Christmas in Venice and the Viking Warrior Gene

Christmas 1970  We were normal once, but that was a long time ago.

At one time we were cute and cuddly and snugly - had manners and said our prayers.

 (I'm the cute one on the rocking horse)

(Erick and Mary)  (Here I am crawling on the floor) 

(Kurt and Karl)

We took pictures without pinching the person in front of us or elbowing the person next to us. We ate meals together at the kitchen table and called our mother and father "mom" and "dad" like most other children in the world. 

Being number 7 most of those days are before my time and are but a shadowy memory at best.

 

(Here is what a couple pictures look like without having prison guards or parents on patrol)

Now that I am 14 and in high-school at Saint Monicas - mom has pretty much checked out and dad stays at work as much as possible--so it is like having the inmates running the asylum.

In the future they will discover something called the warrior gene. This, I'm sure, has been handed down to my family from our Viking ancestry. This genetic disposition is not on my mom's side of the family. There was still some "normal" in her that caused her to long for our family to be like other all the other plain wrap families in the world--but this was not to be.

Everything in our house was a competition. A simple game of croquet turned into World War II with croquet balls launched all the way down Harding Avenue into the Nargie's front yard and the round-missile-objects shot all the way down to the vacant lot where the Fraternity house use to be.

Croquet for the Lennons and Tripps and Blasers was probably just croquet. For us, it would invariability turn into a wrestling match--everything turned into a wrestling match, a boxing match, and a footrace if a chuckwalla, a Iguana or alligator ever got loose.

This is why our house was the center of the world. The Lennons wanted into the fun - the Blasers wanted to hang out here along with the the Tripps - the Grants and is why our house always seemed to be filled with a million people on every occasion.

Why sit around and watch Kung fu or Dick Van Dyke on TV when everyday was an episode of Sanford and Son meets the Adams Family and Dark Shadows--only our haunted house also had a Veloci-Raptor attack-rooster and a crop of luscious marijuana plants in the backyard just to make things more interesting.

(What it looked like then on our front steps)

(What the front steps looks like now with the Police showing up every other day)

Now that I was a Freshman in high school the older boys tried to recruit me into the hippy club and taught me how to smoke and roll a refer. I desperately wanted to be in the club - I wanted to be accepted - I wanted to feel like I was part of the menagerie of older brothers, but didn't want to jump in with both feet quite yet. I wanted to please the older guys and had to show some loyalty to the Wolf Pack by puffing from time to time, but wasn't ready to fully buy in to this whole hippy thing completely.

Making matters worse at Christmas Tony had given up on shopping at Pick and Save altogether. He figured that it was cheaper, more fun and added more to the overall the chaos by rummaging through the attic for junk he could wrap as presents. Then his gift giving digressed from the smelly old-broken stuff to stuff he would steal from someone's bedroom.

One of the highlights of this new Christmas tradition was when any one of of the older boys unwrapped a present allegedly from "Santa" that belonged to someone else all H. E. double toothpicks would break out. This awakens the Force of the Warrior Creed.

Wrestling would break out and bodies would spill out and onto the front lawn.

Dad seemed to enjoy it and acted just like the rest of us but none of this please my mother!

After three or four rounds of utter chaos Mrs. D would stomp her feet on every single tread of the staircase--all the way up to her room while saying things like, "Why couldn't we be more like the Lennons and the Blasers. Slamming her door she would lock her self in imagining what Christmas was probably like next door or down the street at the Lennons.



(Mom...Mrs. D Pictured this to the left...




but got something that looked more like this...to the right)

I could only image that this year after midnight mass upon entering the front door we would get the "Under-Pain-of-Mortal-Sin" speech again just before opening large sliding into the living room just seconds before we jumped onto the mountain of poorly wrapped presents under Mr. D's two dollar tree he finagled from the Troop 32, Boy Scout, Christmas tree lot.

We had a lot to look forward to. Zombies and Wrapping Paper Wars. The stolen presents, the wrestling matches, chaos and mayhem and you can be sure that those normal people would stop by - because they wanted in on the fun also. 

Joy to the World. Merry Christmas from me - Markie D - and from my family to you and yours... may your Christmas be less than normal, but Sacred none-the-less.  

Where we Buried the Body

(Continued from the last post about the hippie we murdered and from the post before that about my sex education).


Anyway, running away from the Kingdom Hall on West Washington Blvd, I was very concerned about becoming emotionally attached to my captures. This is something that happens to Swedes don't ya know... There is no name for it yet, but trust me in the couple years it will be a diagnosed syndrome named after something Swedish - maybe after me or maybe after a city in Sweden like Stockholm!   Just saying!



Afraid of having positive feelings and have empathy towards our kidnappers - I didn't look back and ran straight up the street to the Troop 32 Boy Scout house followed closely behind by Tommy and Jeffery!

There we met up with the likes of Ray Vandenmark and Alan Scout, who were the two Senior Patrol Leaders on the infamous "Boy Scouts from Venice" raid on the National Jamboree in which we nearly killed that nerd kid, Bill Gates, from Seattle and were forever banished from returning to a Jamboree. Anyway, all the same hoodlums who were on that 1969, "fighting-cage-on-wheels," "diarrhea-revenge" road-trip were all there. It was a pretty derelict group and I had earned everyone's respect by fighting my way to the top (Special forces training, care of all of gnarly fights with my big brothers - thank you very much Wolf Pack!).

The grungiest kids were from the  "Golden Triangle" area of Venice whose parents were pretty persnickety by thinking they were better than those of us north of Washington Blvd as though they had somehow been annexed into the new Marina Del Rey. Even though they wrote Marina Del Rey on their outgoing mail - it was still 90291 and they still had Venice DNA, despite how much they pretended to be "Beverly Hills yacht owners."  Even though Steve Kissel was from that area - he was pretty cool and didn't smell as bad as some of the other kids.

Anyway, we get to the troop meeting late when the patrols were already outside in the backyard for the group activity.  I don't know what they did for the group activity over at Mar Vista Troop 34...(if I had to guess) probably something a whole lot tamer and a whole lot cleaner than what we were used to - crocheting maybe..hehehe.  We assembled out back in the dirt lot of the small property that was located between West Washington Boulevard and Washington Way (confusing right... "Sheeze" I guess someone ran out of names when they were naming all the streets in Venice) for a game of "Steal the Bacon."  This was a universal Boy Scout tradition...however, THIS WAS VENICE!  This was not like the normal kind of Steal the Bacon they played over in Mar Vista or in Beverly Hills or in little Billy Gates' troop in suburbia Seattle...  NO... this was knock down and drag out.

I loved it; it was Viking style.  Like something that took place on regular basis in our front yard (only with kids closer to my age).
                         









However, poor Tommy had the wet spot on his jeans and no matter how hard he tried to hide it, as soon as he got dragged across the dirt yard a couple times, it collected dirt that acted like a beacon - a neon sign in Vegas that said "Look, I Pee'd my Pants!"



The boys mercilessly "stop-drop-and-rolled" poor Tommy. When he got home, I got called in to testify about jumping off of metaphoric ten-story-roof and how I shouldn't have encouraged him to jump.







I did want to tell Mrs. Blaser that the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Pope and the Catholics should all be proud... but that might led to having explain about the hippie we might have killed, so I kept my mouth shout about the railroad tracks, the pennies, the guitar...about the Kingdom Hall incident and just said,  "Yes, ma'am!"  afraid that she would ask us to show where we buried the body.

Jeffery kind of liked the thrill of the whole thing and wanted some more...He signed up to go to Camp Slauson in Malibu next week with us and decided to help me with my big plans of payback for Chewbacca. I warned him in advance by asking how he did with snakes and dead things. He said he wasn't sure, but wanted to give it a try. They run a tight ship over at Bob and Jeanette Lennon's house, but Jeffery sneaked over and that is when we put into play       "PLAN: X Y Z!"

Hygiene and the Psychotic Hot Mess

At three hundred and some-odd pounds I couldn't blame Pinky for not wanting to take a bath; he was too big for the bathtub and he didn't want to touch his feet the moldy mushroom stuff we were growing at the bottom of our shower. Besides that, the bathroom door to the shower on the second floor didn't close all the way and there was a small opening that anyone could peer into - if they decided to invade his privacy. Pinky wasn't about to let anyone see him naked - in all of his glory and was determined not to take a shower. The older boys had already tortured him mercilessly with horrible name-calling about his weight and wasn't about to give the Wolf Pack one more thing that they could make fun of him about. His simple hygiene regime was to douse himself in cheap Pick and Save cologne to overpower his odoriferous mass. I was at least glad to have some help and tried my 13-year-old best to be kind to Pinky.


For me, hygiene became a psychotic game of epic proportions. I quit taking baths since the Alligator incident i.e. the Reptile Dysfunction , and as a 13-year-old boy desperately waiting for puberty to set in, I was deathly afraid of being caught naked in the shower by my callous older brothers. Even greater than the fear of being spied on by a member of the wily Wolf Pack was the fear that they would try to humiliate me by dragging me outside naked... or tying me to a tree or shoving me back into that Hamper naked and intentionally leaving under a random car to be discovered by a neighbor.   NO WAY!

I wouldn't put it past any of them and was desperately terrified. I had to strategically pick my moments, when no one was home and the times I thought it was safe to use the shower in the same bathroom that had the broken door.

I don't exactly know why my brothers felt that the baby brother had to be ridiculed, made fun of...or tormented to no end? I do believe the dark, spiritual matter of the universe (i.e the Ouija Board and the Paranormal Ooze) had something to do with it. I think that same invisible substance was like a pandemic plague that was the cause of hate and racism and bullying of any kind. Though, I might like to say things like "it was us who opened the portal to the underworld with our seances" this darkness had already existed and was everywhere!

I liked everything about my family, the loudness, the fun, the craziness - all of it.. it was the dysfunction that made us so special with which we derived our identity as much as we did from our Viking heritage. My dad was funny and my Mom even dressed up like Phyllis Diller and did a comedy routine at Saint Marks every year.

As I said before, my house being exactly in the middle of our block on Harding Avenue was the perfect metaphor for our family being the center of all the hippie craziness that existed in the universe- this part I liked! I like the fun and laughter. I had a bunch of great stories that not many other people on the planet could even begin to relate to... like, letting monkeys out of the zoo.. illegal trailer rides... high-speed police chases... the veloci-rooster... electrocutions... Milk Wars... alligator wrestling... rattlesnake escapes... Albino hikes... Ouija board and secret room discovery... and our UFO Madness where we nearly burned down the Lennon Sister's house at the corner!














I even had some Dahlin Pride about the MEXICAN TOMATO PLANTS that gave us celebrity renown in Venice.

The only thing I didn't like, was being made to feel like I was an outsider. I really don't think there was some evil conspiracy to make me feel like I was an expendable object at their disposal to be played with like a cheap child's toy.

It's just that all of my brothers were older and as they continued to evolved more and more into hippies - their world was a world in which I didn't fit. There was no coherent plan put into place to torture me or to make me feel like I didn't belong, it is just that at 13 - I didn't belong to their hippie, refer madness, draft card burning world yet. I was an outsider and at this point - the perpetual underdog.



One thing that I learned from these feelings of  being singled out and excluded was that everyone liked to be treated with some measure of kindness. I did. I didn't want to be punched with fist of fury but touched instead with tenderness and kindness...an occasional hug would be nice and some edifying words of encouragement -  welcomed.

Love!

I guess?

I never heard the word, but knew this lofty and evasive concept had to be true somewhere out there in the universe.

Even though I was a goof ball at school, I tried especially hard to treat the underdogs kindly (the kids who were easy targets for the bullies). I felt deep down inside my psychotic hot mess - that it was my duty to stick up for them - even at personal risk.


Being the perpetual underdog, I had a real soft spot for the those who were being treated poorly or unjust. Peter Parker's uncle told him that, "with great power comes great responsibility" and I knew that with my heightened justice sensors and fighting for "the least of these" could get me into trouble and often did (like the time I tried to protect Bill Gates from the Naked Zombies) and Harry from Terry's evil Prank).

Though I felt like a loner in a big family, I did not feel alone! I did not wallow in self-pity or in misery because of either my "retardation" (my brother's called it) -  or because I had this secret knowing that I was being prepared for a very special destiny. Somewhere deep inside I had this intrinsic knowing that I would find the meaning of love someday and that everything I was going through now was a part of the process in shaping me for that day!

There was no need to feel sorry for me - I figured that if evil could exist than so must the corresponding antithesis of perfect good!

I had a dream of a bright future!  In the meantime Wolf Pack do your worst - little do you know you are preparing me for an "extraordinary destiny!" Shushhhhhhh...this will be our secret!

Next time putting up the Christmas lights!