part 2 THE HAMPER OF DEATH: I Took the Bait.

"Sure...Kurt, you want me to climb into an the hamper that used to be an old diaper pail!"

This terrible decision all began when Karin and I were playing "The Healing of the Lame Man."  I had lost a shoe that had gotten buried in a pile of clothes somewhere and my ingenious mother decided to wrap my foot in an Ace bandage so I could pretend to have bum foot (She didn't want Mrs. Lennon to see me running around in the neighborhood with only one shoe).

Jump hobble thump. Jump Hobble thump. I had found a crutch and chased Karin around the second floor. Jump... Hobble... Thump went the thud of the crutch on the wooden floors.

Meanwhile the older boys, their girlfriends, a couple of the guys (that live upstairs in the room with the snake cages) and several neighbors were downstairs holding onto electrical wires that my dad had left hanging out of a wall during a past remodel that never got finished. I had already played that game with them enough and went upstairs to get away this time. I had been chasing Karin around as I hobbled on the old wooden crutch.

I don't know why none of us died holding on to those electrical wires...but we didn't. (IT'S DANGEROUS - DON'T DO IT). In my head, I could almost hear Mrs. Blaser saying, "Donny, I don't care if Tony Dahlin jumped off a building, it doesn't mean you have to jump off a building."  I could also see her saying, "YOU DID WHAT?" when he came home with curly hair and told her what the crazy Dahlins were up to next door.

Whenever the boys electrocuted themselves it was always like Frankenstein or something. "IT'S ALIVE!" It seemed to awaken the creative juices of the inner Viking - The Monster! It always spelled some kind of disaster for our neighborhood or just out-right trouble for either me or the grouch next door.

THIS IS WHERE THEY HATCHED THE PLAN - for the inglorious "TWOFER" They would get me and Edna at the same time.

A little bit about the poor, dear-old lady next door. I'm sure she wasn't always a grouch. I'm sure our moving in next door had something to do with it. I'm sure our cars, our junk stacked up on her fence, the fact that we stole her avocados and the fact that our rattlesnakes had kept escaping onto her property had something to do with it. Anyway poor Edna did not want us to touch one blade of her grass, stack car parts or used tires up against her fence or come within 10 FEET OF HER PRECIOUS BUICK!
                                                                                                    "My precious. My Precious!"

Anyway, Kurt and the boys had just finished frying their brains when they hatched this latest plan...where they had commissioned him to trap me.  "Hey Mark, do you want to play Hide-N-seek?"

"Me?" I asked, a little too enthusiastically - giving away too much up front. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be accepted.

He said that he had the best hiding spot in the history of Hide-N-Seek, then pointed to the hamper.

I gagged. The hamper! You mean the retired-diaper-pail! IT STILL SMELLED LIKE BABY DIAPERS - How could it you might ask (Karin has been out of diapers for years)?

Ahhhh...but think about this with me for a minute, because that's exactly what I was doing -THINKING ABOUT IT! With my vomit-superpowers and faulty brain-to-stomach wiring - Not Good!

  

With our family, eight babies with an average of about four or five diapers a day (a couple of those - most likely would have been full of green-baby-pooh). Multiply that by seven days-a-week, times another fifty-two-weeks a year. Multiply that by the fact that an average baby wears diapers for about two years, which means that over all those years and all those babies, (let me see, doing the math in my head), I figured that it had to be close to about a bazillion and one stinky, smelly, poopy diapers that had once been stored up in that diaper-pail. Meaning, that in order for me to successfully hurdle this hamper invitation, I would have to mentally overcome the picture of vast mountains of green-mushy baby-pooh that now occupied the better part of my brain.  Mt Everest of Pooh-Pooh.

8 (kids) X 5 (diapers)                                 X 7 (days a week)                                 X 52 (weeks in a year)                                 X 2 (years+/-) = 1,000,000,000,000,001  dirty, stinky, poopy, diapers

Gagging, I visualized that setting foot inside of that thing would be like tunneling into that mountain of baby diarrhea, which when latched, had no possible way of escape.

           "There are no windows and no doors!"

As soon as Kurt opened the lid, my stomach heaved in a pre-launch sequence for my super-vomit. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3…I willed my stomach into submission before the count-down reached zero. Miracle! Thank you Saint Anthony! Both, Kurt and my Hide-N-Seek career were saved. 

 "Come on boy. You can do it" Kurt said as if coaxing a frightened dog, but what he didn't know is that primordial metal container represented 85.14% of all my worst fears.

       1)    Smelly things.

       2)       Suffocation.

       3)    Death. (death was behind suffocation and gross smelly things). 

       4)    Small places.

       5)    Being left behind at Salton Sea

       6)    Brothers - after they've been jolted by electricity

       7)    Sister Godzilla

       8)   Things that smell like poop.

       9)   Things with lids that latch.

      10)   Small dark places.

      11)  Being trapped.

      12)  Being in things with lids that can be latched from the outside by a brother.

         13)  Brothers - before electricity

      14)  Any smell or sound or thought that makes me think I want to vomit. 

            15) Small dark places with latches that smelled like it had been used for diapers.

      16)  Mrs. Simpson, my third grade substitute teacher.

      17)  Finding Alligators in the bathtub.

      18)  Peeing your pants in 3rd grade. 

      19)  Getting hit by a car and having on dirty underwear 

      20)  Being raised by my Brothers or by the Salton Sea-ites.

I would never say yes!  "...um...sure Kurt, no problem."   WHY?   I was most definitely clinically-psychotic - there was no other explanation! I just wanted them to like me. I wanted to feel like I belonged.

In his generosity, he squish me into conformity of the diaper pail like I was made of Jello - slammed the lid closed and snapped down the old rusted metal flap on the outside. 

It wasn’t about a minute that I heard footsteps and voices

Like an unwelcome swarm of locus coming up the stairs I heard muffled hushes and shushes and whispers and the solid thuds of well-placed fists as the clan smacked each other.   

Please God - don't let them find me, don't let this be a trick and please don't let me die!

More footsteps! More noise! Before I knew it, I was in the air and I think they thought I didn't know! Keeping the hamper pail upright as they carried me somewhere, thinking I was a complete idiot.  With the suppressed giggling and the thumping and the socking and the tribe “hushing” and “shushing” each other along with the sound of slaps to the back of the heads - didn’t help their cause one bit. I knew what was happening all right. I was on to them, but I wanted them to be happy, so I pretended to be oblivious to their treacherous plan.  

First, it was down eight stairs, then a right turn on the landing, then seven more stairs down to the first floor, then more “shushing” as if I didn’t know by this time exactly where they had carried me.

“Dirty bird. Dirty Bird!” sang the mynah bird that Liver-Lips taught curse words to, giving away the location at the bottom of the staircase in the entry.   

After sixteen paces across the entry the tired old hinges squealed as the humungous oak door hesitated to open. They were taking me outside! With a few more steps across porch, I began to get really scared knowing I was being kidnapped and not knowing where they were taking me. Just as we started down the front stairs, someone cut the cheese and brood dropped the hamper as I bounced and tumbled and rattled and shook and came crashing to a solid thud onto the concrete at street level.  

It was not a Good Vibration - I threw that in because it was the hottest Beach Boy song right now. 

By this time, I figured that they knew that I knew so I screamed a little to please them - after all, it is what they wanted...but I was just happy to be included - no matter how afraid of where the next phase would take me...

Call it a premonition...a prophetic utterance... a word of wisdom...but little did I know how right I was to be afraid. It only got worst from here. 

NEXT:  THE GREAT "TWOFER" and the FLAMING HAMPER OF DEATH...Please Reader Discretion Advised in the next episode of markie d.... oh and by the way... I'm not sure that I was feeling the "love-good vibrations" from the Wolf Pack.