The Sleep-Over and the Over-Sexed Oryctolagus Cuniculus.

The Sky is Falling Part 2 continued from: Troglodytes. 

The six-foot-two hairy Sasquatch lumbered into the house hiding among the shadows carrying a bloody hacksaw. The gruesome blood-stained Wookie looked like something straight out the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. James Moore’s jaw dropped when he spied the creature and the short hairs on the back of his neck stood up on end.

Looking over at me in terror, his eyes begged for an answer. I just shrugged my shoulders as if this was nothing out of the ordinary and lined up my cue-stick to take my next shot. 

 [Elliot and Dad in dining room with round "spheres" on the pool table]

James was frightened and confused—having no idea what he was in for when he came over to spend the night. He looked like the person who voluntarily checked themselves into an insane asylum and suddenly realized it was a horrible mistake with no way out.  

"There are no windows and no doors"

I had worked two weeks straight getting ready for this day and with Irene’s help on Fridays, the Formica top of kitchen table was unearthed and glistened and the piles of laundry as high as Mount Everest had been washed and put away.

I had things looking about as normal as people could who had an alligator in the backyard, a pigeon that lived on top of the refrigerator and owned a mutant attack rooster instead of a guard dog.  

Living in Venice put us at a disadvantage already.  I’m not sure I knew of one person who owned a leash. Unlike Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, our dogs ran as free as our hippies and were bathed about as often. Our mongrels went poop on neighbor’s lawns and sat in the middle of the street on warm days. It seemed like the further from Venice the smaller the dog—pampered Chihuahuas, poodles and perfumed purebreds with papers and rhinestone studded dog-collars.

Venice dogs were real dogs: Pitbulls and German shepherds with torn ears and mutts that chewed bald patches on their butts left bare by gnawing teeth on a hunt for fleas.

My dog, Poochie, was a six-breed-beagle that snorted while relentlessly masticating the open sores of eczema on the exposed skin near her tail. The irritating noise of her nonstop chewing never ceased while we shot pool in the dining room.

[best dog ever]

I was afraid that when daylight-comes-tomorrow-morning it would reveal even more that I was embarrassed for James to see. We had rattlesnakes in the attic, chickens and guinea pigs running loose among the bamboo and an ever-multiplying population of rabbits in cages patrolled by a ginormous and disgusting oversexed rabbit with pink, hairless ball-sacs which dragged three inches behind the grotesque creature.

I thought maybe I could put a bag over his head, tie him up and carry him back across the Santa Monica border and drop him off there—not the rabbit—James! 

The testosterone-supercharged rabbit humped every living creature in our backyard including the ancient 18-pound frog we had forever. I kept waiting for some missing link but never found a floppy-eared hairy frog. My bothers named the hideous hare after Hugh Heffner and at one point dressed the rabbit in a bow tie. 

Whenever Hugh would mount my pet dog, Poochie didn’t seem to mind and let the sex-crazed beast of white fur do its disgusting thing.

                           Sick.

I was grossed out, but the hippies thought it was totally cool.  “Dude, far-out. Groovy.”

My mission for tonight was to protect the kid from Topanga from the ooze. (The ooze was some bad mojo that had been released from the pit of hell through a portal in our basement, back in the days when mom had séances and when the Ouiji Board spoke to my bothers that eventually led them to a secret room). 

Tomorrow I would try to steer James clear of the Velociraptor-attack-rooster and the Father of All Rabbits.

I knew that once James had seen the rabbit there was no way of un-seeing it and considered the possible damage it could do to his young psyche–being immortally etched in gray cells of his photographic memory forever.

James was a nerd and I was a dweeb. He was a genius and I was on a quest for acceptance. We were not like Billy Lennon–he was the epitome of cool and was the Student Body President of Saint Monica's.  

It's laughable how imature we were, James even mandated that we refer to the balls on the pool table as spheres. Embarrassed to talk about such things we couldn’t say, “are those your balls” or “my balls,” or “do you have the balls with stripes or are your balls the solid ones.” Instead, we had to say, “spheres,” as in, “You have the solid ‘spheres’ and I am going to hit the ‘7 sphere’ into the corner pocket.” 

Pathetic, right? So, I had this hunch that James would be devastated if he saw this giant fur-bag dragging a pair of pink ball-sacs that were larger than his male parts.

                                                     [1972 swim team] 

[There I am on the blocks]

I digress–on with guy’s night. After sinking the #2 blue sphere in a side pocket, I bragged about my latest conquest (how I ended up holding Cheryl’s hand at the Saint Monica football game at Pali-High–this was a big deal–seeing that I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to my true love, Andrea, for the past 5 years) when the front door suddenly cracked open again.

Tony walked straight into the living room adjacent to where we were playing pool. He knew we were watching him, but acted nonchalant—I had seen this exact theatrically performance a million times already—it was always for show.

Act I. Tony pulled off his shirt and began flexing in front of the mirror—I rolled my eyes.

My oldest brother loved the attention and his muscular reflection. The worst kind of torture for him was to completely ignore him. I pretended not to be aware of his presence though he was only ten feet away.

[Livingroom mirror over fireplace - dining room adjacent to left] 

Act II. He romantically leaned into the mirror and obnoxiously began French kissing his image with wet slobbery sounds, louder than Poochie’s chewing.

Motioning to James with subtle facial communication not to pay attention he finally set his jaw back to where it belonged and was in a middle of a core melt-down unable to concentrate on his next shot.

Unfortunately, Act III always included some terrible form of retribution that usually included spit or electricity.  What would Tony do to the kid from Topanga? I feared.

Pretending to be an accident, Tony hit James’ cue stick as he walked through the dining room sauntering out the back door scattering the “spheres” on the pool table.

That was it? We got off easy.

After rearranging all the spheres exactly where they had been (photographic memory—remember) James lined up his cue stick intently calculating the geometric angles for the best shot when he suddenly leaped into the air and let out a shriek!

Oh no, Tony let in a rattlesnake, I thought.

James looked down at his leg and screamed even louder, higher, shriller. It must have been worse than I originally thought, it had to be the dreaded Veloci-rooster or maybe even the alligator.

I leaned over the pool table and saw that the disgusting rabbit had latched onto his leg, as if on a conjugal visit. James was wearing shorts and it was full-on pink, sagging, scrotum-to-flesh contact.

Tony snapped a shot with his disposable 110 Instamatic while Big Foot and the rest of Dahlin brothers, who had been out back smoking something, came pouring in through the backdoor to watch ACT III.

Poor James.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I thought.

It was a long night. I told James never to cover his head with his sleeping bag and to leave his arms outside should he need to defend himself against some middle of the night hippie attack.  I don’t think he ever slept.

 

The next day, the plan was to teach James how to ride one of the motorcycles and this is when he would discover the truth about the hacksaw wielding sasquatch.

             [That’s for my next post]

Anyway, Cheryl was in love with me and I felt sorry for her because I still didn’t quite know the true meaning of the word.  

Cheryl, the motorcycles, the mess, the ooze—all of it, would lead to a chain of events that I would regret for the rest of my life—and the shame I felt for not fighting back and how much I would despise the $286.00 award money.

Like Pinocchio, I desperately wanted to be a real boy.  

I needed to be free from the tyranny of perfection and the insecurities of desperately needing to feel approval that I confused with acceptance. 

Well anyway, things got worse before they got better (which is all part of the difficult journey--which is my story). It would take some time but eventually I would rise from the ashes! 

Egads Troglodytes! The Sky is Falling.

"Egads - Just look at 'em!" 

Terrified by James Moore’s proposal, my brain nearly shut down from sensory overload. The words of Chicken Little, “The Sky is falling. The Sky is falling,” loudly rattled off the walls of my semi-porous gray cells. 

Last time I left off was in the Fall of 1972 in the illustrious misadventures of Markie D and his primal urge for belonging and acceptance with the mysterious vanishing at Salton Sea. 

At Saint Monica’s I had a new tribe; water polo and swim team friends—people I felt who accepted me—maybe, even more importantly—liked me. 

They say, “blood is thicker than water” but I’m not sure. Water, like fire, purifies and my experience in the pool was like a right of passage as if baptism into a tribe of my own.

I felt unique. Special. Gifted and cursed with the ability to be fully present and to pay attention to everything—that’s the curse part. I watched the nuance on the faces of those speaking and saw things behind the words. I could feel the heart, sense pain, see loneliness, feel empathy, yet be distracted by the noise of a mosquito in the corner of the room.

  

I heard the unspoken things that rattled around in my brain, yet at the same time, I was a terrible listener.  The Curse.  I could never follow a conversation to the end, never fully track and was usually sent off in a world of my own before the other person finished. 

I paid attention to the world in a different way.  Fully Present, yet not there at all as I attempted to focus on everything at the same time.

I could never make it to the end of a song and only knew four words to a song I heard one million times—maybe six words, "I want to hold your hand."

Debi Gas knew the words of every song – I envied regular people who could do that – so I whistled (I was a slave to the beat, who needed words). 

James Moore was just like me. Short. Late bloomer. Pain. He has a lot of unspoken words behind his eyes and needed acceptance just like me. We were the same, only different.

The words that terrified me were his assertive self-invitation to spend the night at the Dahlin House.

Among the thousands of impulses raging in my brain stem were: fear, dread and trembling. None of the emotions had anything to do with joy. Sleepovers were for children and grammar school friends, but for high-schoolers this was weird. Right? Did he have some sinister ulterior motive? 

WHY?

What did he want – REALLY?  

I had a lot to lose.

Would he continue to like me if he visited my haunted house and stepped in the dark ooze or on a carburetor on the black entry steps or slip on an oil slick from one of Erick’s car that he often drove and parked right in the way of the front porch stairs?

         “The sky is falling—the mess!”  

The boats under the palm tree. 































 and boat motors running in trashcans 





and the car parts.

and the carport shoved full of junk and basement stacked to the brim...

and the mountain of clothes and piles of laundry and pieces of motorcycles,  and leaning towers of newspapers.

The bamboo towers in the backyard and Marijuana plants and the Veloci-Rooster, the mosquito-laden pond and the alligator, the Wall Drug hippie-hooch-hut and the esters of skunk-weed carried into our unkempt, leaning, turn-of-the-century home by the ocean breeze.

I felt like it left me exposed and vulnerable like my identity was wrapped up in it.   

Maybe this was a field trip. They had their fair share of hippies in Topanga but I image that he had never run into one in person. That's what people did; they came to Venice to see the hippies and most of them lived in my house.

We were both growing out hair longer as junior hippies but would he confuse my long-haired, shirtless, jean-wearing-half-naked-brothers with troglodytes.  

James could see that I stopped listening to him a long time ago and was patiently waiting for a response.

I visualized the task in front of me. James asked if it could be this weekend.

Panic. 

It would take me two weeks of solid work to clean up the front porch. It would be like the equivalent of an arduous archaeologically dig to unbury the years of strata stacked on the grand staircase, not to mention the eons of sediment laid down by the evolutionary forces of erosion that cluttered the second floor.

Would he see me differently?

Would he be affected by the Ooze and would that hideous dark substance of my upside-down world of Stranger Things follow him back to Topanga?  

Would he cast me into a different category of people – who lived with cars on blocks on the front lawn and who had to move an entire armada of trash barges from one side of the street to the other each Wednesday and Thursday for Street cleaning – a law passed because of us. Would he see us as backwoods rednecks or like the Beverly Hillbillies and those who seem to be blissfully unaware of our unsightly blight?

My brothers didn’t seem to care—hippies didn’t know their poop stank.

Then there was the safety issue—would his life be in danger?

Would he live through it?  Would he be hazed by my older brothers—roped and tied, put into a pit or electrocuted? What might they do to him?  I was used to it and thrived on it—physical pain tolerance was my adrenaline superpowers.

He stood and waited and watched the machinations of my brain.

How would my older sister take it—if he went back to school and reported what he saw? My older sister recently changed her name (in the current wave of name-spelling-rage) and had begun to tell her Santa Monica friends that she was from Marina Del Rey.

Mind racing – it was jammed with the million bits of information it was trying to process. Stuttering, hemming, and hawing I made some lame excuses trying to put off my friend's visit with things like, “our parakeet is suffering from diarrhea” and “the Asian bird flu” I said and then offered a real one that I thought might scare him away, "another rattlesnake escaped."

We didn’t have parakeets – only a mutant, attack Veloci-Rooster in the backyard, a four-letter-word spewing, foul-mouthed Minah bird, and Johnny, the flying-parasite-host of a disgusting pigeon, that lived on the refrigerator.  GROSS!

Undistracted, he stared.  

Meanwhile, I wondered if I could I move mountains...

...or if I could part the Red Sea without Moses’ magical staff...

...or if I could do something like Mary Poppins or like Samantha on Bewitched and wiggle my nose or like the Cat in the Hat and have everything enchantingly go back to its place?

How many trips to the Sepulveda dump would it require moving this amount accumulated debris?

Adrenaline pumping (my drug of choice) – coursing through my veins, I knew it would be a herculean task. Could I make a dent if working night and day—every night and every day straight for 52 years (probably not). This was my fix—I was feeling supercharged.

Markie D? Yes, me! I could pull off the impossible and was determined to shovel everything into the third floors junk rooms, everything else could be crammed in some minuscule vacant space in the carport or cart the crap off to the far corner of the backyard next to the marijuana plants.  

Like The Little That Could, I said, “I think I can, I know I can – I know I can.”

“What?” he said.

“Oh,” I said as if just returning to planet earth or coming up from underneath the surface of the water. “um…two weeks…um sure. That would be great.”  I lied.

This would set the stage for the context of the life-changing episode three weeks later in January. The near-fatal event at the start of the new swim season that would impact my life—that will land me a fleeting $286.00—the most regrettable $286.00  

A $286.00 shame story that makes me vomit to this day and hate myself for not fighting.

 

What was wrong with me—I fought with older brothers and the Little-Angry-Man crew and could hold my own with bullies?

I would live with self-loathing and second-guessing and the ongoing late-night questioning why I didn’t take a full swing and punch the short, pasty-white adult in the face.

I thought I was, “meaner than a junkyard dog” (five words of Jim Croce’s song). I thought I was bulletproof—maybe not so much.

In the meantime, I would have to sneak over the Blaser’s house, the regular people next door, and borrow a snow shovel or some other tools.  Mr. Blaser painted everything in their garage with a bright orange B, to keep us Dahlins from inadvertently acquiring their stuff that was said to “disappear into the black hole at our house."

After the heist, I grit my teeth – picked up the shovel and began clearing a path to the front door.  “Whistle while you work Markie D” dig in and maybe you can keep the “Sky from Falling” and protect the little Topanga, brainiac kid from the ooze.