Read All the Wild Children for Free Online Page A

guy.  Do I owe an amends?...aw fuck em.
    Parting thoughts.  
    One: Yes, God does love me  more.
    Two:  Rough Childhood? Hell yes.  But what a blast. A little crazy down the line, yes, but fuck it, crazy is what kept us sane.  Who gets to do the shit we did and get to live to tell the tale?  It's really a blessing. I think it really is.  Maybe God loved us all more. 
    I love you more,
    Lark 
     
     
    From:               JOSH STALLINGS
    Subject:               Re: some new shite
    Date:               March 23, 7:31:54 PM PDT
    To:Lark Stallings
    Brother, thanks, I now know what the next section is. It starts with your e-mail. Then  this e-mail back to you.  A hit man was on the Today Show, he has a memoir he’s hocking.  Ann Curry (I think) is interviewing him.  (side note: Could Ann Curry be any hotter?)  Curry asks the man hiding behind the silhouette if he used a silencer in his work. 
    “ Heck no, ma’am.  I used the biggest, loudest gun I can find.  Broad day light in a packed restaurant.  Boom!  Boom!  Scare the crap out of them all.  No two patrons ever remember the events the same.  I am alternately a six foot Black man, a short wiry Porto Rican, rotund Cuban.  Almost never the average wasp I am.”  Anne Curry shakes her head in disbelief and they cut to a commercial.
    All my Love and Madness,
    Josh
                 
    In many ways I think Lark took the biggest hit from the divorce.  Not that any one noticed at the time.  He was stoic at ten.  He had responsibility heaped on his young shoulders that would break a grown man.  And he bore it, until he couldn’t and then he shot dope.  But that is years away.
     
    It’s 1966 we’re in yet another fucked up used VW driving home to the mountains.  Stanford is still weeks away.  I’m in the backseat, Larkin is in the front.  My mother is driving.  She is crying.  She’s crying all the time.  She carries ratty tissues in her pocket, she always will.  Later it will be for hay fever.  Now it is for tears.  And snot.  And I’m in the back seat as we wind around La Honda, headed up to Skyline.  I’m trying to imagine my life without my dad.  Who’s going to fix things when they break?  They always break.  Who’s going to be the artistic lightness to my mother’s dark, work-will-set-you - fre e ethic?  Who’s going to finish reading Pooh Bear to me?  
    My mother stops crying.  We drive without speaking for a few miles.  I listen to the road under our wheels.  I listen to the creak of the flexing metal.  I listen to the wind blowing through the gaps in the body panels.  I look at my brother.  His face is empty.  No emotions are leaking out.  Whatever he’s feeling, a team of CIA trained therapists wouldn’t get it out of him.
    “Larkin?”
    “Yeah Mom.”
    “You’re father won’t be coming home.”
    “Yeah.”
    “That means you’re the man of the family now.  I’m counting on you.  You know I am.”
    “Yeah Mom.”
    I am 8, and even I can see this is some fucked up shit.  Not that seeing it will keep me from heaping my share of burden on his shoulders.  The guy can handle it. 
    When we were kids he was the one they gave bibles to, yeah hell of a birthday gift right?  Pull that on me and they would have heard about it.  Never would have occurred to them to give me a bible anyway.  We are all given names and labels when young, hell maybe even at birth.  Lark is the solid one.  Josh is the wild one.  OK, they might have had some evidence to back that up.  As a toddler I figured out how to get out a window and jump into the rose bushes.  By the time I was four I had had my stomach pumped three times, for drinking deadly substances.  At maybe four and a half I drove a jeep down a hill and into a tree.  That one I lay at St. Larkin’s feet.  We were playing Roy Rogers, I was Gabby Hayes to his Roy.  And Gabby drove th e Jee p while Roy shot