All the Wild Children (24 page)

I lay her down on the mat and start to undress.  My heavy leather belt off, I snap it together, the crack it makes is about ten times louder than expected.

“I'm not into that stuff.”  She is firm.

“Noooooo, me neither, not a, the belt slipped, not slipped but fuck.”

Erika is laughing.  She reaches up and takes my hand.  She pulls me down onto the mat.  We make love.  And it is a revelation, no shit, mind blowing.  It is athletic and tender and animal and angelic.  It is a coming home to a place I’ve never been.

Over the Christmas break I go back to Palo Alto and Erika spends it with her folks.  I am love sick for her.  I feel stranded when she isn’t in my bed.  I stay up too late with Tad and talk too much about Erika.  I feel like an essential part of me, a chromosome or an enzyme is missing.

I am 21 and scared to death of feeling this way.

I am 21 and a drunk.  I drink rum and coke.  I go to a party at Autumn and Arthur Tit’s flat.  Marilyn, my tiny lover is there.  She is now seeing Tanner, Lark’s tiny dope buddy.  I am drinking.  I try to convince her to run away with me.  “I can’t, Josh, I’m with Tanner.  And you said you’re with someone.”

I am 50, and have kept this moment buried for twenty-nine years.  I was ashamed.  It made me look weak.  Or unfaithful.  Truth is I was twenty-one and scared to death of what I was feeling.  I wanted to fuck it up, before it could fuck me up.  Everyone but siblings will ultimately leave you holding the bag, cops at the door, and no alibi in sight. 

I am 21 and driving south yet again.  360 miles to think about Erika.  360 miles to get used to the fact I can’t live without her.  360 miles to fear she doesn’t feel the same.  It is New Year's Eve when I make it to Santa Monica.  Erika’s parents are having a party.  All I want to do is fold her into my arms and carry her to bed.  Some drunk is playing a guitar in her room.  He won’t leave.  And then he does.  And we make love.

“It feels like a boulder falling off a cliff, you know?”  I say.  We are both sweaty and love slick. 

“I do know what you mean,” she says.  We spend that and every night after it together.  Jochum moves back to Denmark, Erika moves in and never leaves.  I’m a lucky bastard and when I’m sober I know it.  Hell even when I’m drunk I know it.

At a party in the home of Croxton family friends, I am introduced by a tipsy Dee, “This is Josh, Erika’s boyfriend, they’re going to get married.”  We haven’t even given our relationship a name.  Erika turns paler than her normal Celtic white.  I beam.  I am gobsmacked.  I puff out my chest with pride.  Dee thinks I am worthy of her daughter.

A few weeks later… 

3 AM.  I wake, look at Erika in the moonlight and I say... “Do you want to be my wife?”

“Yes,” she says.  I hold her close and we go back to sleep.  If it was not the rose petals, down on one knee, romantic moment Erika expected, she never let on.

SHUT UP AND SAY SOMETHING

“I’m pregnant... we’re pregnant.”  Erika says.  I go rabbit in the headlights.  Ten thousand things flash across my brain all at once.  How?  We used birth control.  I’m too young.  Fantastic.  I’m on fire.  This is heaven.  This is hell.  Speech fails me.  I smile stupidly.  I hope Erika can’t read my mind.  I want to scream, what the fucking fuck?  I want to laugh and giggle with joy. 

It takes a few weeks but I settle into loving the idea of a baby.  At fifteen after I was arrested for robbing Peter’s home, I did court ordered volunteer work in a childcare center.  I learned how much I loved being with kids while there.  This little polliwog is going to be mine.  Mine to keep and love and cherish.  I really honestly have come to see the blessing.

Then, Erika miscarries.

This moment and being stuck on the Santa Monica freeway are linked in my mind.  Not that they have any real connection.  It just always feels like that - stuck in traffic.  No way off.  An inevitable crawling to the sea. 

Together we mourn a child we never met. 

And here we are.  A wedding heading at us.  We stumble into the happy event tainted by a wistful loss.  But we are young and we know this is bad but life is good.  We are full of optimism.  I rewrite my personal myth.  I think I’m better off without a child. 

We are young and broke and terribly in love.  We do our wedding on the cheap.  The rings come from Walter Wright, a jeweler my pops worked for in the ‘70s.  We get them for cost.  The diamond I give Erika comes from my mother.  Erika is the fourth Stallings woman to wear it.  Even though my mother has a hard time seeing us lasting, her giving the diamond tells me she has more faith than she lets on. 

Erika’s wedding dress is designed by Bel, her best friend and built by the theater company's costumer.  It has unfinished seams.  It is a costume best seen from a few feet away. 

The night before our wedding I’m in bed with Erika.  It is maybe 2 AM, I roll over and look her square in the eye and say…

“I don’t know if getting married is such a good idea.” 

In twelve hours there is to be a church full of people expecting to see a happy couple get hitched.  My lovely bride-to-be bursts into tears and I spend the next hour back pedaling and calming her down.

Old Josh: And what did you learn from this lesson young man?

Young Josh: I learned that everything that goes through the brain need not come out the mouth.

Old Josh: What else?

Young Josh: Well, old man, I learned that sometimes you have to tell a truth that hasn’t happened yet, or, and this is always an option, lie man, lie. 

We marry in the Unitarian Universalist church in Santa Monica.  The same church Erika grew up in.  The reception is in the social hall at the church for one hour, and then we have to clear out because a memorial is booked behind us.  The whole damned affair, from dress to cake, cost under $600.  And it was perfect.  It was us. 

Flash - I’m standing at the altar with Lark and Jochum.  I look up and see Erika striding down the isle.  Fuck me.  She is a fairy princess.  She takes my breath away.  I am the luckiest thug in any church in any town.  I mumble my vows.  She is that beautiful.

Flash - Mom is crying in the bathroom.  They are not tears of joy.

Flash - Grandpa Harold slips a handful of rice in my pocket and whispers “You’ll be happy as soon as you realize she’s right.”  Then he’s gone.  I will turn that koan over and over for ten years before I understand it.  It means that once I approach every disagreement assuming she is right, and I need it explained so I can understand it, then we are discussing instead of fighting.

Flash - Lark gets us a room at the Long Beach Hilton, he is working as a bartender in their Houston branch.  The only thing is I have to pretend to be him.  It is not the first time people can't tell us apart.

Flash - Our room looks out on the Queen Mary.  One night in the Hilton and we think our honeymoon is opulent.

Flash - Eating strawberries and string cheese in the hotel room.  We bought our picnic in a supermarket on the way, too broke for room service. 

Flash - We take mushrooms that Babette, my father’s wife at the time, gave us.  The floor is shark infested.  The bed is safe.  Making love is good.  It is a blurry and loopy night of fun and frolicking.

The rice my grandfather put in my pocket is old Southern magic.  A fertility thing.  Apparently my grandfather packed some powerful mojo.  We are pregnant within a week of the wedding.

I am 22.  The fear once again is choking me.  I’m going to be a father and I have no real model of what that should look like. 

I am 22 and putting on a brave face.  I have to find a way to support my budding family.  Theater is out.  Time to start my film career.  I have no connections.  I have little education.

I am 22 and hold fast to the dream.

I am 22 and scared all the time that I will fail.

I am 50.  I am asked the secret to my success, “Equal parts fear and determination,” I lie.  There was always more fear than anything else.

I am 22 and my head is on Erika’s massive amazing belly.  A small foot from inside kicks me.  My son kicks me.  I’m really fucking terrified, I’ve seen Alien, I know what jumped out of John’s chest.  I’m also in love with this little foot.

I tell Erika not to worry, I will support us.  And so my dream shifts.  I will not be directing the Tony award winning production of the Baccae, with sets made from rusted chains dripping water. 

Apparently
t
heater was a stepping stone, what I really want to be is a filmmaker.  I lie my way on to an A.F.I. film crew as an electrician, I play up the theater lighting and get the nonpaying gig.  Hollywood, so many people want into the dream factory that there is fierce competition even for unpaid gigs. 

It’s raining.  We are lighting a house from the outside.  The effect is amazing, when in the house it feels so lifelike that you think it is a sunny day.  Magic.  Fat red and black cables connect the generator to the set.  I notice I ran them across a puddle.  I reach down to move them.

“Whoa yo, don’t touch that.  Wanna fry your White ass?”  I stop mid grab.  Tony is from Compton.  He’s a dolly grip.  “Take it from the insulated part, and move it out of the water.  Wrap it in one of those trash bags in the truck.”  The next day I move to the grip department.  Tony teaches me about laying dolly track.  We talk about the films we want to make.  We plot our moves.

And then I meet the film’s editor.  “You want to support your family?  Get out of production and into post.”  Terry is a big time commercial cutter who is on this film to stretch himself.  My wife grows round with child and I revise the history of my dream once again.  I now know I always wanted to be an editor.  Terry takes me on as an apprentice.

Nine months after our wedding we are watching Eddie Murphy and laughing so hard that Erika goes into labor.  “Let’s go have a baby, baby,” I say heading for the door.  Erika is much more pragmatic.  There will be no sex for up to six weeks after the baby comes.  So she takes me in the bedroom.

After we make love, we pack and head to the car.  I stop.  I look up at a palm tree against a star filled backdrop.  And I think,
remember this moment.  You are standing on a border between your homeland and a foreign country.  Remember this moment.

The baby is butt down, spine out, a transverse breech, and the head really big.  A scalpel cuts into Erika’s belly.  I watch as they cut through the different layers.  Erika looks up at me.  “What do you see?”

“You... you’re beautiful on the inside too.”  I hold her hand and they pluck our son from her womb.  It is a boy.  In that moment I go from boy to man.  That squirmy little alien angel is our son. 

I follow the nurse when she takes our baby away.  She pinches him and he cries.  She does it again and I snap.  “That’s enough.  No more.”

“We have to hear his lungs.”

“And you did.  No more.”  I don’t care how she stares at me.  Fuck her.  This is my son.

I am 12 and in a restaurant by the sea.  Moms insists that the waiter not seat us by the kitchen.  She is making a minor scene.  “I’m paying the same as every other person here.  I want a seat by the window.”  Single women with kids get shuffled off to the back, but not my mom.  I am mortified.  I want to crawl under a table and hide.  I want to yell at my mom for calling attention to us hippy kids. 

I am 22, a dad, and I finally get my mom in that moment.  Fuck what the waiter wants, my kids get to watch the seals play while we eat.  Fuck the nurse, my wife don’t eat meat.  I told you, now get it right bitches.

I’m 22 and holding my son in Brotman Memorial hospital in Culver City California, and nothing is ever going to be wrong in the world again.  We name him Dylan after that mad Welsh poet.  If he was a girl he would have been Caitlin.
 
Bowie and Jonathan Richmond play the sound track of our son's early life.  We are in love.  We are poor.  We have a bright eyed curly haired boy.  We take turns getting up.  I am working as an assistant editor making $173 bucks a week.  We are set.  These first years are the kind that you should bottle and keep t
o
drink i
n
later years.
 
Me
,
I drank scotch.

SO FREAKY, SO FREE

1981.  Last night I slept under the KEM, spools of film threaded in the machine above me.  I am cutting sound effects for a mix at 9:0
0
AM.  I catch two hours sleep then back at it.  Lacing in chicken bone breaks with thudding body blows to make it so you can really feel the punches.  The trailer is for Cronenberg’s Scanners.