Calico Kids

Foreword

Once upon a time…

No, wait. That makes it sound as if this never happened.

I mean, it didn’t happen, but it also sorta did.

In the olden days before the Internet and mobile phones and helicopter parents, a lot of kids—especially those of middle-class working folks—ran wild, left to their own devices from the end of the school day until dinner time, and often beyond then, especially on weekends. I was among that generation of latchkey kids, Generation X as we’ve become known. Sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and Millennials like processed Oscar Meyer lunchmeat. And I have to admit, if we must be tagged with a generational moniker, I can think of nothing better than to carry the namesake of Billy Idol’s post-Chelsea punk band.

I spent the years between ages eight and sixteen in the sleepy seaside community of Aptos, California, tucked at the north end of Monterey Bay, about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. At the time, it was populated by artists and hippies and the various blue-collar and white-collar wage slaves that make up any American small town. If a parent worked in tech or a large industry, chances are it required an hour commute over the hill into what would come to be called Silicon Valley.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when such communities only had broadcast television and land lines, we kids spent a lot of time in our heads. We gathered in small gangs—I’m still not sure if the technical term is a gaggle or a murder—riding our bikes all over town like two-wheeled hellions, spending our meager allowances on drugstore candy and comic books, dumping the rest in the arcade machines, and generally living life without a helmet.

I’m not trying to romanticize the experience. Multiple skateboarding and cycling accidents, three concussions, and almost being drowned in the high school swimming pool by a bully twice my size may have built some character, but it also left some very real scars. Life without a helmet, or whatever analog you wish to use, is strictly subjective. Like everything, it had its good bits and its bad bits, and gave everyone lucky enough to survive some entertaining stories, and plenty of baggage to sort through. 

Truly, a gift that keeps on giving.

In the summer of 1982, I was fourteen years old. I had a small circle of best friends with whom I spent every spare moment of the day, playing Atari, riding our bikes to Beer Can Beach, or climbing the railroad trestles like insane monkeys. Our uniform was a pullover hoodie, Levis or OP shorts, and usually either Vans or Nikes on our feet. Our vehicles were self-propelled and often home-built hybrids. The last twenty minutes of E.T., when the boys are outrunning the feds on their bikes? That was us.

We played epic, marathon sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, got my buddy’s single mom to get us into rated-R movies, and experimented with beer and weed in the safety of an older friend’s apartment. We went on weekend camp-outs in Nisene Marks National Forest, and counted the days until our sixteenth birthday, when we could level up for real with a driver’s license.

In writing Calico Kids, I wanted to give the reader a sort of urban fantasy adventure—or rural fantasy—but couch everything in very real history. So although the riverside community of Calico is fictional, it’s not quite a wholesale invention. It’s somewhat as if I picked up Aptos, California in the summer of 1982, and set it down on the north bank of the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon.

The dictionary definition of nostalgia is a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, which is not my intent. This is not a memoir, or a treatise on how awesome growing up in the 1980s was, because it frequently was not. (Ever-present doom cloud of nuclear annihilation? Thanks! I’ll have mine to-go.) It is simply a setting and a period with which I’m intimately familiar. And as my English professors always told me, write what you know.

At the end of the day, I wouldn’t change my life without a helmet. But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, either. It was a crazy, chaotic time, full of dizzying highs and tragic lows, and monsters around every corner—not for the faint of heart. I applaud everyone who came through that time without the privilege my friends and I had. Well done indeed.

- Todd Downing, Port Orchard, WA

Summer, 2020

A Few Things

Chapters are given a song title, along with the artist and year of release. Think of it as a mix-tape of sorts. In addition, I've created a curated playlist on Spotify as a sort of inspirational soundtrack. You can find the link at:

www.todddowning.com/calico-kids

Immense gratitude to Debora Iyall of Romeo Void for permission to use the lyric from Fear to Fear.

Likewise, my thanks to Dan Heinrich, Trish Heinrich, Rob Lowry, Malcolm Collie, Julie Collie, Allan McComas, Raffael Boccamazzo, and Ron Dugdale, for beer and inspiration.

Tip of the hat to Mark Bruno and James Stubbs, who wrote the Boomtown Calico setting for my Six Gun RPG.

Thanks also to Jeff Antonio and Christian Zabala of NBC Universal and Universal Music Group, respectively. 

Babciu is a Polish term of endearment for grandmother and is roughly pronounced bob-chew.

Content warning: bullying, substance use/abuse, occult & supernatural themes.

Track 1:

OUR TOWN

Kim Wilde (1980)

The digital clock in the Soundesign cassette deck blinked over to 7:30 a.m., and Blue Öyster Cult’s Burnin’ For You erupted from the tiny pair of speakers beneath the faux-wood case. A soft breeze blew in off the river, bidding the decades-old flower-print curtains dance to the song, carrying the competing odors of pulp mill and salmon cannery to the nostrils of the slumbering teenage boy.

A.J. stirred at the sudden assault of smells and power chords, and reached for his glasses on the milk crate nightstand. Contorting into a semi-reclining position, he grabbed the clock and turned it toward him, yawning.

Alan Jennings was small for his age—thirteen among peers who were already fourteen and dating. What his dad called shit-brown eyes squinted through an unruly mop of dishwater blond hair, bangs kept long to hide the acne on his forehead. His left cheek was already pitted from a fishing accident when he was eight; the hook was still somewhere in his tackle box.

Had he really set his alarm for 7:30? Sure, the extra half hour of sleep was badly needed after studying into the wee hours, but…7:30? Was he insane?

A.J. was a good student. He was also short, skinny, far-sighted, and thus a target for harassment of every type imaginable. Being a font of local history and at least three or four juicy conspiracy theories didn’t help matters. But he was scrappy and fast, and used humor as a finely-honed weapon. Or at least he used to, before he got on Liam’s good side. This year had actually been bearable due to the bully’s protection. Seventh grade the previous year had been a living hell. What had begun as a protection-for-homework arrangement had blossomed into a legitimate friendship, bonding over cultural staples of hard rock and Dungeons & Dragons.

A.J. jumped from his bed and pulled a three-day-old pair of Levis over scrawny, pale legs. It was Friday of finals week, with just four days left in the school year, including today. For A.J., that meant graduation from Calico Junior High (Go Herons!) and entering as a freshman at Calico High (Go Lumberjacks!). He shrugged into a Star Wars logo tee and a red flannel shirt with a selection of mechanical pencils in the chest pocket. His socks were the only article of clothing clean from the drawer.

Hopping out of his bedroom and down the hall, he tried to wrestle his feet into a pair of leather Nikes from last year. At one time, they’d been white, with a red swoosh on the side. But now they were a sort of sad gray, tinged with brown, rubber soles ground down to zero tread, seams and edges worn and ragged. The shoes barely fit, but he knew he could look forward to some school clothes money from Gram this summer. The small Craftsman bungalow on Ash Street was quiet and empty, his parents having left for work at least thirty minutes ago, mom to open the Val-U Drug she managed on Third, dad to Lynx & Co. Construction at Fourth and Lamont, where he toiled as an accountant.

Plucking a foil pack of two Pop Tarts from the box on the kitchen table, A.J. grabbed his jacket and backpack from the corner behind the door and ran into the wide world outside. Still groggy from the late-night cram session, he pulled his Huffy Thunder Road BMX bike from the side of the wood pile under the eaves of the carport and saddled up in a single, well-practiced motion. Letting gravity give him an extra burst of speed down the hill, A.J. lowered his head into the late spring breeze and sped toward the road to school.

He had an algebra test in first period, and he was late.             

Calico, Oregon was a small, blue collar community of four thousand rugged individuals, nestled on the north bank of the Rogue River, less than five miles due east of Gold Beach. Originally a mining boomtown in the 1850s (named for colorful silver prospector Calico Jim Broughton), a mine explosion and gas cloud in 1882 had made the old site unlivable, forcing the residents to move a couple of miles down river.

A.J. dropped down from Hill Avenue onto the bottom half of Hillcrest Drive, which became Lamont Street as it intersected with Fourth Avenue, bordered with flower boxes and bike racks. The aroma from the Golden Palace Chinese restaurant hung in the morning air, the iconic trademark of the oldest continually-owned business in town. His route was so etched in his brain that he could ride it blindfolded, as long as there wasn’t any other traffic.

South on Lamont, left on Pioneer past the dental office and lumber company, where vibrant banners lining the street reminded residents of the upcoming town centennial in August. Then a right onto Silver Street, which ran alongside the school’s athletic field. Dave’s Deli at Third and Silver was a popular sandwich shop for junior high students walking off-campus for lunch, at least students with cash to spend—unlike A.J.

He knew a fair amount of local history, how Calico had reinvented itself as a respectable logging community after the re-charter. The access road he now used as a shortcut to school hadn’t seen a truck in over a decade; most deliveries to the pulp mill usually arrived on the river frontage road. The pulp mill had been the primary employer here since 1920, followed by the fish cannery on the west side of town. Most other businesses—from the diners to the real estate office, the bars to the auto garage on Third Avenue—supported the mill and cannery workers and their families. They also employed wives and teenagers. When he turned fourteen, he’d be able to get a work permit and a part-time gig somewhere. His mom would likely push him toward stocking shelves at the Val-U Drug, but he was far more interested in Dave’s, or the ice cream parlor on Cantor Street, for the obvious fringe benefit of free food.

A.J.’s stomach growled. The cold Pop Tarts had done nothing to assuage his hunger, and their calories had all but burned away on the ride.

He approached Calico Junior High at high speed and found Kristof Korolewski already locking his bike to one of the stalls out front. Kris was fourteen and a first-generation American, his Polish family having immigrated to the States after World War Two. He was blond and apple-cheeked, and a good half-foot taller than A.J.

The Korolewskis owned and operated the Silver City Diner on Second and Durham, complete with a small arcade, which was really just an old coat check room crammed with Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Pac-Man cabinets, a blurry Sportsman duck hunting game, and an Evel Knievel pinball machine from 1977. The diner even featured an old grandmother who spoke fractured English and had a milky eye, but who made the most amazing pierogi ever tasted within a hundred miles of Curry County.

Kris worked the weekday dinner shift and occasional weekend mornings, and was never without a ready supply of those very meat and vegetable dumplings. He tended to use them to buy the friendships in his life, which was really unnecessary. He was a good kid to begin with.

Hey Kris, A.J. hailed as he skidded to a halt, dismounting the banana seat like a cowboy in an old western. He pulled the front wheel into the rack space next to Kris and undid the combination lock without even looking at it. He could see their friend Liam’s Frankenbike opposite their own cycles, a patchwork of primer-gray aluminum, cannibalized black BMX parts, and a seat held together with duct tape.

You’re late, Kris joked, knowing full well they were in the same algebra class, and would share the same fate for being tardy.

A.J. glanced down at the Kricyle—an old Schwinn cruiser with knobby tires, advertising placard in the center frame, and a milk crate basket at each end for delivering take-out to the local community. Up late too?

No doubt, Kris answered, adjusting the strap of his backpack on his left shoulder. Gotta ace this final or hello, summer school.

Your folks wouldn’t do that to you, A.J. dismissed with a wave. They need you at the diner.

The two boys left the long rack of Huffy street bikes, Schwinn BMX conversions, and Raleigh Choppers, heading toward homeroom and their math final.

Besides, A.J. said, playfully slugging his larger friend in the shoulder, you’ve got this.

Track 2:

STORIES FOR BOYS

U2 (1980)

By lunchtime the news had filtered over from the high school: Jeannie Wells hadn’t shown up for classes, and hadn’t come home last night. Ordinarily, gossip of this kind would have slipped past them. The high school sophomore was popular, full of school spirit, and considered attractive by her peers—all things A.J.’s gang weren’t. However Calico was a small American town, and as with most small American towns, connections ran like a nervous system beneath the surface.

Jeannie’s parents had been close with A.J.’s at one time,so close that they’d been asked to be his godparents. Three years ago, a brain aneurysm had claimed Sally Wells, leaving David Wells to soldier on alone, raising his teenage daughter and splitting his time between the paper mill and Elliott’s bar two blocks away. A.J.’s family hardly saw David Wells anymore. And Jeannie had withdrawn