All the Wild Children (5 page)

If there is any tender bittersweet ending to all this, I can’t see it.  I wish I could find the perfect sentence that would make us all go, “my that was terrible, but isn’t it uplifting how they survived.” 

Truth is we didn’t.  And we did.  I was talking to Shaun tonight on the phone.  I told her I was writing about our childhood, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to let her read it.  Told her it was a rough read. 

“It was a rough childhood,” she said and we laughed and laughed.

SUMMER OF LOVE

I am 10, and standing at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury.  I am overwhelmed by the din and constant barrage of color.  I lose the ability to move, I stand letting it swirl around me.  Pedestrians ebb and flow around my island.  It’s a circus.  It’s a gypsy caravan.  It’s thrift store full of floral print exploded onto the skinny, hairy, people. 

“Hey little bud, how you doin’ man?”  The man has blue stars painted on his face.  He is tall.  He is a teenager.  He leans over.  “You wanna turn on?”  He holds out the end of a hand roll, just like my father smokes.  Only it smells sweeter.

I shake my head.

“That’s cool, groovy man.”  The blue star man boy fades into the surging sea of hip.  I can’t help but smile.  Everyone here is smiling.  Everyone is happy.  A teenage girl with flowers in her curly red hair takes my hands and dances in a circle to the beat of a band only she can hear.  The sea takes her away, but casts a fresh faced child onto my shore.  The child is six, he is wearing faded but clean overalls and nothing else.  He looks up at me.  He is nervous, his lower lip trembles.  I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue.  A laugh bursts from the child.  I grin and strike a fresh goofy face.  He laughs deep, from his belly.  A mother’s hand breaks the surf and lifts the child up and back into the sea. 

It reminds me of the fairies on the land where I grew up, the land we left.  If those fairies were large and had a party, it would look just like this.

“JJ come on.  Dad’s waiting.”  Larkin grabs my hand and pulls me towards the fish and chips shop.  I let myself be pulled.  I squint slightly out of focus and over my shoulder I watch the wonderful fairy sea.

We eat fish and chips served in newspaper.  Dad is tired.  He works as the night manager at a Best Western motor lodge.  He dates a stripper named Kay.  She has a son that Dad would like me to meet.  Luckily that never happens. 

The two brothers and two sisters stand on Haight Street and eat fish and chips.  This is the summer of love.  This is the year I am ten.  My father stands beside me, his pants are always streaked with color.  He rubs his hands on them when he paints. 

My father is an artist. 

I am 14, I am told I was conceived on the Mexican side of the border, in the front seat of a Morris Minor.  Try and absorb that.

My parents and the two older siblings had lived in an artist colony outside of Ensenada.  They were headed for th
e
State
s
.  They were broke.  They were always broke.

My father tells me that Mexican prostitutes will lift their skirts to fuck you, but refused to take off their dresses to be painted.  The dichotomy makes him laugh. 

I am 30 and in therapy when I realize two things about these tales.  One, my father knew prostitutes when he was with my mother.  And two, if they know exactly where I was conceived, they weren’t having sex very often.

I am 10, in San Francisco, in 1968.  I have no idea of any of this.  My parents have been divorced over a year.  My father is still trying to be in our life.  He hasn’t left for L.A. yet.

I am 10 and for a moment the world is full of color and joy. 

Things I learned from my father, malt vinegar on fish and chips, never tartar sauce or ketchup.  Crab is best eaten on the rocks down by the bay with plenty of sourdough bread.  Art is meaningful.  Art is all of ours to share.  Art is what you make of it.  Art is process.  Art is an act.

I am 10 and I’m painting.  I have no fine motor control.  My brother and sisters can draw.  I can’t.  My father loves my broad wild stroke.  Art is a process.  Art is an act.

In Golden Gate Park Janis Joplin is playing with Big Brother and the Holding Company. My father is sitting on the grass, he has wrapped Shaun in his Levi jacket, she is sleeping on his lap.  The rich smell of his tobacco wafts over me.  His thumb and forefinger are stained brown.  My big brother and sister are out among the dancing crowd.

And I am standing still.  Taking it all in.               

A big round earth momma lifts me up into her arms.  She is a symphony o
f
India
n
print.  She is a gypsy goddess.  She clutches me to her chest, swaying to the music.  My head rests on her round soft bosom.  I am home. 

She smells of rosemary.  She smells of vanilla.  She smells of fresh baked cookies and sweat.  I am safe.

It is the summer of love and for a moment my world is soft and safe.

It is 1968 and I am 10.

LIVE WITH IT

From:
              LARKIN STALLINGS

Subject:
              Re: some new shite

Date:
              March 23, 7:31:54 PM PDT

To:Josh Stallings

Read the first 28 pages of All The Wild Children in one sitting. Tough.  Hard to read and remember. 

I've wondered but never asked about the
 end of Mom and Dad up close.  It was weird enough through Gma Smiths jaundiced eyes. Tough.  Hard to read and remember. 

I am pretty sure that Lilly went to Jordan and I went to 5th grade at
 Escondido, though fuck it, the story is better the way you wrote it.  I remember it vaguely anyway.  I didn't go to detention, cause I knew how to stuff and play the game.  I held it all in till it all blew up and I beat some big mouth as close to death as a 10 year-old could, with my James Bond 007 lunch pail.  Sean Conery, loved that guy.  Do I owe an amends?...aw fuck em.

Parting thoughts.
 

One: Yes, God does love me
 more.

Two:
 Rough Childhood? Hell yes.  But what a blast. A little crazy down the line, yes, but fuck it, crazy is what kept us sane.  Who gets to do the shit we did and get to live to tell the tale?  It's really a blessing. I think it really is.  Maybe God loved us all more. 

I love you more,

Lark 

From:
              JOSH STALLINGS

Subject:
              Re: some new shite

Date:
              March 23, 7:31:54 PM PDT

To:Lark Stallings

Brother, thanks, I now know what the next section is. It starts with your e-mail. Then  this e-mail back to you.  A hit man was on the Today Show, he has a memoir he’s hocking.  Ann Curry (I think) is interviewing him.  (side note: Could Ann Curry be any hotter?)  Curry asks the man hiding behind the silhouette if he used a silencer in his work. 

“
Heck no, ma’am.  I used the biggest, loudest gun I can find.  Broad day light in a packed restaurant.  Boom!  Boom!  Scare the crap out of them all.  No two patrons ever remember the events the same.  I am alternately a six foot Black man, a short wiry Porto Rican, rotund Cuban.  Almost never the average wasp I am.”  Anne Curry shakes her head in disbelief and they cut to a commercial.

All my Love and Madness,

Josh

In many ways I think Lark took the biggest hit from the divorce.  Not that any one noticed at the time.  He was stoic at ten.  He had responsibility heaped on his young shoulders that would break a grown man.  And he bore it, until he couldn’t and then he shot dope.  But that is years away.

It’s 1966 we’re in yet another fucked up used VW driving home to the mountains.  Stanford is still weeks away.  I’m in the backseat, Larkin is in the front.  My mother is driving.  She is crying.  She’s crying all the time.  She carries ratty tissues in her pocket, she always will.  Later it will be for hay fever.  Now it is for tears.  And snot.  And I’m in the back seat as we wind around La Honda, headed up to Skyline.  I’m trying to imagine my life without my dad.  Who’s going to fix things when they break?  They always break.  Who’s going to be the artistic lightness to my mother’s dark, work-will-set-you
-
fre
e
ethic?  Who’s going to finish reading Pooh Bear to me?  

My mother stops crying.  We drive without speaking for a few miles.  I listen to the road under our wheels.  I listen to the creak of the flexing metal.  I listen to the wind blowing through the gaps in the body panels.  I look at my brother.  His face is empty.  No emotions are leaking out.  Whatever he’s feeling, a team of CIA trained therapists wouldn’t get it out of him.

“Larkin?”

“Yeah Mom.”

“You’re father won’t be coming home.”

“Yeah.”

“That means you’re the man of the family now.  I’m counting on you.  You know I am.”

“Yeah Mom.”

I am 8, and even I can see this is some fucked up shit.  Not that seeing it will keep me from heaping my share of burden on his shoulders.  The guy can handle it. 

When we were kids he was the one they gave bibles to, yeah hell of a birthday gift right?  Pull that on me and they would have heard about it.  Never would have occurred to them to give me a bible anyway.  We are all given names and labels when young, hell maybe even at birth.  Lark is the solid one.  Josh is the wild one.  OK, they might have had some evidence to back that up.  As a toddler I figured out how to get out a window and jump into the rose bushes.  By the time I was four I had had my stomach pumped three times, for drinking deadly substances.  At maybe four and a half I drove a jeep down a hill and into a tree.  That one I lay at St. Larkin’s feet.  We were playing Roy Rogers, I was Gabby Hayes to his Roy.  And Gabby drove th
e
Jee
p
while Roy shot bad men and did other heroic acts.  We were on top of a steep drive way.  I don’t know who took the parking brake off but I’m guessing I didn’t do it alone.  Roy jumps out, leaving Gabby to handle the driving while he runs into the house screaming  “Josh is driving the Jeep!”

Now you can take all of these disparate acts and draw a line to Josh is a trouble case.  Or... just maybe... little JJ was smart enough to know he should run for the border, that the wheels were coming off this family wagon train.  Maybe. 

I am 6 1/2, my father still lives with us.  We are still in the mountains in
the house on the hill
as we called it.  The hippies at Black Mountain commune called it
The Land
.  At six and a half, I call it home.  My big brother and sister are playing a game they like to call revving little JJ up and watching him spin.  It doesn’t take much to get my rage meter pinned.  On this particular day their tactic is to lock me out of the house.  And taunt me from behind the sliding glass door. 

“It’s not fair!  Open!  The!  Door!”

“Make us!”

“Yeah make us!”  They are laughing. 

My face is growing red. 

My heart is pounding like a drum.

I pick up a brick. 

I feel its weight, blood pounds in my temple.

“Open it or I’ll...” I cock my arm, ready. 

“You won’t.”  Lilly laughs at me.  Lark laughs at me. 

The brick hits the sliding glass door.  It shatters.  Sharp glass spears spill into the living room.  Nobody is laughing. 

“I told you I would!”  I’m screaming.  I’m afraid.  No one is hurt this time. 

When my parents get home, my dad is apoplectic, rightfully so I guess.  We will have to pay for the window.  We will have extra chores.  We will not be trusted.  We will still be left alone, just not trusted, I’m not too sure what that looks like in actuality. 

In my bed that night I go over it in my head.  I wonder how broken I am.  I don’t feel guilt.  I feel righteous.

I am 7.  My brother is walking away from me.  He and his friend Mark won’t let me come with them.  They tell me no babies allowed. 

It is not fair. 

They work their way down a steep incline. 

“Wait for me!”  I am shouting. 

My face is growing red. 

My heart is pounding. 

I pick up a rock.

They don’t even look back. 

The rock sails out into space. 

My brother screams.  Blood pours out of his scalp, matting his hair. 

“Sit in your room and think about what you did.  And don’t move until we get back.”  My dad is so angry he has gone past rage to calm.  I sit my ass on the bed in my room and don’t move.  Three hours is long time to think about what I did.  I don’t feel righteous.  I feel guilty.  I know I am broken.  In some fundamental way I am not like my brother.