Baby Jesus and the Veloci-Raptor

(Continued...from Who stold Baby Jesus? )

Footsteps pounding
Adrenalin pumping through my veins
Unbeknownst to me, my drug addiction Drug Addiction was being satisfied - thanks to my fear of the Wolf Pack heading up the stairs as if the angry mob with pitch forks and torches who were after Frankenstein.

They were coming for me: Fight or Flight!

I was trapped in my room - and I knew that if they got through my door- it would be me in a losing brawl against 12 stoned hippies that would likely end in some elaborate form of torture that could involve electricity and a pool or ropes and a straitjacket.

There was no good ending to this!

My mind rushed - knowing that this could be my last Christmas, yet I also possessed the secret knowing that I had some kind of power that gave me superhuman strength to survive whatever torture they could dish out and live through it...(I had the Joseph dream and it worked at Salton Sea).

Hair standing up on the back of my neck and goosebumps on my goosebumps... Frantically, I had to come up with a plan.

Our house had old door handles that had been equipped with ancient skeleton keys back at the turn of the century when the old Victorian was built. The keys had all been lost for like a bazillion years and none of the doors in our house had locks that worked (except my mom's door - which had eight locks installed so mom could keep herself safely locked inside away from the mayhem when we were trying to kill each other - smart mom).

I stuck a chair under the door handle...to buy some time, grabbed baby Jesus and stuffed clothes under my covers in the shape of a 13-year-old...to fake them out; if only for a minute. With the sound of furious fist pounding on the door I quietly, climbed into the sun room, over the junk and out one of the front windows. Inching my way along the bottom trim of the windows I came to the end and leaped off onto the carport roof just as the gang of vindictive hippies burst into my room...chanting my name in a monotone drone like cannibals under some hypnotic spell who were about to put their victim in a giant stew pot.  



It did take long for the brood to discovered they had been duped by the dummy under the covers when one of them spotted the open window.

Unfortunately, none of them chased me out the window - I knew I would have lost a couple of them that way. "Shucks!" Instead, they turned and hastily descended the chairs as mom yelled from her room, "Under pain of mortal sin!"    No one listened!  No one ever listens.


On top of the carport roof... I was faced with a life or death decision, "front or backyard?"  A voice said, "backyard" it might have been the plaster baby Jesus speaking?!  I don't know! None-the-less, that's the way I chose to go. Quickly, I scampered back and leaped onto a stack of decrepit cardboard boxes full of moldy stinky old National Geographics. The boxes I cursed so many times, broke my fall and I found my self face to face with the Veloci-Raptor.  I didn't have time to pull out my "Saint Francis, positive-pheromones, love-for-animals" - thing that I did. But the attack rooster softened its crazy eyes as though it pitied me and allowed me a free ticket to pass go and collect $200 (not really $200, that's in Monopoly - but you get the metaphor).



I took baby Jesus and climbed into the thickest part of the secret cannabis forest that my hippie brothers told my parents were "Mexican tomato plants."  To tell you the truth, I don't think they were tomato plants of any kind - they never did grow tomatoes and the plants smelled like skunk! Gross! I buried myself like a rat in the thick growth with my baby Jesus and watched as the Wolf Pack came out the back door as if hunting down a wounded gazelle.  Jesus and I were trapped and I tried not to breath. As the angry mob weaved past some leaning boxes of National Geographics, by the old tear-drop trailer with flat tires and by an old outboard motor they headed right in my direction as if they had smelled me.

The cunning Veloci-rooster stood directly in their path.  I looked at Jesus and shrugged. The raptor flung itself on the pack of hippies and began piercing the flesh of the long-haired hippies with its 4-inch razor sharp talons. The older boys began screaming like a bunch of junior-high girls as they stumbled over each other trying to make it back into the house where they would be safe.



Giggling from inside the marijuana plants, I winked at baby Jesus and mocked the tribe of would-be trouble-makers by mimicking the words of my eight grade homeroom teacher, Sister Schultz,  "You shouldn't have put yourself in that position." (of course that conversation was all in my head).  Feeling like I was my brother Bob who was in Vietnam and making my way through a hostile jungle, Baby Jesus and I made it to the tear-drop trailer where we spent the night.




I took the bloody rooster-attack on the herb-smoking Wolf Pack as a good sign. I know that normal kids in regular families didn't have to go through any of this crazy stuff - Not Tommy Blaser...Not Kippy Lennon... Not Ricky Tripp, but I felt lucky in a way... Weird right?  I felt blessed to be forged in the furnish of fire that would shape me for whatever destiny that lies ahead for me as if every incident of sibling torture as a milestone that help me learn about me and the crazy world in which I lived.



I looked at the plaster cast of Jesus and said, "Well, it looks like it's gonna be a good Christmas after all. And with your help Jesus, I'll make it to celebrate the 1970 New Year."


Like Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, I had a dream and that dream will keep me going!


                          Happy New Year!