Venice verses the Dahlins: How we changed the World.

To clean streets with those humongous street cleaning machines was no new thing in the late 60's.

ONLY after the Fraternity House Burned down at the corner of Harding and Grandview it meant that the Dahlins had free access to urban sprawl - or worst yet - urban blight!

I'm sure that, whoever burned down the Fraternity had no idea at the time that we would completely take over that corner of the world and fill it with all of the broken down Dahlin vehicles. The arsonist may have thought they were getting rid of the late-night fracas of partying hippies only to face the horrors of reality that "nature abhors a vacuum" and the empty space became a Dahlin parking lot.

 Cars. Trailers. Boats. Trucks.

Truck is a polite word. In fact, our trucks had become trash barges...sarcophagi for the dead remnants of cannibalize automobiles that had been hastened into an early death by the tribe of White Swedes with Gold hair...

I think you get the idea! 

The Venice Police Department did all they could to help our neighbors who had called the cops on us for abandoning cars in front of their houses and across the street from us. They instituted new laws about moving cars every three days. The parking enforcement officers came by in their nifty three-wheeled-Harleys and began the game of  "Chalk the Tires" but we were too clever!

The game began with the officer drawing a chalk mark on the sidewall of the tire to see if the vehicle had been moved within the three day - maximum time allowed by the new "anti-Dahlin-law."

The Dahlins, however, thwarted the plans of "Big Brother" by taking a sponge dipped in water and washing off the chalk-marks.  I'm sure this made Mr. Blaser and the rest of our neighbors upset.  

                                The line of cars and the trash heaps continued to grow (it was almost like a fungus).

The police department had to institute new policies where they had hoped to trick us and keep us unaware of their sneaky plans to control the spread of Dahlin suburban blight by marking the lowest part of the exposed tread of tire to conceal the fact that they had been down Harding and Grandview Avenues.

This cost us a couple tickets, but we were on to their clever tricks!  "The game's afoot" as Sherlock Holmes would say.



This new part of the game was a bit more irksome, as it required more effort by having to roll the vehicle back a foot or two to conceal the chalk mark that was sneakily drawn on the tread of the tire. WE WON.

Sometimes we had to fix a flat or solicit the help of a hundred hippies to push the barges full of junk - even if it was just a couple feet.  But, we were on to the "MAN!"








Then came a new improved strategy on behalf of the city.      
           Venice verses the Dahlins.
Secret meetings were being held and it was decided that at tax payers expense the city would put up "Street Cleaning" signs for the purposes of making the Dahlin boys move their broken down fleet of cars twice a week  (I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist - BUT I wouldn't be surprised if my dad had something to do with this new parking enforcement). He was as tired of all the #@*&# cars as much as Don Blaser and everyone else in the neighborhood.

Up went the new signs that opened a new "theater of operations!"  IT WAS WAR.

John Gillemot and his friends over on Garfield got so upset over the whole thing that they decided to take the law into their own hands and mowed down all the signs along Garfield ave with an old Chevy truck! Though they destroyed the truck, the crazies over on Garfield felt it was a moral victory. Any day that I wasn't used as a throw toy or punching bag and didn't show up for school at Saint Mark's - all Black and Blue was considered a moral victory!

My dad, on the other hand, tried to wear us down by the great Dahlin spectacle put on for all the neighbors to watch in the Wednesday-and-Thursday-Street-Cleaning-Rituals that involved in moving all the Dahlin cars from one side of the street to the other.

The boys hated when my dad, the Staff Sargent, thumped on the walls at 7:00 am in the morning and began shouting his infamous phrases like "Up and at 'em"  "Time of the harvest moon"  "Party all night- sleep all day" and then rattling off  the command to "go" like a machine gun which was received with just about as much enthusiasm as walking into machine gun fire from a sniper. "Let's go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go!" "Up and at 'em...it's time of the harvest moon. Let's go girly-men. Get the hair out of your eyes and let's go move some cars."  To the older boy, this was a true American Horror Story which the neighbors came out and watched every week as if was the Ringling Brothers circus -itself!

I said "some cars" - that was an understatement - it was more like 'let's go and move the 73,000 broken down cars' - some with flat ties - some with no wheels at all - AND... those TRUCKS FULL of TRASH.

And so the party began!

And because of us...there is street-cleaning, parking-enforcement across this great fruited plain! Okay, so maybe we didn't change the World - but our impact was being felt!

Just another day in paradise for the Dahlins on in  Harding Ave!  

  

Revenge of Chewbacca and the tattooed 13-year-old!

My older brother who looked like Chewbacca recently graduated from Santa Monica City College which granted him only more idle time. I don't know who said, "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop," but in the case of hippie older brothers this expression was certainly true - I had experience those unholy hands on too many occasions.  On the mornings he slept in (typically every morning - expect for the Wednesday and Thursday street cleaning torture  - which agitated him to no end)... I had one less obstacle of getting out the door in the morning and safely to Saint Mark's School. What I mean by "one less obstacle" was that I had one less older brother that I had to carefully navigated around - in order to escape unharmed.                               BUT NOT TODAY.

It was a new year (1970) and I prayed for normal! I had been praying for normal ever since the needle tipped arrows and the time I was left behind at Salton Sea. I was thirteen, still waiting for the stubborn hair to show up under my armpits and felt awkward among my classmates in the eight grade, like Ricky Arredondo, who had to shave the coveted peach fuzz on their upper lips.

I just didn't seem to fit; not in my family - and as a late bloomer not at school  - especially since I was the omega (baby) Dahlin boy and had been profiled because of the reputation of my older bothers that made the Nuns hate me and made me feel like everyone else was looking at me with raised eyebrows and sideways glances. On being Catholic





I wasn't a Blaser
I wasn't a Lennon
I wasn't one of those other normal, plain-wrapped kids who lived ordinary lives - I was a Dahlin!

My family was unique and I was special. Every time I walked out of a room I sensed that people were talking about me behind my back. I wanted to feel accepted and like I belonged and it seemed as though my older brothers (the WOLF PACK) knew that and were determined to make make sure that didn't happen.  I was on the outside looking in.

I'm not one who believes in conspiracy theories: I do believe we landed on the moon (6 months ago), that Paul McCartney was still very much alive, that tire companies didn't invent the expansion joints in concrete freeways to wear out tires faster or that the CIA killed President Kennedy - but sometimes I think my older brothers did conspired against me "To keep little brother down" at least it felt that way.

This morning was no different! It was January and the beginning of a new year...I had found clean socks and two shoes that matched. Somehow, in the cosmic order of things, I had been chosen as a select group of students from Saint Marks to attend Zero Period at Saint Monica's High School at O' dark-thirty-in-the-morning. I actually don't know why I was chosen or how someone figured that I qualified to be included in this smart group of kids who traveled each school-morning for advanced math (but I was...it made me nervous and now I had big expectations of high school level algebra to live up to). I had to at least pretend to be smart.  It felt good to feel like I finally belonged to something - even though it was a geek squad! I had to admit when I was just plain ordinary "White and Gold," a Swede with blonde hair I was kinda of cute - but that was the exception to the rule. Usually by the time I showed up to school I was black and blue - covered with all manner of bruises and Band Aids.

Terry Ballentine. Cathleen  Horamomto. David McLean. Smart kids, normal kids... and then there was me! On this particular Monday morning I don't know what Chewbacca was doing up so early - my hunch was that he never went to bed last night and was just making his way in from whatever party he was at. I don't know if our little encounter this morning was part of the "Wolf Pack Conspiracy" or if it was pay back that I had stolen Baby Jesus and managed to get away with it or that he was still upset that I tried to take him to school for show and tell.  In any case, I was a marked man (or a marked prepubescent-whatever-my-sister-called-me)... LITERALLY!

UGHhhhhhhh!

Chewbacca grabbed me from behind, picked me off my feet and squeezed all of the air out of me - cutting off the oxygen to my brain - rendering me unconscious. When I woke up, I quickly headed out the door door and hastily made my way to the waiting carpool of Saint Markian brainiacs. When I got to the car the other kids pointed and laughed (except for Cathleen - she cried! My Saint Mark's sweater was turned backwards and I had black-marker tattoos that covered my face like one of those Hells Angel "biker" guys who live down in the rough, run-down section of the Venice canals. Literally I was marked! In addition to the dripping flames - he drew little hairs on my chest and blacked out one of my teeth. I didn't have a good explanation for the mother who almost refused to let the little black and blue Swede into her car of hysterical 13-year-olds who wouldn't or couldn't stop laughing.  AT ME! Grrrrrrrrr


The only thing I knew, was that all the High School kids at Saint Monica's would see me and that eventually the rest of my classmates at Saint Mark's would think I belonged in the freak show in a circus.

The nun didn't know if she should let me into her class or not, but figured that since it was before homeroom she would take pity on me and let me in just this once with my demonic looking Tatt's - but she wasn't happy about it.

I met a kid named James Moore from Corpus Christi in the Palisades. He was the smartest kid in the class and wanted to write an algebraic word problem on how long it took Chewbacca to draw all over my body. "If Chewbacca began at the freckly mark as point A and drew a line all the way to the mosquito bite at point B and he drew another line from B to C and back to A around the ear and across the chest, which train would get to New York quicker and how long was Markie d on the floor before he woke up."   The kids laughed. It wasn't funny!


After class, when I boarded the "3 Lincoln" the bus driver squinted his eyes in serious scorn and asked me where I was headed - when I told him Venice Boulevard - he rolled his eyes, punched my ticket, reluctantly told me to get in and said "Venice, huh? It figures!"

I had bright expectations for 1970 and had hoped to get Andrea's attention.Only this was not the kind of attention I was looking for.



"Normal"
I prayed for normal but now sat quarantined in the back of the Big Blue Bus on my way back to Venice.

Maybe there really wasn't a conspiracy by the Wolf Pack...maybe they really didn't have secret meetings in the middle of the night to figure out ways of taking me down or trapping me in things like hampers or embarrassing me... if not - it just might be the conspiracy of human nature that makes us do bad things to one another.  I don't know if there any other explanation - the Ooze maybe- yes maybe it is the black sticky ooze we have all stepped into somehow and must find a way to escape.

Continued: Part 2 Back at Saint Marks

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.                                                                   Katherine Anne Porter