Preferably a context where I don’t look like an asshole. 

I’m 16, drunk.  Sitting shotgun in a 1959 Jagua
r
saloon
.
  Pops is driving.  He is drunk.  We are in The City.  It is Lark’s eighteenth birthday and we have come here to get him his first tattoo.  So far it is his last as well.  Out of a flash book he picks the griffin, or rampant lion.  That was three hours ago and we were already drunk then, now we are two steps beyond.  When Mom discovers the tat she will cry,  “You marked your perfect body.”  I think of the scars on my body and laugh.

“Don’t worry Moms, it’s not permanent.”  My brother is trying to placate.  I’m in the corner stoned on hash and trying to not giggle.

“It isn’t?”  

“No, Ma… It will only last sixty years, eighty if I’m really lucky.”  I want to believe we then had a Waltons moment where we all laugh and it breaks the tension and she hugs him and musses my hair.  We didn’t, but it comforts me to think we could have.

In San Francisco we are searching for a hidden Chinese restaurant, we need massive amounts of fried rice to soak up the booze.

“Hang a Lewie at the next light.”  Lark is directing from the back seat.  Why in a city where you can’t spit without hitting a Chinese restaurant do we need to find this particular one? 

I don’t know.  I guess drunk nights need a quest, and this is ours.

“Rosco at the next light!”  And it is this final right that leads us facing a street filled with headlights.  They are coming on fast.  They fill both sides of the road.  It is a one-way street.  It is not going our way.  In a moment of drunken brilliance, Pops wrenches the wheel hard and misses two parked cars.  Bouncing up the curb we skid to a stop.

“OK, one more Lewie and we’re there.”  Lark is and has been laying on the floor with his eyes closed.  He was directing us by pure drunken intuition.  Not a good idea, ever.

I’m 50 and Julie is still drilling away at my shoulder. 

I’m 50 and I’m nowhere nearer to a context where I don’t look like an asshole.

I’m 50 and I have to be OK with that.

MY - O - MY

INT.  HOSPITAL ROOM - DAY - MATERNITY WARD

Elgar: What race are you going to put on the birth certificate?

Francine: White.  I want him to grow up like his daddy did - casual.

That’s from a Hal Ashby film, The Landlord.  For years Lark and I would say when called White - I ain’t White I’m Casual.  In our short stint at Foothill Jr. College we put down Casual as our race and got invited to all the minority functions.  I’m a 6’4” Viking who knows he isn’t White.  It gets confusing sometimes, trust me it does.

In 1975 we were living the sanctimonious drug free life as only ex-druggies can.  Two points I should make here.  One, “drug free” is a relative term.  It didn’t include amyl nitrate, nicotine
,
caffeine
,
the odd Quaalude, a black beauty here and there and enough whiskey to sink the Irish navy.  Point two, I wasn’t a junky or even a major drug user, I have often latched on to my brother's drug addiction and told it like it was mine.