All the Wild Children

by Josh Stallings

  I am 50. I am on my cell phone. Lilly gets rabid aboutBritney Spears and how over sexualized young women are.

  “OK, maybe that’s true. And?”

  “It causes rape.”

  “No, assholes rape women. Blaming Britney is the same as saying, she was asking for it.” I can’t believe I am defending Britney Spears.

  “I read a book, on the internet, men get off watching women get shit on.”

  “Sick men. Sick men get off on that.”

  “What does it say about how we value women, where does it end?”

  “How’s the Sacramento River job coming?” I want to say it ends nowhere. It ends in snuff films. Fuck if I know. Most of it is just people doing people things.

  Nothing is as wicked as another couple's sex life, or as justifiable as your own.

  Shaun told me that.

  Give that girl a cigar.

  On second thought don’t.

  It is 1974. We fuck who we want. We fuck friends. We take our clothes off for money. We run wild in the street. David Nolland is becoming Nola, one bit at a time. He is taking estrogen, he is growing breasts. He wears his purple lame jumpsuit skintight. He has budding cleavage. He likes fucking girls. He is Hannah’s boyfriend for a while. Best I know, he isn’t gay.

  It is 1974, all bets are off.

  It is 1970. Lilly has spent all spring growing this amazing vegetable garden for the family. Our mother says Lilly never does anything around the house. Lilly uproots rows of corn. She uproots rows of spinach, lettuce, carrots, peppers. Tears are streaming down her face. She's an organic Medea, killing her children to spite our mother. Mud cakes her fingers. Blood seeps from cracked nails. She will leave soon. She will have had enough. She will not share a home with our mother for another thirty-two years.

  Lilly hates surprises. Actually all the kids of chaos hate surprises. But she really, really does. So when she comes home on her tenth birthday to find her friends in the living room, her response is to run to the big lake and jump in with all her clothes on. In a nutshell that is my sister. That perfect balance of the dramatic and the absurd. She is a master samurai clown. She is my sister. Mad as a hatter at times, brilliantly lucid at others. She surfs epilepsy and mania and depression and ADD and whatever else comes her way with panache. She drives me crazy. Sometimes I duck her calls. Sometimes I can’t wait to speak to her.

  I am 50, riding in her car. “Got the finish on the Watchmen trailer. I was up against six other trailer companies. It was a big deal.”

  “A big deal in a very small business.” Snap goes my ego. I am the one who always says I am a big fish in a small pond. But I am unaccustomed to having a sibling go after me. Generally in my family we leave the ego crushing to our parents. I guess things change. I now protect myself from her as well as Mom and Pops.

  I am 15 and stoned and drinking Cokes with a bunch of funny strippers and my sister. She tells me stories of hanging out with Iggy Pop and Jonathan Richman. She lived in a factory with a mountain lion she raised. She makes puppets that are so beautiful and tragic they will break your heart. She turned me on to Bowie. She may be the coolest person going.

  I am 15 and laughing my ass off. It is the 70’s and all bets are off.

  MOTHER'S DAY

  1870 –The first Mother's day -

  Arise then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: 'We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own, it says "Disarm! Disarm!" The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.'

  As men have forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress not of Caesar, but of God.

  In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

  1870, Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist, social activist

  My mother wakes us up to Zip-a-dee-doo-dah every morning.

  My mother was the Doris Day of the peace movement.

  My mother believes no is just a yes that needs convincing.

  My mother is a bulldozer in a party dress.

  The summer of the divorce Mom went back to school to get her Ph.D. The timing sucked for us, but her back was to the wall, it was clear my old man wasn’t going to be knocking out the bills. Supporting four kids on a teacher's salary was bleak at best. So she sucked it up and climbed an impossible mountain. Step by step she tried to pull us up from the poverty of dreadful student housing at Stanford. She burned dinner and dulled her eyes with late night studies. At the end of her first year, the day after her last final, she was admitted into the hospital. I don’t remember the disease, but I know the cause. Exhaustion. She was in there two weeks. Any doubt as to the root cause was removed the next year when she did the same exact thing again.

  Finally she became Dr. Stallings.

  I watched her ascent and learned two things. Never be poor if you can help it, it sucks. And don’t let circumstances hold you back. Circumstances change if you push hard enough. Give sweat, give blood, give until it hurts, give until the circumstances change. It seems my mother believes the difference between a wall and a door is how hard you push. I have the scarred and battered forehead to prove I follow in her footsteps.

  I’m 12 and getting into a lot of fights at school. My mom comes by to see me. She is leaving for yet another cross-country trip. She travels a lot. That's her job. And I think she likes it. She gets, for a week, to be Janie Doctor of Education. Without us reminding her of the job she isn’t quite getting to.

  “Josh, honey, are you alright?”

  “Fine.” Why tell her, she’s leaving, I see the suitcase in her car.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “I am.”

  “Hmmm. Would you like to go to Duluth with me.”

  “Where’s Duluth.” No smile. Not yet. Be sure.

  “It’s in Minnesota… It’ll be fun, just you and me.” Now my freckled face is beaming. I am joy. I am a sunflower. I am going to Duluth.

  My memories are spotty, splashes and flashes, but not one is bad. I wonder if this is how normal people feel when they look back on their childhoods. Rose light sparking off the frozen waves on lake Superior. An eight foot tall taxidermy grizzly in the hotel bar. Riding on the back of snowmobiles at night across vast white plains. Laughing in the hotel restaurant at some silly thing. Seeing my mother at a school working. So calm, so in control. Authoritative without being authoritarian. I saw Dr. Stallings in her element. And she was good. Different from the woman I grew up with. At home she let boundaries go unobserved until she could take no more and then she would explode. Like a crazed border guard she would gun down everything in sight. And leave us wondering what the hell just happened.

  But in the classroom, she was clear and concise about what was expected. I guess the cobbler's kids go barefoot, right? My mom was a child development specialist. An educator. We went barefoot a lot.

  I have no intention to paint her as an angel, I’ve gone way too far down this path to start lying now. We kids paid a large part of her bill for that
Dr. before her name. Paid in growing up too fast. Paid in being left alone to sort out their divorce. Chaos. Tears. Laughter. Life. We had it all, only more so. It was as Ken Bruen says - ‘a life writ large.’ He also said, ‘alcoholism doesn't run in my family, it gallops.’ He must have been opening my mail, cause I can’t say it any better.

  1972 May. DEAR MOM - HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY! Our gift to you is this contract... We the undersigned agree to pay you 10% of our income when you are old. NO MATTER WHAT OUR WIVES SAY -- We Love you Larkin & Josh

  FACT 1 - Clearly by the time we wrote this, Hallmark had destroyed any semblance of the original Mother's day.

  FACT 2 - Despite our childhood and witnessing our parent’s marriage self-destruct, Lark and I still assumed one day we would marry.

  FACT 3 - It is foolish to write a contract to my mother. Regardless of your age.

  Mom is terrified of being broke. Mom is a child of the depression. Mom is the daughter of a once rich and grand Indiana farming family. She saw it all disappear. She knows how dark it can get. How cold the Indiana winters are.

  Mom was also an illegitimate child, the only lasting sign of love between Ruthie and Mr. Swanson. She and Ruthie were taken in by Tom Cat, Howard Smith. A good man. A teacher. He fed and clothed them. Whether or not he molested my mother is open to interpretation. But something went down. Something we barely discuss. I hear of a chair wedged under a doorknob so teenage Janie sleeps at night protected from her protector. But where are you grandma Ruthie? He took you and your daughter in. A woman without her own, takes what life hands her, and says thank you.

  Mom learned from all this. She hedged every bet she ever lay. If she knew the fix was in she would back a one legged horse. She was fierce about getting and keeping money. She once told me that deep down the money equated to love, and she was afraid when we no longer needed her monetary help we wouldn't still love her. I have often lovedher in spiteof it. Loved herin spite of the way she used money as a hold over us, bought the right to judge how we lived. She also played a game called Money Doesn't Matter, Art is All That Counts. Art and being true to your self. And the rub is, the only scorecard she tallies is cash.

  By now you think, buggy bastards forgot about the Mother's Day contract. Wrong again bucko. Just giving you some set up. Some understanding of this...

  From the point at which Lark and I start taking down some serious change she starts to bring up that contract, joking, right, two or three times a year. It goes on for four years running. Was this her joke? Yes. Was she reminding us of a fond memory? Yes. Was she sending out feelers to see if she could enforce a contract written by thirteen and fourteen year old boys? Absa-fucking-lutely. Truly strangest part of the whole dealio? If she could somehow get us to kick her 10% of our income, she’d give us back more if we asked. She just wants us to be beholden, not her. Not ever her.

  My mother believes in personal responsibility to the tenth power. If she gets sick she thinks it is something she did or didn’t do to cause it. Illness is a moral failing.

  I’m 42 and have just been let go from a film ad agency, the guy who hired me had moved into a studio gig and the new bosses and I don’t see eye-to-eye. That is largely because they are idiots. That is not bias. It is true. The film business was populated by mean people when I started out, cruel and Machiavellian. But not stupid. Stupid got you fired. Smart made you rich. And then the mega corporations got control. Merger heaven, hostile takeovers, Vendi/PepsiCo/Universal Pictures. And out of this smoking dung pile climbed a new breed. It was the rise of middle management. VP is king. No one knows shit, but damn they all give good meeting. So I’m fired by this cunt who I wouldn’t hire as an assistant editor. I call my mother, now get this, I am one of the top cutters in town, I call for some support.

  “What did you do wrong?“

  “Nothing. Wrong company at the wrong time.”

  “If you learn what you did wrong, you can do different next time. Might they take you back if you talked to them?”

  I don’t do grovel. I don’t do take me back. But she wants to know, what did I do? What did I... fucking do? I was at the wrong shop and forgot to kiss the new pope's ring. I bet on a horse that left for greener pastures. Do? My mother has never said, ‘Oh I’m sorry son, those bastards don’t deserve you.’ Naaa, it was always ‘What could you have done different.’

  It isn’t easy on her, I know. She’s tougher on herself than any of us, and man that’s tough. What a hard way to be, but I guess it is also freeing. Nothing ever just happened to my mother. She has never been a victim of circumstances.

  I’m 50, I look back at the poverty we came out of, and wonder why us? Why did I wind up in a big house when so many of the working poor never do? I remember as a child, fearing we would lose our home. Fearing that there would not be enough of anything to make it around our rather full table. But what we were given was hope. We were never told - this is your lot in life. We were told - reach for the stars. Looking back in the warm light of memory I see the strength of that.

  My mother is in so many ways the quintessential American. She holds the best and some of the not so best of who we are as a people. She can rage, oh sure she can, she has a violent streak that even the Quakers couldn’t completely erase. She is given to excess, parties, holidays, birthdays, always just two or three ticks past prudent. These are American traits. But so is her huge heart. My mother's hand is always ready to reach down to help those who need it.

  While in Russia working on a film in the early 90’s I was struck by how defeated the crew were. To them nothing was possible. No matter how many times I pulled off the impossible they always viewed it as a fluke. I was proud in those days of our ‘can do’ spirit. I was raised to believe the impossible was only that way until some one cracked it.

  I still think that’s true.

  And I don’t.

  I am 16, and graduating from high school. My mother gives me a Bulova pocket watch, inscribed in the case is AIM FOR THE STARS. I am on my way to Hollywood to make my fame and fortune as an actor. I’m reaching.

  I am 50 and I see the inherent problem with this idea, when you are told to aim for the stars and don’t make it you feel like a failure. The American dream is a myth. Some shit is actually impossible. To say it’s not makes us all feel lacking for not achieving more. How about LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS as an inscription. Not as Hallmark but might lead to a more peaceful life.

  YOUNG DUDES, ONE AND ALL

  6:05pm Andrea - Truly amazing that we all survived our adolescence.

  6:07pm Josh - I am writing about it and I have no idea how we did.

  6:09pm Andrea - It makes me remember going up to Skyline with you and Tad and Tom and...who else? in the BIG WHITE Cadillac, doing a 360 coming back down...do you remember? …. I'm sure you are including your infamous birthday party. The formal wear, the Baked Alaska, the gunshot...

  6:11pm Josh - Yes... I probably should give apologies for risking so many lives... I was a bit of a thug tossed in a nice Palo Alto world.

  6:12pm Andrea - Not at all, you were a bit of a rock star.

  6:13pm Josh - I think you may have rose colored memory.

  “Tanqueray and tonic, Schweppes if you have it.” The lads sit at the bar.The lads have lower class English accents of blurry regionalism. A cadence gumbo of two dashes Bowie one dash Rod Stewart and just a wee pinch of Neil Innis. The bar is just off Gerry. The lads are Tad and Me. The year is 1974.

  The deal - they never check too closely the ID of travelers. Clever right? We didn’t make it up; this is an extension of a trick Lark showed me when I was fifteen. Works like this. Ingrid made me some Xeroxed fake student ID, said I was twenty-two. This paper wouldn’t pass a blind clerk. It feels wrong in your hand it has bumpy air bubbles from the home lamination kit. With ID this bad, you had to sell them, make them want to believe it. In The City that meant going into gay discos, boys with boys, and girls with girls. In liquor stores, same play, different slant.

  “Pin
your sleeve up,” Lark is instructing, “Now walk with a limp and speak with a Puerto Rican accent.” I have on my Travis Bickle army jacket, left arm hidden.

  “I don’t know any Puerto Ricans. Tad?”

  “A lot of Mexicans. That chick from South Africa, that doesn’t help, umm, no Puerto Ricans. That’s a New York thing.”

  “Carlos is Nicaraguan, no, Salvadorian… Manny is what?”

  “Cuban.”

  “Bingo buffalo, give Tad a cigar. Manny’s Cubano.”

  “Dudes, shut the fuck up, OK?”

  “We’re just saying, I don’t know any Puerto Ricans.”

  “Fuck the accent, just do what you do little bro.”

  “OK... Fine… The limp?”

  “Limp is mandatory.”

  I limp into the Korean liquor store on Middlefield and grab a bottle of Bacardi 151. I set it on the counter. The old man looks me up and down. Admittedly, I’m a tall motherfucker, but I do not look twenty-one.

  “You need ID.”

  “I-FUCKING-D? Really? ID? They didn’t ask for any fucking ID when they blew my arm off in the Mei Cong delta. Fuck no. Keeping you safe, and you want fucking ID.”

  I whip out the Ingrid forgery. Bam! Slap it on the counter. The guy looks at my ID for less than a second and rings me up.

  1975, Summer. Tad and I are pulling into the parking lot of a teen disco down in Los Gatos. We are getting ready to open the My-O-My, we are scouting the competition. Tad is driving his father’s Rambler. We have yet to explode its transmission. Oh we will. We will lie about how it happens. We will not tell Tad’s rather lovely folks, that crazy Yolanda kicks the gearshift into reverse at sixty plus miles an hour. All this won’t be tonight. Tonight the Rambler is clanking along just fine.