Hippies, Skunk Weed and Baseball!

I apologize to my faithful friends and followers world over...this has been an extremely busy and very trying week at my house, where nothing has gone according to plan.

Now, I want to get back to the story of Markie d.

Laying in bed wondering if I'd ever walk again, I figured that my less-than-illustrious little-league baseball career was over. By this time in seventh grade all my friends had moved up from Minors to the Majors - expect for me. "Gherhing the Great" had grown an inch over the summer and now I was officially the shortest boy in the seventh grade class at Saint Marks School. Heck - as far as I knew, I might have been the shortest seventh grader in the whole world.

              That's Gherhing the Great on the far right.   →

The people in the league let me stay down a division even though was too old, because I was so small; I knew it and I knew everyone else knew it too. The most embarrassing thing is that they nominated me to play in the All-Star game and I had to show up pretending that I was something, when I knew I just a skinny, little fraud in a hand-me-down uniform that was too big.


Oh well, before my accident at McIlliot's pool, I played first base in my first and last "All Star" game and got some kind of trophy. I don't know if I really earned it or not, so I hid the trophy away from my family in the big, o' steamer-trunk buried under junk in the front room on the second story - where the "John the Baptist" fox furs had been decaying for the past billion years (Video blog post...Oct 28 2013).

Since no one in my family came to see me play in the all star game - I guess my secret was safe. 

By this time, my leg was healing and I could crutch myself not only to to the bathroom and back, but had finally gotten enough strength to go back to school. Because of this new gift of mobility I was lucky enough to join the family downstairs for our annual catastrophic upheaval of joking, name-calling and inevitable food fight -  known in other normal households by another name - "Thanksgiving."

After much of the chaos in our house had calmed down to the mere roar of a War-Zone, Dooh-Dooh Pants flung moist turkey dressing on my neck that he had pulled out of his mouth. Not knowing exactly what the brown, icky, stinky stuff was, I couldn't crutch quick enough to the toilet and vomited all the way to the bathroom. That was the creme de la creme... the climatic crescendo that delighted the entire Wolf Pack. Thanksgiving was now complete at our house.

Everyone laughed. Laughing at people was what they liked to do best of all (that's why I didn't dare tell them about my trophy- they would have made sure to totally humiliate me).  

Crutches were kind of cool. Horrible for school, but really good for defending oneself against older brothers who tried to torture me. They were lucky that I was too busy hobbling to the bathroom on those wooden weapons than to use them for my protection. Trust me - No, trust "Flea-Bait!" He could tell you that I was a lot better with those old wooden crutches than I was with a wooden baseball bat any day.
         
Wolf Pack be warned.   Yeah, I know I sound tough, right? But the older boys didn't take my threats very serious when it was always like 10 against one.. and especially now that they had bigger fish to fry!

The bigger fish was the Veloci-Rooster!   

The hippies had to figure out how to get back to the Mexican Tomato Plants and to Wall Drug without being attacked. If the cunning bird of prey allowed them free access to the ivy cave, it was only because the fowl thing was setting a trap on them like he did with the "The Chicken Lady"

Only...only they were usually high on the loco-weed when they discovered their exit (their means of escape) had been completely cut off.

It was funny! At least dad and I thought it was. We sat in the house and rolled with with laughter when they tried to negotiate with "Tomahawk attack helicopter" as if it were one of them.

"Hey, there little fella. Its like, it's all good...happy, happy?" They asked  "Like dude, man it's all groovy...you know...we're all one with the same cosmic universe man!"

"Bro...like, it's all copacetic...man."  

"Yeah dude...bro...peach and love and granola and flower power man"  Kjersten, dad and I couldn't help but laugh, because we knew what was going to happen next.

They thought they had talked the vigilante bird (with the "sidewinder missiles") down with all their mellow hippie nonsense.

"Like man...we're just like you. You want to be understood like us...you know man - Love is where it's at."

The next second, under attack,  we hear 7 of the hippies screeching in pain and laughing at each other at the same time. And then falling, and then stumbling, and then laughing at each other, and then screaming, and then begging their bird-friend-brother child-of-the-cosmos to stop. Oh my goodness, this was better than the Star Trek episode a couple weeks ago when William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols shared the first interracial kiss on US television.

The skunk smelling boys would desperately rush up the back steps - pulling and pushing each other to get in the back door to safety, then seeing us they would walk in and act calm as if pretending like they weren't just out back in the hippie-hideout of Wall Drug smoking it up.  And the funny thing was, I don't think they knew what just happened.  I think that "what-ever-it-was" they were smoking, made them forget EVERY TIME. And every time it was the same: they would emerge from the hollow - try to talk down the crazy rooster with razor-sharp talons having forgotten the results from the last negotiation failure.

For those of you with androids   TV's first interracial kiss

I'm getting to the story of the "Great Fire" of '68.  I'm just setting the stage for the events leading up to it.    

  

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.

The Veloci-Raptor Cometh...

My dad used to be called "Daddio" by the brotherhood of the Viking "Wolf-Pack" when we were younger, but now the older guys just referred to him as Mr. D as though he was no longer a parent, but a roommate.  Mr. D moved our old hospital bed upstairs and into my bedroom.  The old rusty thing had smelled like toxic metal ever since it was donated to us, back in 1962 when Puke-Breath had broken his leg into a billion pieces (Okay, 8 to be exact),  That was when my brothers (affectionately known as the Wolf-Pack) climbed over the chain-link fence at Saint Marks school in their escape after breaking into the church vestry and drinking all the communion wine.                                                                                       There they were: 6 or 7 drunken' platinum-haired, midgets trying to pull Puke-Breath out from under 500 feet of schoolyard fence they had managed to knock over. 

YEP, it made the front page of the Evening Outlook (our local newspaper) like many of the other Dahlin Exploits like the "Salton Sea" story (blog 5/13/13) and the time we "Let all the monkeys out of the Zoo" (Blog 4/29/13)

Anyway...that bed ended up being pretty handy and stayed in our dining room for years, because of all the broken bones our daring brood had suffered.  (As you can see to the left we all had special climbing skills - it was like we entered military boot camp as soon as we came shooting out of the womb).

Now with the bed in my room... I felt like I had been banished to recover from the near-fatal accident when I lost the wrestling match with the glass wall at the McElliot's pool.  My mom prayed to Saint Anthony and said it was a miracle that I lived. (If my mom has any hope of being canonized a saint, she said this will be one of the two miracles she needs to qualify. She said the other miracle is living in the same household as the rest of her offspring. My brothers jokingly said her second miracle was giving birth to all of us - overhearing that, my dad piped in and said that the second miracle was that there were no shallow graves in the backyard.  I think what that meant, was that she didn't kill any of us. He felt - that alone was a miracle).  But I think murder might nullify one's candidacy for sainthood, since it broke one of the "Ten Suggestions"  Number 11 was "Thou shalt not electrify a Nun" and we already did that.  The reasons they were called suggestions in our house is that we had already broke most of them.                                                                               

As I lay here in that ancient, squeaky, metal-smelling, hand-crank hospital-bed I took comfort in my dog who loved me unconditionally and all the get well cards from my mom's classroom - 6S.  6 S is the classroom at Saint marks with the 33 kids in the sixth grade on the south-side of the long east-and-west running hallway - that stretches from one end of the school to the other. 

I kind-of wished I had received some cards from Marilyn or Theresa or Julie or John or Andrea or Keith or Ricky or RALPH or any of the other kids in my seventh grade class...but I didn't. So again I say, thanks to mom for her rescue and to the sixth grade class, which she made write all of my get well cards.                                                                       

I'm not going to lie; it wouldn't have been so bad to hear some kind words of sympathy from my brothers like, "Sorry you almost died"  "Sorry your leg was almost cut off" "Sorry you can't walk for a long time" "Sorry for your pain" "Sorry that we didn't stop dancing to the Rolling Stones and come to help" or  "Get well soon, you little dweeb,"  but like that was ever going to happen!  RIGHT?   They were still too mad that dad made them help carry the million-pound bed frame up all those flights of stairs which they blamed on me.

They gave me some Velcro-tipped sponge darts, knowing that when I threw them for the first time at the target, that I'd be stuck in bed all day without being able to retrieve them.  That was their form of sadistic torture...and let me tell you - IT WORKED! My beloved Poochie, wouldn't fetch them and it was like Dante's Inferno - the thing I desired most was just out of reach.

Anyway, the hippy-commies in my household had a big problem. Turns out that other peace-loving, anti-war, free-love hippies kept sneaking into our backyard and stealing sacks-full of carefully trimmed leaves from the my brother's coveted "Mexican Tomato Plants." So much for love and peace and anti-war - how do you spell "OXYMORON?"  Like generals in a war room, they declared war on the other hippies who they now hated and began planning violent counter measures in order to protect their self-interest.  Since the older boys were good at climbing, they devised a plan to steal a great, big, nasty, notorious rooster from drainage ditch near Marina Del Rey.

From the stories I heard, this rooster was 4 feet tall, had 9-inch razor-sharp talons, had one detached eyeball that hung down by its optic nerve to the goiter on its neck and attacked the chain link fence whenever anyone walked by.  I could hear them downstairs plotting about the rendezvous back at "Wall Drug" to smoke some "hooch" (they called it ) and how they intended to send the "little man crew" of Ulrich, Syndrome and Cosmo over the fence of the drainage-ditch/bird-sanctuary at midnight with a burlap sack and a couple lassos.

That was bound to be a great story! 

The time I spent confined in my room felt like purgatory, but between watching cartoons like Ricochet Rabbit and Mighty Mouse it did give me plenty of time to reflect on the world and contemplate the things around me. Things like: will we ever land on the moon....what does love feel like.... and what is going to happen to the "Chicken Lady" if the boys are successful in bringing home the dreaded and feared Veloci-Raptor of Annihilation to protect their precious plants. 



Those stories to come...  in the mean time... know that Mighty Mouse is on the way...

Take comfort in a good dog... tell someone you love them. I think hearing the "L" word is a good thing...
and know even when you don't hear someone say the words you long to hear -  that you are loved and pursued by the Greatest Love in the universe.  

The Day the Music Died.

 "Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live"

                                                                                          Norman Cousins

11:37 am 

Like a salmon swimming upstream, Joan forged her way through the party animals that crowded the downstairs of the large turn-of-the-century Craftsman house.

Noise!

Loud noise! 

 

"I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag

I was schooled with a strap right across my back

But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas

But it's all right, I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash

It's a gas! Gas! Gas

I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead

I fell down to my feet and I saw they bled

I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread

Yeah, yeah, yeah"

The Wolf Pack and their friends had the new Rolling Stone album b lasting on the Hi-Fi record-player...needle skipping occasionally as they rocked out to the music - shaking the floor of the old house.

As usual, Mr. D was off selling real estate. Today it was West Covina. 

Dancing

Long golden hair flung wildly.

""Yeah, yeah, yeahs" sung off-tune.

Joan's distressed pleas for help went unanswered - falling on deaf and uncaring ears.  Suddenly, she became the least popular person in the entire universe when she dragged the needle across the record as a last resort.

It was like the proverbial "Shot heard around the world."  It was symbolic for her. Her youngest boy was 2 miles away with a torn appendage in a pool of blood. For her it was the day the music died.

With the stereophonic console silenced it took another 5 minutes for most of the hippies to realize that Mick Jagger wasn't even singing lead vocals any more - as the Hippy clones droned on.

Markie's leg has been cut off!" she screamed, trying to get their attention. "And he might be dead. I need a ride this instant" she demanded with urgency, trying to solicit help and a car. Most of the Wolf Pack knew what THAT meant. It meant that if Markie wasn't dead, it would be a long and boring trip to Saint John's emergency room in Santa Monica that would interrupt what had begun as a good day. 

No one budged. No one said a word. It was like a "Mexican-Standoff" where the first person to speak - loses!

Nothing was ever serious in our house. Everything had to be a joke! In the far back of the living room someone ducked behind a wall of smelly teenage bodies and lowered their voice, pretending to mimic dad and said, "It'll be one less mouth to feed."

Laughter.

Not much at first.

Some of it nervous. The non-Dahlins weren't sure this was an appropriate time to be laughing.  But the "Mexican Tomato Plants" had a way of dulling the senses and made ordinary things funny.  "Hahaha...dude...look at my hand. Where did that come from? Hahahaha"

The little bit of laughter seemed to grant permission  for them not to take the situation serious as one of the clever older boys shouted, "We never liked him anyway."  

More laughter.

Bad timing!

Joan was upset. "Hell!" she exclaimed in utter frustration. She looked out the window and saw that her car was packed in behind twelve other cars and that it would take an Act of God to extricate it within the next 40 minutes. Tom Weltz' 57 Chevy was parked catawampus - half-in and half-out of the driveway. Maybe out of control. Maybe out of mind. Maybe doing the right thing, She swung and caught Tom with a right hook to the face - knocking him to the ground. Don't mess with the lioness when one of her lion cubs are in trouble.

Tom was dazed, but not completely out, so Joan ordered Pinky off his Lazy-Boy throne and made him pin Tom to the ground while she frisked him for his keys.

Pinky was the only one on the first floor that had not inhaled the skunk-smelling herbs. Finding the keys in Tom's tight pants pocket she yanked them out and sprang from the porch with Pinky lumbering close behind.  Hoping upon hope the two of them hijacked Tom precious hot rod.  Pinky couldn't drive a stick shift so Joan did the driving as the car sank on the right side under the weight of Pinky's massive frame.  "Water weight!" and "Big bones" Pinky always said in denial. Yeah, well tell that to the shock absorbers.

Joan popped the clutch twice killing the motor...and jerked backwards out of the driveway on the third attempt.

Stomping her foot on the gas pedal as if she could push it through the floor, she dumped the clutch and pealed rubber all the way down the street towards the Lennon house on the corner.

Mr. Lennon came out with his 4 iron and golf ball to make sure it wasn't Leland, only to be totally flabbergasted to discover it Joan behind the steering wheel of the car that sped around the corner towards Saint Mark's Church. He shrugged his shoulders and rooted for her to make the left turn at the end of the street without crashing through the doors of the church. 

Tearing around the corner she made a sign of the cross and breathed a silent prayer while shifting into second gear, chirping the tires and barely missing pedestrians at McDonald's.

11:39 Am 
Meanwhile, back at the Harding house...the Wolf-Pack turned on the record again as though the brief annoyance had never happened.

 "But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas

But it's all right, I'm Jumping Jack Flash

Its a gas! Gas! GAs!

Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas

Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas

Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas 

 Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas 

 Jumping Jack Flash, it's a gas

11:40 am
Left at Lincoln Liquor Locker - down Zanja - she screeched to a halt in the dirt ally stirring up a dust cloud that enveloped the car.  Frantically emerging from the brown cloud, Joan found 3 crying 9-year-olds, a delirious 12-year-old talking to himself like a mental patient and what appeared to be the corpse of her baby boy laying lifeless in a pool of blood. 

Joan shook him, but there was no response! Pinky meant well when he said the first thing that came to him mind, "kick him!"  (You see, it was hard for him to bend over, so using his feet just made sense to him).  Seeing the leg and blood, Joan felt she had arrived too late.

I Should Have Stopped at Three Laps

Thank you, to all who are tracking with my Blog and I want to welcome the people from the last 10 countries to my story!

Welcome: Nepal, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Belarus, Colombia, Cambodia, Ecuador, China and Thailand!  

Captains Log: Star Date October 12th 1968.  It is two days after Detroit Tigers won the World series and the morning after the very first telecast from outer-space - that was really cool!

A lot had been happening on our street over the past couple of years. One of the significant developments is that the older Lennon boys down the street had gotten bitten by the "Long-Haired-Hippy-Bug." This infection must explain they reason they were migrating towards our house and I also think those "Mexican Tomato Plants" had something to do with it. That was like the proverbial "crack in the dike" which was followed by the flood waters of defection of Lennons down to and including the youngest girl - Annie. Annie was just around 9-years-old at this time and I can assure you that she had nothing to so with those skunk-smelling plants hidden in our backyard. Innocently, she just followed Karin to the black-hole of chaos at our house.

Chewbacca...no longer had his lunch breaks at the same time Karin, Annie and I ventured off the Saint Mark's campus for lunch everyday at our house. Though subjected to whatever mess, whatever creatures were loose and running around (maybe an escaping rattlesnake or something tame like guinea pigs, or something disgusting like Chewbacca's house-guest, a gross pigeon with a parasite that lived on top of the refrigerator! Did I already say "gross!"? GROSS!) At least Annie was safe from Chewbacca's cruel "Template of Torture" Chewbacca and the Terrible Templates). So, Annie was on today's short list of those invited to go and swim at the McElliot's built-in pool!


In the last year, Ralph had replaced "Gherhing the Great" as my new "Bestest" friend at Saint Marks. My buddy Gherhing had turned a corner. He came to school a month ago in what he affectionately called his black pointed "Beaner-Shoes," I didn't like that word very much, but he said the hard pointed tips were really good for getting into fights with. He talked about all the race fights that were taking place over at Mark Twain Jr. High School and how he couldn't wait to get involved. (No sir,  not me - I didn't feel like I wanted to invite any more conflict into my world than I was already dealing with at home so the two of us began to drift apart).

Ralph, like most of the other guys in the 7th grade, was about a head taller than me and had hair on his lip already like Ricky Arredondo. The nuns at Saint Mark's grammar school weren't too keen on Ricky's mustache and brought his parents in for a conference and told them they had to make Ricky shave it off.  The rumor around school was that either Ricky or his dad told Sister Superior that Ricky would shave off his mustache "When Sister ChaCha shaved hers." That was the latest rumor that made all of us kids laugh and will likely turn into a trend in the future like - "No Shave November!" or something like that.  

On the list with Annie and Ralph was Tommy from next door. It happened to be a Saturday that Tommy wasn't grounded. Tommy's mom, Mrs. Blaser, didn't particularly like the idea that our pool had always been green and mosquito infested, which she feared would spread the contagion of all the "A" ending words: Diphtheria; Malaria, Diarrhea and Ebola! (I think the reason my parents actually wanted us to eat that moldy, old sourdough bread was for antibiotic medicinal properties in fuzzy green penicillin. "Pshaw" - the Blasers might be susceptible to those diseases, but none of us Dahlins were ever going to get Diphtheria or Ebola because of all the moldy bread we had to eat).   

Anyway, Ulrich (against his will) was commissioned to walk us over to the McElliot's pool, which was just past Ricky's house - down Zanja a couple blocks and close to Venice high school. Ulrich was 15 and had his reputation to consider. Begrudgingly, he led us down the alley route, so that no one would see him with a bunch of little kids like us. It was a scary time and his job was to get us there safely, but we have to be extremely quiet and very careful "not to act like little kids" - he said. (I think it was because he "woke up on the wrong side of the bed" again).

Though we were in the middle of an October "heat wave" the water could have been warmer. Surprisingly, Ulrich stuck around longer than he needed to. After we changed into our swim suits he made sure to baptize us by throwing all of us into the unwelcoming temperatures of the pool water. Even more odd, was the fact that he even encouraged us in a game of "how many laps under water."  Pshaw - This was cake. It was me against three 9-year-olds and Ralph...and I was practically a fish. First Annie, then Tommy, then Kjersten, then Ralph! Kjersten nearly did two full laps. Driven by ego, Ralph made it all the way to two laps, just to prove he could beat a 9-year-old girl. (It nearly killed him though so I was glad that an older person like Ulrich was there, just in case one of the other kids drowned or something. I knew that if Tommy Blaser or Annie Lennon had drowned that neither mother would have liked that very much).

 Then it was my turn!  I had to beat my little sister and I HAD to beat Ralph.

One lap
Two laps...
...on my way to Three laps!  Ulrich had done three laps one time... if I could just touch the wall and turn back the other direction I would beat his record.  

I was already out of breath and should have stopped there...but I had prove myself and kept going. My stomach convulsed against me as if in rebellion, but I was determined to press on and win - as though this was something that really mattered.

For me it was like the Gold Medal of the Mexican Olympics was at stake...

At the Olympics this past summer was a 18-year-old hot shot by the name of Mark Spitz who had already won 10 world records. Mark Spitz had won 2 Gold Medals at the Olympics... and I WAS MARK SPITZ!

Four laps...I was making it... It might kill me but I was doing it. FOUR LAPS!  I'm sure it was Lennon record... a Blaser record... Dahlin record... a Venice record and quite possibly a WORLD RECORD! If I were to drown there was an older kid to rescue me - so I had nothing to lose.

Completely out of air, I was barely able to touch the end of the pool but somehow managed to make it all four laps when I shot up from the deep end...like a submarine -kaboom! Urgently surfacing from the depths of the deep I emerged with my mouth opened wide - gasping - and desperately sucking in volumes of air!  That is when heart sank - realizing the terror that awaited me.  Instead of the accolades of the crowds and the cheers of adoring fans; instead of a pat on the back and words of congratulations from my friends (which had motivated me to pursue this dangerous task) I received nothing of the kind. Instead, i was welcomed with the terrifying epiphany of knowing this whole thing had been a diabolical plot just like the time I was betrayed by Dooh-Dooh Pants with the insidious "Hamper of Death" scheme  Betrayal and Hamper of Death. In this case it was Ulrich. He was crouched in the hopeful anticipation of this exact moment in time - running from one end of the pool to the other with each lap waiting for me to emerge. Like an cunning animal of prey that had been patiently waiting for the timing to make his attack.

Bent low to the water's surface...Ulrich inhaled mucus through his nose cavity and with precision, launched the largest, greenest, thickest loogie ever recorded in the history of mankind - right down the center of my mouth - NO... right down the center of my throat - striking my uvula on the way down.

All the contents of his nasal passages ended up with all the contents of everything that was gurgling in my stomach. I was not Mark Spitz... He was Ulrich spits.  My gold medal was a loogie the size of The Beatles Yellow Submarine"      WHICH TRIGGERED MY....

Superpowers!

Vomit!  Hello?  I tried my best to direct the blast of steamy plasma on to Urich, but unfortunately I missed. He was no dummy and knew that it was coming and the second he launched his lethal warhead he had quickly retreated in order to avoid the gooey retribution. The warm confetti of Friday Fish Sticks (Catholics and Fish Sticks ) and the meal-worm laden oatmeal (that's a Dahlin thing) made quite a mess on the pool deck changed the complexity of our morning!

This was only the "Tip of the Iceberg." The five of us were alone and none of us were equipped to handle the tragic bloody episode that was about to happen next.

"If you think you're going to die, pray, 'Oh dear God, I love you and am sorry for my sins'" 

                                                  Sister Edith Mary

                                                                                           (My 7th grade teacher at Saint Marks)