All the Wild Children (19 page)

Getting the facts wrong doesn’t bother me.  This is my truth.  My memory.  But I hold myself to a high standard.  I will honor my truth.  I will not knowingly lie.  And the idea that in the past I cadged my brother’s pain and used it for my own glorification makes me want to vomit.  And why, really?  I never felt my pain was enough.  The pain is always greater on the other side of the fence. 

Only an alcoholic thinks being a junky is romantic. 

In Hollywood program meetings, some newcomers feel the need to be the baddest sonofabitch in the room, so they lie.  As an old-timer, I tell them the truth.  Don’t bother comparing your insides to other people's outsides.  And don’t get in a dick wagging contest in the rooms.  There will always be that guy who shot dope in his eyeball.  And he will be trumped by the guy who shot dope in his dick. 

I’ve
m
et them both. 

They reall
y
did those things.  In late night Hollywood meetings you meet people who did things you can't fathom.  But I remember, my story, is my story.  My pain, is my pain.

I am 16, high on speed and Jack Daniel
s
and Budweise
r
.  I’m doing 110 MPH, in the hills just north of Santa Cruz.  Every turn is a four wheel drift across both lanes.  It’s night.  My lights are off.  I don’t notice, I have my sunglasses on.  Tad and the other passengers don’t notice because they have their sunglasses on too.  I hit one corner way too hard, the body roll on the Pontiac is insane.  I feel the left wheels go light.  Then the tread on the right front tire rips up, exposing the steel belts.  Zap pow, we are on the rim and shooting sparks.  Decelerating on a rim is a total screw job.  The rim digs in and tries to swing us right.  I wrestle the wheel and brakes.  We are on the gravel when the Pontiac finally stops. 

We are on a country lane.  We are on our way to a party in Santa Cruz.  The White Whale’s trunk is filled with cases of beer and a half-gallon of Jack.  Bags of ice have been dumped and are melting in the trunk.  I am rooting around in this mess, looking for the tire and jack.  My sunglasses are off.  Tad holds the flashlight for me. 

“Yo big skinny, you got a spare?”

“Girl?  Dick?  Dime?  Spare what?”

“A, I’ve seen yo girls, and honestly I can do better.  B, you are Keen's brother so I bet your dick is held together by the diseases battling to control it.  And C, … um … C, what was C?”

“Dime, it was a dime.  As in, I’m gonna drop a dime on your ass, you don’t hand me that tire iron.” 

I get the car jacked up, I stare at the dead tire.  “Fucking retreads.  You ever wonder what it’s like to ride on new tires?”

“New tires?  New tires, we don’t need no stinking new tires.”

“Yeah, they’d probably fuck the White Whale, she’s not used to traction.” 

I am sitting on the dead tire and tightening the lugs on the spare when the cop rolls up.  I am wearing painted on jeans and a little kid’s shirt with BRAT spelled out in toy blocks on it.  I have silver platforms on.  We are in the sticks.  None of this is good.

“How are you doing, sir?”  Tad goes from stoned to sober in a three-foot walk. 

Cory uses his huge intellect to slip the trunk lid down as they pull up.  I’m not being sarcastic about Cory, he has a massive brain.  He and Tad play an early iteration of seven degrees of separation.  They see how many people it takes to connect obscure music artists.  For hours they play this.  I always feel stupid when they play it, I have a hard time remembering my phone number.  I often feel stupid at sixteen.  I overcompensate with my I don’t give a fuck attitude. 

“Need some help son?”

“No sir, think we just about got it fixed, right Josh?”

“Just about.”  I fumble the lug nuts, drop one and have to crawl under the car.  I am stalling.  If I have to open the trunk to put the tire in, the jig is up.

“We’re trying to get to Basin Street?”  Tad, the genius has stretched out a map on the cop car’s hood.  I could kiss him.  I could anyway, he looks hot in his mother’s coat and eye make-up.

As soon as Johnn
y
La
w
looks down at the map I toss the ruined tire into the trunk and slam the lid. 

“Don’t forget your jack.”  Oh crap.  The cop is walking over.  I ratchet the jack down. Fold it up. 

“I won’t.”  I try and see just how long it can take to fold a jack.

“Well, you boys have a good night.  Drive safe.”  As the cop drives off I am amazed by Tad and his endless ability to get authority figures to believe he is innocent.

“Call me Ishmael, Josh and let’s sail this bitch outta here.”  At the party we stay up all night.  There is no speed left so we have to settle for coffee.  Somewhere around 4 AM Cory, Tad and I try smoking coffee grounds.  The other party kids think we are nuts, hopelessly fucked in the heads, and endlessly cool.  They are correct on all counts.

A few weeks later I am driving Ingrid up to the City to go dancing.  Do we have cocktails in hand?  Hell yes, it is Friday night.  I get pulled over and can’t pass the field sobriety test. 

Touch my nose with eyes closed, can’t do it on a dare. 

Stand on one foot in platforms and lean back, are you kidding?

Say the alphabet backwards.  Dude, I can’t do it forwards on a great day.  I still have to sing the ABC song in my head when I’m at the library looking for a book.

My combined brain and neurological anomalies make me the perfect candidate to fail the test.  The spilled White Russian on the floor makes my protesting a bit weak.  And if they had caught me three hours later I guarantee I would have been smashed.  As it is I was just getting my smooth going. 

The cuffs ratchet onto my wrists.  They aren’t kidding.  This is real.  This is happening.  They don’t allow Ingrid to take the Pontiac.  From the back window of the cop car I see her getting into a tow truck with a Hell's Angel for a driver.  She looks nervous.  Ingrid is never nervous.  I am trapped in the cop car.  They can do anything they want.  I have no control.  Rage will do no good.  I try and kiss the officer's ass.  I tell him my grandfather was a cop.  I tell him I want to be a cop.  He sees through me.  He knows a punk when he sees one.  I feel soft for trying.  Weak.  On the long drive I have time to imagine being put i
n
juvie
.
  I imagine it is Ravenswood on steroids.  How long will it take before I crack?  For all of my bluster and roll, I am a skinny White boy.  I am scared.  I hate myself for it.

At the Hillsboro station they take blood and call my mother.  I am not legally drunk.  Not sober, but not legally drunk.  I get off with a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to.  No one thinks that maybe I could use some help dealing with all the shit in my head.  Maybe they do, and I can’t hear it.  Too much bad water under that bridge for me to look for help from the parents.

Down in Baja, we cook up a plan.  Fueled by boredom, amyl and tequila. 

Good combo.  We are there on a road trip with Mom and Perry.  She didn’t keep Perry long.  We never let him go.  He passed a year ago.  Every one of us kids stayed in touch.  Every one of us mourned his leaving.  We are eating tacos and laughing and thinking about what was next for us.

A teen disco.  Open a teen disco.  It’s a way to keep us out of trouble.  It’s a way to give back to the youth of Palo Alto.  There’s money in disco.  These are the points we use to sell Moms and Perry on the idea. 

In 1976 a teen disco seems like a fun plan.  Why not. 

What do we know about opening a club?  Not a thing. 

Does that fact scare us?  Not one bit. 

My-O-My, Lilly comes up with the name.  Mom and Perry come up with the cash.  Shaun and Ingrid come up with the waitress uniforms.  Larkin is our General Manager, trouble shooter and the one we all look up to.  Paul,
Idiots
drummer, builds our sound system.  Tad does our graphics.  Ivan and I wire the place and set the lighting.  It is total Mickey Rooney time.  Instead of an old barn, we find an old car showroom on High Street.  It is a beehive of teenagers with power tools.  Underage and unskilled.  No one is getting paid.  Who gives a rat's ass.  We are actually doing something.  Building something. 

My DJ booth is a giant jukebox, it even has Lucite tubes with colored water and a bubble blower.  The waitresses, Shaun, Ingrid and her younger sister Johanna, wear cute Betty Boop sailor suits.  They invent non-alcoholic cocktails.  This place will be class all the way.

I am in the ceiling, a crawl space so thin I only have a couple feet above me.  I am wiring lights.  I don’t turn the circuit breaker off.  I am smarter than electricity.  I am smarter than other electricians.  I am seventeen and don’t want to climb down the ladder.  So fuck it, I’ll be careful.  When I short the fixture, 240 volts blast through my body.  The spasm slams my body up into the roof.  It blows a Connie high top off my foot.  I am one smart son of a bitch. 

The club is a success.  The youth of Palo Alto line up to give us two bucks at the door and a buck for Cokes.  My-O-My at Homer and High is the only place to be Friday and Saturday nights.  Each night after we close, Lark and I walk the neighborhood picking up beer bottles, cigarette butts, burger wrappers, the flotsam and jetsam of the rising tide of teenagers we have attracted.  Once the club is cleaned and all the paying customers are gone, we lock the doors and crank up The Tubes, Stones or NY Dolls.  Our music.  Collected girls from the night hang out.  Drink Bacardi and Coke.  Fuck in the office.  No one’s getting paid, but working here is your buy in to the best late night party in town. 

Lark is good at this club deal.  Later he will make stacks upon stacks of ducats, building and running clubs in Texas.  But for now it is just what keeps him from self-destructing.  The club gives all of us a place to put unspent energy.  I am driven to be an actor.  Direct movies.  To write.  My creative passion is stronger than the booze.  Not by much, but enough. 

When Lark was thirteen and Moms found him smoking, she bought him a cool hat to get him to quit.  He said he did.  He smoked for another thirty-five years.  I smoked too, just never in front of my mother.  I was thirty and still sneaking out to grab a nicotine hit.  On a purely non financial level, I think she got it right when she and Perry invested in the club.  It was a lame horse in a bad race, but it was the horse we needed.

For a time My-O-My was the darling of Palo Alto.  The Times wrote us up, gushing about the good work we were doing.  We were keeping drugs and booze out of the club.  Cops liked us.  For a short time we were treated like lads with a future.  But nothing lasts.

In the winter I moved to L.A. for six months to study acting.  When I returned that summer the climate had changed.  At My-O-My people were actually getting paid.  The crowd had shifted.  It was almost entirely Black.  My-O-My was attracting kids from East Palo Alto, and no one in Palo Alto was happy about that. 

“Soon as we started getting Black kids, the White kids stopped showing up.  Fuck ‘em, money’s money.”

“You got any DJ shifts open?”

“Nope.”

“Fuck you, I’m your brother.  I helped build this joint.”

“And you went away, and now I have DJ’s.  What I need are doormen.”

“Do you mean a bouncer?”

“I guess I do.”

“Cool.”

The first night goes relatively alright.  Mostly good kids, just looking for a place to dance and meet chicks.  Hardcore thugs in general go to titty bars, not kiddy bars.  The only tense moments come when we check for weapons and booze.  A White boy searching you doesn’t always go down so well.  But we are polite and professional.  If the kids are regulars, they know the drill so there’s no drama.  The cops have taken to cruising the area.  Flashing the lights on anyone sitting in their cars.  Palo Alto, home to Stanford, liberal bastion.  Racist yuppy scum.

We continue to keep our side of the street clean, literally.  We keep drugs out.  We give the kids a safe place to party.  It is a drama free zone, for a clientele who have enough drama at home. 

The man leaning on the bar and hassling Shaun, looks thirty and hard. 

“Excuse me sir.”  I am six kinds of polite.

“Watchu want young blood?”

“You have to be under eighteen to be in the club.”

“That right?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, it’s the rule.”

“I got a .357 in my coat.  Now what’d you say?  Yeah that’s what I thought.  Want me to show it to you.”

“God no.  That is the last thing I want to see.  Really, trust me, I believe you.” 

“So what we gonna do?  Huh?”

“You’re going to leave.  Or you’re going to pull out the .357 and try and shoot me.”

“Damn straight.”

“OK, follow this down, you take out your .357 and shoot me.  A White boy in Palo Alto?  Dude you’re done.  No way you hide from that.  They take you in and after years of appeals they fry you.  Or, you pull that .357 and I pull an amazing kung fu move, disarming and bitch slapping you in front everyone.  It could happen.  Or the waitress calls the cops, I mean there is just no way this will work out for you.”