All the Wild Children (32 page)

After he is gone I discover he stole my Epiphone arch-top, power tools, the camera Erika gave me for Christmas and my laptop.  I want to strangle him.  I want to pound his head into the wall.  I am a ball of rage.  I am glad he is gone or I would hurt him.  I love him and I want to do him harm.  That he would steal from me, me who would give my family anything they needed. 

“It’s not personal, it’s what junkies do, they steal,” Erika tells me.  I want to yell at her.  Not because she’s wrong, just because she is in the room and he isn’t.

A month goes by.  We haven’t heard a word from him.  His dead car sits, a steel statue to my failure to guide my son off the rocks.  I put it up for sale on Craig’s list.  A mechanic looks at it.  The frame is bent, the radiator burst.  Jared drove it with no water until the head cracked and the engine seized.  He had abandoned it a block from our house.  That night he almost made it home. 

The car sells cheap.  I come home from work and it is gone.  I feel freed from that night, that moment.  We had helped him get the little black Hyundai, back then he had a job and what looked like a future.  No, he still has a future it is just bleak as hell.  When he was little he wanted to play for the NBA.  Then he wanted to be a musician.  In the 5th grade he told me he was going to go to Stanford.  Going to a high school for the arts he wanted to be a filmmaker and an actor.  His teachers loved him.  He was a brilliant star of possibilities.

Three months before his twenty-sixth birthday I was at Bouchercon, a crime writer’s convention
,
whe
n
I got a call: “Hi, Josh, this is Corrine’s mom.”  (Corrine had been Jared’s girl, he lost her when he went back to shooting dope.)  “Do you know where Jared is?”

“No, I haven’t seen him in a month.”

“I got off the freeway at Silver Lake and he was holding a sign that said ‘I’m Hungry.’  I called out to him but he hid himself behind the sign.  He wouldn’t come to me.”             

“I’m Hungry.”

Now it occurs to me that if he is found dead I may never know. 

Now it occurs to me I may never see him again.

Now it occurs to me I know nothing.  He may come home, he may become a cop or a chef or a battleship commander or a ballerina.  He may become less hungry. 

Me, I will learn to be whatever I’ll be.  And that has to be enough.

Rain pours down across Los Angeles.  My son’s winter coat, the leather one I bought him that reminds me of the Ramones, it is in the barn with the rest of his things.  Last week I found him sleeping in the barn.  Woke him with a boot to his chair.  Raged at him.  “I have always had your back, always.  No more.  Now all I have for you is anger.”  Please don’t let those be the last words he hears from me.

Jared was a band-aid ripper from the git.  Every time I’d put it back on, he’d rip it off until there was nothing between us but pain.

I am 50, in my office typing these words.  Jared is on a run.  Wherever he is sleeping I hope he finds warmth and love and his one thing that makes it all worth fighting for.  He and his brother were that one thing for me for years.  Now just like him, I am looking for my one thing again. 

This story never ends, I simply stop typing and it rolls on.  Today I went to the Glendale jail and spoke to my son through a phone and video screen.  He’s down for possession.  Says it wasn’t his.  I let the lie slide between us.  Behind me a young Latina is flashing complicated hand signs.  Behind Jared a young gangbanger is flashing signals back at her.  They are using our time to make contact, the guards don’t see it.  I am distracted as the boy shakes where tits would be if he was a girl, he is trying to get her to jiggle ‘em for him.

I focus on my son, his beard is long, his hair dirty.  He is coming down off a rough hard road.  He tells me he has th
e
fl
u
.  I think he is kicking dope, but I don’t say it.  I tell him I’m pissed he stole my shit.  I tell him I creeped houses, stole other people’s shit when I was young, so maybe it’s karmic justice.  The screen is flashing 1 minute left.

“I love you son.”

“I love you too Dad.” 

I won’t post his bail, he knows it, says he understands.  I don’t get to say goodbye before the screen goes cold blue and he is gone back into the POD.  Back into his caged world.

Twenty years ago I tucked this little man into a bed, a pallet on the floor because he wanted to be nearer to his big brother when he slept.  I told him a story I made up with Vikings and robots.  I sang him, “One of these mornings you gonna wake up singing, spread your wings and take to the sky…” I drew swirls with my thumb on his brow until he fell asleep.  Putting that lad to sleep, loving him hard, that is the easiest job a man will ever do.

BABY BOY CRAZY

In the waiting room of the mental hospital, I sit alone.  Longing for that one perfect moment to return.  The one that never comes, and is only dreamt.  Forever ago, I was holding a child in my arms.  He was hot and wet from his mother's womb.  He was pure possibility. 

I’m the father.  I fear only the exterior.  The random car, the red light missed, look both ways, hold my hand and you’ll be fine.  My son never - no really - NEVER went into a public restroom alone.  I am THAT father.

My Viking ancestors inform my cells, danger will come from beyond the sturdy walls I built around my son’s childhood.  In my keep he is safe.

He is two and not walking.  A stone falls from my wall.  Only one, the wall is solid.  He is safe.

Your son has a chromosome break.  Another stone crumbles.  He is developmentally delayed.  Just a term.  My mortar is fresh, the rocks are river rounded and hard.  My wall will hold.

My beautiful blonde baby boy.  He has his father's hair, and smile.  They tell me he is slow, and he teaches me to slow down, tie bandanas around our heads.  We play pirates safe in the courtyard I have built.

We get a dog with one blue eye, the other brown.  My son laughs, and dances and presses his tiny fingers together, signing for more.  Speech is slow to come.  But it does.  It is slurred.  I understand most of his words.  He is safe. 

On the street his hand never leaves mine.  SAFE.  We walk through heartache and high school.  Summer camp and dances.  And.  And schizophrenia.

At twenty-five my darling son rages and trashes his room.  He tears at the stone wall.  With bloody fingers he claws at the crumbling mortar.

The police place handcuffs on my baby boy.  They take him to a place with no forks or belts or laces.

Schizophrenia.

Genetic.

It lay dormant in his DNA.  Waiting like Iago, to take our castle down from within.

Genetic.

A danger passed from father to son.

Genetic.

A danger not outside.

Genetic.

A danger, a spy, a mental assassin in the blood.

Schizophrenia.

So now I hold his hand.  We watch the world spinning mad.  I wonder what he sees. 

I am sorry my son, I was never able or meant to keep you safe.  All I can do is bear witness to all of you.  Great and small.  And I hold your hand.  That I can do.

GREEN FREEDOM

I’m walking in the field, wee sheepies gambol about.  I am standing on the blood soaked battlefield where my wife’s clansmen fought and fell to keep their windswept rock hard corner of the world free.  Here is where the MacLeans and MacKenzies massed, held their ground and died.  Over there, Jacobites fell. 

Scotland the brave, you bet your ass. 

Culloden is as somber as the sheep are silly as they play among the grave markers.  They have no idea they are playing on death’s field in the gray mid-morning.  No, they only know some inner voice called them out to play.

I feel the tug of a desire to fall heroically in battle.  To have my life mean more than knocking out the bills.  Silly.  I have more in common with the wee sheep than the fallen warriors. 

I stand in the battlefield, watching Erika as she honors the place of her clans and I wonder if my boys will bless me with grandchildren.  I doubt it.

When I go to that green freedom will it have meant more than this?  Will it end a line that led back to that Viking battlement?

Will my boys end that conversation?

And if so, so what?

Will my ashes give a rat's fart whether or not I leave a marker on a rock in a battlefield in Scotland, or if I leave heirs to carry my name?

I bet not.

Erika and I have soup and sammies in the museum's café.  We walk Inverness, mouth of Loch Ness.  She holds my two middle fingers in her hand.  This moment is as important as any other.  The memorial stone for this moment would read...

HE LOVED HER FIERCE, THEY LOVED EACH OTHER, BECAUSE OF AND IN-SPITE OF, ALL LIFE HAS TOSSED AT THEM.
 

The sea stretches out, gray and calm at our feet.  I hold Erika’s small hand.  We dance across the round smooth stones.  We are free in our ignorant bliss.  Let the monument read, if you must place one...

HE LIVED AS FREE AS HE COULD GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES -
  no  -
HE LIVED  HIS LIFE
- no -
WE LIVE BEST WE KNOW HOW, AND ALL TOO SOON IT ENDS AND HEROES AND FOOLS ARE BOTH JUST AS DEAD WHEN IT IS DONE.

LOVE IS GREEN, it’s an open field in the hills above Palo Alto.  It’s a long walk with Torso the wonder dog.  Green is the color of Erika’s eyes.  Green is miner’s lettuce, water rich, plump and ready to chew.  Green is the dew on the hills of Skye.  Green is the sea that crashes against the jagged granite of Skye. 

We walk, Erika, me, no one else. 

She weeps for the sheer beauty of Skye.  She feels a tug, deeper than heart, from her clanswomen.

Now it is gray.  We are standing in the center of a ritual stone circle on the Isle of Lewis.  It took a plane, a bus, a train, a rental car and two ferries for us to reach this moment.  Throughout our travels Erika carries ashes of her mother, Dee.  We say two silent blessings for a woman we both loved.  The grey ash is taken by the wind and flutters twisting into the grey air and it is gone.

Two years later things seemed relatively stable at home so we take a second trip to Scotland, this time taking Erika’s father Jim with us.  We stay on the Island of Mull, the Scottish side of his family’s ancestral home.  It is wonderful.  And while we walk the bays and lochs and moors, while we stomp about in the heather, my baby boy Jared throws a brick into a hundred year old plate glass window.  His rage is brought on because we had the audacity to ask him to stay away from our home while he is drinking.  He too has put his hand into the mental health genetic grab bag and come up with manic depression.  In his manic phase he is the smartest person in any room.  He also rages when fueled by booze.             

We return from Scotland to discover the mass destruction Jared has caused.  I will find the blood splatters from the hand he cut on the broken window.  Ironically, I will find the apartment totally trashed, just as his brother had done before him.

“We couldn’t find you, you left no numbers.” - My sister Lilly says, pissed and indignant.  Twelve days out of communication in twenty-seven years.  We earned it.  But then again it is easy to judge when you have no skin in the game.

“
It ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do.” -
The Wildbunch

I am 50 and I have again watched the police take Dylan to a mental hospital.  Now I sit in the visiting room.  He is doped to the gills, trying to get him to sleep and break the mania’s back.  I am grieving the loss of all that I thought my life with these boys would be.  There is a day coming where I will have adjusted to this new normal.  Beyond that is a day where I will feel the pure uncomplicated joy of life.  It ain’t perfect, wasn’t ever going to be.  But some days when the wind is just right I hear the leaves rustle and remember how my retarded son taught me to slow down and see, really see, the magic of leaf covered branches in the wind.

ROLL CALL

Tomas - MIA

Tanner - MIA - Last seen working in Holland and Cambodia, center of the heroin golden triangle.  Word is he’s clean.  I pray that’s true.

Michael Kowalski - DOA

Tad Williams - Father of two.  Husband.  Best selling author.   Still the best friend a man could ask for.

Jochum Therkleson - Father of three.  Sculptor.  Living in Copenhagen.

Dean Smith - DOA

Arthur Tittel - DOA

The women I loved - I ended the relationships badly.  They are all MIA, but not forgotten.

Jared Stallings - On the road with a good woman and dog named Blue.  He’s drifting around the south, his Great Grandpa Harold’s ancestral hunting grounds.  He may settle down in Austin or keep drifting.  He is a good brave man, still searching for his one thing.