All the Wild Children

  ALL THE WILD CHILDREN

  JOSH STALLINGS

  All the Wild Children by Josh Stallings

  Published by Snubnose Press at Amazon

  The copyright belongs to the authors unless otherwise noted. 2013. All rights reserved.

  Amazon Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  FirstAmazon Original Edition, 2013

  Cover Design: Eric Beetner

  Amazon Edition, License Notes

  All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  "Josh has done an incredible job with the hand life dealt him. I admire the hell outa that. All the Wild Children is simply Stunning." - Ken Bruen

  "What is most remarkable about All The Wild Children isn't the rhythmic fleetness of it's earnest prose, nor the relentless pace, nor the fantastic nature of its plot, nor, even, the fact that it is all true. What is most remarkable is that Josh Stallings managed to survive malicious fate, addiction, and the belligerent idiocy of his youth, and somehow find some dregs of fortitude remaining that allowed him to put it all on the page with a rare degree of honesty; willingly admitting that truth is fleeting and that this is no more than his best recollection of the storms and what they left behind. Laughing in the face of brutal misfortune and epic poor judgement is a tonic. One that Stallings graciously invites us to imbibe with him. Drink up. God knows Josh did." - CHARLIE HUSTON

  “Someday, this will read much better than it lived.” - Lark Stallings (1975)

  What you are about to read is at best the recollections of a man with a weak memory but a strong sense of what it felt like. Truth is personal. We are all the heroes of our own narrative, this is mine.

  This book is dedicated to Larkin, Shaun and Lilly. Strong feral children and brave and honorable and if given a choice they are the three I would have gone through our mess of a childhood with.

  INTRODUCTION by Tad Williams

  Every word that Josh writes in this book is true. I tell you that not just because I witnessed and participated in many of the events, but because that's who Josh is -- he's compulsively honest. People who are afraid of themselves often are. Honestly, he's one of the world's best humans, but he doesn't seem to know that. He won't even believe it when I write it here for everybody to see.

  The parts of Josh's story I experienced were all in the 1970s, when we invented irony. By we, I mean the kids that grew up in the years after the great explosion of the counterculture. When I say we invented it, I don't mean the concept or even the practice, but that it was our generation -- disgusted by The Establishment but also annoyed by hippie optimism -- that made it the cultural norm. (And now the snotty global language of the internet era. Sorry about that, world.)

  We were experimenting heavily with drugs and drink and sex, of course, but in the particular circles in which Josh and I ran, we were also deep into scenarios and identities. Maybe we were waiting in a trough between cultural waves, in a sense, waiting to see what the next curl was going to be. In any case, we took what was there, weaving an identity for ourselves out of suburban snarkiness, Black and gay culture, theater, pre- and post-punk attitudes toward the mainstream and "ordinary people", and a reverence for Hunter S. Thompson and his works.

  When you're older you can see how all of the decades have passed and how they've each changed you, but when you're a child becoming an adult, what's in front of you is the only game in town. For better or worse, you have found your social milieu. It will surround you for the rest of your life, get name-checked in nostalgic discussions, jump out of car commercial soundtracks like an aged showgirl out of a cake.

  We came along after the hippies, and in some cases they were parents of ours, or at least zoned-out older siblings. We didn't mind the zoned-out part so much, but we didn't want to escape society, we wanted to control it -- or, failing that, live in it free and unfettered, like happy anarchist rats in the walls. I don't remember worrying once about how I would make a living, even long after the age I should have been aiming toward something. It wasn't because I thought anyone else would support me, my parents or the government. I just felt confident that I'd eventually be able to find a way to live while doing what I loved. Astonishingly, it worked out. Not everybody's dream did. We were a generation who had many disappointments later, friends and heroes dying from the twin plagues of drugs and AIDS, but we started when people were still playing folk-rock on the radio and singing about sunshine and giving peace a chance.

  So when Josh talks about his dad leaving, he's also telling you about a personal time that a whole generation experienced in a larger sense, where we 70s kids consciously stepped away from the more outwardly radical lifestyles of our immediate elders and back toward the mainstream, but with the distinct idea of ourselves as not having given in. We were secret agents, moles, almost, by our own definition -- in society but not of society.

  A lot of that was bullshit, of course, to excuse ourselves for not being as radical and active as the preceding group of youth. And a lot of what we felt was unique was the same stuff all groups of young people feel. But even if people as a whole remain much the same from generation to generation, society itself changes, and we were born into a great deal of change, Peace and Love versus the Cold War. I think that defined us all, even the kids who had less interesting childhoods than Josh did. From the start, we walked on shaky ground.

  But one of the things we did take directly from the 60s folks who preceded us was that we believed life should also be fun -- interesting and unexpected fun, not just picnics and church socials and team sports. We were actors and artists and musicians in the suburbs and had to make our own excitement, so it could get pretty creative. It was also part of trying on new identities. When Josh tells how we once pretended to be English musicians (for weeks and weeks) it's not just about fooling some cute girls into thinking we were cool (although it was certainly about that) but also about the unspoken idea that, in some sense, we could be anyone we wanted to be. That brains and balls and a sense of humor could make anything happen. (That list is metaphorical, by the way. I knew lots of women back then, including Josh's sisters, who were ballsy as hell.) That idea of "anything is possible" cut both ways, of course. You can start a company in your garage that will change the world, but you can also watch your parents give up on being parents and decide to try something new with their lives.

  Anyway, whatever else had happened in the preceding ten years -- call it 1963-1972 -- we young people of the next decade felt that nobody was going to force us back into a social mold again, not without a fight. That principle we absorbed from our elders. That we took to heart.

  Less certainty and more freedom. I guess that's what was at the heart of our brief moment, when we were the young in-crowd. We had an almost unlimited set of possibilities laid before us. Not all of us made good decisions, of course, and some of us never recovered from the bad ones. But Josh, like many of us, managed to survive that unfortunate period many of us go through, when we think we can outlive anything, or stop caring whether we do. He came out the other side. But he also paid attention while he was there, and as you'll see when you read this book, he th
ought a lot about how to take the good and bad and make it all into something significant.

  He did, too -- both in his life and in this very, very fine story about his life.

  “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

   Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

  

  FROM THE DAY ROOM OF A MENTAL HOSPITAL

  I am 50, and I am sitting in the day room of a mental hospital. The world around me is

  muted colors. Scuffed white floors and walls. Pale green scrubs. The dayroom is full. Brown skin, light skin, crazy is democratic. Men, women, in between, crazy takes no sides in the gender war.

  Crazy takes casualties.

  Crazy takes prisoners.

  Crazy is the woman rocking back and forth wrapped in her Snoopy blanket, her once blonde hair matted thick as any dread.

  Crazy rails.

  Crazy cries softly.

  Crazy is my son.

  His eyes come briefly into focus. He looks around at the damaged inhabitants of the day room and then at me. His eyes ask, how did I get here? And I wish I knew. So I start to write this book. I think it is about my son. I know it is about much more.

  I am 5, watching my older brother Lark as he kneels to say his prayers, he is seven and my best friend. He speaks to Jesus. I think he must be faking it when he prays, because I am. Or maybe he really does hear God’s voice. Maybe God talks to him because he likes Lark better than me.

  I am 6, my folks are at each other again. Their screaming is part of the background noise of my life. Like traffic in the city only this noise you don’t get used to.

  I am 7, and my father is yelling at my mother. She screams back. I stand between them and rage, “You told me God doesn’t want us to fight, so why are you!” Good Quaker logic I think. I'm thrown against the wall. My father’s hand on my throat. Pinned.

  I am 50, and wonder why I still feel the grip of that hand.

  I am 7, and my father’s angry hurt eyes beg me to back down. Beg me to give an inch so he can let me go and hug me without admitting a child’s victory over him. The trouble is. Always is. I’m not capable of backing down. Born without a reverse gear. A cornered raccoon will try to kill a dog three times its size. I know this because I’ve seen it. The dog was mine. A cornered raccoon has only two choices, die or kill. No white flag. No calling uncle. My dog wasn’t as committed to the battle - he thought walk away was an option. He was wrong. If not for a rifle bullet through the raccoon’s heart, my dog would have died that night.

  My father holds me pinned. I can smell the tobacco on his breath. My jaw sets and I will not cry, not with my back to the wall. My father looks in my eyes and knows he must kill me or walk away. He walks away.

  I am 8 and my father no longer lives with us. We move from the country to student housing at Stanford. Our eighteen acre back yard becomes a patio. My brother and I share a room. A blessing. My sisters, who are separated by six years, share a room. A curse. In one summer everything we know changes. I learned early not to trust change. The mother goes to grad school and works. The father works nights, sleeps days, dates a stripper. We kids raise each other the best we know how. Later we will say we were raised by wolves. Wolves that loved us, but wolves none the less.

  This is the new normal.

  Inarguably.

  Get used to it.

  Of course this is an over simplification of a childhood. It had good and great and awful days. Some days my mother was there. Some days my father took us to the park. Some days my little sister Shaun and I would play in a drainage ditch and makeclothes for fairies out of pounded algae. My brother and I will go to high school in the ghetto. We will carry guns. We will sell drugs. We will creep houses. We will fall in love. We will get laid. We will survive. At sixteen, Lilly my older sister will have had enough. She will move to L.A. She will shoot dope. She will strip for a living. She will give me my first David Bowie album. At sixteen I will go to L.A. and study acting.

  I am 50, and I wonder how the first sixteen years of my life can still hold such sway over me.

  My brother tells me you have to just put that shit away and move on.

  I wonder if he has.

  I wonder if God still loves him more.

  Lilly says, “Life tastes like watermelon, life tastes like aspirin.”

  I can’t argue that.

  RAIN TIME

  I am 50, and the asphalt reflects ruby taillights up at me. The visor on my helmet fogs. Small rivers and tributaries run down it. My view goes syrupy. I wipe with a gloved hand and smear the highway into an impressionist painting. The BMW R1200R feels surefooted, strong, Bavarian. It was built for foul weather in mountain countries where they ride year round. My brain searches the swirling world for visual warning signs ahead.

  I am 6, the wheels have already started to come off my family. We are on Alpine, a dirt track of a road. Rain slashes down on the old VW bus. Pops is driving, Mom sits beside him, they are laughing at something Shaun said. I’m not listening. I have my face pressed to the side window, feeling cool on my cheek. I watch my breath turn to condensation on the glass.

  I am 50, on highway 101. Rain. Rain. No time to stop. It’s my wife’s birthday and I promised her I’d make it home in time to take her to dinner. I don’t break my word as easily as I once did. Somewhere on the road it became important to me. Red smears ahead warn of brakes being hit.

  I am 6 when we slide in the mud. My brother and sister are yelling. I just stare out the window in mute panic. Forty feet down the steep bank is the creek, now gorged and fast moving.

  I am 50, and driven. I will keep my word to my wife or die trying. Am I a noble man? Or a guilty man? I spent the weekend before her birthday at Laguna Seca racetrack. I know, without her saying it, that the combination of me, a motorcycle and a racetrack scares the shit out of her. Motorcycles aren’t safe.

  I am 32 when the Mustang skids out of the DMV and collides with my Harley. My left great toe is crushed beyond repair. My femur is shattered. In the hospital they won’t give me pain meds, they assume I have brain damage. “Give my husband something for the pain. If he’s telling jokes it is because he is in serious pain.” My wife watches me die and be revived in the ICU. That was 18 years ago. Not that she has forgotten.

  I am 6 and scared. The van’s right wheels slide off the road. In a slow, gut sickening moment we tilt. Gravity presses me against the window.

  I am 50 and my fingers are wet and frozen.

  I am 6 and the van is slipping down the bank. The river rushes up towards me. My mother is yelling something that is muffled by my fear. There is a thud and a splash and we aren’t moving any more. The window I’m pressed against is brown with mud.

  I am 50, and decide I don’t want to die in the rain. At Paso Robles I turn inland, east toward the 5 and out of the rain.

  I am 6. My father’s strong hands are around my wrists. He lifts me out of the sideways van. No one is hurt. My father teaches me and my siblings how to walk with our feet sideways, up the near vertical muddy bank. This will in time become one of my happiest memories. We are a family for that moment, united by mud and an incline.

  I am 50 and I hit a dust storm. The 5 is fog thick and choking with dust. I will never forget my ride through this surreal brown world. A world where airborne tumbleweeds fly across the road only to explode into confetti on a truck’s grill. A world of twenty feet visibility and then endless swirling brown earth. A world where breathing is hard.

  I am 50 and eating dinner with my wife and I think you just never know what in the pages of your life will be good and what will be bad. I kiss my wife and remember to make the tale of the rain and the dust feel safe. I remember a rainy day when my father taught me to walk sideways and we were a family.

  THE DUMMY

  “Your son is just not as smart as other kids Mrs. Stallings.” - Doctor 1

  “Some children are just clumsy, can’t all be athletes.” - Doctor 2

&nbs
p; I am 7, and reading my first chapter book. It’s about otters, they are sliding down an ice covered hill. I am struggling. Fighting claw and tooth for every word. By sheer force of will I am going to beat this book into submission.

  My eyes hurt.

  My brain aches.

  I have taken four pages, then five... so many left. I don’t count or even look at the stack of unread pages. Rover, our three legged Scotty is barking from the woods behind our house. As opposed to the woods in front of our house or on the sides. We live on eighteen acres in the Northern Californian mountains.

  Rover keeps yapping, he might be in trouble. He might need me. No, his barks don’t sound like he’s in trouble, but you never know.

  I’m at page seven when I set the otter book down and go outside.

  The day is hot and smells like dust. I love the feel of dry earth on my bare feet. I love the sounds of birds and wind in tall trees. I love these woods. Out here I’m not stupid, or angry, or clumsy. I am a boy of these woods. I have on the green jerkin my mother sewed for me. I have the Little John staff my father made for me. My brother is Robin Hood, but he’s spending the night at a friend’s.

  Little John is on his own to rescue Rover from the Sheriff’s men. I take my task seriously. I move with stealth and grace. I hold my staff at ready, not to be taken unprepared. I slip past the blackberry bramble, stopping midway I kneel down to speak to Tangle Thistlerod. He is an inch tall, very tall for a fairy. He is Queen Starshine’s most trusted warrior. He is a general of the Columbine order. Tangle Thistlerod carries the wounds from more battles than either of us can remember. The troll battles aren't too bad; Tangle and his troop have flight and intelligence to balance against the troll invader’s size advantage.