“Why not. Shoot the works.” My father strikes his zippo and fires a Camel. He drinks coffee and flirts with the waitress. He is skinny. He doesn’t eat.
“Man, my boy can eat, that’s what happens when you only feed them once a month.”
I laugh and keep shoveling waffles in.
I am 50, I remember being skinny, always cold. I remember how happy my father was that day. How the whole world was brighter when he was happy. If I could just keep navigating for him we could make it. Our rambles weren’t on a schedule. They would always come after a night of anger and bad dreams. They are my happiest memory of my father. They are the rare times I felt in control. If we could just keep driving we would leave the evil mayors in our dust trails.
“Dad?” We are pulling out of the parking lot back onto the highway.
“Yeah JJ?”
“Why don’t you love Mom?” His hands go white as they grip on the wheel.
“I don’t know... It’s complicated... I love her but...” he keeps talking.
I stop listening. I know the next words will be lies.
I am 7, and I know to trust the hands. Not the mouth.
I pull my jacket over my palm and clear a hole in the window’s condensation. I watch the sea disappear as we turn towards home, up that long curving mountain road. I know we will not go rambling again. My days as my father’s navigator have come to an end. No lighthouse warns me of the rocks we are about to crash on. There are no stars to guide us back from where my family is headed.
And at Black Mountain commune, a fourteen year old runaway builds a fire to make tea for her old man. He is sixteen, and trying desperately to grow a beard. She hears him grumble in his sleep. She rubs her belly and smiles at the beauty of this day.
PEOPLE GO AWAY
JUNE... I am 8. It’s the beginning of summer. No school. Warm days. Cool nights. The little lake still has enough water for swimming as long as you are willing to wade through the deep black muck and algae. Shaun and I are willing. She is six. She is a passionate child, prone to raging screaming fits and wild laughing jags. I like eliciting both in equal parts. My older brother and sister have been sent to Indiana to be with my mother’s parents. Shaun and I know our parents are seeing a therapist. We know because their therapist is Shaun’s best friend’s dad. The therapy isn’t helping. Our parents are either fighting or in stony silence. We are alone a lot in the mountains.
We are the lost generation. My brother and sisters and I. Not lost, just misplaced. It is 1966, a time to save the world. A time to save yourself. None of the old rules are helping. The youth are in the streets and nothing will ever be the same again.
Our parents, God bless their tiny hearts, awoke to the hippy revolution.
They were told turn on, tune in, drop out.
They were told to follow their bliss.
They were told to be free and find their inner child.
All the while their outer children were alone in the woods.
This is not a bad thing. I think we were saved by their absence.
Whenever they leave and I hear the car tires fading down the gravel drive I feel relief. The woods are safe. The rule of the Stallings kids, we take care of our own. No one is left behind. No hurt is left un-avenged. We only tell the truth to each other. Outside the four of us, you can say anything, words don’t count, we learned that at our father’s knee. But you don’t lie to your siblings. Never. No matter what.
Shaun and I spend long mornings playing with the fairies in the blackberry bramble. Shaun makes Queen Fen Starshine a hooded cape out of pounded algae. I make small swords out of rusty nails, I use electrician’s tape for the pommel. For lunch we make peanut butter and jelly sandwichesand drink glasses of cold well water. We sit on small prayer bench under a spreading madrone. The house was a Russian nunnery when my parents bought it. Orthodox crosses are cut into the shutters. They barely make the mortgage every month. We all know we’re broke, and teetering on the edge of losing everything. Why spare the kids that reality.
And here my memory goes blank. I remember sitting under the madrone and eating sandwiches with Shaun. I remember laughing as she tried to tell a joke.
“So the hippopotamus, his name is Jerry... This is in San Francisco, but not the zoo... and... oh yeah there’s a chicken named Larry... He has cowboy hat, but that doesn’t matter...” She has forgotten the punch line. So instead of admitting that, she riffs on, building an ever-expanding lead up, “They take a bus, to Los Angeles... It’s raining, and they forgot their umbrellas...”
“Larry the chicken and Jerry the hippo?”
“Yes... hippopotamus’ don’t care if it rains. But chickens...” No one can tell a joke like my little sister. She turns randomness into an art form.
We’re sitting there, eating sandwiches, backs against the tree trunk. I can feel its flakey rough bark and smooth skin, the dappled sun warming us. One moment we are sitting against that tree chatting...
And then we’re not.
We are in a shitty apartment in student housing at Stanford. Our pets are gone. Our woods are gone. Our parents are gone. My father to an even shittier apartment across town. My mother to work and grad school.
I am 8. Shaun is 6. Lark is 10. Lilly is 12. And we are on our own. Only, on your own isn’t safe in the flats. The flats have people. People who aren’t us. People who are clearly them. There is a common out our back door. Some grass and a small sand box. The kids here aren’t like the hippy kids we grew up around. These kids have a meanness about them. I watch four boys knock a sparrow’s nest out of a sapling and stomp the featherless chicks. I hate them. I can’t stop them. I hate my impotence.
I do what I can. I lovingly grow tomatoes from seed in the tiny patch of dirt out our back door. I love the plants. I love how they flourish with a little water and care. I watch the buds become blooms become round green globes. I water them every day. I watch them. They are beautiful. The fruit becomes yellow, then red starts to show. My mother says we should pick them. I want to cherish them one more day.
The next afternoon, when I come home from school I find all the tomatoes have been torn off the plants and smashed on the grass. I never grow tomatoes again. I learn to make up tales, long intricate stories I tell myself as I lay in bed. No one can take a story from you. No one can make you move away from a good story. If I can’t be with the fairies, I can make up legends about them. My fantasy life becomes mythic. General Tangle and General JJ battle ogres and trolls on far off shores. They sail long boats like their Viking kin. I read books on Vikings. I read Norse mythology. It speaks in ways that the Christ of my family never has. Norse gods screw up all the time. They do good, they do bad, they battle the chaos that is always outside the gate, just across the ice bridge. Waiting. Ragnarok, twilight of the gods. Chaos. It is all waiting. It is our job to hold it off as long as possible. It is a warrior’s job to never accept it, even as it pulls us under.
SEPTEMBER... No more hippy private school. Parents stop teaching. No more free ride for the Stallings kids. We are sent to Palo Alto unified public school system. We are to be split up. Lilly will go to Paly High school. Lark to Jordan Junior High. Shaun and I to Escondido grammar school.
OK, so I’m dyslexic, but even I can work this out. First your mom and dad split up. Second you have to get rid of all your pets. Third you move from the country into a small flatland apartment. Fourth the only people you ever trusted are sent to schools miles apart. Fifth the schools they send you to want you to wear shoes and act like a robot. Any way you add it up, it blows donkey dicks.
“I’m scared,” Shaun says as we were getting ready for bed. “What if the other kids hate me?”
“Nobody can hate you. You are consort to Queen Fen Starshine. You are a member of the court of the Royal Blackberry.” It is the night before we start the new school.
“What if they don’t understand?” Her brow is knit, tight, worried.
“Then I’ll explain it.”
“What if they ar
e mean to me?”
“Then I’ll kick their ass.” She looks at me. Thinks for a moment. Her brow unknits a small bit.
“Promise?”
“Pixie promise.” Solemnly we lock little fingers and shake.
I don’t sleep much that night. I lay in bed worrying. What if I can’t keep my sister safe? Who will keep me safe? It’s all falling apart. Does Ragnarok hurt?
Escondido grammar school and I don’t get along very well. That is an understatement.
I am holding Shaun’s hand as we walk onto the cement play yard. The kids can tell we are different. Like dogs they can smell we aren’t of their pack. We are the other they were bred to fear.
“There you are honey, I was looking for you. I’m Miss Franklin.” The woman takes Shaun’s hand. Pulling. Shaun looks at me. Shaun holds tight to my hand. “Now come on, first graders on the left, say goodbye to your brother, he has to get to his class.” Shaun’s hand slips out of mine and she is swallowed up in the mass of children. I catch a glimpse of her eyes through the crowd.
I hate it here.
I sit in an uncomfortable desk, in a row of other uncomfortable desks. Ticki tacky little boxes. This is what the song was about. They start the morning by all standing up like little robots and face the flag.
I don’t stand up.
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." They chant in unison. I keep silent. At 10:30 a bell rings, they call it a bell. I’ve heard a bell. This is more like a klaxon. The klaxon has the kids on their feet and heading out for recess.
I want to get to the playground. I want to find Shaun.
Mrs. Harris corners me at the door, “Josh, I know you’re new, so I will let it go today. But we all rise and say the pledge of allegiance. I know you love America.”
“Um, OK.” I rush out the door. Moving through the mass of kickball players, hopscotchers, tether ballers, and millers, finally I spot my little sister. She’s sitting on the cement. She is talking to no one. She is staring at the ground.
I start to run toward her, I trip over a kid playing catch.
“Hey watch it, spaz.”
I pull myself up and keep going.
The playground is divided by two thick yellow stripes. On one side is the bigger kids. My side. On the other is the kindergartners and first graders. Between the two is a five or six foot strip of no man’s land. I am running full tilt as I cross the line. I am within feet of reaching Shaun when a floral print dress blocks my path. Hands reach down grabbing my shoulders. Holding me back.
Miss Franklin tries to look friendly. She fails. “Hold on young man, you’re on the wrong side of the age line.”
“But my sister... I need... ” My face is turning red.
“You’re sister is fine. Now go on.”
“She’s not fine.” Miss Franklin shakes me firmly. “Let go fucker.”
I did not make it to Shaun. I failed. I do make it tovice-principal Davison’s office. For the first of five visits that week. He is actually not a bad man. He listens to me. He says he understands how I feel about my sister.
“You want to go take a peek in on her before you go back to class?”
From outside he and I look in on Shaun’s classroom. She is talking to another little girl. She is smiling. She is safe.
8:35 the next morning I am sitting outsidevice-principal Davison’s office. I had refused to say the pledge of allegiance so here I am.
“Alright Josh, what do we have this time?” Mr. Davison looks at the note I brought from my teacher. “You won’t stand and pledge allegiance to America?”
“Nope.”
“Are you a Communist?”
“No, I think we’re Quakers.”
“Don’t you love your country?”
“No.”
“Why would you say that?” Now he’s starting to get concerned.
“It’s a mean country. It hurts people. Kills people.”
“I’m sure that’s what your parents tell you, but it does good things too.”
“Doesn’t matter. Won’t say it.”
“Now son, sometimes we have to say something to get along, stay out of trouble.”
“I won’t.”
“How about, you mouth the words... but think, I don’t mean this?” He is really trying.
“No.” Poor vice-principal Davison, he came at it from every angle but he had just met the raccoon in me, no backing down no surrender. Every moment at Escondido I could feel my back against the wall. Give an inch and they’ll take your life. Never back down. Never surrender.
“Here’s the trick to winning a war.” General Tangle had told me a lifetime ago in the blackberry bramble. “You just have to be willing to suffer more casualties than the other guy.”
Wednesday it is fighting a kid who teases me for having long hair. Thursday it is swearing in class, but Governor Reagan is an asshole, so I stand by that one. Friday it is sneaking a peek in the girls bathroom from a hole in the boys. This one I didn’t do. Two other boys did. They are let off. I am blamed. Five short days I went from “that new kid”, to “He did it, it’s his fault.”
After school I have to meet with vice-principal Davison and my mom. The moment I see the way Mr. Davison looks at my mother I know why he has been so nice to me. She is that divorced grad student with the rack he keeps stealing glances at. Little does he know she doesn't have time for him or anyone, her dance card is three checks past full.
It gets easier after that first week.
I get used to being treated like a trouble case. I get used to the jeers at my long hair. I get used to Mrs. Harris’ glares as I refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance. It all became the new normal. The one where my father was gone and my mother is busy and my little sister is separated by a yellow strip of paint and my big brother and sister are across town.
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 sq
uint 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 theStates. 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.
All the Wild Children Page 3