All the Wild Children (29 page)

“I’m kinda doing a Goddard thing, hand held, verte.”  He’s also directing something at the lot.  “How's your shoot going?  I’m shooting a prison scene.  For a set the art department gives me two racks of bars and one cot.  So I fill it with fog, hide the lack of set, go Fellini on it.”  I eat my lunch to his monologue.  He is a welcome distraction from my shot list and how far I am behind today.  It isn’t until he is gone that I realize he is the director of the porn flick.  And here I was feeling insecure because I never went to film school.

“I was just in the women's bathroom,” Erika says, “You know the porn they’re shooting?”

“They’re shooting in the ladies' room?”

“No.  The trash in there is filled with empty Betadine medicated douches.”

“That is kinda disgusting.”

“Yeah, but it says all that needs be said about porn, doesn’t it.”

The Great Nipple Revolt
: 

The day before shooting our first dance scenes the ladies come to me and explain they want to wear pasties.  They have decided not to show nipples.

“Would you feel better if I stripped down too?”

“Um... well...” At least they are smiling now.

“Fuck it, I won’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do.”  The ladies decide nipples are OK and I direct the rest of the movie in boxers and Doc Martins.

Bronwyn's Big Day
: 

Today she shows bush.  Really.  In the film she is a sad girl who will do anything to win a dance contest, even break the club rules and go bottomless.  Bronwyn is having cold feet.  Understandably.  I convince her it is for art.  I convince all the ladies of wonderland that it is for art.  Hell it’s black and white.  Art.  But truth is, it is for art.  Black and white 16mm has insured it won’t be sold as a spank film.  She does the bush shot.  It is sad and powerful and degrading.  It is everything we hoped it would be.

Eight months later we are buying tickets to see Kinda Cute For A Whiteboy.  It has a two week run in a new director series.  Holding that ticket in my hand I know a lifetime goal is about to be realized... I made a film.  Me and Tad and a gang of others.  And I am holding the ticket in my hand.  Something shifts.  I did it sober, and if I want to do more I might be able to pull it off.  But what do I want to do?  What does one do to find a new dream?  My boys leave very little time to think about all this.  I have no idea how far the tide has risen.  Had no idea of the fifty-foot waves ready to crush us.

MY SON SOLD YOUR HONOR STUDENT HERION

When Hunter S. Thompson said that myths and legends die hard in America he must have been reading my mail.  Every family has its myths, its tales of hope and glory.  Most are bullshit made up after all the principal players have moved on to greener pastures.  My great-gre
a
t-grandmother was a cook in the Danish royal home in Ribe.  She fell in love with a Mormon
,
they took the voyage and pushed a cart from NY to Salt Lake.  I take all this on faith.  Why not, sounds as good as any other story.  It’s when we get closer to the bone that it starts to matter. 

My Grandfather Harold was a drunk and a penny ante criminal from a young age.  A rough and tumble thirteen year old, he sold hooch during prohibition from an orange juice stand on the pike in Long Beach.  Sailors would order the special, and that meant bathtub gin and a splash of OJ.

Tobias Jean, AKA Harold Leon Stallings III, AKA Pops, was a wild lad and hard drinking teen.  He joined the army during the Korean war.  Given his later pacifism I can’t figure why he signed up.  I could call Pops up and ask him, but the old bastard lies.  So the myth remains.  In boot, while the other grunts were training he was at the officer's club playing cards.  For five weeks this was a fantastic plan.  Then they started posting shipping out orders.  Hal will soon be sent to a war zone and he has never shot his gun.  Myth stands, Harold II (my grandfather), calls in some favors, has Harold III moved into the MP’s and kept state side.  An act for which I’m sure my dad never forgave his dad.  The Military Police gig doesn’t last.  After he highjacks a car at gunpoint they didn’t seem to want him t
o
han
g
around.

In our clan, the sins of the father are borne by his father.  Pain stretches back generation to generation.

My brother's and my crimes are well documented.  Why would I ever have the hubris to believe it would end with us.

“Mr. Stallings, Jared hears these stories of rebellion, and takes them as fact.”  She is Jared’s second grade teacher, “Couldn’t you tell more authority friendly tales?  Things that will help him get along with others?”

“I could but they’d be lies.”  Her nervous laughter tells me she hopes I’m joking.  In hindsight I wish I’d paid more attention that day.  Maybe we could have discovered if the Stallings male time bomb is genetic or historic.  Maybe that little experiment will be left for Jared’s kids if he survives to have any.

Jared is 15 and the warning signs are starting to stack up.  Me, I’m chest deep in denial.  I tell Erika I’d know if he was doing drugs, hell I’d been there. 

Jared is 15 and the distance widens.  He is often sullen or snappish.  Gone is the funny silly brave heart we raised.  He is replaced by this teen zombie.

It is totally age appropriate.

Jared is 16 and borrows my Yukon to visit a friend from the Unitarian Universalist youth group.  A church friend.  What could go wrong?  Other than the parked truck being hit and near totaled in the night.  Erika questions the whole event.  I don't.  I discover that the airbag hadn’t deployed so I am sure the engine was off at the time.  Thus the story is true enough to deal with.  Only it is a lie.  One I won't recognize for years.

And then one day Jared overdoses on heroin and I have my blinders ripped from my face.

“You said you would know…” Erika is angry.

“I... I... ”

“I told you I thought something was going on.  You said you would know if it were.  I believed you.”  I was tragically wrong. 

To search for fault is human.  I scan my son's friends to see who led him astray.  There is tha
t
squirrell
y
  punk ex-kid actor trust fund piece of crap.  He did it.  Must have.  If I could I'd round up all the drug dealers in L.A. and pull that trigger until the coliseum ran red.  I hate them for what they have done to my son. 

I am 50 and can only now accept the truth of the matter.

1) That trusted church friend, she introduced him to Meth.

2) That kid actor was along for the ride.  He bought his ticket, but he wasn't the conductor.

3) The first time Jared shot smack it was with a lovely fresh faced theater student who injected him.

4) The kid going downtown and scoring, then bringing it back to high school was Jared.

My son sold your honor student heroin.  If I am to kick anyone’s ass it should be my own, or my pops, or his pops.  Hell I should climb our family tree kicking ass up one side and down the other.  Or possibly, just maybe, no one is to blame.  If he had been stricken with cancer would I be searching for who was at fault?  Probably.  I’m his father.  All I know is someone needs their ass kicked.

RADAR BOY

Dylan is 5.  We are on a road trip heading north.  I am singing Wheels On the Bus.  I am wondering if he’s getting hungry.  Up ahead is a McDonalds and a Burger King.  I’m wondering which to get him.  Communication is hard, his tongue muscles are very weak, he slurs, he can be hard to understand.  So I’m in my head wondering which restaurant he would prefer.

“Old McDonalds.”  Dylan says, answering a question I hadn’t asked.  This isn’t abnormal for us.  He can read my thoughts.  Always has been able to.  We call him Psychic Boy.

Grandee, Erika’s mom, is seeing a healer, a layer on of hands named Joan Wulfsohn.  Dee is pragmatic.  Dee worships at the altar of logic.  Dee has no truck with magical thinking.  Dee believes in Joan and her healing hands.  Joan heals my Epstein-Barr, while my doctors continued to be completely baffled by the condition.  We decide to take eight year old Dylan to see Joan.  It does seem to help him, or at least he enjoys it and it causes no damage. 

I think there is a cure.

I think Dylan will be cured.

We are in a cabin in Big Bear.  Dylan starts tapping his forehead.  Not like he is in pain, more like there is something of interest in his head.

“Did you notice anything with Dylan?”
 
Joa
n
asks in her South African accent, “While you were in the mountains, did you notice anything?”

I tell her of the head tapping, and she grins.  “He is very receptive.”  At the same moment Dylan had been tapping hi
s
skull
,
95 miles south Joan had be practicing distant healing, deep meditation, holding Dylan’s brain in her hands. 

“In some cultures, a child like Dylan would be revered as a shaman.”  She says.

I just want her to cure him.

I am 50 and Dylan is a man of 28 with a scraggly beard.  He still loves teen movies and Raffi.  He has never learned to write, but he can read some.  I have just picked him up for our standing Saturday morning date.  “Aooooowww!”  He howls playfully.  “Foxy’s!”  I had just been thinking about where to go for breakfast.  Foxy’s is a local breakfast joint.  I scarcely notice that he can answer questions I don’t ask.

“You already have one son, Jared.”  We are sitting on Foxy’s patio finishing eating.

“I have two son’s, you and Jared.”

“One is enough.”

“I like being father to both of you.”  It is a half-lie.  Lately the long haul of fatherhood feels like it may crush me.  I have been an active on-the-job father longer than I’ve been anything else.  I need a break that never comes.

“Call me buddy.”  Dylan is not kidding.

“OK buddy.”

“Yeah buddy.”

“You want to be buddies instead of father and son?”

“Yes buddy.”  Radar boy has me tuned in loud and clear.  I’m wondering when fatherhood ends. 

Dylan knows when.

Dylan needs no cure.

Dylan is just fine.

I wonder, if that’s true for Dylan, if he is just fine the way he is, if he needs no cure, then maybe, just maybe I don’t need one either.

MAD BRUSH FIRES

The hills all around Eagle Rock are in flames.  Fifty years of chaparral fuels the wildfire. This is what happens when nature is contained too long.  With no burn-off, dried brush has stacked higher and higher until one random spark.  Then forty-foot walls of flame sweep down from the high country and into our once safe city. 

Twenty years ago Jared was two years old and the hills across from our house in Montecito Heights caught fire.  Helicopters roared overhead.  Fear soaked the air.  Coyotes and rabbits dashed frantic out of the brush.  And my younger son connected all the dots wrong.  Helicopters and sirens meant danger.  Firemen made fires.  He would tremble when a chopper flew overhead for years. 

Now the hills of Los Angeles are in flames and my son’s head is on fire.  I don’t recognize him any better than I recognize my city.  Ash is falling like snow, and the storm clouds are made of smoke.  There is a stranger inside my son, and my son is a stranger inside my home.

Jared is 2 and inconsolable.  I hold him to my bare chest.  Skin on skin, blood of my blood.  He is a lad of big emotions.  He is his father's son.  He has his mother's dark hair and dark eyes, but he has his father's heart.  I hold him until he falls asleep.  I lay him in his bed and rub my thumb in a circle between his eyebrows.  He is down for the count.  It is clear that rest is what he needs but if you make the mistake of pointing this out, he won't sleep a wink.  Or he might, but he’ll fight it tooth and nail.  I have the bite and scratch marks to prove this.

Jared is 23 and running wild in the streets.  He has drunk and raged his way out of his last four jobs.
 
He lets me know he is leaving home in a text. 
I m movin to SF cant liv wid yo wife.
I take him at his word.  Within ten days his bedroom is packed and boxed and transformed into a spare bedroom for our niece to stay in while she looks for a place.  He does not rage when he arrives home, tail between his legs.  He plays it off as if he expected it.  He keeps his rage buried deep.  He carries his rage, just under his bruised skin. 

What happened?  What off-ramp led to this foreign neighborhood?

Jared is 16 and missing from school.  I leave work and go searching.  His girlfriend climbs into my SUV and we roll.  We look at all the haunts.  He is in none of them.  Deep dread fills my heart.  “Rocko and Jared sometimes hang out in the Drunk Tank.”  I stare at her blankly.  “In Echo Park.  It's a house they call the Drunk Tank.”  That is all I need to know and I’m gone.