Gillemonster and His Dog-Poop Alibi

(Continued from 1/25/14) Chewbacca knelt over the dead body as tears lightly fell on the seared flesh that smell of burnt hair.  Crying, he mourned the loss of his friend.

Let's come back to the fatality left behind by the Great Fire of '69 and turn back to our list of possible arson suspects.

Out of the 16 or 17 on my original list, I have narrowed the suspects to a mere four:

1) Rita Nargie
2) Sea-Shell
3) Anti-War, Draft-card-burning, peace-loving hippies
4) The Owner

RITA HAD MOTIVE. She had been rejected by one of the "Frat - guys" and was holding a grudge. When my brothers and crew went down to the "Frat-House" in drag (dressed as women) and two were invited in - it only served to intensify her female hormonal angst against every man in the world. From the kitchen window of her house next door, she was allegedly heard screaming at the top of her Italian lungs that she would get even someday.  Unfortunately for Rita, the entire neighborhood heard her threats and this is why I felt she needed to be investigated. It does turn out that she had not come out of her room for more than a month, which I was able to verify by the dirty stack of surplus dinner plates left just outside her bedroom door.  Her mother had been in no mood to clean up after Rita, which the neighborhood also knew about.

I refer to that incident as "The Leaning Tower of  Stand-off Soufflé"   
 So Rita went off the list and the fire somehow brought closure to all the hurts she had suffered and had seemed to exact the vengeance she was looking for and the next week at church it was mentioned from the pulpit by the droning-monotone Irish accent of  Father Hoban as a miracle.  One lady said, "Hallelujah" and was promptly asked to leave the church.

I'm am now left with 1)  Sea-Shell, the 11 year-old-sister of the Frat-House President who had been
                                      dropped on her head.
                               2)  Hippies - other than my brothers
                               3)  Mr. Malon, the owner of the Property.

As for Johnny the Gillemonster...as I mentioned before he had motive!  He was a paperboy for the our local Herald Examiner newspaper. His route included the Harding Avenue Fraternity House. You can only imagine what a nightmare it must have been for the poor kid to collect the Newspaper fee from a bunch of transient squirrely irresponsible college-dropout types!  Every time Gillemonster knocked on the door, a different person answered and told him to come back tomorrow. After about 10 such visits 'O Gilly figured that they were running him around and that no one was ever going to pay.  He turned bright red and shook his fist at that house and said he's get payback. "You just wait and see!"  he yelled and spun dirt on the porch  from the back wheel of his customized Schwinn Sting-Ray (bicycle) as he spun out.  (Every kid in America had a Stingray bike).

Remember I told you about the lyrics that Four Eyes sent in to Creedence Clearwater Revival... about Do..do...do... looking out my back door... and all the other words the nuns told me when I interrogated them... well it wasn't "do...do...do"  It was literally "Dooh...Dooh...Dooh!"

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Lookin' out my Back Door

Johnny was so angry at feeling like he had been messed with... that he took the largest... stinkiest... warmest... pile of fresh-steaming dog dooh he could find early the next Sunday morning on a neighbors lawn and squished it between the sports section and the comics of the 50 pound Sunday Morning edition of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.  "Gilly" left that "special" payback edition of the newspaper right on the welcome mat in front of the large entry door. He rang the bell, ran across the street, hid in a bush and watched in delight as those drunkards with hangover vomited their guts out.  Gillemonster told me, that was his alibi and as he spoke I carefully watch every indicator on his face and really believe that the Dog-Poop completely satisfied his desire for payback.  TRUE!

I would never accuse a Catholic Priest - that's why Father Hoban never made it on my list to begin with, but he was known to have quite a temper - and being raised in Belfast had plenty of training in making Molotov Cocktails.

Let's just leave it at that - for now!  I was too frightened about going into the Rectory so I wasn't about to interrogate the Father... I'd leave that investigation to the Fire Marshal.

I already had enough problems at Saint Marks and next year - my last and final year - was destined to be a living Purgatory, for I had to look forward to spending the year under Sister Shultz.

Meanwhile, the mellow and cuddly Chewbacca grieved over the death of the neighborhood cat as though the thing had been a close relative of his.  Before the fire, I'd have to admit, that the feral Calico cat did look like a miniature version of my hairy older brother.  My brother looked like a giant version of Cousin It  from the Addams Family TV Show.

In the midst of smoke and firemen and ambulances and Secret Service and the Crazy Vietnam War vet with a broom and the Zombie Holocaust, Chewbacca scooped the dead cat into a cardboard box and took it past the dreaded Veloci-Rooster into the the hippie sanctuary of "Wall Drug" in our Venice backyard.  If you think the Rita-thing was a miracle - wait until next time.

It wasn't the Somnambulant and it wasn't Bill Lennon

(Continued from 1-18-14) I stood across the street and felt the dry heat of the flames as the old mansion continued to burn. The smell of the smoke did not betray the age of the old place. It didn't smell of new pine, but like old wood mixed with ancient dust that was being incinerated. The chaos of a ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST continued to loom as I watched the all the aimless and dazed half-naked zombies who had been rescued by Mr. Blaser in his underwear - and by my tribe - to which I was very proud, but also a tad bit miffed for making me stay across the street "out of harm's way."



It was dangerous as cars continued to catch on fire and blow up... I don't want to sound morbid - this was indeed another sad chapter in the story of Harding avenue...but I can't lie, it was entertaining to see O' Mr. Nargie behaving like a teenage cheerleader at football game, as he frantically rooted on Bobby Tripp who was on the roof with a garden hose (with very low water pressure) trying his best to keep the Nargie -Tripp duplex from catching on fire.

I made up cheers and began - chanting them to Tommy who was standing next to... as though they were Mr. Nargie's words... who was across the street moving back and forth like a crab and waving his arms up and down for the home team.

"Douse it out...Douse it out...WAY OUT! Keep it back... Keep it back...Way back!  Douse it out...Keep it back...Put it out...WAY OUT!"  I had Tommy in stitches... until I was interrupted.

Pat Lennon looked down at me, shook his head and said, "You're weird!"

The first thing that came to my mind was, 'of course I was - I've been electrocuted...left behind...tied to trees...buried in pits...choked...knocked out...attacked by a rooster...shot with needle-tipped arrows...wrestled an alligator...had to contend with the revenge of Sister Godzilla in the fifth grade and suffered oxygen loss to the brain...OF COURSE I'M WEIRD! Hello!?'

Then it suddenly dawned on me who it was. It was Pat Lennon!  I looked up at him sadly and asked what he was doing here.

"Climbed out of a window and escaped!" he said. "Couldn't miss this."

"Where is everyone else" I asked.

"Danny snuck out with me and is around here somewhere, but everyone else is under lock-down by the Secret Service. When the cars started blowing up, man, they thought it was gun shots and went ape on us."

"Hey, Pat...I'm sorry!" That's all I could say... and probably all I needed to say!  Like I said before this was the third biggest crime to ever happen in the history of Venice California. The first biggest crime happened just a couple weeks prior to this with a bunch of craziness when a lunatic who had been stalking the Lennon Sisters also made assassination threats against the President of the United States. In trying to be sensitive to that event, I'm not going to go into that story at this time... but suffice to say that with a Secret Service detail at the Lennon House and with the entire the family under protective custody we can cross Billy and Joey and Kippy and all the other Lennon's off the suspect list.

1) My Brothers - the Wolf Pack
2) Mr. Blaser and his whitey-tighties 
3) My Dad - AKA Mr. D
4). Mr. Lennon
5) Frank Nargie
6) Rita Nargie
7) Sea-Shell
8) Leeland the hot-rodder
9) Weenie Tripp and Family
10) Johnny Gillemonster
11) Tommy Blaser the Somnambulist
12) Four boys dressed up as girls
13 The Saint Mark's Nuns
14 Walter Daniels
15 The Anti-War Crazies
16 the Owner of the property.

For my brothers...they were out in Wall Drug doing some hippie stuff back there and had not sent up any... UFO's i.e. flaming dry-cleaning bags...recently so it wasn't them. They go off the list (Blog Post 8/24/13). As for the four boys who had dressed up like girls - even though everyone's feelings were hurt, Tommy and I had seen them through the fence in the backyard smoking leaves from their precious "Mexican Tomato Plants" in those funny shaped cigarettes.



1) My Brothers - the Wolf Pack
3) My Dad - AKA Mr. D
6) Rita Nargie
7) Sea-Shell
8) Leeland the hot-rodder
12) Four boys dressed up as girls
13 The Saint Mark's Nuns
15 The Anti-War - peace-loving Crazies
16 the Owner of the property.

My oldest brother, Gustav was out in the Rat Killer racing Leeland and had brought home a pocket crammed full of cash to prove it...so that accounts for all of my brothers and unfortunately, also gives Leeland an alibi.

1) My Brothers - the Wolf Pack
3) My Dad - AKA Mr. D
6) Rita Nargie
7) Sea-Shell
8) Leeland the hot-rodder
12) Four boys dressed up as girls
13 The Saint Mark's Nuns
15 The Anti-War - peace-loving Crazies
16 the Owner of the property.

I pretty sure dad wasn't involve - he had just driven in late from West Covina selling new, all-electric gold-medallion track homes out there so that eliminates all the Dahlins.

3) My Dad - AKA Mr. D

I was now down to four possible suspects, although Ricky Tripp came over to where Tommy and I had been standing and said something about his mother smiling a lot with all the firemen running through their house. I didn't know what to make of that - but I still don't think she set it on fire.

1) Rita Nargie
2) Sea-Shell
3) The Anti-War, draft-card-burning, peace-loving Crazies
4) The Owner of the property.

As for Johnny Gillemonster... I really liked him as a suspect and when I went over to his house with my detective note pad... and  interrogated him... this is when he told me the of story of the dog-poop payback - did jive with me - so I'll tell you that story next time.

In the meantime...Chewbacca had discovered a dead body at the foot of the 60 year old palm tree which turned out to be the only fatality of the Great Fire of '69.  Chewbacca fell to his knees, leaned over the corpse and cried.

Until next time..my friends...Gud välsigne och Hej då

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.  

Hippies and Mexican Tomato Plants

Whack… slapped the stick, three times on my outstretched rump. Seriously, do you really think for one moment that after all I had been through already, that a couple well placed eraser-bombs and several smacks on my tight little derrière was going to have any effect! I was like one of those used cars for sale that looked good on the outside, but already had a million miles on it.  While still in the "position" (last blog post) I tried my darnedest to pass gas...but to no avail, because I didn't have the superpowers that one of my older brothers, Dooh-Dooh Pants, had who so magnificently mastered. There I was, stomach churning, butt pointed at everyone I wanted to payback, but was unable to channel my gastric juices into a defensive weapon.

The year is 1968 and a lot has happened in the last two years - since the 5th grade. Obviously I lived through Sr. Godzilla, the 5th grade "Templates" (blog Post June 26th) and somehow managed to make it this far.

One brother was in Viet Nam. My oldest brother, Gustav had been Honorably Discharged from the military with some lame excuse like having bad teeth or because he had a rare blood type. Three of the other brothers - the ones who were full-fledged, long-haired, Anti-Viet-Nam-War-hippies, didn't just burn their draft cards, but sent them back to President Johnson to make an even bigger statement...

Which reminds me of our chance - impossible - real-live-encounter with the President of the United States, which took place while we were driving across country on our vacation this past summer. 

TRUE STORY

Who else in the world does this happen to?  Nobody, right?  Nobody, other than the Dahlins! We'll get to that in the next couple blog post... but, seriously... what are the mathematical probabilities of running into the Presidential motorcade in North Texas and having a chance encounter.  It is about the same, I guess of having an alien abduction in the middle of New York City.  (You're going to have to wait on that one. Oh, and add snapping turtles to the story - and it must be something like, 1:100,000,000 to the 120th power).

After what happened to John F. Kennedy... it made you wonder why LBJ, the 36th President, of the United States got out of his protected limousine and pulled his dirty rotten trick on us.

Didn't he know he was messing with the "Wolf Pack." 

By this time the Lennons were beginning to wonder off the reservation and the older boys had also begun to let their hair hang low. Pat and Billy had traversed the chasm of our tarry-asphalt street and engaged in some of the bizarre behaviors of Hotel Crazy at our pad. The virus of the hippy-bug made its way across the street, past the Blessed Virgin Mary that stood guard in their front window and spread the infection in their house. Getting into this long-haired-hippy movement, the older Lennon boys began to fit right in with the Dahlins and embraced "what my older brothers had begun cultivating" in the far reaches of the backyard - hidden behind old cars, boats that refused to float, stacks of decaying National Geographics and  lots of junk that was perfect for protecting their secret garden. My older bothers told my parents were "Mexican Tomato Plants"   Heck, I don't know why they spent so much time out there caring the trimming those plants - didn't seem to do any good. The dumb plants never did grow tomatoes - go figure!  

Last year in the Sixth Grade my oldest brother, Gustav and his girl friend, Patty, took me to Sears and bought me a really cool Tobias suit. This is the famous picture that Marilyn Monroe is holding at the top of my Blog Post (until I change it, of course).
 
My Sixth Grade felt like a"life-sentence"  with hard labor. (more about that later). But, look at how cute this little guy is!

These was my first real clothes, that weren't hand-me-down-down-down-down-downs. This didn't come with blood stains or bullet holes or 17 patches over patches... Just look at him.

LADY KILLER right!

Imagine all those six grade girls drooling all over me! I wasn't keeping count and didn't have a clue.  Look into those precious eyes that seem to be lost in deep thought. What do you supposed I was thinking at that moment? Probably didn't have anything to do with girls.  I'll bet anything that I was too busy contemplating my everyday survival to be a "player."  If I had any inkling that a girl liked me, I was so insecure that I couldn't even open my mouth. I stuttered...and most people didn't know because they thought I was just being funny and a lot of my words didn't come out right. (No one in my family listened so anyone, they all just competed for floor time and had no idea that I had speech problems - except for my dad. He kept telling me that I should learn to talk with marbles in my mouth to help my pronuncification)

And what others thought was confidence was really just nothing more than the artful-dodging of a lonely street rat - still searching for the meaning of life and wanting to hear one word spoken in my HOUSE!

Next Time - The infamous story of amateur taxidermy and the SKUNK STINK-SACKS.

Please, no one tell the Blasers - because I don't think they know how their beloved collie got a hold of these things that he dragged like a crazed werewolf into the house. 


The Beatles have a song. It's been a hard days night... but for me it has been a hard-couple years..and I feel like I've been working like a dog just to survive the pits, and the jalapenos, and the big-bang-burnie, and the fights, and the mosquitoes, and leprosy, and the Veloci-rooster and the alligator...

                                                                    Just how much farther would Markie D make it?