Heather Stallings

Summer is on the horizon and the teenagers are asking where we’re going on vacation. I haven’t told them that the question is not where but whether—as in whether we are taking you. As teens they are more demanding, setting moratoriums on seeing shrines and lingering at dinner. They complain that no one understands when the crazy husband is joking—they were mortified when he asked the waiter whether they’d hire them to wash dishes to pay off our dinner tab, and they call his banter with airport employees a matter of “national security.” I confess to some tense moments when our 14-year old son brought the swine flu to Tokyo and we spent our vacation time in a research hospital—I definitely messed up when I called the hotel doctor, who turned us in, as my son warned me he would.

I feel pressure on vacation to keep everyone entertained. No longer can you just park the kids on a beach, where they used to dig and eat sand all day long. My dad always said that at age 12.5, the friends become the priority, and this has proven to be true—sometimes what your parents say is true, although it often takes decades to realize it.

After the swine flu in Tokyo we braved the World’s Fair in China. We got three days in Asia—that’s all we had between the kids’ summer camps—John said it was going to prepare them for future business travel. There were so few Westerners at this world’s fair that people were taking our photos. At the entrance, a surly female guard patted down our pre-teen, and upon finding her tutti frutti juicy lip gloss, she thrust it back at her, saying “try it!” Please. Did she think the fuchsia tube of gloss was explosive, and if she did, was she planning to finish off my 12-year old on the spot? Once through the gates, John steered us toward the Somalia pavilion to find some pirates. We were discouraged from going to the U.S. pavilion—I still wonder what they had in there. I was amazed by how the Chinese citizens would wait in line for hours—seven or more—because it’s very difficult to leave China and many people come from the countryside—their chance to see what other countries are like. Americans were not painted in the best light—apparently we eat more beef, I learned. Calorie consumption was totaled and compared, and was not favorable to the West.

So John asked our guide to take us to “the Axis of Evil Pavilions.” Our guide was not amused and neither were the kids. When John asked more specifically about the North Korea booth (he wasn’t joking, trust me), the guide said that the line was too long. In the Chinese pavilion, where the guides actually want to take you or may be paid to do so, but you still have to wait three hours even with a reservation, John refused to sit and watch the mandatory film about modern China. In his words, “the required film was a heavy handed propaganda film, full of rapturous minorities with perfect skin and teeth straight from central casting, engaged in backbreaking manual labor while experiencing the ecstasy of building the new Chinese utopia,” and he wasn’t going to watch it even if we had to escape the theater, the kids disowning us.

Since that trip, the teenagers have been refusing to leave the continent, but we finally pleased them when we took them to a family summer camp in a brisk, middle-of-nowhere spot in Canada, where it’s so cold you never wear the shorts you packed, you shoot bears with paintball guns, and river kayak in glacier melt after the staff sees you can Eskimo roll, which involves submerging your head in ice water when they tip over your kayak. Bins of red licorice and sour Jolly Ranchers abound in the lodge. A young teen paradise. Our tent neighbors were welcomed by a bear popping its head into their tent in the middle of the night after it drank the staff’s gin and ate all the paint balls (did you know they’re full of fish oil?). A Texan’s daughter was startled by a German man climbing into the public spa buck naked. I personally was most startled when a bear sprung out of the bushes outside the kids’ tent when I went to check on them before bed. After that, I never went over there, and the kids loved me for that. Because the camp has a bar and a spa (but no flush toilets), it’s referred to as “glamping.”

Mandatory Film China Pavillion -- No Photos

Where to you suggest to take teens?  I don’t think our family will be glamping this summer.  I might just be glamping in a local bar.

I like to write stories on the edge—almost absurd, but then you realize that life can really get this nutty, as a reviewer of my novel False Alarm put it. It’s a fine line. While researching my just-completed novel, The Incompatibles, a black comedy about family dysfunction and infertility, I saw a Newsweek article “You Got Your Sperm Where?” about men who call themselves donorsexual—a guy who gives his sperm away for free, motivated by “a desire to spawn as many children as possible,” handing off his specimen cups to women in places like Starbucks bathrooms. The FDA tried to put a stop to this, calling one individual “a one-man sperm bank,” but he argues that it’s legal to pick up random people in bars with all the risks of communicable diseases so what’s the difference? I have to admit I was tempted to use a donorsexual as part of The Incompatibles’ landscape, but I dismissed it as too far out there even for this novel. I remember so many times in writing workshops when people complained that a story was unbelievable. But it’s true! (The author will often defend herself even though that’s forbidden in formal workshops.) Truth is never a defense. Another cliché that is true—truth is stranger than fiction.

You know how I like to draw heavily from real life so the novel I’m just finishing is set right here in the Silicon Valley outback.  I’m calling it The Incompatibles— a whacky black comedy about infertility—possibly the world’s first. There’s an aggressive sperm recruiter on the loose, coming between a Los Gatos couple, who get themselves into a darkly comic pretzel, working at cross-purposes to get a baby. I had originally set the novel in L.A., where I’ve spent some time, and even though the details were technically correct, I didn’t think it had the gritty feel of reading about a place by a writer who’s lived what she’s talking about. I think it’s a lot more convincing if you write what you know, a cliché that’s actually true. And more importantly, it’s more fun to write. You get to make a lot more mischief. Los Gatos, with its natural beauty and genius recluses—mountain lions in your yard and bioengineers splicing genes in their mountain garages— tends to be a party town. People who’ve lived here a long time say that the turning point was when the Brazilian soccer team stayed here during the 1994 World Cup. Footage of those parties looks straight out of the rum-guzzling, panty-flinging Mardi Gras events. The lingerie   shops and the sports bars remain. Los Gatos is its own memorable character.

After seeing my SWAT Training post, a lawyer emailed me that she had taken all her secretaries to the gun range— and made them wear skirts and high heels! Afterwards, she took them out for a drink. I love this photo of the high-heeled shooter.  We could have used her at SWAT Training—much feistier than the Lara Croft look that the crazy husband envisioned. She would have shown those boys. Kate, in False Alarm, could have used this type of training. Let me know if you have any stories or photos of Girls with Guns.

John got a hankering to take SWAT training so we went to the backwoods of Half Moon Bay near Mavericks, where they have Hawaii-5-0 sized surf waves in Northern California that few are willing to risk. I love that area, especially that funky restaurant called the Moss Beach Distillery, which has the Blue Lady Ghost, who they say haunts the bathrooms and steals earrings. (She was featured on Unsolved Mysteries.) So we pulled up to a NO CIVILIANS sign way off the main road. I’m not even sure how we got to do this—the other couple we went with knew someone. We met up with seven friendly SWAT guys in camo fatigues. I was wearing a leather jacket, and John said I looked like the gun-wielding Lara Croft (!). “You’ll  love an M4,” he said, because it was “light” and “easy to handle.” I didn’t. It felt like a toy, which made it creepy. John’s convinced that overexposure to guns is going to change my mind about them in the way they treat arachnophobia by making people travel on airplanes with a thousand loose spiders. But I don’t    think so. A few years ago we went on an old-fashioned pheasant hunt in the backwoods of Austria (all the men wore formal hunting suits, except for John, who wore a cowboy hat and people kept calling him George Bush), and I never touched a gun. It was our first “hunt” and everyone was tolerant and polite and referred to us as “The Americans.” Our lovely hostess said “just don’t shoot our dogs.”  Out in the field my feet were frozen (December in Austria is Siberia—in the evenings I wore cut-off tights under my ball gown to stay warm), the air was black with gunsmoke, shotguns cracking and dead birds piling up for the bird funeral.  It was late afternoon and getting dark when a giant white rabbit leaped through the field like a bobbing surrender flag—someone  yelled “John, get your hare!” and even though this was a competition, John glanced back at me, where I waited in horror with immobile feet (in my memory they are stuck in rabbit holes), and lowered his gun.

At SWAT training, worse than the automatic weapon is the Barrett, which shoots a mile. It’s essentially a cannon. You have to lie on the ground while a SWAT guy loads it. I was sure it would explode in my face. Ultimately it was peer pressure that got me to do it, the way it was before I rode Daisy, the mechanical bull, at the Cowgirl Corral Saloon in high school. When I looked through the scope into the woods that was a jungle, I thought of the movie Predator—I had the big gun but I felt clearly on the defensive.  Slowly, I pulled the heavy trigger and the Barrett kicked and caught my shoulder. Everyone cheered. Later the guys barbecued hamburgers for us and took photos—I don’t think they get many visitors. John still swears I that I love shooting and had a smile on my face and  says he has the photos of me smiling to prove it, but most likely it’s a grimace from the bruised shoulder.

Poor Zar had dysplasia in his elbows that if left unchecked was going to have him not using his front legs and hopping around the yard like a bunny. Out on his walks he would go on a sit-down strike if his legs hurt him. (He also does that if he gets too hot, but that’s another story.) So he had surgery in both front legs—horrible that they have to cut the legs and let them grow back together. He was supposed to come home the next day—another German Shepherd had the same surgery and was released the next day—but the nurse called and asked whether they could keep Zar longer because he seemed to be in so much pain—howling night and day, the poor thing.  It was a zoo at my house already. “By all means, keep him longer,” I told her. You would not believe how crazy it gets around here when the dogs are under the weather. Zar will never swallow his pills no matter how I try to trick him—wrap pills in turkey lunch meat, tickle his throat, attempt to pry open his steel jaws to check—you have to carry him outside and he weighs 109 pounds and  I don’t get a second to write. Turns out it’s much cheaper to keep him at the pet hospital inpatient than put him in the Pet Palace, where they don’t do room service. He’s very smart and I’m sure he’s onto this and has been charming the ladies at the vet, looking at them in that very cute way that shows the whites of his eyes that always gets to me. OK, here I’m stealing material from my own novel, False Alarm. I’m reusing it—see, you can do this. Steal from yourself and save your cuts—there’s good stuff on the editing desk floor. No writing is ever wasted. The following came from my dog in the first place. The name was changed to protect his identity.

Stirling, wiped out from his decimation of their living room, lay peacefully in the corner, looking at Kate, showing the whites of his eyes in that very cute way that always got to her. He wason his dog pillow —something he turned up his nose at unless he knew he was in trouble. Part of it was her fault. The dog trainer had insisted that if they made “continual eye contact” with him, he wouldn’t be so naughty, sniffing crotches and snatching mozzarella sticks that Sandy planted on the arm of the sofa.

 Kate felt that continual eye contact with a 90-pound animal in a household with two small children was ambitious. Most mornings when Consuelo opened their front door, Stirling Moss did a nosedive for her crotch. But, now and then, without notice, Sandy would decide that Stirling needed discipline. Those times, Consuelo opened the front door to Sandy restraining

Stirling with a choke collar, shouting commands — down, boy; hurry up (in a tiny voice); goooood, Stirling — stuffing pepperoni treats into his mouth. “This is what we’re trying with Stirling today,” he’d tell Consuelo, never breaking eye contact with the dog.Kate guessed that Sandy took Stirling’s failures personally. Stirling was meek, neurotic as a show dog, afraid of the voice on the answering machine, and generally afraid — there were birds not hunted, things left undone. Sandy was certain that Stirling was only biding his time. Afterall, every evening Stirling would run out in the back yard and flush Mike the neighbor’s cat from the bushes — proof enough that an instinct was there, buried in the everyday burdens of a city dog.

Whenever I call the pet hospital and say it’s Zar’s mom, the nurse sighs, then, “Oh, Zar.” Last call it was, “He’s so handsome… and silly. The way he plays with his toys…” Have you ever had a dog that actually plays with his toys? Daisy won’t touch them. I had thought they were more for the pet owners. Twice the nurse called to keep him longer and it was a week before I got to pick him up.

So when I finally went to retrieve Zar at the pet hospital the nurse had written “Zar” on his bag of painkillers and drawn red hearts around his name.  Check out the Zar poster that John sent her—I suspect it’s hanging in the lobby or in her living room. Entering the clinic, I could hear a dog howling in the back and I knew it was mine,  but in the waiting room I tried to look as annoyed as everyone else did.  Zar hadn’t stopped his cries of evident pain while I met with the vet, who politely explained that the “male snow dogs” are very sensitive and howl the most of any dog. It was news to me that Zar is a “snow dog.” He hasn’t seen snow and I’m not sure he’d like it unless he wore booties.  A snow dog, please. Did I tell you he’s now on a duck and venison diet? I think the vet felt sorry for him that he was only getting white, hypoallergenic food. He has us all snowed.

Writers are like hoarders—you stash all your little stories and lines from your life (my high school friends still remember me with my notebook). “Never date a guy who turns more heads than you do,” —interesting advice from a dear friend during college, which I had my character, Virginia, giving to her daughter years later in False Alarm. Your friends might be sick of your stuff, but writing is a way to reuse it for a whole new audience. For instance, take my trip to Belize—an incredible place, but when we arrived the hotel warned us that the Guatemalan rebels had been coming out of the jungle and hijacking tourists. A hotel in our vicinity had been held hostage—I was thinking Bel Canto or worse. You drive in on a long bumpy road to the middle of nowhere, which at least has lush plants and pretty birds and good red wine—and the Robins Crusoe bungalow we checked into was very cool. But the staff at one place pleasantly asked us to put a 15-foot 2 x 4 against the door, which was provided (!), and seemed like something you’d do in a barn to keep the horses in. But face it, you’re barricading yourself in. And from what? I never got a straight answer. Then you’re supposed to sound a Conch shell horn if trouble arises. In fact, the phone is a conch shell, but it only goes to the front desk—more like a tin can for the telephone game. Understandable why they wouldn’t let us drive ourselves to some Mayan caves, where you canoe in for miles through a dark, narrowing passageway in the mountain—you actually have to duck in places to avoid the stalactites. At one point the guide shut off our only light—just for fun. He told us that many people had had to turn around by that point. I stayed the course because I wasn’t going to chicken out in front him and I wasn’t even speaking to the crazy husband by then. I’d wanted to go to the butterfly farm. Then the guide showed us a Mayan sacrificial altar complete with a skull, which of course appealed to you know who.

The cave situation and its level of annoyance popped into my head while I was writing a scene in False Alarm. The maitre d’ led Kate down a skinny aisle to the darkest, remotest table in the restaurant—the one Pedro had requested. Here’s the excerpt:

The restaurant was a tunnel, the way they made kitchens in San Francisco, going deeper than she had imagined, reminding her of a Mayan cave that she and Sandy had canoed into on their honeymoon in Belize. Any darker and she’d need the headlamp she’d had to wear a mile in.

Of course, in real life only the guide had a light, but since it’s fiction you can change it. You can drop your misadventures into your stories, so it’s good to leave the house sometimes and do stuff. You can even call it work while you’re supposedly on vacation. After that I got to go to the butterfly farm.

At the sports firm, one of my colleagues put up a trophy animal head in his office behind his desk. The implication is that he shot it himself (I sort of assume that when someone hangs a head), but no one asked any questions. Don’t forget this is downtown San Francisco, where you could be spray painted for wearing fur, probably shot for hanging animals in your office. We have neighbors who have competing “His” and “Her” trophy animal head walls—and this isn’t Texas. I’m talking about the Silicon Valley Outback, which you might think is politically correct and afraid to offend to the point of boring, but that’s not at all the case. So the crazy husband has had his eye on a Jackalope at a cowboy store called Kemo Sabe for me to hang in my office—just for kicks and to poke fun at this practice—no way does the coworker get to have the most macho office in town.  It’s a jackrabbit with antelope horns—a fake hybrid animal like out of Impossible Creatures, but you have to look twice. It could be my Valentine’s Day present.  By the way, the sports firm is the office that inspired False Alarm, but the animal heads haven’t made it into a novel—yet. But I’m thinking they could make a good scene. You ask where writers come up with ideas. To me it’s not waiting around for a Mission Impossible style adventure to inspire you because that rarely happens to writers, and the best stuff comes from everyday events and how you experience them. Everyone has a different lens.

In Aspen we didn’t end up in a bomb shelter this New Year’s and Charlie Sheen wasn’t arrested, but that town never lacks excitement. With not much snow yet, Aspen was so jammed during the day you couldn’t get into a restaurant and we were living on hotel pillow chocolates and these horrible protein balls that the crazy husband eats. I wouldn’t have minded joining the masses in the streets for the passed whiskey that flowed freely, but of course—you guessed it—we opted for seeking adventure and skiing on dirt. Hey, if adventure is what you’re after, snow conditions are perfect—in places the moguls are deep and carved up, in others the terrain looks like a glazed doughnut. I had to sidestep down a boulder field, dodge tumbling rocks, and ski right over a fallen tree. But it’s breathtaking to be absolutely alone on a mountainside, with no possibility of being medevaced. A ski instructor told us that a woman had taken too much cold medicine and fell asleep in the trees and her husband didn’t report her missing until 7 the next morning—right about the time the ski patrol found her when they did their morning sweep. Alive, fortunately. Where was the husband all night? Hmmm. I’ve got to write a story about this mystery. I wouldn’t try spending the night on the slopes, but if you ski near the trees or on the manufactured snow it’s not at all bad, and in any case, the excuse that I was “cold” didn’t work. The crazy husband rigged up my ski boots with two scrappy heaters and duct tape—I was a little ticked off, thinking that this really is getting to be pyromania, and that much of what I write in my novels is barely subliminal. With wires and flashing lights on my boots, I looked like a suicide bomber. My feet were on fire, but I have to admit that I was never cold once.

By the way, duct tape has a lot of uses—my dad always carries a roll when he travels to tape along the doorjamb in case of a hotel fire, and check out the rolls offered like toilet paper in the ski lodge! After all that fun on the hill, it was nice to get back into town, which is a character itself with its jeweled sweater dogs, the waiters from Transylvania, and the very popular former sheriff, Bob Braudis (hard to miss at 6’6”, long trench coat, shock of silver hair), who was buddies with Hunter S. Thompson. But when the always over-the-top fireworks rocked the town at midnight, I was too wiped out to watch, and the explosions only sounded like gunfire from my bed. On the flight home, it was nice to get upgraded to first class, but the dinner looked like what we’d been living on all week.

First Class Meal

Duct Tape Dispenser

I’m no domestic diva, but when it comes to Burnt Cream (or crème brulee, the French translation) I may actually have a leg up on my mother this Christmas—sorry, Mom. Kate in False Alarm may never get to cook again with her mother’s new boyfriend around—he really is the Pillsbury Doughboy in the kitchen. But thanks to technology and the Crazy Husband’s 50,000 btu butane torch, my sugar crust is crispier than my mother’s. I make up individual creams before burning them and freeze, then when I need them I just sprinkle with sugar and the Crazy Husband fires up the torch (makes him think he’s participating in the way that men barbecue, but I still take full credit at dinner parties). It’s fun for the whole family. No need to even defrost (my type of recipe). Just be careful and keep a fire extinguisher at hand. A pyromaniac like Kate’s husband will go nuts for this device. It’s the type you attach to a propane tank that you have to wheel into the kitchen and looks like it could blow-up a boat. In spite of this torch’s superior nuking power, Mom still insists on crisping her creams the old-fashioned way under the broiler—not that I want to give the impression that we are much in the way of housewives. I was taken aback by the1950s housewife fashions that we’re supposed to wearing—Mad Men inspired, I’m told. The throwback fashions were even noted in the Wall Street Journal.  Is this for real? No way can I see Kate’s mother, Virginia, even wearing Oscar de la Renta. She insists on toe cleavage, even in winter. I don’t think she can be domesticated.

Burnt Cream recipe:

2 cups whipping cream

½ cup sugar

4 egg yolks

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Scald cream in pan over low heat until bubbles form on edge.

Beat egg yolks and sugar together thoroughly and add vanilla to eggs.

Beat warm cream and egg mixture together and pour into 6 oven-safe cups.

Put cups in oven in a pan of tepid water to bake until mix is set and top is golden brown (Try 25 minutes at 375 degrees).

Cool the cups. Sprinkle ½ teaspoon or more of granulated sugar over top.

Torch.

The vet called this morning alarmed that Zar has ballooned up to 109 pounds from 90 pounds in just six weeks. She ran an extensive panel of blood work, certain of a thyroid condition, but turns out Zar’s blood was “gorgeous,” and guess what? He just eats too much. No more table scraps! the vet says, which puts a stop to the roasted Whole Foods chickens that my mother brings the dogs to win their favor. Zar has a variety of issues—skin conditions and allergies and separation anxiety and now he’s required to eat only a certain hypoallergenic white dog food and white bread and rice if he has indigestion. How do you keep him separated from Daisy, who eats ordinary brown dog chow? Please. A dog who only eats white food? I can’t lock him outside while Daisy’s eating—he wails for her and you know how our neighbors call the police.  I may have to risk a trip down to the station. Fortunately, ‘tis the season and the dogs are wearing jingle bells around their necks, which ward off those nasty coyotes and I don’t have to babysit them in the yard. Should Daisy be denied her chickens and eat white food, too? How am I ever going to finish editing The Incompatibles?