All the Wild Children by Josh Stallings Page A

high.
    “Homes, Lovelace and another cat drew down.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah.  No one shot, but I just about shit myself.”
    “That’s about the right response.”
    Things at Ravenswood were starting to get hectic.
    Two weeks later we’re standing in the parking lot smoking, laughing, Tomas, James, Jorge, and me.  Doing a whole lot of nothing good.  First it’s a police helicopter flying in low over the apartment building across the street from school.  Then a brother jumps from the second story window.  He runs towards us, he’s maybe twenty, sweating and frightened.  An unmarked cop car squeals around the apartment building.  The man clears the parking lot and runs onto the football field.  The chopper is hovering above him. 
    “Put down the gun and lay face down.”  The loudspeaker in the chopper sounds metallic and inhuman.  I can see a cop with an M16 leaning out the chopper door.  They are only twenty feet above the guy.  Grass clippings swirl into the air.  The young man turns and points a pistol at the chopper.  The gunshots are almost lost in the helicopter noise.  The young man falls like a broken toy.  Arms and legs twisting into unnatural angles.  They call an ambulance.  We all know that’s just for show. 
    Drama.  Static.  Hectic.  Screwed up. 
    Worst part?  It didn’t really freak any of us out.  It was detached from reality.  Just some shit that happened over there, not here.
    Tomas and me, if nothing else, we saw that a knife and Kung Fu wasn’t going to get the job done any more.  Enterprising young lads that we were we started dealing hash and Mexican rag weed in the parking lot.  I started to carry a Beretta Jetfire .25 ACP automatic.  It would fit in the palm of my hand, conceal in a coat pocket.  Held five shots in the clip, one in the chamber. Tomas, ever the over achiever that he was, had a Browning 9mm in the back of his pants.  Jorge his brother didn’t have dick.  He was just our driver.  We were fourteen, rolling hard, staying stoned.
     
    The Funkadelics say, America eats its young , and Curtis says Freddy’s dead. And there’s a diamond in the back, sunroof top, digging the scene with a gangster lean.  Oh Oh gangster white walls.…

DRUGS
     
    Blame it on the seventies, blame lack of parenting, blame it on teen melancholia, whatever.  Fact:  Drugs and booze were ever present.  Forget my mother's pot brownies, write that off to the times and her wanting to get laid.  Forget my old man’s multiple acid trips sea r ching for the new Godhead, hell if he’d found it, we’d have called him a hero.  Point is, I didn’t need their encouragement.  From the moment I learned getting high meant getting out of your head I was in. 
    I am 12, I’m huffing Pam, the spray on anti-stick crap.  Heard some kids got in trouble for doing it in the park, so naturally I have to try it. 
    Lift the cardboard tube to your mouth. 
    Spray a liberal amount of Pam.               
    Breath in.  Fall over.  See the pretty lights. 
    I think it coated your lungs and cut off the oxygen to your brain.  The first time I try it my mother comes in.  I am belly down on my bed and can’t talk.  I hide the Pam can under my chest.  I tell her I think I am the Devil.  She gets on the phone to one of those prayer lines.  Has Christians all across America praying for me.  Whether she thinks I am possessed or that the prayer will help with my new madness is unclear. 
    We never speak of it again. 
     
    From eighteen years sober I can see clearly what was so murky then.  I can see that the drugs and alcohol kept us alive.  Kept us from going insane.  Self-medication my shrink called it.  Seems about right.  Pot for fear.  Hash for obliterating all shades of sadness.  Booze to pour on top of all the stuffed down feelings.  Speed to keep upright. 
    I kept a stash of white crosses beside my bed.  My mom or Shaun would wake me with a glass of orange