My older brother who looked like Chewbacca recently graduated from Santa Monica City College which granted him only more idle time. I don't know who said, "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop," but in the case of hippie older brothers this expression was certainly true - I had experience those unholy hands on too many occasions. On the mornings he slept in (typically every morning - expect for the Wednesday and Thursday street cleaning torture - which agitated him to no end)... I had one less obstacle of getting out the door in the morning and safely to Saint Mark's School. What I mean by "one less obstacle" was that I had one less older brother that I had to carefully navigated around - in order to escape unharmed. BUT NOT TODAY.It was a new year (1970) and I prayed for normal! I had been praying for normal ever since the needle tipped arrows and the time I was left behind at Salton Sea. I was thirteen, still waiting for the stubborn hair to show up under my armpits and felt awkward among my classmates in the eight grade, like Ricky Arredondo, who had to shave the coveted peach fuzz on their upper lips.
I just didn't seem to fit; not in my family - and as a late bloomer not at school - especially since I was the omega (baby) Dahlin boy and had been profiled because of the reputation of my older bothers that made the Nuns hate me and made me feel like everyone else was looking at me with raised eyebrows and sideways glances. On being Catholic 
I wasn't a Blaser I wasn't a Lennon
I wasn't one of those other normal, plain-wrapped kids who lived ordinary lives - I was a Dahlin!
My family was unique and I was special. Every time I walked out of a room I sensed that people were talking about me behind my back. I wanted to feel accepted and like I belonged and it seemed as though my older brothers (the WOLF PACK) knew that and were determined to make make sure that didn't happen. I was on the outside looking in.
I'm not one who believes in conspiracy theories: I do believe we landed on the moon (6 months ago), that Paul McCartney was still very much alive, that tire companies didn't invent the expansion joints in concrete freeways to wear out tires faster or that the CIA killed President Kennedy - but sometimes I think my older brothers did conspired against me "To keep little brother down" at least it felt that way.
This morning was no different! It was January and the beginning of a new year...I had found clean socks and two shoes that matched. Somehow, in the cosmic order of things, I had been chosen as a select group of students from Saint Marks to attend Zero Period at Saint Monica's High School at O' dark-thirty-in-the-morning. I actually don't know why I was chosen or how someone figured that I qualified to be included in this smart group of kids who traveled each school-morning for advanced math (but I was...it made me nervous and now I had big expectations of high school level algebra to live up to). I had to at least pretend to be smart. It felt good to feel like I finally belonged to something - even though it was a geek squad! I had to admit when I was just plain ordinary "White and Gold," a Swede with blonde hair I was kinda of cute - but that was the exception to the rule. Usually by the time I showed up to school I was black and blue - covered with all manner of bruises and Band Aids. Terry Ballentine. Cathleen Horamomto. David McLean. Smart kids, normal kids... and then there was me! On this particular Monday morning I don't know what Chewbacca was doing up so early - my hunch was that he never went to bed last night and was just making his way in from whatever party he was at. I don't know if our little encounter this morning was part of the "Wolf Pack Conspiracy" or if it was pay back that I had stolen Baby Jesus and managed to get away with it or that he was still upset that I tried to take him to school for show and tell. In any case, I was a marked man (or a marked prepubescent-whatever-my-sister-called-me)... LITERALLY!
UGHhhhhhhh!
Chewbacca grabbed me from behind, picked me off my feet and squeezed all of the air out of me - cutting off the oxygen to my brain - rendering me unconscious. When I woke up, I quickly headed out the door door and hastily made my way to the waiting carpool of Saint Markian brainiacs. When I got to the car the other kids pointed and laughed (except for Cathleen - she cried! My Saint Mark's sweater was turned backwards and I had black-marker tattoos that covered my face like one of those Hells Angel "biker" guys who live down in the rough, run-down section of the Venice canals. Literally I was marked! In addition to the dripping flames - he drew little hairs on my chest and blacked out one of my teeth. I didn't have a good explanation for the mother who almost refused to let the little black and blue Swede into her car of hysterical 13-year-olds who wouldn't or couldn't stop laughing. AT ME! Grrrrrrrrr
The only thing I knew, was that all the High School kids at Saint Monica's would see me and that eventually the rest of my classmates at Saint Mark's would think I belonged in the freak show in a circus.
The nun didn't know if she should let me into her class or not, but figured that since it was before homeroom she would take pity on me and let me in just this once with my demonic looking Tatt's - but she wasn't happy about it.
I met a kid named James Moore from Corpus Christi in the Palisades. He was the smartest kid in the class and wanted to write an algebraic word problem on how long it took Chewbacca to draw all over my body. "If Chewbacca began at the freckly mark as point A and drew a line all the way to the mosquito bite at point B and he drew another line from B to C and back to A around the ear and across the chest, which train would get to New York quicker and how long was Markie d on the floor before he woke up." The kids laughed. It wasn't funny!
After class, when I boarded the "3 Lincoln" the bus driver squinted his eyes in serious scorn and asked me where I was headed - when I told him Venice Boulevard - he rolled his eyes, punched my ticket, reluctantly told me to get in and said "Venice, huh? It figures!"
I had bright expectations for 1970 and had hoped to get Andrea's attention.Only this was not the kind of attention I was looking for.
"Normal"
I prayed for normal but now sat quarantined in the back of the Big Blue Bus on my way back to Venice.
Continued: Part 2 Back at Saint Marks
Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. Katherine Anne Porter
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