All the Wild Children Read online

  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,redneckswith rifle racks, the Weather Underground, theNational Guard. 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 theSummer of Love, 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.

  My father is working nights at the Best Western. We see him on weekends. My mother is working on her doctorate. We see less of her. She burns one too many meals. Lilly takes over the cooking. We survive. Some days we even thrive.

  1968, April 4, four days before Shaun is to turn eight, Martin Luther King is assassinated. My mother is inconsolable... The country is inconsolable.

  1968, June 5, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles. The movement is over for my parents. Enough is enough. My mother will continue to fight from inside the system. My father will remain in the counter culture. He will become increasingly less political.

  By the fall of 1968 theSummer of Loveis over. Tripping has turned to drug addiction, free love to a venereal disease epidemic. Homelessness and violence rack the Haight. The dream is dead. The party has moved on. Theyouth rose up and got spanked down hard. In Los Angeles the Sunset strip is rocking. Hippies in L.A. work in movies. They cash in on the counter culture. Stone cold freaks like Dennis Hopper are making bank on hippy biker films.

  By Christmas of 1968 my father moves to Los Angeles. We see him less and less frequently. He says if you need me just call. The bad news is we’re kids and don’t know when we need help. The good news, we’re all we need, all we ever will need. We are a tribe of four. We are the Stallings. We are descendants of Viking warriors.

  My father is an epic poem waiting to be written.

  My father is a hero.

  My father is an artist.

  My father is an old man.

  My father is a drunk. Who sometimes pisses in his closet.

  My father tells me he always felt like this was a dress rehearsal and when his real life starts he’ll do it much better.

  My father knows his days are numbered. He will not go gentle.

  I am 15 and Dad says he wants to kill himself. It is not the first time. We are drinking rum and coke out on the catwalks over the bay lands. The sun is sparking off the open water.

  “Really feel like I can’t keep going. It is time to exit this stage.” He’s crying.

  “Pops, do it, or don’t, I really don’t give a fuck any more. But if you do kill yourself, you go out into the desert and dig your own grave. I don’t want to find your body. I don’t want to take your garbage out any more. I’m done, man.”

  I am 15 and I know what I’ve always known. He ain’t the patriarch of mi familia, he abdicated long before I was born. My brother and I are princes in a foreign land with no clear way home.

  IF YOU CAN’T BE SAFE, BE FIERCE - PART ONE

  1975, it is two in the morning and Lark and I are on the 280 freeway. Doing push ups in the middle of the fast lane.

  We are 16 and 17.

  We live on our own.

  1968, December. Pops is gone. Mom moves us back up the mountain to the house on the hill. I don’t bother to unpack.

  2001, Los Angeles, Dr. Meyers office.

  “Do you think I’m unstable?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Yeah, I am. But anyone would be.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  “Well, let’s us just see... my family moved eleven times in the sixteen years I lived with them.”

  “You left home at sixteen?”

  “No Doc, by the time I was sixteen, there wasn’t a home to leave, just the next place my mom had rented.”

  I am 9, and my sullen older brother is 11 and pissed off a lot of the time. Not that anyone but me notices it. You can stuff, but you can’t hide from your brother. It’s Saturday, Mom is working down the hill. Lilly is at Becka’s riding horses. Shaun is staying the night with Jenny, her best friend. (Note: Shaun will tell me she was there, in the woods, that day. She may have been, or not, but if she wants to be there in print, she will have to write her own damn account.)

  Lark and I are clearing rocks out of the culvert running along our half mile drive way. We dig the rock out with shovels and toss them up onto the crown of the road. Cars will slowly push the rocks into the dirt road, giving traction in the wet of winter. By the end of winter the tires will push the rocks back into the culvert and we will start all over again. Paving a half mile is expensive. Sweat and gravel are cheap.

  I like the work. It isn’t subjective. No one will judge you. The rocks are either out of the culvert or they aren’t, no gray area. No wiggle room to find it some how wrong. I like the way it makes my arms and back feel. I like how my body feels covered in sweat. I like how when I’m tired enough, I don’t think. Not thinking is good. The shovel is working its magic on Lark as well. He’s smiling, even laughing as I give him my best Fester from Gun Smoke. “Marshal Dillon, Marshal Dillon, Clem dun shot my hangy down part clean off.” I hold my ear and hop around from foot to foot.

  It’s afternoon when we stop work and trek back to the house. The day is hot, and near silent. Even the jays are keeping quiet. Our feet crunching on the gravelsounds loud in the quiet.

  “What are you hungry for?” Lark asks, one thing about the Stallings kids, they all can cook. “Big hunk of steak wrapped in bacon?”

  “That is gross.” I am a vegetarian. It happened at the renaissance fair, I looked at a roasting turkey on a spit and I was done. The moment had actually been set in motion two summers before when my Indiana farmer relatives thought it was a good plan to take the hippy Quaker kids to a duck slaughter house. Mechanized death got under my skin. And when a man dressed like Friar Tuck offered me a t
urkey leg I made the connection, I saw where I fit into the blood stained assembly line and I opted out.

  I pull out the peanut butter and jam and start to make a sandwich.

  “You’re laying it too thick, we both have to get a sandwich out of what’s left.”

  He was right. Iscrapeda lot of the peanut butter off the bread and back into the jar. “Weren’t things supposed to get easier now that mom started working?”

  “Doesn’t look like, does it? Let’s go up to the big lake.”

  We sit with our feet in the black mud, eating our PB&J’s. Lark picks up a stone and tosses it out over the water. Torso, our black lab, jumps in after it, thinking the rock is a stick or ball or bird or whatever his genetic program tells him he must fetch. The black goo is up to his chest before he hits deep enough water to swim. Torso paddles in a widening circle starting from where the rock splashed. I originally named him Thor, that became Tor, and in a week it was Torso and that stuck. Why my sister’s cat is named Nunzy, is way beyond me.

  After Pop split, my nightmares got worse. Every night the mayors in the crooked top hats chased me. I’d wake up sweating and screaming. We got Torso from the pound. He looked up through the chain link cage and I knew he was mine and I was his. That night he slept in my bed.

  He kept guard.

  The mayors never came back.

  At 50 they still haven’t. I sleep with a Bullmastiff now.

  “Torso, get the fuck off me, you stink. JJ your dog stinks.”

  “Yes my brother, he does.” Torso shakes himself splattering mud onto Lark. “Then again, so do you.” He wants to be angry. But my smile and laugher pulls him in.

  “Lark, do you miss Dad?”

  “No.” He is lying and I know, he knows I know. So it’s not really a lie, it’s just his way of saying drop it. We don’t speak of it again as we walk down the trail to home.

  In the front garden, I turn the hose on Torso and spray off the black muck. I release his collar and he shakes wildly and runs off to hide from the evil towel. A cold tingle runs up my spine. I look around, but hear and see nothing. Lark looks up, fear in his eyes.

  “Get in the house.” He didn’t actually have to tell me, I am already headed that way. The thing about kids raised around violence is you learn to read the unspoken signs. The tingle on my spine tells me to move and I move. You can’t trust the adults, so you trust your instincts.

  Lark closes the kitchen door and flips the bolt on it. Not that that will do us much good, the top quarter of the door is glass. We look out into the front yard. The only sound is our breathing. Then slowly we hear tires on gravel. It is coming towards us. I know it is not my mother, the only thing that sounds like an air cooled VW engine, is another air cooled VW. This is definitely a V8. American built. I know my cars, and this one is a stranger.

  A battered sedan rounds the bend and crawls to a stop in front of our house. The driveway doesn’t go anywhere else. If you come here, you come looking for us, or Ron and Katy, the young couple who rent a small cottage down the hill in the deep woods. Or you’re lost.

  The windows on the sedan are smeared, blurring the interior. The back seat seems to be full of newspapers and bags. The driver, from what I can see, is a man, old, he is either wearing a hat, or he is bald.

  We watch. We wait. We try not to hyperventilate.

  A fact of living where we did is, if you call the county sheriff you areforty minute away, at minimum, before any help will arrive. You learn to take care of your own. When the Santa Cruz serial killer was stalking our mountain range, I set movie lights facing out the windows so we could instantly light the perimeter. Lark and I rigged a flashlight to a shotgun so Mom wouldn’t have to aim. Point the light and pull the trigger. By the time we did that, we both were in high school and knew more about guns than any young person should.

  The driver’s door is on the other side of the car from us. The man climbs out. Over the roof I can make out a balding scalp, stringy hair plastered down with sweat. The man has grey stubble on his slack jaw. He is weaving as he walks towards the house. He looks like a sailor trying to move across a pitching deck in a storm. His clothes are dirty. He is walking up the steps to the door, he is looking straight at us.

  “Hi boys, I’m Henry, car broke down. Could you open the door and let me call triple A?” His speech is only very slightly slurred. We don’t move. We stare out at him. I discover what the rabbit feels when the lights hit it. My body is frozen, my mind skips a gear in disbelief, this can’t really be happening. I can’t really be here. That car is not really bearing down on me. This is the ultimate act of denial.

  “Open the goddamn door! I’m sorry I didn’t mean that boys, it’s just... Open this door!” He is twisting the knob, trying to get it open. And then he is gone. Down below the window and out of our vision.

  “Back door?”

  “What, what if he’s there?” I can’t control the trembling.

  “So the front door?”

  “No. We need to stay. We need to stay here.”

  “JJ, listen man, he will be coming in, a door a window I don’t know. But, shit. If we can get to the woods.”

  We are staring out the door, scanning for the man. It’s a hundred open yards from us to the trees. We are just about to break for it when I hear Torso whimper.

  The sweaty man moves into our line of vision. He has Torso’s collar. He is dragging him toward the door. “Yer dog wants to come in... Open up.” Torso is struggling. “Come on boys, open the door for yer dog.” The man is at the door. I open it. I don’t think. I turn the bolt and open the door. The man pushes. Lark pushes back. Torso’s muzzle is through the opening.

  My hand is still on the knob. I am frozen. I am terrified.

  Torso suddenly jolts backwards, ducking. He slips his head out of his collar and he is gone, running, free.

  The man puts his shoulder to the door.

  Lark is pushing back, calling me. “Josh! I can’t... you have..” He is straining.

  The man is shocked when I slam my body into the door. He stumbles back. The door closes. Lark slams the bolt home.

  “Back door! Run!”

  We run through the house. Out the siding glass door. There is a three foot path and then a steep brush covered slope. We are flying for a moment, our momentum takes us out, gravity pulls us down. I hit a manzanita plant, tearing my jeans and scratching my face. I don’t care. We are rolling, getting up and running. We bash our way through the brush and onto a footpath.

  When we get to the cabin, Ron the renter is sitting on his porch, smoking a pipe and softly strumming his guitar. He looks up smiling, the wild Stallings boys are at it again. Then he sees our eyes, our fear. And he is up and moving. We tell him about the creepy guy. Ron doesn’t question us. He believes us. He is rare.

  We are sitting in our living room, the creepy old guy is spinning a cap gun drunkenly, trying to tell us he had been in a John Wayne movie once. Ron stands between us and him. We are waiting for the police. I watch the old drunk and wonder if I got it wrong. Maybe he was a harmless drunk looking for a soft place to fall.

  The drunk old man looks at me out of the back of the police car as they drive away.

  He is handcuffed. He is on his way to jail. He is a wanted man. He is a pedophile.

  I am 50, and I wonder what those boys were doing alone in that house.

  I am 9, and I’m proud of myself and my brother. The boogie man came a hunting and we sent him away in cuffs. We survived. Stallings boys 1, boogie man 0.

  IF YOU CAN’T BE SAFE, BE FIERCE - PART TWO

  1975, it is three in the morning, Lark and I have climbed a power line tower. We are more than a hundred feet off the ground. High voltage is crackling like black cat firecrackers over our heads. Our hands are wrapped around steel beams. Our feet dangle into space. We are doing pull ups. We are alive.

  Lark and I are hooligans.

  I am 9. Lark is 11. He thinks he is a badass. So do I.

  �
��Try an stick me with the knife.”

  “No, I don’t wanna.”

  “Do it dude, I’ve been practicing tae kwon do.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, just try.” Lark has placed the knife in my hand.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Do it.”

  I do and the blade sinks a half inch into the fat over his heart.

  “Fuck dude!”

  “You told me to.”

  “Fuck!” The babysitter opens the door. She sees my brother, she sees the knife in his chest. She starts to scream. Lark pulls it out, barely any blood. No biggy. I’ve seen worse falling off a bike.

  “What is wrong with you boys?” The babysitter is yelling. We are laughing now. She never comes back.

  Forgetting the histrionics, hers was a valid question. What was wrong with us? Fucked if I know. I stumble in the dark looking at symptoms and hope they will lead me to a root cause, name it and own it and let it go. I’m no closer so I keep prospecting.

  There is a picture of me at 5 years old, sitting on my father’s lap. My strawberry blonde hair is wild and tousled around my face. My brother is turned away, all you can see is his freshly shorn head. Dad has a tight crew cut. Once a month my mother rounds us up and clips our nails and runs a trimmer over our heads. On haircut Saturday I would hide in the woods all day. It wasn’t some deep desire to have long or short hair and nails. No. It was a need even then to have control over my body.

  I am 11, my Mother sends me to an orthodontist. I don’t want to go. This battle with her and me goes all the way back to the womb.