Born to Be Wild

After he gets beaten up, Jimmy’s mom sends him to live with his uncle in IB, but Mikey is living with his mom, the twins and his little sister in the rickety squat in the alley nearby. When I get home from school the afternoon of the concert, Mikey and his friend Marc are sitting on the front porch, their bikes sprawled across the lawn.

"What's up?" I ask, knowing perfectly what's up. The little boys, age 10 or so, want to go to the jumps. They hope I'm going hiking. I'm always afraid to take them without the big boys who will watch them and care for them in that dangerous playground. I usually turn them down, and this time I have a reason.

"Are you going to Mission?"

"Not today. Jim and I are going to the Del Mar Fair."

"Can we go?" Mike asks.

"We won’t get home until after midnight. That’s kind of late for you."

"Why so late?"

"We're going to a concert."

"Who?" asks Mikey.

"Steppenwolf."

They start jumping up and down and singing, "Born to Be Wild!"

"You know the band?"

"Yeah. It's my dad's favorite." I should have thought. Mikey's dad is a biker guy who lives in Nevada. It's clear from looking at their mom that she spent many tough biker-babe days on the back a chopper.

"You have to ask your mom, Mikey, and I need PROOF you asked her so tell her to call me, OK? You won't get home until maybe 1 a.m., depending on the traffic, and it's a school night."

"Yay!" They jump up, grab their bikes and spin home. Minutes later, I'm on the phone with Mikey's mom.

"Are you sure you want them? They can be a handful."

"It’ll be fun."

"What time should they be ready?"

"We’ll leave as soon as Jim gets home from work. Two hours?"

"OK. Do you want me to send them down?"

"No. Jim's unpredictable. We'll come get them. I'll call you first."

"Great, Martha. Thank you so much. I appreciate everything you do for my boys. I don't know where they'd be without you."

I have a lump in my throat. There is nothing generous in anything I do "for" the boys. We're in it together. Whatever I might do for them, they do ten-fold for me. "It's nothing. I love them."

"They love you, too."

"I know. I just think they're great. I love their sport. Have you seen them?"

"No. I'm too scared to watch. I saw it on TV once. Still, I think it's better for them to do that than all the other things around nowadays for kids to get in trouble with, but I don't want to watch it."

I laugh. "I can understand that, but it's very beautiful and they are very good. See you in a bit."

At 7 we go get Mikey and Marc. I knock on the door of this unbelievable house. It's a white Craftsman cottage from the twenties. The stones and bricks that once held it off the ground have disintegrated or been kicked out of the way. It’s held up, literally, with whatever solid scrap rock and concrete block the boys have found lying in the alley. At one point a plastic milk crate has been pressed into service I've contributed some concrete paving stones I found in my back yard to this task. I have never been inside.

I knock. Colleen opens the door leading directly to the kitchen. The room is lit by candles, to save money on electricity. "They're almost ready." Marc is ready, standing by the kitchen table in clean jeans and a plaid shirt, grinning, his pale hair wetted and combed flat against his head. Normally, he has a "Dennis-the-Menace" cowlick. When his hair dries, the lick springs back up. Mikey comes out. My eyes are by then used to the dim light and I look around. The room is neat, as neat and clean as it could be. This is a one bedroom house in which a woman and at least five kids are living. The walls are covered, literally covered, crawling with, German cockroaches. I think of an article I read of terrible infections from cockroaches crawling into the ears of the sleeping children, dying there, rotting. I'm simultaneously nauseated and moved to tears over this unnecessary poverty. I’m shattered with respect for this woman who holds her family together and opens the little space she has to all the kids who want to spend the weekend up here with her sons and with me. I feel guilty for never opening my much larger house to them, but then I think it’s enough I have a truck and keep the kids from getting into trouble by taking them to the jumps. It is her joy to offer a home.

"You guys ready?" I swallow the lump in my throat.

"Born to be Wild!" they say together, little fists thrust into the air.

"Their dad loves Steppenwolf. I'm sure they told you." The year before, this elusive all-but-vanished male progenitor had sent them money to visit him in Nevada. "Me too," she smiles, and sucks deep on her cigarette.

The drive to Del Mar is the customary mess by which we all earn the right to go to the fair. The stage is set up on the race track and we stand behind the fence, as close to the band as we can. The long summer day drifts into dark; the stage lights come up, and John Kay and Steppenwolf take the stage. The little boys jump up and down in excitement. It's not only their first real, grownup concert, but it's Steppenwolf.

They play all their old hits, the long version of "The Pusher" and "Monster" and some songs from the album that came out after the Berlin Wall fell. John Kay was born in East Berlin and had gone back in 1990 and played a concert on the rubble of the wall. Then, the sixth song, "Born to Be Wild." At the very first chords, the crowd goes nuts. It is iconic. It is style="font-style: italic;">Easy Rider, it's the beginning of heavy metal, it's a generation of people for whom Strawberry Fields are NOT forever, people who wanted something raw and loud with a throbbing bass line. I was such a one such, and at one point in my first marriage, my abusive husband threw my Steppenwolf albums in the dumpster, saying, "There's more to life than a 10 minute drum solo." Whatever that might have been, I don't think he had any idea, none that he demonstrated to me beyond pushing me down stairs and kicking me in the crotch as I lay on the floor. Well, either you like Steppenwolf or you don't. I do, and I am surrounded by paunchy middle-aged men playing air guitars, young guys who raise their fists in the air, and everyone singing along, badly. I look back at Mikey and Marc, who found a place to stand where they can see better, and see two small, freckled faces, singing ALL THE WORDS at the top of their lungs, absolutely happy. Stunning.

"This was the best night of my LIFE!" says Mikey.

"Mine too!” shrieks Marc.

They’re still jumping up and down as we thread through the carnival to the exit.



"You wanna' ride something? You wanna' ride that?" I point at the Bayern Curve.

"Is that a roller coaster?" asks Mikey.

"Kind of, but faster." I realize it's a LOT like a very fast ride on a BMX bike over several jumps, one after the other.

Jim never rides these things, so we hand him our jackets and packs and give the carnie our tickets. No one else is riding. "Sit between us!" says Mikey.

"You don't want that. The guy by the door gets smashed. It's better if you smash me than I smash you. You'll understand when the ride gets going."

"Pull the bar down, guys," says the carnie, and the little boys pull the bar down. "OK kids, hold on!" The carnie shouts switches on the ride. The first circuit is slow, the next a bit faster then the ride gets going, faster and faster. The little boys' bodies slam against my side. Their mouths are open in huge scared-happy smiles; their cheeks are pulled back by the spinning force. Their carefully combed hair stands up and back from their foreheads. They scream and yell and we go around and around and around. Too soon, the ride comes to a stop.

"You guys wanna' go again?" asks the carnie. No one is waiting for the ride. "I'll let you ride for free." This is some kind of perfect night, Steppenwolf and free rides.

"Yay!"

The ride starts up again, slow, faster, fast. This time, the boys know what to expect and anxiously wait for that first fast loop. The ride runs for a full ten minutes. I am loving it as much as the boys are. Fighting the "G-force," I turn to look at them. Somehow, my dad is reflected in their freckles, their grins, their joy at the wild ride. My dad loved a roller coaster, but I never rode one with him. By the time I was big enough to ride, he was too ill.

My heart skips a beat. I had recently dreamt about the boys in a magical dream of my father. In the dream, I sat on the tailgate of the truck on a Friday afternoon, waiting for the boys to show up. They came down the street, whizzing dragonflies on their bikes, brightly colored jerseys, cardboard painted white with painted numbers fixed to their handlebars with twist-ties. Jimmy rode up to me and said, "I made a new friend. He wants to go with us."

In my dream, a kid with dishwater blond hair came up behind Jimmy. He rode the same put-together bike the others have, his homemade race number, shin guards made from a thrown away diving suit.

"Sure. There's room in the truck."

The kid looked up at me from under his baseball hat. I recognized his snow-shadow blue eyes, the curl in the middle of his forehead, the freckles; I knew that face, but whose face is it? He smiled. The broken front tooth. "Hi, MAK," he said. It was my dad. It was my dad as one of these wild boys. "Well, of course," I think later. "This is just the kind of boy he was, a boy who ran away from his brutal, drunken dad at 13 and hopped a freight to Canada. If he were alive now, here, and this age, he'd be Jimmy, or Mikey. Another wild Irish boy lost in America." I woke up then and realized that I was nearly the age my dad was when he died and that the life I would live would be years, a part, a transition, my dad had not lived, and that, miraculously, I'd been given the chance to live this wild boy part, too.

As we spin around the Bayern Curve, I feel my dad is in the car with us. "Live this with all your heart, MAK," he says inside my heart, "this is the part of life I never had."