The Venice Infection Continues to Spread

Star Date: July 16, 1969       10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1..."BLAST OFF" 

I know dad will be upset because I wasted an extra penny on this post card with my 6 cent Apollo 8 stamp, but I felt like I had to splurge since they launched the Apollo 11 today with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as humankind was on the verge of taking its first steps on extraterrestrial soil.   Yuri was the first human into outer-space in 1961 and the USSR had been way ahead of us in the Space Race. But now, the good 'O USA was about to finally leap into the lead!  Yee Haw! We were winning so I spent the extra penny on postage.

By this time, most of the pooping business had calmed down and we were regular again - well I don't know if "regular" is a good word to describe our troop from Venice.. but our bowels had certainly settled down.

When we rolled into Farragut State Park in Idaho to meet up with the other 35,000 Boy Scouts we were sweaty from fighting and smelled like an outhouse evidenced by the flies and mosquitoes in tow and also couldn't walk in a straight line - dizzy from carbon monoxide.

 It was pretty obvious that we were far from "regular."

We were like an infection spreading across the Midwest - more like the Bubonic Plague actually.


My adrenaline addiction helped me beat all the kids in the wrestle-mania staged in the back of Scout Truck and so things were looking up. I couldn't fight Cockerel, because he had diarrhea so bad and when our Scout Masters asked those in charge if we could camp next to the outhouses they graciously acquiesced to our request.

 "Wasn't that kind of them!"   Uh Huh!  

I was part of the Hawks patrol, thank God, because the Flaming Arrow patrol had Cockerel, Ronnie and "little Wiener" who staked their claim right next to the KYBO's.  In Boy Scout language or in Military language (I'm not sure which), KYBO was some fancy code word for the outhouses...it meant Keep Your Bowels Open! Seriously! I thought they must have read about us in the newspaper or something, because if there was anybody in the world that had their bowels open it was Troop 32!

It was embarrassing, really!  Those guys not only looked like they lived in KYBOs, but smell like it too! I pitched my tent as far-away as possible because I thought I might die from vomiting - you know my SuperPowers!

I felt a little sorry for Venice California because I think we had just soiled (that was a pun) their laid-back beach-city surfer reputation!  Anyway, if I could sing an ode to express the way I feeling right now in "Allan Sherman" style, it would go something like this:


Hello Mudder, hello Fadda
Here I am at camp "Diarrhea"
All the boys are overflowing
They say we'll have some fun when we stop pooping.



I saved the life of, naked Cockerel
he almost drowned from constipation.
You remember "Little Wiener"
He got gut-rot from last night's spaghetti dinner.

Now I don’t want, this to scare ya

But Cockerel now has "prune" eruptions

You remember the "Salton Sea" fuss

The Highway Patrol brought him back to us

Take me home, Oh Mudda, Fadda

Take me home to good ‘O Venice

Don’t leave me here in the back of the scout bus

or I might die from puking my guts up

Chronister smells like a bag of dog poop

And attracts all mosquitoes

Flies are attacking our dirty shirts

And everyone here has the “Hershey Squirts” 

Dearest Fadda, darling Mudda

How are my precious older Brothers?

Let me come home if you miss me

I’ll even let the hippies torture me!

Yellowstone was just okay

We made it out alive yesterday

I beat up Kissel, "Rollie-Pollie" and the Venice High Wrestler

Now I’m the champ, gee that’s better

Mudda, Fadda, kindly disregard this letter. 

for android users Allan Sherman: Hello Muddah Hello Fadda

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.

Stewed Prunes and Open wide "The Flood Gates"

Star-date: July 9th 1969  (continued)...







I had no idea what was going to happen since the Scout Masters had put my name on the "No BM" side of the secret ledger at the private interrogations last night. I crawled out of my sleeping bag the next morning and didn't have a care in the world. We were on the way to the Boy Scout National Jamboree and the United States was about to send men to the moon...for the very first time in the History of the world... and the sun was shining - "I was a Happy Boy and things were going my way!"

I'm a Happy Boy   
Our Senior Patrol Leader, Ray, suspiciously sneered at us as he stood stirring whatever-it-was - steaming in the great big pot over the low flame on the camp stove.  PRUNES!  500 gallons of prunes - so I exaggerate - sue me! But someone in our troop must have bought out the entire prune section of the local Wyoming (not-so-super) Super Market!
 

We were called to attention by a poor rendition of revelry that snorted and wheezed and sputtered out of the end of Alan's dented old bugle. We were separated into two lines. The short line had the kids who were smart enough to lie and say they had taken a "BM" (obviously these were the kids from outside Venice where they used proper language for what we called "Dropping a Buick" "Laying a Brick" "Taking a Dump"). The rest of us stupid kids were herded into the long line right behind 500-million-gallon bucket of stewed prunes. With an ominous premonition I wasn't too sure that things were going "my way" anymore and was suddenly nervous about the immediate future of this Boy Scout summer extravaganza.

There is still a remote possibility that letting Boy Scouts out of Venice could have decent ending... hubba- hubba-hubba-hubba-hubba... but the feeling I was having right now is that this adventure might not have such a good middle.

The four other guys got hot oatmeal - while Ray ecstatically scooped ladles of mushy warm prunes into the tin bowls of our boy-scout mess-kits. I've seen this stuff before. This was "old lady food" and I know what it can do to you. I ate two bites of the laxative-fruit-cocktail, not because I particularly wanted to, but because I was plugged up by oatmeal and gloop-pasta-paste and needed to. However, I wasn't about to over do it. As they watch us, I put one bite in my mouth and flung two bites over my head into the shrubs behind us whenever they looked away. I was beating the system - I was "beating the man"  Hehehe. I  wonder if this is what my older brothers felt like when they burned their draft cards... Markie D was an anarchist.  

Here is the long and the short of it: Remember David Cockerell the 15-year-old human garbage disposal who almost drowned yesterday trying to liberate his bowels? Well, believe it or not - this knucklehead volunteered to eat the remaining 4 gallons of the left-over prunes.  NOT GOOD! Worst was...that some ADULT ALLOWED HIM to scrape out the pot and eat the entire remains of this evil elixir! This guy was either hungry or desperate or both! We packed-up all of our stuff, jammed our personal belonging into our backpacks, threw it into the back of the scout truck and headed down the highway.

As the stiff-shocked, moving-truck rattled down the highway towards the west entrance of Yellowstone National Park - rebellious bellies began to gurgle and rumble and made noises louder than the exhaust of the carbon-monoxide belching truck we traveled in.     SHAKE RATTLE AND ROLL baby!

A rocket ship was about to be sent to the moon and yet the height of our technology, was a whinny little doorbell buzzer someone had brilliantly installed in the back of the moving van, as an emergency communication with those in the front cab.

A couple guys pee'd out of the back, trying to relieve themselves as usual, but two hours later the prunes began to do what prunes do - DRAINO!

I'll tell you right now, "We were no longer The NO POOP TROOP"

Steve had to go. He said that if they didn't stop the truck he would probably explode in some kind of violent eruption akin to what happened at Mount Vesuvius. Alan, the bugler, laid on the buzzer until the scout masters pulled the truck over and even before it came to a complete stop, 3 or 4 guys jumped out of the back and headed into the pine forest.

        The Flood Gates were open wide!

We managed to get inside Yellowstone until the next diarrhea panic attack!

The other "normal" scouts had a bathroom in the back of their luxurious travel-coaches, but for us - it was press the buzzer, jump over the barn-doors and squat behind some shrub and wipe off with nearby branches or pine cones - (something we'd all regret later). I don't think Ronny, Cockerel or Chronister even washed their grubby little hands and it looked like they rubbed their filthy mitts on their uniforms.   "Gross! It was disgusting!" They looked grody and they smelled even worse!"

"Hey, Kissel..what has six wheels and flies?" I asked.
"I don't know. What? An airplane?" he replied
"No" I said "Our troop 32 scout bus."  We laughed, but it was true.


The back of the truck smelled like poop and was now swarming with flies. The good news was that by about our third stop inside the park, the cause of our stomachaches had been liquefied and partially eradicated. 

In the words of Iron Butterfly... IN A GADDA DA VIDA...   

     ...thankfully, it looked like the days of "Prairie Dogging" "Logs, Buicks and bricks were behind us"



With the stuff in our belles that felt like the hot geothermal brew of the Blue Sulfur Springs, poor-poor Cockerel was as eruptive and as reliable as Old Faithful.

We spent a night inside Yellowstone Park and on the 11th began to make our way to Idaho.  This is when the event that led to the embarrassment of the entire Boy Scouts of America - that had Lord Baden Powell rolling over in his grave...happened!

My stomach felt better and we were on the road again so "I was a happy boy." However, this inexplicable euphoric feeling might have had something to do with the fact that I chose to travel with my head hanging out of the back of the truck, inhaling the toxic fumes in order to keep from smelling, Ronny, Cockerel and Chronister...

Next, my premonition comes true: Our Scout Masters worst nightmare and the unfortunate serious of events in the not-so-good middle part of our summer adventure...

...MMA cage fighting and the Highway Patrol escort.  In the mean time we pretended to be hippies and got all psychedelic rocking out on air guitars to Iron Butterfly - We were from Venice and had a reputation to uphold.    

Jesus. Venice. And Night of the Living Dead!

Venice was not just a place, but an identity - something that is inescapable part of you. Good or bad, being from Venice gave you both pride and cringe.  Though only 12, by 1969 I had been across the country and back 3 times and seen my fair share of the "Purple Mountain Majesty and Fruited Plains."  Everywhere we went, "tourist" (we called them, derogatorily), were the people living in their own towns who look at the long hair of my brothers and invariable asked if we were from Venice. I learned early on of the stigma of being from Venice that gave my brothers such pride.  It was like that part in the Bible where it talked about Jesus being from Nazareth that said, "Can anything good come for Nazareth?"

Every time someone looked at my family and asked if we were from Venice, it was as if  they were saying, "Can anything other than hippies, free love, drugs Flower Power and Jim Morrison come from Venice?" We thought that was good, but it appeared they didn't share that sentiment. They might well have said to our face, "Can anything good come from Venice?"  So I guess I understood how Jesus felt when he heard those words.

The once glamorous Canals that hadn't been filled-in, began to rot and stink and the formerly cute bungalows of Abbot Kinney's dream were now run down shacks full of pot smoking hippies, unemployed artist, and raucous parties of the flower children of the sixties.

Several weeks after I broke my arm playing football in the street, I had been outside in my cast. Although it had Andrea's treasured signature, as well as some other seventh graders, it smelled and was pretty disgusting already. I was didn't give much thought to that fact that I had only been wearing one shoe when an older couple slowed down to a stop in front of our house and gawked. The old geezer cracked his window a couple inches, as if the air on Harding avenue was unsafe to breathe, and called me over.







His wife was holding some kind of Hollywood, or Beverly Hills, or Celebrity map or something and stared at our house - eyes wide in disbelief and mouth hanging open in shock.




















With cars and boats and more broken down cars and broken down boats and creaky stairs and hippie brothers hanging out on the porch, the couple from Nebraska carefully whispered through the cracked window asking if my house was a hippie commune?



I said, "No, I live here!"

"With your Parents?" they asked, incredulously.

"Yeah!" I said.

"Poor parents" the man muttered.

"Where's your other shoe" the lady asked.

"What other shoe? I asked

"The one your missing" she snarled, thinking I was being a disrespectful smart-aleck.

I informed her, "I'm not missing one."

"Then why are you only wearing one shoe?" her husband barked at me as he took over.

"Oh, this old thing isn't my shoe. I came outside barefooted and found this decroded thing in the flowerbed."

I looked inside the window to see if our house was on the tourist map as a place of interest for being a hippie commune as they rolled up the window and sped away - only to screech to a halt in front of the Lennon Sister's home two houses up the street. I ran down the street towards them in my older brother's size 11 shoe and frightened the poor couple like I was one of the dead bodies in "Night of the Living Dead."

I can't really say with certainty whether our house was on  that map or not, but certainly this couple went back to where they came from telling their neighbors about what they saw on Harding Avenue and wondering if anything good could come from Venice?"






Pshaw... "fer sure" We have the Famous Lennon Sisters across the street and right behind us was Cheryl Arnold who was Miss Venice, and Miss Santa Monica, and Miss LA...SO TAKE THAT... tourist!

Ha! Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

With all that said, I guess the thing I want to share next with the world is that fact that my Boy Scout Troop from Venice - Troop 32, had been in steep decline by the time I had been recruited by my Eagle Scout brother and was not the best thing Venice exported: something me and my fellow hoodlum scouts took great pride in.

We raided camporees at night, causing havoc on Troop 34, cutting the ropes on tents and making life as miserable as we could at Camp Slauson in Malibu in the Santa Monica mountains.

Here is a picture of our (converted moving truck) i.e. Troop 32 Boy Scout Truck - that was a not a whole lot more than "cage wresting" on wheels.

You can take the Boy Scouts out of Venice, but you cant' take the Venice out of Troop 32!

Next time: National Jamboree and "Diarrhea 'till Easters"