All the Wild Children (25 page)

The nights are forever.  I am an assistant editor at Aspect Ratio, they will one day become the five hundred pound gorilla of movie advertising, but today they are a five person company.  I am the guy who makes the titles go whoosh.  I am the guy who makes pistols sound like shotguns, and shotguns sound like cannons and cannons sound like the end of days. 

“In a world…” Don Lafontaine growls, I cut his voice over in, “One man stands between…”  “The hunted becomes the hunter…”  Soon these will become trite punch lines to joke trailers, but today it is fresh and new.  We are all young and wild and making it up as we go along.  We have long hair, pinned eyes from too little sleep and way too much caffeine.  We throw out the V.O. and tell the story with images and dialogue.  Hell on
Farewell to the King
I toss out everything but the music, let the picture speak for itself.

In
Scanners
, heads explode.  The MPAA will never allow that in a trailer, so we cut to black just before impact and let sound carry the weight.  Chicken bone breaks again, this time add water splash, melon drop, pig carcass stab.  Mix it just right and it will make you wince.  Mix it just right and it will make you want to puke.

The sky grows grey.  I wake.  I crawl out from under the KEM and get back to editing.  It is just me, the sounds, the flickering light, then dawn, then day.  The office comes to life.  The boss takes the tracks I have just finished building and heads off to a mix stage where they will mix my thirteen tracks down to one.  There is paper tape holding a Webril wipe around my finger, it keeps the blood off the film and one more taped where I cut my forearm on the splicer when I reached for a grease pencil.  Film editing is not without danger.

I drink a huge mug of strong coffee and get back to work.  I clean up all the trims and hang them in a trim bin.  When an editor says “Is there any more of that shot of Tom Cruise?”  I look in the bin and tell them.  I love the way film feels in my hands, I love the smell of it.  I’m blurry tired but I just keep pushing on.  This is the job.  No quitting until the studio guys are happy.

I love my job.

“What the fuck is this?”

“
Um, my invoice.”

“
I know that, what the fuck is this OT?”

“
I never went home, slept.”

“
So.  At nine AM you go back to regular pay.”

“
I never went home.”

“
There is no OT after nine, get it?  That’s a fresh fucking day.”

“
I never went home.”

“
You keep saying that.  So fucking what?”

“
I want my money, or I’m gone.”

“
Hard fucking ball?  Fine you want your OT?  Fuck you.” 

“
No, fuck you.”

“
Fine, I will pay your goddamn over time.  But if I do, you will never work in this town again.”  He actually said that.

Some days I wish he had meant it.

Some days.

Most days I love my job.

The 80’s are rough on editors, the deadlines insane, the coke lines fat.  I worked at least two all-nighters a week.  All for $4.32 an hour plus time and a half after 6.  Somehow we survived.  The editors did coke.  Us assistants did coffee and cigarettes.  We had youth on our side.  Somewhere in here I convince the boss to hire Bear, a longhaired-mountain-man-bearded-freak from Art Center.  Bear and I plot the take over of Hollywood. 

I lose or choose to lose my assistant editor gig and go on unemployment.  I am a state paid writer.  I work on
Oliver’s Army
a mercenary action film inspired by Costello’s song.  It started as stacks of papers with felt-tipped pen scribbles on them.  Lark and I had the first draft down, back before Erika and Hollywood and all this.  Now Bear and I worked on it.  I go pro, switching from pens to an Olivetti manual.

Dylan isn’t even one year old yet.  Erika is cocktailing at night.  She works at
SLICKS
a club on the top floor of the Pasadena Hilton.  She comes home with tired feet, smelling of cigarettes she didn’t smoke and booze she didn’t drink.  Her breasts hurt from the milk coming in mid shift.  I rub the indents left on her feet from shoe straps.  Dylan nurses, relieving the pressure in her breasts.

Bear sleeps on our couch.  We write and shoot a short film based on Dylan Thomas’
Love In The Asylum. 
It stars Erika and my dad.  Erika’s parents are also in it.  Bear makes Dylan giggle with his impression of
Sesame Street’s
Count.  “One, ah, ah, ah, two, ah, ah, ah…”

These are wild bohemian days.

Erika carries tray after tray of drinks across a crowded meat market so I can write and we can stretch my tiny stipend into an almost living.  The thing about growing up poor, neither of us expected much.  These are the rice and bean years.  These are the be thankful for that Friday night chicken years.  These are the days of raising a baby.  These are the days of raising each other.

Erika has gone to work and I am dancing with Joey the Pope (Dylan’s middle name is Joseph after my brother, and he wears a sack like a pope dress) or Winston (after Churchill. When serious, he looks surprisingly like the late prime minister.)  Around the room we twirl to Jonathan Richman’s
Party in the Woods
.  His
Into My Life
and Bowie’s
Hunky Dory
are the sound track of Dylan’s first two years.  Every night I read him
Where the Wild Things Are
. 

Dylan is an old soul, he has wise eyes.  I saw that the first time in the hospital, he reached out and took my finger in his tiny hand and looked into my eyes.  I could feel him welcoming me into his world.  Now he wakes up early.  Often in the predawn light I fumble to change a wet diaper.  I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve drawn blood, mine not his.  Instead of safety pins, they should be called sharp poky make you bleed pins.  In the grey lit kitchen sits the young lord in his high chair, I have to be careful because he still has a tendency to fall over.  His muscle growth and coordination are slightly delayed.  I fix him a bottle and hand it to him.  He drinks in silence while I brew some coffee.  I sit next to him, me drinking my coffee in silence, he his bottle, it isn’t until we are both done that he wants to get moving.

Dylan finds pure joy in the small things, the play of light on a tree, a cat stalking its shadow, dancing with his father.

During the day I write in a broom closet, it is just wide enough for my small desk and a chair.  But it has a door.  It isn’t until you have children that you realize the great value of a door.  To block out the noise I wear headphones.  I put on an LP and set it on repeat.  The music becomes background noise to drown out distractions.  Nothing quite like hearing my son giggling as his mother blows raspberries to make me want to step away from my typewriter.

These are the rice and bean years.  These are the making love and playing with our amazing son years.  These are the party in the woods years.  I don’t drink when I’m with Dylan.  I drink when I’m writing, it shuts out all the voices in my head that tell me I’m crap.  I drink with the boys in Hollywood dive bars.  I drink and write mad into the night after Erika and Dylan are safe in bed. 

“
Shouldn’t he be walking?”

“
No Mom, Doctor Paul said not to worry.  He said all kids walk sooner or later.”

“
I had a cousin, they had to break her legs and put them in a cast so she could walk.”

“
We’re not breaking Dyl’s legs Mom.  Unless he misses a payment, I don’t get the vig your legs is gone, hear me boy?”  I have Dylan held over my head, he is giggling.

“
You should give him liver, organ meats, those are brain foods.”  Mom tells Erika.  Erika is cooking an all veg soup, her face goes pale.  I truly hope she doesn’t puke in the soup.

Mom doesn’t come around much.  No one does.  Pop comes down and spends the first two weeks being Erika’s nursemaid.  He is fantastic.  Erika’s mom comes and helps with the first bath.  But mostly we are left alone.  We cocoon.  We hold each other tight.  We are all we need.

I am 22 and driving with my mom, Dylan is mere cells dividing in Erika’s uterus.  We are up north staying at Mom’s condo.  I’m working long shifts at the fruit cocktail canning plant.  I am working to get enough money to afford the birth.  My mom doesn’t know Erika is pregnant.  We are driving on Middlefield Boulevard when I tell her.  She is silent for a moment.  Then bursts into tears.

“You are going to ruin your life, just like your father did.”

I’m 22, scared and could use some support.  I don’t say that.  I go quiet.

I am 38.  I am in therapy and I have a revelation.  Let’s do the math...  Having Dylan will ruin my life, like my father.  So the logic is, having children ruined my father's life.  Ergo, I ruined my father's life.  Nice move Mom.  Toss a grenade that took sixteen years to explode.  At twenty-two I feel the sting without knowing why.  At thirty-eight I see the break in the logic, if I fucked up Pop’s life in the eight years he lived with me, what about the other sixty-nine years?  I wasn’t there.  He barely paid child support.  No, I’m not biting.  I will not take the rap for the years I wasn’t in his life.  End of story.

I am 50 and my old man calls me.  “Bringing you kids into the world was the single most important thing I’ve done with my life.”

“
Really?”

He laughs, it is after noon so I’m sure he’s had a few glasses of wine.  He is in Seattle and I am in L.A. smiling into my cell phone.

Dylan is little.  He has his bandana on in homage to the Boss.  He is rocking out some crazy game that involves dressing up and dancing to Springsteen.  I’m rocking beside him, ready to dive and catch him if he falls.  His balance is weak.  We decide instead of always telling him to be careful we will make it safer to be him in the world.  Erika finds a youth boxing helmet.  It makes him look like a contender.  Dylan wears it every day for several years.  Leather fringed vest, bandana, socks on his hands, Converse on his feet, the kid looks like a rock star.

Every month he falls farther behind the developmental norm.

I am 23.  It is late.  Erika and Dylan are sleeping.  I am drinking Yukon Gold.

We have been given the news. 

Retarded. 

My lil’ man is retarded. 

He has developmental delays. 

Retarded. 

Fuck. 

Retarded. 

Drink deep. 

Retarded.

I am 10.  We are in Hawaii celebrating my mother's graduation from Stanford.  We are at a trailer park in Hana on Maui, we spent the day playing in the Seven Sacred Pools.  I’m walking back to our trailer and I see a retarded man with a rake.  His features are strange and distorted.  A long string of green snot trails from his left nostril.  I have never seen anyone who looks like him.  I stare and feel my stomach go cold.  I can't sleep.  I lay in my bed thinking about the strange man.  I feel fear I can’t name.

I am 23 and my son is retarded.

“
All right here is what you do.”  Lark is on the phone.  “Stand up... you up?”

“
I’m up.”  Not too steady, but vertical.

“
All right walk down the hall.”

I do as told.  I have been crying.  I trail the phone cord behind me.

“Open Dyl’s door.  Look in there.  See that boy in the crib.”  I do as told, I look at my wonderful son and the fear is gone.  “Your boy?  That is real.  Retarded is just a word.” 

I am 50 and I still hear Lark’s words.  Labels mean little in the face of human complexity.  Black, White, Mexican, American, Jew, Retarded.  None of them tell you squat about the person.  Nelson Mandela was Black, so was O.J. Simpson.  Dylan is retarded or in new speak he is developmentally delayed, and that information is of little or no use in understanding him.  Jeffrey Dahmer had an above average intelligence.  I’m massively dyslexic.  So what.

“
Now say ‘retarded’ and then pick that baby up.” 

“
Retarded.”  It comes out a whisper, I am afraid volume will make it stick.

“
Pick him up.”  I do.  I smell that sweet intoxicating scent of baby sleep sweat.  He snergles a little then settles comfortably into my arms.  “Is he any different?  Did the word change Dyl?”  Lark knows the answer.  I kiss my boy and hold him close.  My amazing old soul silly goose rock star retarded son.

Oh yes, there’s
a party in the woods tonight
.
.
.

GOLDEN DAYS

Bear and I finish Oliver’s Army, he has a poster made and everything.  We put together a deal with an East Indian filmmaker, by deal
I
mean he said some stuff and we believed it.  He is going to make our movie
. 
It must be shot in Kenya so instead of getting paying work, I rewrite it for the Rift Valley.  Erika and my money are running thin.  But I hold out for the dream.  Longer than I should, but once they make the movie we will be swimming in cash.  Only they don’t make the movie.  They make a different movie.  Erika, Dylan and I are fucked.