The hilarious, picture-driven, true memoir of the youngest boy of the 60's "most dysfunctional family." Markie d's quest for survival and identity helps us discover and deal with the dysfunction in all of us. Funny, politically incorrect and thought provoking.
In the words of an ancient sage, "Laughter is good medicine."
"Going by the Blasers...Now the McClains. Hi Mac how ya doing? Now by the Bibles Hey Pat, Cathy... beautiful day! Now a jaunt by Campbell's court around the corner in front of Doctor Arnold's. Hey Doc!"
My dad, "Mr. D" was in the living room jogging in place and talked to himself. He pretended to run around the block and say "hi" to all the neighbors that he passed on his short imaginary journey that took far less time to accomplish than a real run down around Harding Avenue, Grandview, Venice Boulevard, Naples and back.
I had fully intended on jumping on one of the motorcycles out in front and driving it over to the Venice Fire station, but since I had just turned 13 and dad was home - I opted to ride over on the handlebars of Jimmy's custom Stingray "Krate" with the 3 speed gear-shift-lever.
The only problem with the cool gear-shift-lever is that if you ever slipped off the pedal "OUCH!" Boy did that black knob hurt the "vitals." (Don't tell Jimmy, but every now and then I jammed on the brakes pretending it was purely accidental, hoping I could get him to jam his boy parts on the shifter! This morning on the way to the Fire Station it worked twice and poor Jimmy could barely walk by the time we arrived).
Anyway, I walked into the station with my list of arson suspects with poor Jimmy hobbling behind and asked to see the Chief. Knowing that he had been at a loss since Young and Manson had officially been removed as prime suspects (last post), I showed him my list of suspects and explained everyone's motives.
1) Chet Young
2) Charles Manson and gang
3) Mr. Blaser
4) A couple of my brothers and a long-haired friend
5) Susie Grant
6) Mr. D (my dad). 7) Johnny Gillemot
8) The Catholic Nuns
9) Leeland
10) Walter Daniels
11) The Nargies
12) Tommy Blaser
13) Mr. Malon
Though my neighbor, Don Blaser, had helped in the rescue, he had as much motive to burn the house to the ground as did most of the hard working responsible adults on our street. It was a plight and it needed to go!
The Chief's eyes widened and seemed very interested in Mr. Blaser- until I explained what I thought, unfortunately, was a pretty iron-clad alibi. We were right next door to the Blaser's and our house was an even worse plight.
I had an old couple from Nebraska pull up in front of my house one time and ask me if our dilapidated old thing was a hippie commune. With all the junk and the cars and the long-hairs hanging around. I have to admit, we did look like a commune which certainly had to drive down the prices of real estate on our street. Besides the fleas, the mosquitoes and the escaping rattlesnakes - Escaping Rattlesnakes and Iguana Del Diablo (click here) being right next door to the Blasers...this gave Mr. Blaser more motive to burn our house to the ground.
Judging by these pictures you might understand why the Fire chief could have felt why Don Blaser would have wanted our house to go up in flames first.
The Fire Chief had written his name down as a person of interest and then sadly scratched it off seeing the logic that if Don Blaser was going to burn anyone's house down- it definitely would have been ours first!
1) Chet Young
2) Charles Manson and gang
3) Mr. Blaser
My 4th suspect wasn't just one person, but was really three of the older boys who had been rejected in their cross-dressing scheme hoping to fake out the phony "frat guys" in order to gain acceptance into the place (this was what they had to do for losing a bet).
Again he was interested! I think the city of Venice was looking for any good reason to lock us up, but I explained that it probably wasn't the older long-hairs who had dressed up as girls to get into spurious "Frat House" - because the guys had all taken their girl friends on another one of their notorious "Albino hikes" Click here for : Albinos and Vampires and finished off the night out back in the hippie-hutch-hut we called "Wall Drug."
That explained the reason why we couldn't wake them up right away when all of the explosions were going off. They had just gotten to bed and probably had a little too much of this and a little too much of that....
Even more sadly, he crossed them off too!
4) Chewbacca. Puke-Breath. Primo.
5) Next was Susie. Although, she was young, she had every reason to burn the place down. It wasn't because she necessarily wanted to see the place go up in flames, but rather because she wanted to punish her older brother for dropping her on her head on more than one occasion. (I asked the Chief if he had seen the movie The Bad Seed and told him that I think she could have done it). He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and wanted to hear more.
"Isn't that right Jimmy?" I said, calling on my star witness. "Jimmy, tell the Chief why you believe it could have been Susie. (He was there when Cameron dropped kicked Susie from the second floor balcony of the "Fraternity house" and saw the whole thing). "Jimmy!"
Jimmy was over on the bench, apparently consumed with rubbing life back into his numb boy parts and hadn't been paying attention to one thing were were talking about.
I could tell this investigation was going nowhere without me, and now, the Fire Chief was beginning to realized how much he needed my eyes and ears if we were ever going to solve this mystery.
Next time: Susie off the hook and Johnny Gillemot's alibi!
If you look carefully at this picture, you'll see three Dahlins with 3 broken bones; two legs and an arm, all at the same time. COUNT 'EM - THREE!
Everyone of those broken bones was a trip across town to Saint John's emergency room in Santa Monica.
Star Date: Saturday Morning September 10th 1966. Two nights ago a new television series came out called called Star Trek... The first episode was called "The Man Trap." (Oh, and although it was in color), it was pretty corny, really...and might not last long, except for the fascination, we as humans, have with space; especially here in America ever since President John F. Kennedy said, that man someday would walk on the moon.
I'm not sure of the importance being able to land on the moon, other than maybe bringing back a bunch of cheese - I guess that would be kind of cool-daddio, if that ever happened... maybe someone could stick a flag up there and boast to the world that we got there first.
Anyway, as I continue to journal my first week of fifth grade in Catholic School... it's easy to tell that I live in dog years. What I have described so far (for the average person) might take a life time. My life, however, has been turbo-charged by absent parents and the wiles of the creative Wolf-Pack as though I live 7 years for every one of - the average normal human.
It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.
Captain's Log: It was Saturday morning - Post-Apocalyptic-Zombie-Friday-Night-Freak-Fright (last 2 blog post).
Having survived all that, Saturday is no exception. I was pinned in the back of a race car, had to condemn a perfectly good fort when Tommy and I discovered that his cousin Jeffery Lennon had pooped in it. I had jumped out of our third floor window like a flying squirrel to test the new fire-escape invention. I had been chased by a man who likes to touch boys, sent one kid to St. John's Emergency room for another broken arm, used as a decoy to hold up the Helm's bakery truck, (Post8/3/13) and almost burned down the famous Lennon Sister's house (Post 8/26/13) .
Was this a "Venice thing?" Although the setting was the heart of Venice, it was definitely a"Dahlin Thing!"
Let me put it this way. In most normal American dining rooms you'd expect to find a dining room but NOT in OUR HOUSE. Do you know what we had, instead? The TRUTH! We had an old hospital crank bed that we stole from the trash bin at Saint John's Hospital in our Dining Room. ""Heck,we practically paidd for the thing"
We lived on the edge! With all the broken bones, our house was like something right out of Bellevue.
I've included a couple pictures here of some of broken bones... but to count all of them up by this time exceeded well over 50 and by the look of things I don't' think that number is going to plateau any time soon.
Saint Johns are you ready for the Dahlins?
You think I'm joking! No!
Puke-Breath had his leg broken in eight places when the Wolf Pack knocked down the entire fence at Saints Marks school and spent a year on that bed. Mad Dog broke his arm and leg at the same time and had all kinds of pins and screws and metal placed inside his body and walked around like Frankenstein. The older boys called him "The Crip" ...short for "The Cripple."
That hospital bed saw lots of good use.
I bet none of the Lennon's on the block had a hospital bed in their dining rooms... I mean what family in America did? The Lennons on the corner barely even let their poor kids come out of the house especially since we had the "beware lost rattlesnake" flag at full mast.
I doubt they ever even had a broken bone...its' hard to do in the safety of your living room singing songs! (Like singing will ever come in handy some day?)
anyway…
Let's begin after Saturday morning cartoons...after oatmeal, after meal-worms, after milk tasting, and just after Tommy and I had put an old piece of carpet in the bottom of the pit we dug for the fort in my backyard. We were safe in our little building enterprise, because the Wolf Pack was still sleeping up stairs on the third floor.
Our house was like a jungle.. not only because of the zoo we had with our collection of animals and reptiles, but because of the crazy older boys. They had stayed up late after the Albino Camp backfire listening to rock and roll on KRLA and were still sleeping. Yeah!
The jungle was quiet and the village was peaceful. "In the village the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight." (Love that song by the way).
The fort was perfect with all the junk-lumber and plywood we had stacked on top. Nailed on with straps of tire-rubber was a hatch that opened to two dirt steps that led down to the bottom.
HONK! Jimmy came over broadcasting his presence with this honking sound he could make with his throat that could be heard from Saint Marks to Venice high school. He also had this way of stretching out his bottom lip with this thump and forefinger and whistling by sucking in air that could be heard all the way to Santa Monica, however, with all the saliva it conjured up, it made his upper lip chapped and red. I'm not going to lie, it looked a little like he had some kind of disease. You can bet your sweet bippy that Jerry, "The Toucher" wasn't about to go anywhere near Jimmy - he was safe. Jimmy's mom made his wear gobs of Vaseline on his face and when his boogers ran out of his nostrils, you couldn't tell the difference of which was which. It was like totally groady! It was particularly disgusting when he folded his bottom lip over his top lip and sucked in boogers and Vaseline. YUCK!
I often heaved when I stared too long at his face, but aside from that, we began dreaming and imagining about how we were going to divide up the floor-space of this amazing architectural masterpiece (this certainly had to be one of the 7 wonders of fort-building world). And when we talked about one corner being a living room and one corner being a kitchen and another corner being a bathroom...I think Jimmy thought that those corners really were a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom... The told Jeff Lennon about the bathroom idea and Jeff thought it was "for real."
Anyway the big boys (The Wolf Pack) got up and Tommy said he thought he heard his mom calling him. I think he made that up (but who could blame him - after all, he had been electrocuted along with me in the pool and was rightfully afraid of the older boys - very afraid).
After Tommy went home and took some of their tools back with him, I heard... Zit-King's fire-breathing dragon two blocks away, reeving at about 8000 RPM. The older boys called the oldest brother Gustav (who liked to be called King Gustav) Zit King. I'll give you one one guess why. I never said it, because I could tell by the way he flexed his muscles and kissed all the mirrors in the house that it hurt his feelings.
I ran to the front yard.
Jimmy honked
Jeffery stayed in the fort - doing something!!!!!
Tommy ran home.
My friend from school, Ghering the Great heard Gustav's racing car, "The Rat Killer," all the way from his house and decided to mosey on over. He liked cars! Zit King...ah...King Gustav came into the house with a wad of money he had won from racing last night - feeling proud and was looking for mischief. The older boys went into the backyard and began conspiring how to make the pole thing more fun by hooking it up to the exposed electrical wires in the kitchen.
When they were younger, they fastened a pulley to the top corbel (of the tippy-top) of the house and tied a rope around the big pepper tree in the back. They experimented by putting Dooh-Dooh-Pants in an old suitcase to test it out when the whole shooten-match: the rope, the pulley, the suitcase - Dooh-Dooh-Pants and everything came crashing some 40 feet to the ground. Believe it or not, Dooh-Dooh Pants lived to pass gas another day.
The Wolf Pack thought it was a man's world, but let me tell ya' we were lost without mom...She was the one who had to washed Dooh-Dooh-Pants off with a hose, because he soiled his trousers so badly... and that was a another trip for poor mom to the Saint Jon's Hospital emergency room.
(Dooh-Dooh-Pants is always cutting the cheese - but this was the day he got his nickname).
This morning, they had decided that they could set a diabolical plan into motion for a grand "TWOFER."
Not only did they plan to modify the galvanized pipe (hanging from the top of the house) to surprise some unsuspecting dupe... but they might also employed it in a way to drive Jerry "TT"crazy.
(Photo from Susan Milner on https://www.facebook.com/groups/123108724454751/)
And, let me tell you... they were successful at both. It resulted in another broken arm, ANOTHER trip to Saint John's Hospital emergency room and set Jerry "TT" completely off his rocker... If only!
If only I didn't have to get involved.
This picture, obviously isn't in 5th grade. My first of many, many, many broken bones isn't until next year in 6th grade. This is sophomore year...I should have been dead in my motorcycle accident (but "Someone upstairs" must have been looking out for me)... all I suffered was a broken femur.
Still debating whether the St. Christopher necklace helped.
I could tell this investigation was going nowhere without me, and now, the Fire Chief was beginning to realized how much he needed my eyes and ears if we were ever going to solve this mystery.
