Grumpy Cat started it all!

Continued...(Christmas lights and three things I feared most)

Believe it or not, when we weren't in training to kill each other....(see pictures below) we really were angels at one time.

Look at how cute we were... sometimes we were even saints...

But with the advent of The Beatles, long hair, marijuana plants and the Ooze- those days are long gone. 

Because my mother has locked herself in her room and refuses to come out... my older brothers are meaner than junkyard dogs with mange, and this time it was the stupid grumpy cat that had riled them up. The "Law" in our house was that boys could not pick on girls and since I was the youngest boy... all sibling torture fell on my plate - it was a tough job, but somebody had to do it. 

In the last episode, Lazarus, "The Miracle Cat," had lost the rat which upset the older boys to no end... that caused a riot to brake out in the living room when one of them caught a glimpse of me climbing out the window. With an old smelly rope slung over my shoulder that I had pulled out of the murky bottom of one of the two sailboats on the front lawn, I tried to sneak onto the carport roof without being seen. My job was to scale the steep pitch of the old turn-of-the-century house so that I could pull up the Christmas lights that Karin, Pinky and I had laid out earlier on the front lawn (lawn is a loose translation- but go with it). 

Those little stinkers - Tommy Blaser and Jeffery Lennon and Michael Lennon kept breaking our Christmas lights and I was content to have a good third of them working when we tested them while the boys were betting inside.

After the wrestling match inside, older boys had retreated to the hippie-hut out back and I had gotten to the tippy-top peak of the old house without incident. 

                                           

I figured that with 38.2% of our light bulbs working and the fact that I had made it to the top of the house without being spotted by my big brothers (the Wolf Pack)...                                                                                                                                     ...THIS WAS GOING TO BE A GREAT FINISH to a hard year.    

In order to pull off this Christmas light project every year, it meant that I had to face three of my greatest fears. The first: Fear of the dark. I had to climb into the dark cluttered basement - home of the portal to hell in order to retrieve the lights. As usual, I threatened my little 9-year-old sister, Karin, that Santa would not bring any toys if she did not go into the basement with me and lead the way. I told her that I didn't want her to trip over all the junk down there, that I needed to go second to "have her back" and that I needed to hold her hand so that I could protect her...(all lies).

I was thirteen, but was smarter than her and knew the boogie man lived down there.

I had overcome my first fear with the help of my little sister - but I'm not going to admit that to anyone.

My second fear was heights.

My job was to climb to the top - shimmy out along the peak (hurting my boy parts) as I straddled the high roof and lean out over the edge to lower the rope down to Pinky who would tie a boy scout approved square-knot to the middle section of the enormous string of lights.

Not gonna lie - this freaked me out! I had to sit there leaning out over the edge of the roof some 900 feet up in the air... (okay 35 feet or something like that) but I couldn't show negative pheromones because as soon as the Wolf Pack were to discover this weakness they would certainly exploit it.

The third thing I was afraid of was being discovered by the Wolf Pack with a rope... To me, it was like sending up the bat-signal into the sky showing the Wolf Pack my location as though it were a beacon that invited them to come and torture me. It reminded me of the story in the Bible with Abraham and Isaac. Isaac was told to carry the wood to the top of the hill...the very wood he was to be sacrificed with...gulp!

There I sat on top of the roof with the potential that all of the negative stars in the universe could line up against me.

But with the hippies out back smoking it up - everything was groovy - "all copacetic" as Bruce Grant would say.

With the ropes clearing the third-floor window I nearly had it all finished when I heard the clamor of Santa's Reindeer right behind me - it was a Christmas miracle!

Hearing the commotion of all of the reindeer hooves and panting and the noise of the sleigh settling on top of roof behind me, I turned around expecting to see Santa himself. Actually, I turned around praying it would be Santa...for I had a foreboding feeling in my gut.

YES, Kids never...ever...ever climb to the top of a very tall building with a long rope slung over your shoulder in the presence of older brothers or near the edge of a cliff or near a tree or near an abandoned well... if you happen to be the baby brother - LET ME JUST SAY THIS NOW - you are only asking for trouble.

The Bat-signal was up.. I had sealed my fate. The Wolf Pack plotted revenge on me for laughing at them when the retarded grumpy cat attacked them.  Somehow it was all my fault and now I was tied up by the ankles and being dangled over the top and swung back and forth by half of the motley crew who were on the ground racing back and forth across the lawn with the strand of Christmas lights.

Okay so... we weren't normal...but who has ever seen a kid hanging by his ankles from a rope off of the top of a giant three story house swinging back and forth? The Blasers might have had the straightest Christmas lights, but by golly who could top this show - not even the Lennons (who were in show-business) down the street...The rest of the world- eat your heart out!

All of this to say - I guess it is good that my parents had especially trained me in advance for such occasions...

The grumpy, mean O' cat came out of the house, as if to see, if I could land on my feet if the rope broke...and wouldn't take his eyes off me as if betting against me.
I stared the sucker down as if to show the dumb cat that I had more lives than it did and was thankful that Kris and Donny didn't bring out the BB guns and use me for target practice...

So you see in the end, it wasn't all that bad - it could have been worse!  

I'm sure my homeroom teacher, Sister Schultz, would tell me that, "I shouldn't have put yourself in that position."  

I'm wondering if she would have told that to poor Issac!

Merry Christmas

The Epic Race: Dahlins verses the Lennons

Star Date: August 11th 1969.

I got back from the "diarrhea-trip to Valhalla" (otherwise known as the 1969 Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho) to find that things were awfully weird on Harding Ave.
Wait!
Wait!
Wait...that didn't come out right...everything was always kind of weird on my street, because we lived there of course.


 "Weird" is not the right word, maybe I should have said "unusual." Not that things had gotten normal all of a sudden, but that there was this ominous vibe in the air. I think the adults could explain it better, but as a kid it's something that you could feel by the silence.

Mr. Lennon was very athletic and always had his kids running time-trials up and down Naples avenue with a stop watch in his hand. I don't know if the times he recorded should have counted because the 50 and 100 dash-marks he painted in the street next to their house ran down hill towards Saint Marks church. Anyway, I think Danny and Mimi were his two fastest runners. Mr. Lennon was always trying to get us to race his kids, but I saw Mimi run a couple of times and knew that she could beat the pants off of me by a mile. Danny was playing football at Loyola University up on the hill with the big letter L that you could see from our house. Mr. Lennon's big challenge was his oldest boy, Danny, race against my oldest brother, Tony...
                            .                  ...i.e. the Lennons verses the Dahlins.

It was the anticipated event of the summer!  But when I got back home to Venice from this Boy Scout trip with Troop 32, there was no visible activity going on anywhere on Harding avenue.

 No diabolical plans of reeling in the old grouch next door (post 5/9/13).
 No launching of flaming UFO's (post 8/24/13).
 No bags of dooh-dooh on Edna's front porch.
 No hamper torture (post 6/5/13)
 No electrocutions (post 4/26/13 & 7/8/13).
 No screeching down the streets in Hot Rods.
 No Helm's Bakery Truck ambushes (post 8/3/13).

Tommy couldn't come out and play, the Blasers had to stay inside for some reason

Jeffry couldn't come out and play, Bob and Jeanette Lennon's family had to stay inside.

None of the Superior ave Lennons were around (and they were always around).

No touch football was taking place in the street. No kick-the-can and none of the Dahlins were shooting each other with B.B. guns nor we they hunting me with needle-tipped arrows.


I couldn't put my finger on it, but something wasn't right.

The hippies were in the back, quietly minding their own business, doing whatever it is they do in that back-ivy-cave with those "Mexican tomato plants" of theirs. I was beginning to get suspicious of those plants because they never seemed to grow any tomatoes  - even after all the attention my brothers gave them.

One of hippies was making his way from the ivy enclave (the dark ivy cave that the older boys called "Wall Drug") when the Veloci-Rooster attacked and scared the "long-hairs" spit-less who then screamed like a little girl and fell onto the thin, tin walls of the old, pool-turned reptile-habitat. Stretched out across the side of the fallen tin wall, the freaked-out screeches of the long-hair turned to a muffle as the dude landed face down into the billion gallons of sand that we had stolen from Venice Beach. When the cocky attack rooster caught a glimpse of what was slowly making a predatory approach in the direction of the downed hippie, it wisely backed up and gave way.    

The insidious yellow eyes of the creature blinked slowly as if assessing what to do with its victim. Exposing its dagger-shaped teeth the Caiman alligator appeared to have weighed it options and decided for escape rather than attack.  

Let me tell you, "That was one lucky hippie!"

The "gator" creature took off across the stoned victim and began running in a frenzied circle around the backyard looking for the easiest means of exit.

Chickens flew! Feathers were everywhere! Rabbits and chuckwallas and guinea pigs and even the desert tortoises took cover. Things flung, rusty bikes buckled into a heap and old BBQs standing on three legs fell over as stacks of decaying National Geographics swayed as if under the influence of the latest earthquake.

The chicken squawking, the awful screaming, the animal caterwaul, and the clamorous racket of the symphony of dissonance alerted all of us in the house that something terrible was "afoot" (Sherlock Holmes would say), in the backyard.  Tony and I looked out the window in time to see the gator making his way into the front yard.  The prehistoric reptile ran to the soft tar street and couldn't decide which way to turn. I hoped the Tripps wouldn't open their front door after what had happened to them last time (post 8/1/13 Iguana Del Diablo) and thought how nice it would be if Edna's brother, Hutch, was makings one of his notorious visits to Harding Ave instead and had a close encounter of the worst kind with the savage reptilian gargoyle.

(Ricky Tripp pictured to the left).

Without any fear at all, Tony took off his shoes and bolted after the flesh eating monster. The sharped-toothed beast raised it's body on all fours and took off towards the Lennon house. Forget Tony verses Danny Lennon, this was Tony verses the lightning fast cold-blooded carnivore that had escaped from the Dahlin swamp.

Billy Lennon decided he would break the top security curfew and had lurking outside in front where he watched the whole thing.

Down the street, came the gator ablaze with the inspiration of freedom, followed by the barefooted Dahlin whose feet were moving so fast that you couldn't even see them.


Taking a right at the corner of the Lennon's house Tony bolted after the high-strung vertebrate and made a record 50-yard-dash, grabbing the tail of the raptor so that it could not run into the wide open doors of Saint Mark's Church!

Tony flung the thing around a couple times to scatter its feeble brain, heaved it over his shoulder and returned the ravenous beast to it home.

Billy knew!  He saw the whole thing.

Billy knew that his oldest brother, Danny didn't stand a chance against my oldest brother! He sneaked back inside the safety of the compound and whispered accounts of the events of the epic race that took place right out in front of his house.

(I just put in the picture to the Right, for fun of course. The Lennon Sisters weren't really out in front during this latest episode...they were being diligently protected by the watchful eye of their Dad because of the rising intensity of the lunatic threats that the crazed fan, Chet Young, had made against Bill Lennon).

My birthday was in two days. I would finally become a teenager...13!  But in two days that didn't seem to matter anymore.. because everything was about to change the very next day on our beloved street!

                 Venice as I knew it, was about to change forever!

Oh and if any one sees Keith Bjelajac, thank him for letting me borrow his Saint Mark's sweater.

                  Next Time: The Tagic News!



 

Hell Hath no Fury...Veloci-Rooster Conclusion.

(Continued from last blog posting)

Around the corner from us was this single-mother, who was probably way ahead of her time. She lived in a small house that was sandwiched between the "Fraternity" house at the corner of our street and just before the convent which was across the street form Saint Marks Catholic School. (A convent is a place where all the Sisters of The Holy Names of Jesus and Mary live).

 
Everyday, for the sake of educating her two young children, this lady brought them over to our house for a lesson in science and biology.  Where else could you expect to find a giant 20-year-old frog (the size of a beagle) named, "Grandpa," swallowing baby chickens whole and wrestling rats like they were mere crickets.

Where else in the city could you expect find tortoises cavorting or rabbits mating on any given day.  With the infestation of guinea pigs and rabbits along with the snakes and all the other critters, we had a veritable zoo in our backyard. This is not to mention the long-haired hippies who belonged in the Zoo right next to their primate relatives. With our plethora of animals and the per diem enterprise of procreation on prominent display, what a brilliant way to teach your children about nature and sex education. 


As Catholics, we were not allow to talk about those kinds of things but I'm sure Darwin would be pleased with this lady's progressive approach to home-education. 

These field trips with her 4-year-old and stroller-bound infant had become routine. She was as regular as the Milk Man, the Post Man or the Helms Bakery Man (even though Herbie the Helms Man was mad at us for stealing his eclairs - Harding Avenue was still on his route (Blog Post 8/3/13).

Her children especially loved the chickens and would spend considerable time staring though the chicken wire at the hens in our crudely built hen-house. Her 18-month-old would stand in the stroller, giggling, gawking, and ecstatically drooling down her bib while her 4-year-old jumped up and down, enthusiastically waving his hands in an awkward way, as if he broken chicken wings, while making attempts at chicken sounds. He had very thick glasses and looked special and this only helped to reinforce our assumptions.  

The way I looked at it (keeping my family in mind - who managed to find the worst in people and christian that with an awful nickname), I figured that this lady was probably lucky to have such a tame nickname like "The Chicken Lady."   Seriously, it could have been a whole lot worse!  She had learned to let herself in through the side gate and usually showed up unannounced.

MIND YOU - I was up in bed with my leg sutured in a million places AND COULD NOT WARN HER!

She had absolutely no idea that the delicate laws of the universe had been change last night when the group of angry small man and hippies climbed over the fence (fell really) and brought home:

THE BEAST!

EL POLLO LOCO!

 VELOCI-ROOSTER!

THE TERROR OF VENICE!

Unfortunately, understanding the new rules that governed the universe came with a terrible price tag. One that would required a bloody and protracted learning curve for anyone and anything that entered our backyard, including the herbal-smoking-perpetrators of this latest fowl kidnapping.  

This bird was definitely related to its dinosaur ancestor, the Veloci-Raptor. Though it had the brain the size of a pistachio nut it was a devious and cunning predator. (Speaking of gray matter, my dad said my brother's brains were not more than the size of a walnut. Which made them slightly more intelligent and more capable in their diabolical scheming.)

Anyway, the calculating beast let the poor Chicken Lady push her stroller all the way back to the chicken coop.   The kid squawked, the baby drooled and the rooster from hell stealthily moved in behind them to seal off the exit path.


This unprovoked attack by the raptor of prey, would be its revenge for the kidnapping the night before.

Talons blazing...up, up, up flew El Pollo Loco! In a rear assault as the Veloci-Rooster struck the lady in the derriere time and time again like something out of a Hitchcock horror movie.

                              "Hell has no fury like a mother scorned"

Under siege, the mother pushed the baby down into the stroller and closed her in the bonnet. She protected the 4-year-old by shielding him with her body. There was only one way out of the primordial graveyard of old car parts, decaying boats, and travel trailers —that had no "travel" left in them. She could not navigate her baby stroller over the decaying remains of prehistoric washing machines and outboard motors that haven’t had pistons in them for ten years. She had no other option, but to go through the BEAST! 

Ramming the rooster with the stroller and beating it off with a trashcan lid, she eventually managed to escape the ravages of the taloned-beast with only 16 bloody puncture wounds. The poor woman moved from Venice and was never heard from again. As for the crazy-eye'd rooster, the Chicken Lady had only managed to wound the bird's pride thus making it meaner than it ever was.

Venice - Harding - Dahlins - Marijuana Thieves BEWARE! 

Four Eyes sneaked in past the foul-mouthed mynah bird in the entry to visit me in my room so he could inform me of all the details of today's events (I was sad that I couldn't be there to protect the Chicken Lady and her two children). Four Eyes pulled a pen and notepad out of his pocket and began writing notes. While writing, he droned on about how in the future they should make a movie about Veloci-raptors. He said that because of our rooster, someone in Hollywood should portray the raptor as a close relative and make it have the cunning ability to hunt its prey. I hit him in the head and said, "You're so dumb! For real! Four-Eyes. No one would ever be stupid enough to believe something like that! Not ever! 

A minute later, I heard some of the hippies in the backyard screaming bloody murder. Apparently they had been back at Wall Drug and they had been trapped by Veloci-Rooster.  I giggled thinking this was divine payback. Four Eyes left and I could go to sleep on with something positive on my mind :)

Next the Big Fire and the scandalous tightie-whities.