Electrified Rattlesnake Mayhem

"As it is written in the Book of Jashar.        The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since..." 

Star Date: September 10th, 1966.  The Bible records a day the sun stood still... and this Saturday had the makings of such a day.

Captain's Log: This very, very, very long day includes:
            AM  8:00-10:00   Welcome to Hotel Crazy   (Last blog post)
                                                   Honking Jimmy and the incredibly chapped lips
                    10:00-12:00  Electrified Rattlesnake Mayhem 
                                                   Discovering the rattlesnake while electrifying the "fire escape"
            PM  12:00-1:00    Day of the Iguana
                                                   Catch one and lose another - the poor Trips!
                    1:00 - 2:00    The Dreadful Discovery: What Jimmy left behind
                                                    Jimmy literally thought we meant bathroom.
                     2:00-2:30     Fire Pole Terrorism: The Not-So-Great Escape
                                                     Chased by Jerry "TT" (See last blog post) Not Good!                           
                     3:00- 4:00    Chewy's Free Fall.
                                                   The switch gets turned on, mom rushes Chewy to the Hospital
                     4:00-5:00     The Great Escape.
                                                   "The Rat Killer" verses the Venice Police Department...
                                                      ...and the stupid hitchhikers!

                    Time out for french fries. We had to eat sometime (and gather resources). 

                     6:30-7:30     The Prank on Edna's Porch
                                                    The whole stinking shooten-match
                     8:30-9:30      Burning Down the Lennon Sister's House
                                                    What happens when a homemade Chinese lantern goes very wrong!
 
10:00 AM. The peaceful jungle on the third floor was suddenly alive when dad beat the ceiling and walls with a  broom handle to wake up the Wolf Pack. The hot Oatmeal he had made was now nothing more than a lump of cold gruel.

Jimmy was still hanging out in the fort probably slurping the boogers and Vaseline that lathered together on his upper lip. Tommy had run home in fear and Gherhing the Great came by when he heard Gustav's "Rat Killer."   The excitement was just beginning. Gustav didn't dare "hot-rod" down Harding, because of what Mr. Lennon did to Leland's car with a well placed golf-ball using his 5 iron, but that didn't keep Gustav from waking up Venice with the roar of the billion horsepower he had under the hood of his rather nondescript outside packaging of that old 56 Ford (deception at its finest).

I told Gherhing the Great (my 5th grade buddy from Saint Marks) that it wasn't safe inside - at least not for me, because of Milk Wars (blog post 7 13 2013). So I kept Gherhing the Great at bay until the Wolf Pack finished their food fight and emerged from the back door to begin their diabolical plan of electrifying the "fire escape" pole they installed years earlier that dangled precariously from a tippy-top corbel at the peak of the roof. 

                       Here is a picture from years earlier!

and years before that...

                                                       ...and years before that!







It appears that we liked to climb and fight and hang on to things that would cause irreparable damage if we fell - hence all the broken bones and the need for a hospital bed in the dining room (last blog post). Putting ourselves at risk seemed to be in our DNA.




Making the flying leap out the back window of our three story house had ceased to thrill them and they felt compelled to come up with some brilliant plan in order to satisfy their sweet tooth for peril. With Gustav there you can bet it would included something to do with electricity... since they had already found out a way to electrify me, John Masson and one of the nuns from Saint Marks Catholic grammar school.

With king Gustav's help they employed the bare electrical wires that hung out of the kitchen wall (blog post 7 11, 2013 "Shocking") with bunch of jumper cables he had wired through a crude switch.

The pole, however, missed the ground by about six feet, which still made the final leap to the ground pretty hairy for someone my size. Below the pole was an old Azalea bush that helped cushion the landing... while Puke Breath was standing on Chewbacca's shoulder attaching the jumper cables... that is when we made the most terrifying discovery...or should I say, that is when the missing rattle snake discovered us. Well, not really us  - but Chewbacca. Turns out that this just happened to be the hiding spot of choice for the fugitive rattlesnake.  Since Chewbacca's feet were glued to the ground with Puke Breath standing on his shoulders, the snake decided to seek refuge up Chewbacca's pant leg.

Chewbacca stiffened and screamed as the snaked slithered northward towards his boy parts. He vaulted Puke Breath off his shoulders who landed 8 feet away on top of my new fort crashing the roof in on top of Jimmy who was still inside. Jimmy Honked letting the boys know he was trapped underneath.

Honk!

No one had any idea what was going on with Chewbacca as he froze like a concrete pillar and pointed to his pants. The Wolf Pack grew frustrated as they decided to tackle him and take him down. Chewbacca turned slowly and the Band of Brothers could see the snake slithering up towards his crotch.

Chewbacca was dead. There was just no way to rescue the doomed 18 year old.  The flustered tribe couldn't come up with any way to coax a deadly and agitated rattlesnake out of someone britches?  In a snide comment Dooh-Dooh Pants sarcastically said, "Why don't we electrocute him."

"That's it" Gustav said.
"What's it?" Dooh-Dooh Pants said.
"What you said!" Gustav said.
"What did I say?" Dooh-Dooh Pants asked.

"We'll electrocute them!" Gustave said, snapping fingers and beginning to bark out orders.

"Them?" Chewbacca asked fearfully discering the plural in the word "them." At this moment he felt he would rather take his chances with the deadly viper that had begun taking up residence in his crotch. "No" he begged, trying not to move his lips or any part of his body, but it was too late.

Dooh-Dooh Pants was already in place with jumper cables ready to forcefully make contact to Chewbacca's exposed forearms at Gustav's command. "Now!" shouted Gustav as Dooh Dooh Pants touched the metal ends to Chewbacca like paddles of a electronic defibrillator.

Chewbacca screamed as all that long blonde hair shot straight up, he stiffened and keeled over as if dead.

The boys rushed in and descended on him like a pack of wolves on a downed bear.  They unzipped his pants and pulled them down to his ankles in a split second. As Chewbacca laid unconsciousness (like I usually did after one of his infamous "Templates" - blog post 6 24, 2014 "Template of Doom") Dooh-Dooh Pants, our official snake wrangler, had the stunned rattler around the neck so it couldn't strike with its deadly teeth and carefully began to transport it back upstairs to the cages up on the third floor.

Meanwhile, Chewbacca came to (that was good news), but staggered to his feet in nothing but his tightly-whities...tripping over the pants that had been pulled down around his ankles. At least mom didn't have to make a trip to the emergency room.

Mind you, I did take great literary license in this story, as I conflate the big picture of several stories and put them together. I think, however, you're beginning to get an idea of what life was like at my house i.e. "Hotel Crazy"  (I also changed the names to protect the innocent - or should I say guilty).  







                   
                                                   

Captain's Log: Welcome to Hotel Crazy

If you look carefully at this picture, you'll see three Dahlins with 3 broken bones; two legs and an arm, all at the same time.                                     COUNT 'EM - THREE!

Everyone of those broken bones was a trip across town to Saint John's emergency room in Santa Monica.

Star Date: Saturday Morning September 10th 1966.  Two nights ago a new television series came out called called Star Trek... The first episode was called "The Man Trap." (Oh, and although it was in color), it was pretty corny, really...and might not last long, except for the fascination, we as humans, have with space; especially here in America ever since President John F. Kennedy said, that man someday would walk on the moon.




I'm not sure of the importance being able to land on the moon, other than maybe bringing back a bunch of cheese - I guess that would be kind of cool-daddio, if that ever happened... maybe someone could stick a flag up there and boast to the world that we got there first.



Anyway, as I continue to journal my first week of fifth grade in Catholic School... it's easy to tell that I live in dog years. What I have described so far (for the average person) might take a life time. My life, however, has been turbo-charged by absent parents and the wiles of the creative Wolf-Pack as though I live 7 years for every one of - the average normal human.

                                              It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.

Captain's Log: It was Saturday morning - Post-Apocalyptic-Zombie-Friday-Night-Freak-Fright (last 2 blog post).  

Having survived all that, Saturday is no exception. I was pinned in the back of a race car, had to condemn a perfectly good fort when Tommy and I discovered that his cousin Jeffery Lennon had pooped in it. I had jumped out of our third floor window like a flying squirrel to test the new fire-escape invention. I had been chased by a man who likes to touch boys, sent one kid to St. John's Emergency room for another broken arm, used as a decoy to hold up the Helm's bakery truck, (Post8/3/13) and almost burned down the famous Lennon Sister's house (Post 8/26/13) .

Was this a "Venice thing?" Although the setting was the heart of Venice, it was definitely a"Dahlin Thing!"

Let me put it this way.  In most normal American dining rooms you'd expect to find a dining room but NOT in OUR HOUSE. Do you know what we had, instead? The TRUTH! We had an old hospital crank bed that we stole from the trash bin at Saint John's Hospital in our Dining Room. ""Heck,we practically paidd for the thing"



We lived on the edge! With all the broken bones, our house was like something right out of Bellevue.


I've included a couple pictures here of some of broken bones... but to count all of them up by this time exceeded well over 50 and by the look of things I don't' think that number is going to plateau any time soon.

Saint Johns are you ready for the Dahlins?
You think I'm joking!    
No!

 

Puke-Breath had his leg broken in eight places when the Wolf Pack knocked down the entire fence at Saints Marks school and spent a year on that bed. Mad Dog broke his arm and leg at the same time and had all kinds of pins and screws and metal placed inside his body and walked around like Frankenstein. The older boys called him "The Crip" ...short for "The Cripple."          

That hospital bed saw lots of good use. 

I bet none of the Lennon's on the block had a hospital bed in their dining rooms... I mean what family in America did?  The Lennons on the corner barely even let their poor kids come out of the house especially since we had the "beware lost rattlesnake" flag at full mast.

I doubt they ever even had a broken bone...its' hard to do in the safety of your living room singing songs! (Like singing will ever come in handy some day?)

anyway…

Let's begin after Saturday morning cartoons...after oatmeal, after meal-worms, after milk tasting, and just after Tommy and I had put an old piece of carpet in the bottom of the pit we dug for the fort in my backyard. We were safe in our little building enterprise, because the Wolf Pack was still sleeping up stairs on the third floor.

Our house was like a jungle.. not only because of the zoo we had with our collection of animals and reptiles, but because of the crazy older boys.  They had stayed up late after the Albino Camp backfire listening to rock and roll on KRLA and were still sleeping. Yeah!

The jungle was quiet and the village was peaceful.  "In the village the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight."  (Love that song by the way).

The fort was perfect with all the junk-lumber and plywood we had stacked on top.  Nailed on with straps of tire-rubber was a hatch that opened to two dirt steps that led down to the bottom.

HONK!   Jimmy came over broadcasting his presence with this honking sound he could make with his throat that could be heard from Saint Marks to Venice high school. He also had this way of stretching out his bottom lip with this thump and forefinger and whistling by sucking in air that could be heard all the way to Santa Monica, however, with all the saliva it conjured up, it made his upper lip chapped and red. I'm not going to lie, it looked a little like he had some kind of disease. You can bet your sweet bippy that Jerry, "The Toucher" wasn't about to go anywhere near Jimmy - he was safe. Jimmy's mom made his wear gobs of Vaseline on his face and when his boogers ran out of his nostrils, you couldn't tell the difference of which was which. It was like totally groady!   It was particularly disgusting when he folded his bottom lip over his top lip and sucked in boogers and Vaseline. YUCK!

I often heaved when I stared too long at his face, but aside from that, we began dreaming and imagining about how we were going to divide up the floor-space of this amazing architectural masterpiece (this certainly had to be one of the 7 wonders of fort-building world). And when we talked about one corner being a living room and one corner being a kitchen and another corner being a bathroom...I think Jimmy thought that those corners really were a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom... The told Jeff Lennon about the bathroom idea and Jeff thought it was "for real."

Anyway the big boys (The Wolf Pack) got up and Tommy said he thought he heard his mom calling him. I think he made that up (but who could blame him - after all, he had been electrocuted along with me in the pool and was rightfully afraid of the older boys - very afraid).
After Tommy went home and took some of their tools back with him, I heard... Zit-King's fire-breathing dragon two blocks away, reeving at about 8000 RPM. The older boys called the oldest brother Gustav (who liked to be called King Gustav) Zit King. I'll give you one one guess why. I never said it, because I could tell by the way he flexed his muscles and kissed all the mirrors in the house that it hurt his feelings.

I ran to the front yard.
Jimmy honked
Jeffery stayed in the fort - doing something!!!!!
Tommy ran home.

My friend from school, Ghering the Great heard Gustav's racing car, "The Rat Killer," all the way from his house and decided to mosey on over. He liked cars! Zit King...ah...King Gustav came into the house with a wad of money he had won from racing last night - feeling proud and was looking for mischief.  The older boys went into the backyard and began conspiring how to make the pole thing more fun by hooking it up to the exposed electrical wires in the kitchen. 

When they were younger, they fastened a pulley to the top corbel (of the tippy-top) of the house and tied a rope around the big pepper tree in the back. They experimented by putting Dooh-Dooh-Pants in an old suitcase to test it out when the whole shooten-match: the rope, the pulley, the suitcase - Dooh-Dooh-Pants and everything came crashing some 40 feet to the ground. Believe it or not, Dooh-Dooh Pants lived to pass gas another day.

The Wolf Pack thought it was a man's world, but let me tell ya' we were lost without mom...She was the one who had to washed Dooh-Dooh-Pants off with a hose, because he soiled his trousers so badly... and that was a another trip for poor mom to the Saint Jon's Hospital emergency room.
(Dooh-Dooh-Pants is always cutting the cheese - but this was the day he got his nickname).

This morning, they had decided that they could set a diabolical plan into motion for a grand "TWOFER."

Not only did they plan to modify the galvanized pipe (hanging from the top of the house) to surprise some unsuspecting dupe... but they might also employed it in a way to drive Jerry "TT"crazy.



(Photo from Susan Milner on https://www.facebook.com/groups/123108724454751/)

And, let me tell you... they were successful at both. It resulted in another broken arm, ANOTHER trip to Saint John's Hospital emergency room and set Jerry "TT" completely off his rocker... If only!


                    If only I didn't have to get involved.


This picture, obviously isn't in 5th grade. My first of many, many, many broken bones isn't until next year in 6th grade. This is sophomore year...I should have been dead in my motorcycle accident (but "Someone upstairs" must have been looking out for me)... all I suffered was a broken femur.  

        Still debating whether the St. Christopher necklace helped.