The Prune Conspiracy: Prison for Cockerel? Part 4

(Continued)  Star Date: July 12th 1969

Unleashing the wrath of Venice upon the unsuspecting world.  There was no one with more spaghetti, more glue, more clumpy oatmeal or more Bisquick dough in their belly than poor, poor Cockerel!  By this time, the 15-year-old Boy Scout must had something like 32 pounds of this glop, clogging the inside of his intestines. Add to that the 900 pounds of prunes he consumed two days ago and it turned out to be an explosive mix of volatile reactants.


 "Thar she blows!" was the warning cry every time Cockerel's stomach began to rumble - as Alan blew taps on his bugle and Ray urgently leaned on the buzzer to warn scout masters up front to pull the truck over.

With most of us feeling better (with the exception of chapped and irritated behinds), the Senior Patrol Leaders who were trapped in the back with us, felt it was important to stage bracketed cage fighting. By this time in the journey, all the backpacks and camping gear that had been carefully confined to the very center section of the rear of the truck (upon our initial departure) was now nothing more than an indistinguishable jumble that filled the entire back end from wall to wall. No longer sitting on the benches, sweaty bodies of stinky teen and pre-teen boys reclined on disorganized mess.

I came to this thing to get away from fighting! I thought I was safe in my new tribe! At home, I had to contend with Ulrich and his angry-little-man-crew almost every day in bloody fist fights and as the baby boy of the Wolf Pack I was subjected to sibling torture and thought this was my chance to get couple weeks off from all of that physical and emotional terrorism.             BUT NO!




Now, the pimple-faced leaders who were in charge of us wanted us to fight, and besides, I'm the second smallest kid in the outfit. I weigh like 90 pounds and there are guys in here on the Venice High School wrestling team who outweigh me by nearly 100 pounds!

Although he had smelled putrid from the fecal particulates spread on his uniform, I had beaten Chronister despite the smell and also beat the pudgy kid who reminded me of the Pillsbury Dough boy!  Then a lot of the bigger guys fought and I was scared about having to eventually go up against one of them.

I beat the other kid my age who was about 40 pounds heavier than me and found that I was somehow the champ of the lightweight division. I don't know why they couldn't just let it go at that and give me a piece of bubblegum and say I was the champion of the 14-and-under bracket.  BUT NO!

They wanted me to fight, Philip, the wrestler from Venice High who had side burns and a mustache. I was dead!  He was about 5' 8" and I was 4 foot something. Well, do you remember what happened in "The Sourdough Smackdown" in fifth grade to "Cursty," the chump who stole my toast (post 6/29/13) and to Terry the bully in the school yard (post 6/5/14)- I guess that same magic happened here. I think I was so freaked out that my adrenals went into some kind of overload and I jumped on the wrestler's head and had him pinned in a choke hold in about 2 seconds. The two Senior Patrol Leaders had to pull me off and even that wasn't easy.  I didn't mean it to happen, but in my adrenaline mode, I was like one of those drug addicts on PCP.

Now, they wanted to pit me against Cockerel - who was like André the Giant. 

The chants began: "Dahlin" half the troop yelled.
                            "Cockerel" the other half shouted in boyish merriment!

Yuck, I had to fight the humongous high-schooler who had rubbed diarrhea all over his uniform!

                            "Dahlin"
                            "Cockerel"
                            "Dahlin"
                            "Cockerel...Cockerel?  Cockerel? The stupid chanting stopped and the Senior Patrol Leaders began to panic. "Where's Cockerel? Has anyone seen Cockerel?  Their screams were met with lots of empty glares and shoulder shrugs.  Alan, squeaked out some frenzied notes (mostly sharps and flats) on his pathetic bugle and Ray pressed the buzzer with all his might.  Practically out of Yellowstone, the Scout Masters found a place to pull the truck off to the side of the road. The two older boys jumped over the back gate of the truck and had a conference next to the driver's door. Figuring that we left Cockerel behind somewhere in Yellowstone, the scout master came back and asked when any of us saw him last. No one could agree and all kinds of Twilight Zone theories were offered for the cause of his disappearance.

We turned the truck around and headed back inside the National Park, retracing our route. 20 minutes in, we were passed by a Highway Patrol with lights and sirens - headed in the other direction. That's when Kissel spotted Cockerel in the backseat of the Highway patrol vehicle, "There he is. There's Cockerel!"

AGAIN the bugle, and again the panic-buzzer-pushing. AGAIN we pulled over - this time making a u-turn.

The same things happened AGAIN... We're headed back out of the park and AGAIN the Highway Patrol come speeding back in our direction.  Rumors buzzed about him going to jail or the Scoutmasters being thrown into prison (I had been through this once before and figured that if we didn't try to lie like my dad did when he left me behind at Salton Sea (Post 5/27/13) then it was a good chance that nobody was going to have to spend time with Johnny Cash at Folsom prison). Humphries was sure they had him handcuffed. I figured if they did, it was because they didn't want him touching anything with his filthy paws.

The worst part of this whole story is not just that had Cockerel was left behind relieving his burgeoning bowels from "Prune-Gate" and that he was also hitchhiking...but the fact that he was hitchhiking in in his Boy Scout of America uniform and not just any old Boy Scout uniform that you might expect to see on one of those "regular kids" from Beverly Hills Troop 64 or Philadelphia, Troop 26, who rode in one of those nice travel-coaches with bathrooms - BUT No - his uniform was disheveled, filthy and stunk like an outhouse. He looked like a refugee and worse still  - is that fact that he told the poor Highway Patrol officers the whole story of the spaghetti, the near drowning, the stomach aches, the prunes, and about his endless bout with the "Hershey Squirts" and having to wipe off with pine needles and watching us drive off without him while he was still doing his business behind a shrub.    

It was painful for everyone involved.

I don't think I mentioned the part where this was the first time and last time I had ever seen Police Officers riding with their heads out of the windows of their car like police dogs as if trying to escape the stink in the back seat and suck in volumes of  clean Wyoming air.

The Highway Patrol officers escorted us out of the Yellowstone National Park...waited through one more diarrhea run (to make sure Cockerel made it back on board) and escorted us all the way to the Idaho State line!

We were on our way...to the National Jamboree at Farragut State Park in Idaho to represent the Boy Scouts of American and good 'old Venice California.

NEXT TIME: "The KYBO Patrol"    

I hear the whistle blowing... we headed into Idaho and I just hope that before this whole trip is over all of us don't end up singing the The Folsom Blues" from our prison cells.

AT ANY COST: The Induction Malfunction

As they tied the Boy Scout handkerchief around my eyes I could smell the salt air mixed with the dust of the backyard of the old Venice Scout House. With my eyes blindfolded my senses buzzed. I could hear the sound of the lone engine of the “Venice Short Line” that slowly chugged down West Washington Way and could also smell Alan, who hadn't bothered to bathe or use deodorant in about a month, and fought back against my urge to vomit.  In this initiation process, two Patrol Leaders spun me around trying to make me as dizzy as possible before pointing me in the direction of the backdoor that finally creaked open.

 

My heart jumped with anticipation about the secret induction ceremony into the Venice Boy Scout Troop 32. We were not the saints we had been years earlier. 

At twelve, I was youngest, smallest, weakest member of the Dahlin Wolf Pack. I was in by blood, but didn't really feel like I belonged.

I wasn't old enough to smoke with them in the hippie "hooch hut" out back or hang out with them when they went on those notorious hikes to Tuna canyon in Malibu. 

All I was to them was a toy, a thing to punch, or knock out, or electrocute, or bury, or shoot, or embarrass in front of friends and to experiment with.  

I lived in the same house, drove in the same cars, but always felt like an outsider looking in.    

I hoped this Boy Scout thing would be different, like a new tribe – a brotherhood where I might feel accepted and as though I belonged - crazy right? This is probably the same thing “Squeaky” Fromme was thinking when she signed up for the Manson Family. 

My head was still spinning when the Junior Assistant Scout Master put a dollar bill in my hand and whispered in my ear that I should not lose it, "at any cost."  Still reeling and off balance I ran into the door jam and eventually stumbled into the scout house that was dark and lit only by candles. Waiting inside were all the potential members of my new tribe. 

Walking through the short, dark corridor and into the center of the dilapidated old house on Washington Way (that had been purchased by the Venice Lions Club and giving to our Troop), I could feel the intensity of those anxious, sweaty, smelly boy scouts who had been just as eager as I was for this induction initiation.  Before reaching my destination someone grabbed the dollar bill out of my hand. I could smell the fiend and had every honorable intention of getting the dollar back “at any cost” (but figured that socking the kid in the face who stole it was something that I had to deal with later).

The handkerchief was pulled off eyes and I stood stunned before a tribunal of Senior Patrol Leaders and the two Scout Masters – Jim Serosi and Lyman Tapp as the entire troop looked in.  I don’t know why, but I felt like one of those Christians in the coliseum getting ready to be burned at the stake. 

“Mark Dahlin” said the skinny Scout master, “You were handed a dollar bill, were you not?”

“Yes sir,” I said nervously, yet with intense pinpointed eyes that I think might have frightened him.

In an effort to bail out the other leader, the heavier Scout Master continued, “Where is the dollar bill now, Mr. Dahlin? Will you produce it for us?” 

Biting my tongue and clenching my jaws, I had a couple options and I didn't want to blow my chance of finally belonging. If I said I dropped it, it would be a lie. Did they want a liar in the troop? Probably not! If I told the truth and said that someone stole it from me, then it would be like ratting-out one of my new tribal members and who would want a snitch to belong to this new brotherhood that I was so desperate for.

At home no one listened to me anyway, so blaming someone else was totally out of the question. Besides, the dollar bill was given to me and it was my duty to hang on to it. I had one job and I failed. I looked around the room at all the solemn eyes that stared disapprovingly in my direction.  I wanted in! I saw Steve Kissel, and Ronnie, and James Humphries, and David Cockrell, and Phillip Aylala, and Chronister and Dego, and Mark and Alan and Ray and had to figure a way to fix the mess I had gotten myself into. Then I remembered the words, “At all cost.”  Was that a challenge or permission to do whatever it took?  Maybe that’s what they wanted, I thought?  Maybe this whole thing was a test and felt that this new tribe wanted to see what I was made of. 

I looked around at the “Pillsbury Doughboys” and the “Theodore Cleavers” and the “regular” kids from regular families that hadn't been raised by a pack of wolves like I had. 

I looked at those soft kids who hadn't had to fight everyday and who hadn't been though the same crud I did… and did what any member of a Wolf Pack would do among sheep. I smelled the stench of the kid who stole my dollar bill, grinned at the two Scout Masters and hurled myself onto about six members of the Flaming Arrow Patrol. 

Down we went into a massive dog pile of flailing arms and legs. I had Ronnie around the neck in a choke hold and squeezed him until his fingers loosened the grimy grip he had on the coveted dollar bill. Phillip, a wrestler from the Venice High wrestling team, (who outweighed me by 50 pounds) was on my back and was unsuccessfully trying to peal me off of Ronnie.  

“At any cost”

“At any cost”

“At any cost” …were the words that kept going through my head.

The whole troop was on the floor fighting. It was a regular bar-room brawl. Yelling and screaming and making threats to cancel the National Jamboree trip planned for July, the Scout Masters and Senior Patrols Leaders pulled kids off one by one until they got down to Ronnie and me.

Leaving Ronnie’s limp body on the ground, I quickly stood my feet, straightened my uniform, smiled at the two men in charge, saluted and said, “I believe this is the dollar bill you guys are looking for.” Pleased with myself. I smiled as though this was all in the course of ordinary business, like it was straight out of the scout handbook or something. 

It took a tribunal, several phone calls to parents (and seeing that my dad was the President of the Lions club and Troop treasurer), I was admitted to my new clan. Pshaw I didn't get what all the fuss was about…this was like just an ordinary day at my house.  After all this was not your ordinary Boy Scout Troop –this was a Boy Scout Troop from Venice California and a Boy Scout Troop that was now infected by the youngest member of the Dahlin Wolf Pack.  

Just so you know, this long-held, sacred ‘rite of passage’ for Troop 32 was abandoned and exchanged for something much different, more friendly and a little tamer...JUST IN CASE another kid from Harding Avenue every decided to join the Troop. 

Our dysFUNtional troop was now headed out of Venice and into the the Midwest! 

 Beware World! 

Moon Landing and Diarrhea part I