All the Wild Children (6 page)

They send me to Paul Warner.  The same man who isn’t helping their marriage, doesn't help me.  I don’t actually blame him for any of it.  Our family is FUBAR.  Who am I to judge him.  I am an angry child, who will turn into an angry teenager, who will turn into an angry young man, who will beat up refrigerators and yell and frighten his own small children.  I will never lay a hand on them, so maybe that’s growth.  Or maybe I’m just not as honest about how I feel as my father was.

My father left when I was eight

Who I’d follow

Was left up to you and fate

I love you big brother

You are infallible

Most valuable

To me

I am 11.  It is 1969.  I write a song for my brother.  For his birthday.
 
Forget the extra helping of cheese and bad wordplay.  Look at the sentiment. 
In-fucking-fallible. 
Try and live up to that big brother.

I know I couldn’t.

But what’s another pound to an elephant, right?   Hell the boy had the house on his shoulders, what was one brick. 

I am 40.  It is 1998.  I call my brother in Texas where he now lives.  I have just uncovered an unexamined falsehood.  Not a lie, but not the truth.

“Lark you son of a bitch, you told me a premature orgasm was if the man came before the woman.”  I’m laughing.  Teasing the bugger.  “Not that any of the women I was with minded, but it was a lot of pressure for a young guy.”  

“Yeah, I can see that.  One question.”

“Shoot.”

“How old were you when I gave you this sage but lacking advice?”

“Twelve.”

“Shit dude, I was fourteen.  What the hell did I know.”  And in that moment I get it.  He was just a kid.  He was always just a kid.  But he was eighteen months older than me so I thought he was grown up.

MY FATHER

My father is an epic poem waiting to be written.  My father is pin pricks of starlight.  We lay on our backs and he names all the constellations.  I will never look at Orion without thinking of him and the mountains and the smell of night in the upper meadow. 

I am 6.  It is daybreak.  I need to know what things are called.  I think I will make sense of the chaos if I know names.  I point at a red flower, a shooting star.

“That’s Columbine.  The purple one is a Bleeding Heart.  That over there?  That’s an Iris, see the black ink marks?”  My father is naming all of the flowers in the fields around our house.  “California Poppy.  Missio
n
Bell
s
.  That one’s a Buttercup, put it under your chin to see if you are in love.  The green is Miner’s Salad, you can eat it.”  It tastes cool and wet.  “Lupine and Clover and Fairy Lanterns” - everywhere color to be named.  I have these same wildflowers tattooed spiraling up my left arm.  As I type they remind me of where I come from.  They remind me to be honest.  They remind me to name the names.  The red skinned trees are madrone.  The shrubs are manzanita.

My father is a harbor from my mother’s anger.  My father is a raging storm. 

I am 50, I search for a happy memory of my parents together.  I find happy memories of my mother, see her laughing in her peasant dress.  I can smell yeast and flour on her hands.  I have happy memories of my father.  But never the two of them in the same frame. 

I call Lark, there has to be one memory tucked in there.

There is a long pause.  “I got it.”

“OK, I’m ready, shoot.”

“Remember them on the beach, San Gregorio?” 

I do.  Bonfires, bright heat against the cold northern California air.  My parents and their friends drink red mountain wine from big jugs.  Me, skinny, with blue lips from cold.  I snuggle into mom’s poncho.  My father sits beside us, playing his dark brown time worn Martin.  The adults are singing Woody Guthrie songs, protest songs, train songs.  This land was made for you and me.  Midnight special shine its ever loving light. 

“Were they all Quakers?”

“I think so.”  He is quiet again.  He’s thinking.  I can see the way his brow knits, it’s subtle, but I can see it.  Or imagine I can, he’s in Houston, I’m in Los Angeles.  “Hum.”

“What?”

“I remember now, they would have a Quaker meeting up at our house, and after they would potluck.  They would drink red wine.  And our parents would smile at each other.  Damn, the only time our parents got along, they were drinking.  And I became a drunk, any big surprise?”  He’s smiling, I can hear it.

“Yeah that’s it!  If only our parents hadn’t a drunk wine, we would be able to drink like gentlemen.”  We’re both laughing now.  We’re both long time sober now.  Lark is in his car on the way home from running an AA meeting at the Houston jail.

In 1962 Quaker activists build a trimaran called the Everyman.  Their plan is to sail deep into the Pacific ocean in an attempt to stop Christmas Island nuclear testing.  My father petitions to be captain of the ship.

I want to volunteer as one of the crew members for the voyage to Christmas Island. You will want to know my reasons as I understand them. One night while my five-year-old son was suffering from an acute attack of asthma it struck me that if there was a father anywhere in the world who could do anything that might help or protect my child no matter the cost to that man, I would expect it of him. I would not feel that he had done anything special. The fraternity of fathers brings its own unique responsibilities. Now it is my turn. I see danger impending. The fathers who cannot protect themselves or their children are waiting for my response.

HAL STALLINGS

My father is made captain.  They don’t make it to the Christmas Island.  They are arrested twelve miles out.  Later my father tells me they never would have made it.  The Everyman was taking on water, the crew was grossly under skilled.  If they hadn’t been arrested they certainly would have drowned.

U.S. v. Stallings, Lazar, Yoes. (ND Calif., S. Div.) 3 Defs. sailed trimaran Everyman I out of San Francisco harbor toward U.S. atomic testing area (Christmas Island) in Pacific Ocean; boarded by U.S. Atty., crew arrested for violating temporary restraining order issued without notice or hearing.  Defs'. arrest 12 mi. at sea unlawful. June 7, 1962: DC after hearing found Defs. guilty of contempt; 30 days due to Defs. unwillingness to purge themselves of contempt by agreeing to obey future ct. orders. No appeals.

At sentencing my father made the following statement. 

I feel that I have let some misconception about myself grow in this courtroom. While this may seem overly personal and irrelevant in a courtroom, it is the only thing I know.  Yesterday Al Wirin and Marshall Heslep called me Captain Stallings. And up came the image of the self-sufficient seafarer striding the deck, facing the storm. It did not even hint at the cowering, afraid, sea-sick guy unable to even think for his own fear, willing to have his friends endanger themselves on that boat before himself.

(Marshal) Cecil Poole's question yesterday always hits me with fresh new import. "Hal Stallings—are you flagrantly doing what you 'durn well please'? Where did you get the right to think you alone might be right?"

I don't know that I'm right in any sense, I have neither divine nor human, neither internal nor external assurance that I'm right in any grand sense.  I yearn sometimes for a world where I can feel truly confident that my three-year-old who tells me in wonder and expectation that he wants to be a "builder" and build a home for his mother and me has a real chance to grow to be that builder; that at the very least I have done everything I can to protect that future.

I yearn not to remember when I put my kids to bed that there is a mother in Hiroshima putting her children to bed—their father dead—killed by radiation—killed in my and my children's "defense."

It is 1962 and my father goes to jail for thirty days.  He is a hero of the movement.  My mother is left at home with four kids and wondering how to feed them.  The woman's movement hasn’t reached the Quakers yet.  I hate having my father gone.

In 1963 My father is arrested blocking the entrance to the Livermore Nuclear Testing Facility.

1963 Mom and another Quaker woman pack up a VW van full of kids and head for the south.  There is a firebrand young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr. leading marches.  My mother is not late coming to the freedom movement.  As a young student she protested not being able to sit with her Black friends in a movie house.  She left Indiana and worked in an inner-city school.  She had been fighting for equality long before the TV cameras started rolling.

My siblings and me see lynching on the nightly news.  We see dogs and hoses set on crowds.  The drive south scares the hell out of us.  We are going into enemy territory, unarmed with our arms held wide open.

In Salt Lake City Utah I slam my thumb in the door of the van, smashing and cutting it pretty bad.  Thanks to the wide gaps in VW body panels I don’t lose any flesh.  I remember clearly my mother going door to door asking for ice for her son’s hurt finger.  Doors are slammed in her face.  She smiles and tells me they don’t have ice in Salt Lake City.  For years I thought it had to do with salt water having such a low freezing temperature.

November 22, 1963 President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.  My mother sits in her rocking chair weeping openly. 

November 25, 1963 President Kennedy is buried.  That brave little boy stands beside his mother at the graveside.  He stands for all of us kids.  He makes us proud as we stand beside our crying mothers.  Two days later I turn six.  I doubt there was much of a party that year.  Which is as it should be.

February 21, 1965 Malcolm X is assassinated.  My family mourns.

Summer, 1966 my father leaves.  My family mourns.

January, 1967 the nightmare that was our foray into public school ends.  We have survived one semester at Escondido before our sentence is commuted.  Whether it is because Lark beat that boy up (his theory) or my constant detention (my theory) or because my mother saw how unhappy w
e
wer
e
(her theory).  It really didn’t matter.  We were free, free at last, sweet lord free at last.

I’m smiling victoriously as I reenter Peninsula.  It has been raining.  Puddles lake the playground.  The mud gushes through my toes.  I am home.  For all of its failings, its rich kid, poor kid inadequacies, Peninsula is one part of my life that has returned to the old normal. 

In wood shop, I’m using a table saw to cut a wall for a barn I am making for Shaun’s plastic horses.  Above the saw, tacked to the wall is an official looking sign –

IN CASE OF NUCLEAR ATTACK

1) SIT UNDER A TABLE OR DESK

2) AVOID WINDOWS

3) SIT ON THE GROUND

4) PLACE YOUR HEAD BETWEEN YOUR LEGS

5) KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE

I am back in the bosom of the counter culture. 

It’s 1967.  A war is raging, the battle lines have been drawn in super markets and diners across America.  The foot soldiers are kids and old ladies.  The shock troops are the Black Panthers
,
redneck
s
with rifle racks, the Weather Underground, th
e
National Guar
d
.  The Kent State massacre is only four years away.  Things are heating up.

It is freaks against the straights.  Long hairs against the short.  Everything we do, dress, speech and action is a way to say we ain’t you babe. 

Straight old lady -
Are you a boy or a girl?

Hippy kid, JJ -
Unless you want to fuck me why do you care?

She knows I am a boy.  I know an eight year old saying
fuck
, will freak her. 

We are fighting for the rights of Black people to eat at the same restaurant as White people.  We are fighting to end an unjust war in South East Asia.  We are fighting to stop nuclear war from destroying our planet.  We are fighting to be heard.  We are fighting for our lives. 

The old lady is fighting because I with my long tangled hair and bare feet stand for all that she is losing.  I stand for the world that is crumbling under her feet.  I stand for the chaos lurking in the dark just beyond her porch light. 

1967, the hippy movement is ramping up, fighting hate with love and LSD.  Northern California bay area is the epicenter.  Ken Kesey lives over the hill from us.  Joan Baez lives down the road from our land.  Her husband owns Keplers book store, meeting place of radicals and poets.  Neil Young herds goats off Skyline. 

At the Human Be-In Timothy Leary speaks to 30,000 long haired kids in Golden Gate Park.  He says, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”  They take it up as a battle cry.  It is a year and half before th
e
Summer of Lov
e
, but the wheels are already rolling hard.  The straights are starting to panic.  Change is in the wind, and they are all starting to freak.  They can see the deal going pear shaped.