'72 swim team

'72 swim team
My New Tribe

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Egads Troglodytes! The Sky is Falling.


"Egads - Just look at 'em!" 


Terrified by James Moore’s proposal, my brain nearly shut down from sensory overload. The words of Chicken Little, “The Sky is falling. The Sky is falling,” loudly rattled off the walls of my semi-porous gray cells. 

Last time I left off was in the Fall of 1972 in the illustrious misadventures of Markie D and his primal urge for belonging and acceptance with the mysterious vanishing at Salton Sea. 

At Saint Monica’s I had a new tribe; water polo and swim team friends—people I felt who accepted me—maybe, even more importantly—liked me. 


They say, “blood is thicker than water” but I’m not sure. Water, like fire, purifies and my experience in the pool was like a right of passage as if baptism into a tribe of my own.

I felt unique. Special. Gifted and cursed with the ability to be fully present and to pay attention to everything—that’s the curse part. I watched the nuance on the faces of those speaking and saw things behind the words. I could feel the heart, sense pain, see loneliness, feel empathy, yet be distracted by the noise of a mosquito in the corner of the room.
  
I heard the unspoken things that rattled around in my brain, yet at the same time, I was a terrible listener.  The Curse.  I could never follow a conversation to the end, never fully track and was usually sent off in a world of my own before the other person finished. 

I paid attention to the world in a different way.  Fully Present, yet not there at all as I attempted to focus on everything at the same time.

I could never make it to the end of a song and only knew four words to a song I heard one million times—maybe six words, "I want to hold your hand."

Debi Gas knew the words of every song – I envied regular people who could do that – so I whistled (I was a slave to the beat, who needed words). 




James Moore was just like me. Short. Late bloomer. Pain. He has a lot of unspoken words behind his eyes and needed acceptance just like me. We were the same, only different.


The words that terrified me were his assertive self-invitation to spend the night at the Dahlin House.


Among the thousands of impulses raging in my brain stem were: fear, dread and trembling. None of the emotions had anything to do with joy. Sleepovers were for children and grammar school friends, but for high-schoolers this was weird. Right? Did he have some sinister ulterior motive? 

WHY?
What did he want – REALLY?  

I had a lot to lose.





Would he continue to like me if he visited my haunted house and stepped in the dark ooze or on a carburetor on the black entry steps or slip on an oil slick from one of Erick’s car that he often drove and parked right in the way of the front porch stairs?




         “The sky is falling—the mess!”  














The boats under the palm tree. 































 and boat motors running in trashcans 





and the car parts.













and the carport shoved full of junk and basement stacked to the brim...







and the mountain of clothes and piles of laundry and pieces of motorcycles,  and leaning towers of newspapers.

The bamboo towers in the backyard and Marijuana plants and the Veloci-Rooster, the mosquito-laden pond and the alligator, the Wall Drug hippie-hooch-hut and the esters of skunk-weed carried into our unkempt, leaning, turn-of-the-century home by the ocean breeze.

I felt like it left me exposed and vulnerable like my identity was wrapped up in it.   

Maybe this was a field trip. They had their fair share of hippies in Topanga but I image that he had never run into one in person. That's what people did; they came to Venice to see the hippies and most of them lived in my house.

We were both growing out hair longer as junior hippies but would he confuse my long-haired, shirtless, jean-wearing-half-naked-brothers with troglodytes.  




James could see that I stopped listening to him a long time ago and was patiently waiting for a response.

I visualized the task in front of me. James asked if it could be this weekend.


Panic. 



It would take me two weeks of solid work to clean up the front porch. It would be like the equivalent of an arduous archaeologically dig to unbury the years of strata stacked on the grand staircase, not to mention the eons of sediment laid down by the evolutionary forces of erosion that cluttered the second floor.

Would he see me differently?

Would he be affected by the Ooze and would that hideous dark substance of my upside-down world of Stranger Things follow him back to Topanga?  

Would he cast me into a different category of people – who lived with cars on blocks on the front lawn and who had to move an entire armada of trash barges from one side of the street to the other each Wednesday and Thursday for Street cleaning – a law passed because of us. Would he see us as backwoods rednecks or like the Beverly Hillbillies and those who seem to be blissfully unaware of our unsightly blight?

My brothers didn’t seem to care—hippies didn’t know their poop stank.

Then there was the safety issue—would his life be in danger?

Would he live through it?  Would he be hazed by my older brothers—roped and tied, put into a pit or electrocuted? What might they do to him?  I was used to it and thrived on it—physical pain tolerance was my adrenaline superpowers.

He stood and waited and watched the machinations of my brain.

How would my older sister take it—if he went back to school and reported what he saw? My older sister recently changed her name (in the current wave of name-spelling-rage) and had begun to tell her Santa Monica friends that she was from Marina Del Rey.

Mind racing – it was jammed with the million bits of information it was trying to process. Stuttering, hemming, and hawing I made some lame excuses trying to put off my friend's visit with things like, “our parakeet is suffering from diarrhea” and “the Asian bird flu” I said and then offered a real one that I thought might scare him away, "another rattlesnake escaped."

We didn’t have parakeets – only a mutant, attack Veloci-Rooster in the backyard, a four-letter-word spewing, foul-mouthed Minah bird, and Johnny, the flying-parasite-host of a disgusting pigeon, that lived on the refrigerator.  GROSS!

Undistracted, he stared.  

Meanwhile, I wondered if I could I move mountains...

...or if I could part the Red Sea without Moses’ magical staff...

...or if I could do something like Mary Poppins or like Samantha on Bewitched and wiggle my nose or like the Cat in the Hat and have everything enchantingly go back to its place?

How many trips to the Sepulveda dump would it require moving this amount accumulated debris?

Adrenaline pumping (my drug of choice) – coursing through my veins, I knew it would be a herculean task. Could I make a dent if working night and day—every night and every day straight for 52 years (probably not). This was my fix—I was feeling supercharged.

Markie D? Yes, me! I could pull off the impossible and was determined to shovel everything into the third floors junk rooms, everything else could be crammed in some minuscule vacant space in the carport or cart the crap off to the far corner of the backyard next to the marijuana plants.  

Like The Little That Could, I said, “I think I can, I know I can – I know I can.”

“What?” he said.

“Oh,” I said as if just returning to planet earth or coming up from underneath the surface of the water. “um…two weeks…um sure. That would be great.”  I lied.

This would set the stage for the context of the life-changing episode three weeks later in January. The near-fatal event at the start of the new swim season that would impact my life—that will land me a fleeting $286.00—the most regrettable $286.00  

A $286.00 shame story that makes me vomit to this day and hate myself for not fighting.
 
What was wrong with me—I fought with older brothers and the Little-Angry-Man crew and could hold my own with bullies?

I would live with self-loathing and second-guessing and the ongoing late-night questioning why I didn’t take a full swing and punch the short, pasty-white adult in the face.

I thought I was, “meaner than a junkyard dog” (five words of Jim Croce’s song). I thought I was bulletproof—maybe not so much.

In the meantime, I would have to sneak over the Blaser’s house, the regular people next door, and borrow a snow shovel or some other tools.  Mr. Blaser painted everything in their garage with a bright orange B, to keep us Dahlins from inadvertently acquiring their stuff that was said to “disappear into the black hole at our house."


After the heist, I grit my teeth – picked up the shovel and began clearing a path to the front door.  “Whistle while you work Markie D” dig in and maybe you can keep the “Sky from Falling” and protect the little Topanga, brainiac kid from the ooze. 

Christmas DAHLIN-STYLE (Just for fun)

Repost for those who may have missed his last year - make sure to click on the Video Link



When God was handing out singing voices the Lennons were in line first and by the time He got through ALL of themthere was nothing left for Him to give the Dahlins.  Plain and simple they could SING the Dahlinsnot so much.  I am sorry to say that this is my attempt at trying to pull off my Dahlin parody of the 12 Days of Christmas. 

PLEASE DON'T JUDGE. 

After the videolater when I have time, I will type out the song and add it here for translation for those of you in other countries (or if you just cannot stand my amazing singing abilities), I will also include pictures along with the written version (and links to the corresponding post).

Christmas at our house was chaotic. We would walk home from Saint Mark's Church after midnight mass and round the corner at the Lennon Sister's house (the one pictured here with the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the front dining room window).  My mother would shush ushoping to hear some of the angelic voices of the Lennon Sisters as we passed by. 


We would push and pull hair and step on the back of the shoes of the kid in front of us to give them a "flat tire."

When we got into the house mom (we called her H. Joan) would throw herself in front of the large double-sliding doors the led from the front entry into the huge living room with the $2.00 tree purchased from the Venice Boy Scout Troop 32 Christmas tree lot. 

My dad was the treasurer of the Venice Boy Scout Troup (the year of this flyer...his handwritten accounting is in the back) and when it was all over we made a grand total of $148.00 (hey that was a lot of money back then). 

The Blasers next door always bought a nice, expensive tree for $12.00 and in a good year we would buy two $2.00 trees and tie them together because they were so pathetically sparse (seriously the Charlie Brown tree had more foliage), then we'd cover it with tinselgobs and gobs of tinsel. 

H. Joan (mom) wanted us to place each piece on tinsel on the tree one strand of tinsel at a time like the Blasers did, but we ended up throwing tinsel hand-grenades at the tree and just let it explode and coagulate where it landed in smothering clumps. 

Anyway, back to the part where Mrs. D threw herself against the big heavy doors, mom would threaten us with her "the pain of mortal sin" speech not to dive into the presents like sharks on a whale carcassshe pleaded and begged us to be more like the Lennons and the Tripps and the Blasers.







She imaged how it might have been down at the corner at the Lennon house, we knew of the relative calm next door at the Blasers and she wanted us to open the presents one at a time for everyone to see the present, to know who it was from, and then to give a polite golf-clap of appreciation after each present. 

After the stern warning and the threat to retreat upstairs if it got out of hand, she would open the doors and like little saints we walked into the living room, THEN flung ourselves on top of the pile of presents in a frenzy like blood-thirsty piranhatossing presents and tearing into them that made a mountain of wrapping paper that filled the entire living room floorpresents were lost and sometimes so were kids and sometimes we didn't care.   

During the bloodbath, Tony sneaked away and climb into one of the junk rooms up on the third floor to hunt for used stuff to give away and wrap it in the torn and discarded paper. I got the same rusted old Kline-Smith Chemistry sent from him for eight years in a row. None of the chemicals that you could mix to make an explosion were in the setthey had already been used up by about the time I was born (bummer). 

I will leave out the part of the wrapping paper warsthe part where I try to clean things up and organized and where the older boys threw the wrapping paper out again behind my back. It was pathetic—torturelike the poor little dog endlessly running in circles trying to catch its tail.  

Every year it was the same. 
The same threats.

The same speech.

The same chaos.

The same fun...

...and always, the best Christmas ever! 

Merry Christmas 



P.S. and if you would like to buy my Book about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego... it is a short, fun read that does give the historical setting behind WHY there were Three Wise Men (Magi) in the East who anticipated the birth of baby Jesus...  (here is the link if you are interested).