All the Wild Children

by Josh Stallings

  I wasn’t the only Stallings getting laid, no not by a long shot. My brother amazed his doctor by contracting the clap while in bed with hepatitis. I don’t think that was what they meant by bed rest.

  Lilly, not old enough to legally buy smokes, was all grown up and stripping. And getting her swerve on with some good men and some real winners. Arty who when running dope thin liked to punch her. The first time, Lark and I, at our mother’s bidding, had a rather physical talk with him. Bounced him off a couple cars, gave him a good old hillbilly talking to. Lilly yelled at us, called us assholes and went running back to her wounded baby.

  Shaun had her own wild runs, mostly with OK guys. One loser, Chad, he pisses me off, he has a girlfriend. Shaun is the other woman. It makes her feel cheap. So I have to drag him out of her bed and toss him down a flight of stairs. The little White punk pulls a knife on me. Brandishing it just like he’d seen in the movies. Without thinking, Ravenswood fear kicks my adrenaline off the charts. Everything goes into slow motion. I stand outside my body watching it react. My body grabs his wrist and smashes it into the banister. My body kicks him. My body picks his knife off the floor and grips it, point down, honed edge away from my wrist. My body is ready to punch or stab, just like Tomas taught me. Chad runs out and saves me from it getting any uglier.

  Chadly sits in his car crying. Shaun sits comforting him.

  “Chad’s afraid of you.”

  “He should be, the guy's a total asshole.”

  “I know he is. He says you took his knife.”

  “I did.”

  “He wants it back.”

  “Tell that pussy, it’s right here any time he want to come get it.”

  “He’s afraid.”

  “Then fuck him.” I walk away. She sits in the car with him again. She comforts him again. I am left alone, drinking rum from the bottle to stop the excess adrenaline jangling my synapses. I learn the hard way it’s a mistake to get between a fighting couple. Odds are they both picked the music and chose the dance.

  My breakup with Ingrid is as rough as it gets. From a distance I can see I was too much of a wimp to end it clean, so I was an asshole until she ended it.

  In a Tahitian restaurant over pork and Blue Moons, I tell her I have cheated on her.

  “With who?” Her eyes are tearing. She, who I loved, is in pain.

  “Let’s face it, I fucked them all.” I ended our love with that banal quote from Warren Beatty’s Shampoo. For the next thirty years of my life I will pull this moment out and use it to remind myself I am a weak sister.

  By the time I was twenty-one and met my wife, I had learned one or two things. Sex was never enough for me. I wanted their hearts and gave mine in fair trade. If I lied to them, I lied to myself worse, not that that makes a damn bit of difference.

  If I close my eyes they flutter across my vision. Lovely. Perfect.

  Ihad,for the time I was withthem, loved each and every one of them deeply and fiercely.

  To love so fully and so entirely is strong and brave. A girl said that to me once, sometimes I try to believe it. Other times I see what a sham of a man I am. Am I a brute, a weak sister, a brave man, or all of these in turn? That’s the quandary I live through most days.

  Bowie says - Just remember Lovers never lose. 'Cause they are Free of thoughts unpure. And of thoughts unkind. Gentleness clears the soul. Love cleans the mind and makes it Free.

  Bowies says - Suck baby suck. Give me your head. Before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead.

  And the colored girls go do da do doo da do do.

  GUNS

  From: LARKIN STALLINGS

  Subject: ALL THE WILD CHILDREN

  Date: April 11, 10:20:12 PM PDT

  To: Josh Stallings

  Earlier this evening I had dinner with Jack, Jord and your name sake at Black Dog (you know, the joint with the bucket o seafood). It's cold and rainy here in MV and the place was empty. We got a table by the fire. I can't convey how cozy it was. The rain and mist on the harbor. Lights from the ferry as it crossed from Woodshole. Warm and cozy. Jack and Jord drank a bottle of red between them. We talked and laugh a lot. We don’t get much time together any more. I miss it. Jordy brought up how there was a lot of talk about the pros and cons of legalizing the carrying of guns on college campuses. We all agreed that is crazy. There was a girl killed in our neighborhood in Houston recently. Some idiot shot her with a gun he thought was empty. I told them about the time Lilly shot the Christmas tree in West Virginia. The story makes Jack uncomfortable. She forgets where I come from. I closed by telling them that if they ever felt they needed a gun call a cop. Josh reminded me that I carried a gun for years. He had seen it. I told him that I didn't any more and that it was just a totem that made me feel safe but actually put me in danger. I am a dad. I am not sure if I was telling the whole truth, but I love my son and I don't want him to ever feel the fear you and I felt when we were his age and most of all, even though I know it's a fools errand, I want him safe. I pray a lot.

  I’ve done what I can. Mom and Dad are in love and the kids know it, not an issue. We all had lobster and dessert, Dad's an earner and the bill's never an issue.

  I came home and read your work. Got me in the gut again. I don't know if anyone but us will ever relate, but I am glad you’re writing it, if only for us. I look at where I am and the family that is now sleeping in the warm little cottage on an island safe from madness and I don't know how I got here from the story you just told. I don't know how you got to the house on Hermosa or to the high dollar job in Hollywood. How would anyone get to here from there? You couldn't, the trip would be too much for you. We did. No idea how.

  I love you bro. Regarding any load I carried, I did the best I could with what I had at the time, so did you. I raised you some, and through it you raised me too. Most of all we were brothers and friends. Flesh and blood. Heart to heart. I wouldn't change a thing (except the ditching you part, I was a prick and deserved the split head for sure).

  Big Love, Larkin

  How much denial does it take to be a parent? To survive without hanging yourself in the closet? Imagine you come home from a date only to find your oldest son behind the sofa aiming a shotgun at the door, while his midget sidekick aims a .38 at your male friend. Imagine your son, the one you struggled through labor to deliver because of his melon sized Stallings head, tells you they are just fucking around with blank guns. They are props for a film they are shooting. How much denial does it take to swallow that?

  Not as much as you’d think. The psyche is built to shield us from unacceptable facts. So when your oldest son Lark tells you the reason your Volvo has a bent frame is he hit a polar bear in the fog, you buy it. You do if you’re my mom.

  The truth as I know it? The guns aimed at the door? Lark and Tanner had just been ripped off trying to cop a key of top-notch grass. They thought the dealers who had ripped them off were coming back for more. The bent Volvo? Lark was jumping a berm down on Alpine, a dirt road below our house. The Volvo took off better than you would think, it was the landing that fucked the frame, coming down nose first as it did.

  Polar bears, movie props, you believe what you have to, to get through the day and stay out of that closet.

  I am 50, the puckered scar on the top of my elbow is obscured by time. The flecks of gunpowder driven under the skin are all but invisible.

  I am 14, and home alone. I have found my brother’s snub nosed Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special. I unload it and replace one cartridge. I spin the cylinder and snap it closed. Russian roulette, why is it called that? Cold war propaganda? Did the Russians invent this particularly brutal game of chance?

  I snap back the hammer.

  I’m a pussy, so I look to where the shell is in rotation, making sure it isn’t under the hammer. I put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. Snap! Case-hardened steel hits an empty chamber.

  I spin the cylinder again. I pull the trigger. Snap!

  And again. Snap!
Snap! Russian roulette is dull if you know where the bullet is. I’m not nuts enough to play it any other way. I’m not suicidal. I’m bored.

  Through sheer gauze curtains I look out on Hamilton Avenue. Palo Alto is suburbia to the tenth power. A teen rides down the street. I track him with the revolver nestled in the crook of my arm, like some TV cop. I pull the trigger and pretend it has fired, I make the bang sound and everything. I pull the trigger again.

  The roar is deafening.

  Flame shoots from the barrel singeing a hole in the curtain. The windowpane explodes out. Where the bullet lands is anyone's guess. But the kid on the bike rides on, unaware of how close he came to a real bad day. The crook of my arm is bleeding from the nick the bullet left exiting the barrel. The powder burn leaves flecks imbedded in my flesh.

  As the shock wears off, I go into cover my ass mode. I take the burned curtain down and hide it at the bottom of the dustbin. I open all the windows to air out the distinctive smell of cordite. I clean my arm the best I can, and bandage it. I will wear long sleeves for the next month. I will tell my mother I was playing kung fu and broke the window with a broom handle. She won’t think twice about it. I will not tell Lark I found his gun.

  Within six months I will have a pistol of my own.

  Within six months we will be back up in the house on the hill.

  Within six months Tomas, Jorge and I will be staying alone there on a Friday night. We will pick up a teenage hitchhiker. We will all get stoned and drunk. Tomas will wake up on the floor, hung over. The blue jays out the window will be squawking, ripping holes in his head. He will open a window and fire seven shots from his Browning. The birds will go silent. The hitchhiker Tomas hadn’t seen under the window will go pale and start to cry. We will laugh our asses off every time we speak of him.

  “Guns are dumb,” Jackie, Lark's wife, said. I can’t put it any better.

  VIOLENCE

  Fact: my grand father was a rough kid who came up in a rough time on the wrong side of Long Beach. In the sixth grade his teacher said, “Harold Stallings, you will spend your life behind bars.” He did, he became cop, spent his later life as Chief of Corrections, behind bars. He also spent his first forty years in bars as often as possible. He was long time sober when he passed.

  My father stole his first car at 16. It was a Ford coupe. Black. Sexy. He did it to impress a girl who sold lemonade on the boardwalk. As he tells it, the keys were in the ignition. The car was in the driveway. The owner could be seen washing dishes. Pop took off the brake and let it roll down to the street. He then drove to the beach and parked in plain view of the boardwalk. It was important the girl saw him get out. He knew this would cinch the deal with her. He walked down an incline and was almost to her. She was smiling. He swallowed and started to speak, “Hi I saw-”

  “Hal, you best come up here.” His father stood between the patrol car and the stolen Ford coupe. Busted.

  The second car he took at gunpoint. He was nineteen and serving in the army. He was at a bar, hustling a redhead. She was laughing at his jokes. They drank bourbon. They smoked Lucky Strikes. She could French inhale. He could blow a line of smoke rings. His cash ran out. Party over.

  He wanted the girl, so he did what any drunk Stallings man would do. Went back to the base, to the armory and checked out a .45. Drove to a lonely stretch of Highway 1. Hid his car and stuck out his thumb. The good Samaritan who stopped for him smiled.

  “Need a lift soldier?”

  “Yes I do.” Hal only slurred a little.

  “My son is serving in Korea, Army 5th. You shipping out soon?”

  “I’m in the MP’s, stateside.” Sweat seeped out of his hairline. He fumbled for the automatic.

  “What’s wrong there son, you OK?”

  Instead of answering Hal pulled the gun.

  “Oh son you don’t want to do this.” The man was trembling. Hal was trembling. The barrel shook as he spoke.

  “I need your wallet.”

  “Don’t kill me, please, I have a wife.”

  “Wallet.”

  Hal took $47 and asked the man to step out of the car. He then drove away, leaving the man not more than a hundred yards from a pay phone.

  Highway 1 snakes along the coast of California. There were no cut offs, no intersections for miles. In the dark of the car Hal felt the tension start to leave. He smiled, then let out a drunken whoop. Images of that redhead laying down on a motel bed, her eyes welcoming him, pleading for him to have her, played out in his mind.

  He was two miles from the bar, when he rounded a corner and was blinded by white light. Behind the lights, two cop cars stood end to end blocking the highway. Haloed by the light a cop stood aiming his shotgun at Hal. For the briefest moment he thought of running. But the big man with the shouldered shotgun convinced him to hit the brakes.

  “Pop, what were you thinking?” I asked him a few weeks ago when I was in Seattle interviewing him for a biography I’m working on.

  “I don’t think I was. If I was, I was thinking about that redhead. In court the guy I robbed told the judge I had the eyes of a stone killer, he had no doubt if he hadn’t done what I said I would have killed him.”

  “Stone killer, huh?”

  “I suspect any man pointing a pistol in your face looks like a killer.”

  Grandpa Harold was a great man to me, he and Grandma Eleanor did as much to shape who I grew up to be as anyone. They lived in the same home in Los Angeles for my entire life. They loved me hard, and tight. In their care I always felt safe. They were my father's parents. His experience with them was very different. They were kids when they had him. They had no support. Grandpa was not sober yet. None of that made a difference to my father, he was a kid who had violent parents in a time when smacking your son around was called disciplining him. Saying it hurt, was called talking back.

  My old man tried to strangle me, that’s all I can remember of violence against me, but everything I know about human nature tells me that wasn’t the only time it got physical. My mother broke the sturdy stalk of a Red Rider bb rifle over the back of a dog. I know she slapped Lark so hard she fractured her wrist, he was eleven at the time. I know she and Lilly always got into it. I hear tales of broken hairbrushes. These tales feel like ghosts and rumors. I am trying to access memories tucked long away for my own safety. What I can say for sure is, my parents never understood personal, physical or psychological boundaries. I grew up in chaos, bedlam.

  Given that, it really isn’t, or shouldn't be a surprise to anyone the amount of violence in Lark’s and my story. We have been fighting to blood for as long as I can remember. It was how we talked some times. With sticks and stones. I can count the number of times there was any real anger on two fingers. One was the infamous rock to his head. The other was much later when we were almost grown. The rule of battle was simple, kick each other’s asses until someone cried uncle or bled. No one ever cried uncle.

  I am at Paly the first time I intentionally let the beast out to play. That little boy rage that broke the glass door and split my brother head. Tantrums, is what they called them. The beast, is what I call them.

  At Paly, there are a group of football jocks who have taken to calling me fag, faggot, queer. I am not sure if it is because of how their girlfriends look at my tight jeans or maybe it is just the worst slander they can think of. They have weak imaginations.

  I am 16. I have gay friends from the disco. I don’t really give a fuck about the insult. But the underlying anger scares me. They roam in packs. They look like they enjoy hurting people. Their bullshit is ever present and inescapable. I hate meatheads. I hate stupidity. As a friend puts it, I will suffer anything but fools.

  It is lunch. Louise and I are off campus at the outdoor shopping center across from school. We’re sharing a takeout of fried rice. I’m telling her about a Bad Finger LP I just got.

  “There is no such thing as a bad finger, if you’re lonely enough.” I’m laughing at her. She is randy and swe
et. We made out once at Ingrid’s, before Ingrid and I were an item. We are good friends. We are walking. Laughing. Not looking.

  “Hey faggot!”

  “This is our parking lot fag!”

  “Yeah fucking fag!”

  Somewhere deep down I have had enough.

  “This is not yours.” I’m pointing at the asphalt.

  “Sorry cunt hear you fag.” They are all laughing. I scan them. Six in all.

  “Fuck it. I’ll fight your baddest right now. Step the fuck up.” The street side of my brain is calculating. One might kick my ass. Six could kill me.

  “Take him down Blue!”

  “Do it Blue!”

  Blue, I never even knew he had a name before that moment. He bobs and weaves up to me. He swings up a hand and slaps me. He quickly follows with a slap from the other hand.

  My arms hang at my side. I let him slap me. I have no idea how this slap boxing game is played.

  “Fight back faggot.” My face stings. My face is red. He slaps harder.

  Keep it coming Blue. Hurt me. Scare me. Meet the beast.

  “Leave him alone you jerk!” Louise touches Blue from behind.

  Blue spins and kicks her in the crotch.

  I fill with rage. The world goes into syrupy slow motion. I watch myself grab Blue around the torso and lift him off the ground. I watch as his body is slammed onto a car windshield and again and again. Three times his head bounces off the safety glass.