All the Wild Children (30 page)

Erika is in the truck.  We cruise up Alvarado Boulevard.  Erika gets directions to the Drunk Tank from Rocko’s mother.  Rocko shoots dope with my son.  Rocko is smart as hell.  He is AP off the charts smart.  Rocko will be doing hard time by his nineteenth birthday.

Outside the Drunk Tank we sit at the curb.  “Whatever happens you don’t come in.  If it goes wrong, leave and I’ll meet you at home.”  I am calm as I take a Buck knife from the glove box and slip it in my jacket.  “If our son is in there, I will bring him out.”  I’m back in the ghetto fighting for my life as I move up the walkway.

Jared is 4, he has his red cowboy hat on.  He is riding a pony at Griffith Park.  His smile is pure sunshine.  I would do anything for that child.

“He’s not here.”  The girl at the door cops a small attitude.  A young man behind her sits on the floor watching I Love Lucy.  He looks up at me, all bluster and tough.  The girl starts to shut the door on me.

I push the door open. 

“You have no fucking idea who I am.  You see a concerned dad and have no idea where I come from.”  I am still, speaking without emotion.  Cold.  “I just got out of prison, and I don’t want to go back, but I will.”  It’s a lie.  So what.  “I’m not leaving without my boy.”

The girl breathes slowly looking up at me.  The kid on the floor watches TV like his life depends on it.  The mood I’m in, it may.

“I’m not leaving without my boy.”

“You won’t believe me he’s not here?”

“I won't.”

“Guess you’re going to want to search the place?”

“Yes, I will.”  I keep myself neutral, hand in my pocket on the knife, ready for whatever.  She steps out of the way.  I walk past the sitting young man.  He still won't look up.  The girl leads me from room to room.  Two stories and a basement.  I feel bad about scaring the girl, but not bad enough to stop looking for my son. 

I leave without him.

Erika and I go home and wait for the inevitable phone call.  I pray for the hospital as opposed to the morgue. 

Jared is 14, he and I are in London, hanging in a friend's flat in Islington.  Deb and I are talking movies and smoking.  Jared is on the floor with Jo-Anne, a crime reporter and her husband Jemar, a flamenco dancer, they are playing a board game and laughing.  He is amazing, he is my running mate.  My travel partner.

The phone call comes.  It is the emergency room.  My baby boy overdosed on opiates.  He will tell me they were pills he mixed with beer.  The nurse will tell me they found him out cold on the sidewalk, if a neighbor hadn’t reported it he would be dead.  I will call my brother and the next day, still hung over I will place my boy on a plane to Texas.  Two weeks.  My brother and brother in-law will clean him up and send him home.  Only it won't take.  He has years left to run.  His college fund will be spent on rehabs, and none will take.

The fire is 48% contained today.  My son is wild in the streets.  Out on a run.  I don’t know if he is still alive.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  I know that my ambivalence makes me sad.

The fire is 60% contained.  Erika finds soot in the downstairs bathroom sink.  Matches lit below a spoon to heat heroin leaves soot.  We learned this when he was sixteen.  That was six years ago.  Now it makes me feel hollow.  I feel shallow.  My emotions too weak to make it to the surface. 

I wonder if the LAFD will extinguish the wildfire before my son extinguishes his.  I wonder how it will make me feel.  To contemplate my son’s death, forces me to face what I put my mother through.

“Hey Ma... yeah it’s me... I’m fine...”  I’m on the cell driving across Los Feliz.  I don’t tell her about her grandson or my feelings.  I carry my own water.  “Boys are good... I just called to tell you I’m sorry for every time I made you worry if I was going to die.”  She laughs and thanks me.  She tells me a story I’ve heard before.

We are on the beach, I am seven or eight, I have an orange towel around my neck, like superman’s cape.  I start climbing a sandstone cliff.  My mother watches as the little boy scampers up higher and higher.  He is too high for her to catch if he falls.  He is too high for her to help.  She has two choices, scream up and tell him to come down, or turn away and not watch his daredevil climb.  She turns her gaze out to the water and prays,
God, this is Jane, please watch over my boy.  He’s in your hands now
.

Jared is 6, he and I are in Joshua Tree.  He wants to climb a rock cliff.  We do.  Both of us fearless.  Both of us aware we are sharing something very special.  On top of the rocky spire is a flat tabletop rock.  Jared looks out over the valley.  We are over a hundred feet in the air.  “I’m so glad Mom isn’t here!”  He screams, tiny fists pump over his head.

I am 50.  I miss that little boy who is so much like his father.

I am 50 and the fire is still burning in Los Angeles.

BROTHERS 2

My sons are both amazing, each in his way. 

Dylan is 22.  We are at an awards ceremony at Eagle Rock High School.  It is a mixed campus, mostly non-special needs kids.  They call his name and the auditorium erupts.  I had no idea the effect he had on his fellow students.  He strides on stage proud and strong.

I am 44 and need this day.  His little brother's drug addiction is going into year two and it is wearing me down.  You can only hurt so long.  But this day is Dylan's.  He earned this day.  Erika and I earned this day.  We are so proud.  I have told Dylan that if he graduates high school he can have his own apartment.  Over the last year we have been working to that end.  On the back of our property, behind our 1910 Craftsman we are building a garage with an apartment over it.  My boy is growing up. 

Graduation day.  Grandma Jane comes to celebrate.  I buy Dylan a new suit, new loafers, a shirt, a tie.  My boy is pimped.  I’m proud of him.  I’m proud of Erika.  She fought for every day he was in school; “Superintendent, Dylan has a right to an appropriate education.  Just like every other kid...  I’m sure I don’t need to call in an attorney...  Which school he attends will NOT be decided by the closest bus routes… Yes I want to see all available special ed. classes…  Look at his IEP, he will be mainstreamed, he will not be hidden on a special ed. only campus… I don’t care where the funding comes from, not my business, he will be going to Franklin High School…”

When the administrators see Erika coming they panic.  One principal attempts to funnel special needs money into AP’s budget.  He rubs Erika’s shoulders while he explains that these are complicated budget procedures, and that she really need not worry about it.

Two weeks later the special needs class is funded, Dylan’s teacher is reinstated and the principal is reassigned.  Tiger-Mother my ass, Erika is a mad dog who takes no prisoners.

She is 23.  She grows up fast.  She has no support, I’m working all the time so she can stay home.  She grows a backbone of steel.  She becomes unstoppable.  Our son gets the best education available.  He never knows all she has done.

On the day of Dylan’s high school graduation Jared loses his mind.  He is high as a kite.  I fight with him on his bed.  A window breaks.  Jared is screaming at me.  “If you try and put me in rehab I’ll kill myself.”

“No you won’t.”  I have him pinned, mind racing to the broken glass.

“I’ll kill myself.”  He is wild eyed, he looks like he hates me, or maybe himself, or us both.  He is not safe here.  We pack him into the car, I hold him so he doesn’t jump out.  Erika drives.  Las Encinas is a lovely old world Spanish influenced complex.  They have a juvenile lockdown psych unit.  Jared is stunned, deer in the headlights, as they ask him questions. 

He is non-responsive. 

He shouts rage with his silence.

I look at my watch and know Dylan’s graduation has begun.  My mother is taking him, she will stand in for all of us.  I will never forget her kindness and ease.  My mother is strong and loving under pressure.

I’m so angry I want to slam my fist through a wall.  I want to let the beast off its leash and tear this place up.  But in here they lock you up for that crap.  I go dead inside while they describe what the next seventy-two hours will be like, it won't be fun, he will be in a lock down psych ward.  It won’t be therapeutic.  It will keep him from killing himself until the suicidal mood blows past.  When two big orderlies lead my boy out, for a moment I see a scared kid, then that tough ass is back.

My last image of my boy is through chicken-wired safety glass.  I see the real crazy kids in there and know my boy doesn’t belong.  Yet I am relieved as we drive away.  At least for the next seventy-two hours he will not kill himself.  Of all the things drugs have taken from me, missing Dylan graduate tops the list. 

Time drags its ass across my life.  Dylan starts to work full-time as a volunteer in the Elysian Park Adaptive Recreation Cente
r
.  He helps take care of the younger kids.  He loves it.  It makes him proud.  He has an official L.A. County voluntee
r
badge and all.  He is good at this.  He keeps them safe.  He ensures rules were followed.  I never get in the car without hearing him tell me to put on my safety belt.

Jared is in and out of rehab.

Dylan has vertigo.  Bad.  He falls down at work and can no longer continue to do his job.  By now he’s living in the apartment we built for him.  We get him a job with a cool company, they have a work center and social events.  Dylan sits for four hour stretches counting bolts and putting them in bags.  I don’t see it soon enough but he hates it.  He liked working with the kids.  He liked feeling needed. 

Jared hits 19.  He cannot stop using so we kick him out. 

Erika and I stand on the street and watch our baby boy drive away, fairly sure it is the last time we will see him.  It takes three days before his car is jacked in a drug deal.  He is stranded in skid row.  He is protected by an angel in the guise of a six-foot tall tranny.  He starts to cry and she tells him he has to stop, “Do that around here and they will eat you alive.”  She saves my son’s life.

He is ready to get clean.  He comes home and detoxes in our living room.  It isn’t Linda Blair in the exorcist but it is close. 

Jared goes to meetings.  We have hope.  He gets a good sponsor.  He works steps.  All is doing well.

Dylan starts to get vertigo at work, falling on the floor.  A cute aide gives him attention.  I wonder if the falling isn’t an attention getter.

The wheels are now well and truly coming off our life.  I try to see the best outcome for the boy.  It is getting harder.  I look at the world through jaded eyes covered by rose colored glasses.  That is as true as I know how to say it.

Erika’s letter;

November 28
th
, 2005                           

Dear family, I’m writing to let everyone know about the crisis we are experiencing with Dylan. Very early in the morning on Sat. Nov.19th Dylan completely trashed his apartment. Although he remembers doing it and could tell us exactly where certain items were in the mess, he kept saying he didn’t do it, that his brother did. We kept him in the house with us Sat. and tried to calm and console him, as he was very emotionally fragile. He didn’t sleep more than four hours Sat. pm and ate very little. By Sunday evening he became manic, delusional and combative, hardly sleeping or eating.

We decided to make our trip to Texas thinking the change would be good for him, but he became increasingly less stable. The first night in Houston he had a fever and raged for four hours in the wee hours of the morning.

The Clash’s Straight To Hell echoes through my life.  I am 46.  We are in Texas for Thanksgiving.  I have little to be thankful for.  I have my son Dylan pinned down.  My hand is clasped over his mouth to keep him from waking Larkin’s family.  Dylan is raging.  He is insane.  We have no diagnosis for this, no label to give it a predictable shape.  It is the eve of my forty-seventh birthday and I don’t care what it is called.  I just want to make it through to dawn.  I am pinning him down.  My hand is over his mouth. 

The symmetry between this and my father choking me is not lost.  I still have no walkaway in me, no reverse.  If I did I would be long in the wind by now.  Instead I hang tough, just one more grunt trying to make it home for Christmas. 

Erika’s letter;

Since coming home from Texas on Saturday, Dylan has been somewhat calmer. We still monitor him closely, but he is eating normally and although somewhat oppositional he has not been violent. He just won’t sleep, and the manic behavior continues. This morning I've got calls out to the troops, his MD, neurologist, social worker, and Regional Center caseworker. Josh and Jared and I have been in communication with our 12 step sponsors for emotional support, and our minister just called. Several of our friends and family members are offering practical support in that they can come and stay with him if needed. Tomorrow we see his neurologist. So we are holding on. Josh can take a few more days off work, and we're hoping to find a daytime placement for him, or home care if he is unable to return to his program in Pasadena so Josh and I can both get back to work. He is frightened and confused by his own actions and sometimes says it is his brother who is having trouble, not him.