Alien Abduction and the FUN in dysFUNction

(1972 continued from the last Post in Video Format)

With our family, every event whether a birthday party or family vacation was anything but ordinary. 

It was usually crazy and borderline insane. 

Letting the monkeys out of the zoo, releasing fire ants in a convent, getting caught skinny dipping by the President of the United States, electrocuting a nun or two, alligator wrestling, rattlesnake wrangling, marijuana growing, skunk-sack terrorism, swat team evading, hot rod racing, draft card burning or death-evading—we put the fun in dysfunction.

This trip was no exception. I left off last time with the mysterious disappearance of 6 older brothers and 11 other hippies from Venice and Santa Monica.

Like Gilligan aboard the S.S. Minnow, the older boys left for a “three-hour tour.”  They set out halfway across the Salton Sea, away from the view of my parents, on a reefer-madness excursion and never came back!  

I doubt their disappearance was related to pirates. Everyone has heard of The Pirates of the Caribbean but not Pirates of Salton Sea, so I ruled out capture by pirates. 

The note the Sherriff left (stuck on the side of our VW van) said they had drowned in the storm, but our side had been perfectly calm so we weren’t buying that explanation—there must have been something more.

Mom, dad, Mary, Tony Druliner and the few of us who were left behind, sat quietly around the campfire in solemn contemplation until the red glow of the embers faded as dark as the night sky.

I still think it was an alien abduction. Salton Sea would be the perfect place. Everyone knows there is life on other planets. Just about every day in the LA Times and the National Enquirer there are hazy pictures of UFOs and preposterous abduction stories told by some old geezer about how his wife got sucked out of the pickup truck on a lone country highway late at night. 

I could only image the field day aliens would have with a bunch of hippies from Venice. The extra-terrestrials would most likely prod, poke, physically probe, psychologically peruse and project them back to planet earth like the story of the farmer’s wife who now sits docile in a chair and does little more than drool.

We woke up to the warm, yellow glow of the sun’s rays that spilled over the mountains to the east and with the usual morning breeze.

With this mysterious thinning of the herd, I got to eat my half-piece of bacon and grease-soaked-toast (seasoned with crunchy particles of wind-swept sand).

No one complained (a rule in our house).

Dad said that the sand was good for us, like rabbits that needed to chew wood to sharpen their teeth. He said, the finest restaurants intentionally aged beef, that old cheese was gourmet, that burnt toast was good for the digestive track and that mealworms in our oatmeal added protein and that we should be thankful. 

Back in the fifth grade, Sister Godzilla was teaching math. After going over fractions, she pointed her bony finger at me and told me to stand up.

“Mark,” she said, “your parents have ten kids. Suppose your mother makes a pie and cuts it into equal slices so that each of you gets a piece…what percentage or fraction of the pie do you get?”

I stared into outer space and scratched my head.

“Well,” she screamed, “how much?”

Carefully I said, “none.”

Kids laughed

“None?” she bellowed.

I shrugged and said, “My mother doesn’t make pies, and if she did, by the time it got down to me, there wouldn’t be any left.”

With an irritating sound, she scratched, 1/10^th on the blackboard and pointed her crooked finger to the classroom door. “Go to MOTHER SUPERIOR’S OFFICE right now young man.” 

I digress.

All of that to say, I was happy for my half-piece of bacon and crunchy toast that was sharpening my teeth (all the better to eat carrots with—I guess).

We drove a short distance to the Salton Sea Marina and called the Sherriff’s office from a pay phone.

My dad dialed the number for Bob’s Playa—Ria Resort.

“Yep, we gots all them hippies here,” said the voice on the other end.

A resort, I thought.

“How many survived?” dad said.

“Dun-know…fifteen to twenty…maybe.” I could hear the voice say.

Initially, dad was relieved. Then began writing directions and notes. "What?" he half-yelled. "Where? 

“The boat’s broken. We've got to go pick them up?” He said, covering the mouthpiece of the receiver, looking at me. 

Dad was in shock. We had to drive all the way around to the east side of Salton Sea somewhere near Bombay Beach.

Mom was happy (I think) and dad began grumbling under his breath and doing calculations in his head without the use of his slide ruler and began adding things up out loud.

Bacon was eighty-three cents a pound—cut in half that added up to 3.4 cents a mouth.

We bought bread from the day-old bread store on Washington Blvd—five loaves for a dollar, which was just over a penny a slice. He was proud of how he could feed us all breakfast for about a nickel a person.

Gas had been holding steady at about thirty-six cents a gallon and it would cost us about $3.60 to drive all the way around to the east side of Salton Sea towing the trailer to pick up the “hairy-mole-rats” he called them.

“Let’s see:

     The campsite                    free

     Lettuce                             free   (Compliments of Frank Nargie)     

     Sunscreen                         free   (dirt we smeared on for protection)

     Cheese                              free   (Compliments of Frank Nargie)

     Corbina                             free   (Today's fishing)

     Toilet paper                      free   (Stolen from Indio)

     Bacon                             $1.66  2 lbs

     Bread                              $1.00 5 loaves

     Three tanks of gas        $16.20

     Gas and oil for the boat $2.56

     Birthday Party               $3.00

     Phone call                       a nickel

        Sub Total                  $24.52

  Unforeseen expenses  +   $3.60

                 Total                $28.12

 

Hmmm. This somewhere around a twelve percent increase I figured, “Take that Sister Godzilla!”

 

Dad looked over at me like I was crazy. “Silence is golden.” He was in no mood. The waste of $3.60 was killing him especially since we missed the turnoff down the dirt road to Bob’s resort.

Backtracking, we discovered that Bob's Playa-Ria Resort used to be the Ski Inn and it never occurred to them to change the sign. 

Hmmm. Resort?

The word Resort was an oft misnomer for trailer parks at Salton Sea. If a campground had an outhouse and water hook-ups for trailers it was the Life of Luxury.

Since we flopped out in the middle of nowhere where we camped it was free but had no amenities like an outhouse. We had to hike to a tumbleweed and take a poop in the sand or find an old tire or chair that might suffice.

Driving through Indio dad always stopped and stole a phonebook out of phone booth.

Mom was charged with allotting two-pages-per-person every time we needed to head to a tumbleweed to take care of business.  

The lucky people got the Yellow Pages, which served as a twofer: it provided reading material while squatting and ultimately used for—toilet paper.

This morning I got blessed with a sheet from the “N” classified section about surviving a Nuclear attack.

I checked for rattlesnakes before bearing my naken backside to nature. Reading my toilet paper I contemplated the mysteries of eternity, Nuclear attacks and bomb shelters, which took my thoughts to the Lennons who lived across the street and the Beauty Queen (Miss Santa Monica) who lived directly behind us. 

I wondered if the famous Lennon Sisters or Cheryl Arnold ever had a chance to camp like us—shucks, the things they missed out on I thought and wiped with my Yellow Page.

Back to the story

We loaded the boat on the trailer and packed up the Wolf Pack. Nineteen of us couldn’t fit in the station wagon so Dad made some of the wet hairy hoard— hide in the boat for the ride back to camp on the west side of the immense inland sea.

The citizens of Bob’s resort had never seen anything like this before. They lined the dirt road and waved good-bye. With the invasion of the Venice hippies on the night of the awful storm, the trailer park residents pooled their resources and made a spaghetti feast. Some were happy and some were sad to see the Wolf Pack leave.

As we left, Bubbles cried. She was in love with Karl.

Comma Jumpers.

Like every story, the boys began talking over each other and jumping in on comas, unwilling to wait their turn.

  

The wind

The waves

John crawling under the bow and crying

Kurt bailing

Water to the gunnels

Erick, screaming, "We're all going to die"

They feared imminent death like the 12 disciples on the Sea of Galilee.

 

Bubbles was a 26-year-old girl in a polka-dot bikini (twice the size of Pinky Parlette) and had two missing teeth. Charlie said, “She was so big, she could kick-start a 747.” 

Meanwhile, Tony fell in love with a girl named Sharon. She gave him some story that she was Sharon Morris, heiress to the Philip Morris tobacco company.

I think he believed it, but come on? Hmmmm. At a trailer park, at Salton Sea?

Oh, that’s right it was a RESORT. 

I watched to see if they were drooling—signs of alien abduction.

Looking deep into the portholes of their soul, I tried to see if they were still human.

The jury was still out.

When we arrived at our campsite on the other side, those in the boat began telling the story, rehearsing the narrative as if a badge of honor in surviving another glorious Dahlin-near-tragedy!

Circling around the outside the raucous story-telling circle I carefully examined for puncture wounds on the back of the neck, like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Had they been abducted?

 

Should I be on guard for an Alien uprising?

With all that long hair, it would be nearly impossible to check for signs of Alien spinal implants.

Dad charged each of the aliens  oops Dahlins, Blasers, Lennons, Grants, Masons, Irvines and the other hippies from Hollister Avenue a nickel for the trouble and the added expense they caused.  

"Mexican tomato plants" He mumbled sarcastically under his breath!

As for the lettuce and cheese, the mailman across the street began raiding the dumpster at the Safeway store on Grand Avenue.  

He brought home boxes of lettuce, vegetables and old cheese to share with the neighborhood. 

The aliens didn’t like it much, but dad insisted, "It’s good for you. It'll put hair on your chest." 

Dad extracted his $3.60 from the refugees and we finally made it back home to Venice with, yet, another life and death adventure-story to tell.  

It's practically a shame what normal people miss out on! 

Bob Dylan sings the Markie D song 

"One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity...." Albert Einstein 

Anyone care for a carrot?

Booby-Trapped between Hormones and Hope.

I was in Hensheys on the fifth floor. Hensheys in Santa Monica was upscale for those of us from Venice. Excited to be buying new clothes I was, “bouncing off the walls” according to my mom and all the other regular people in the store who were freaking out about the earthquake.

I wasn’t really there at all. I was back at Saint Monica’s thinking about the time I was cornered.

Darting from clothes-rack to clothes-rack, my  mind traveling back as if I was right there when Marilyn and Theresa cut me off and trapped me in the hallway. I felt like the wounded gazelle on one of those nature shows on TV.

“Well?” Marilyn said with hands firmly planted on her hips, in the way Sister Godzilla and the nuns did at Saint Marks every time I was in trouble.

I looked at Marilyn then to Theresa, then back to Marilyn, and did this a couple times before opening my mouth.

“Well…well…well what?” I asked with great trepidation. Not knowing what I was in trouble for, feeling like the girls were about to pounce on me and rip the flesh from by body.

This could be a problem. Not because Marilyn was about 9 feet taller than me or that she outweighed me by a good 50 pounds, but because we had two rules in our house.

Rule 1: Dad said that us boys were never…NEVER ever…EVER to hit one of our sisters i.e. girls.

Rule 2: I can’t remember what the second one was.

Anyway, I wasn’t really afraid that they could beat me up, after all I had taken on members of the Wolf Pack more than twice my size before. I was more afraid that if war broke out between us I would have to let them beat me up and was also afraid for them if my crazy-psychotic adrenaline stuff kicked in ( I didn't want to go to prison). It was a Game of Thrones. Who was in charge here? Definitely not me.

Trapped.

With pupils pinpointed they waited for my answer and held their ground, blocking any chance I had of escape.

I had no idea what they were talking about. I felt like I was in History or Latin class—nothing my teachers said made any sense to me.

“What’s wrong with you?” one of them said demanding an answer.

You know that proverbial “Deer in the headlights of an oncoming car” look. That was me. The same look I give my teachers whenever they asked me a question in class.

      Today would probably not be a good day.

I opened my mouth. No words. What do I tell them?

There were a lot of things wrong with me—duh!

Where do I start?  Do I tell them that I was tested to see if I was retarded? At least, that’s what my oldest brother said. He said that was the reason Aunt Mary had taken me up to Loyola University. Usually I didn’t believe him, but felt it had to be true because all of my other brothers agreed with him, when they laughed about it at the kitchen table.

“I’m retarded.”  I thought. No, that wasn’t the answer they were looking for.
“I’m hyper.” All the nuns at Saint Marks said so.

I ran down the list of all my faults, “I’m a robot,” “numb” “adrenaline junkie” “PTSD” “memory issues.”

I don’t think any of those explanations is what they were looking for. AND I certainly wasn’t about to share my deepest-darkest-secrets with anyone—EVER!  Fear. Shame.

Sighing, I shrugged, hoping they would give me a clue for this ambush.

“What’s wrong with you,” Theresa led off with again followed with, “why didn’t you do anything?”

While processing the words, “Do anything” Marilyn jumped in. “Yeah. Why didn’t you go after her?”

Stunned and having no idea what these crazy girls were talking about, I stared as the oncoming car came speeding toward me. This was not like Marilyn and Theresa, they were my friends—I didn't understand.

(Marilyn pictured to the right)

“Andrea!” blurted Theresa like an erupting volcano that couldn’t hold back the pressure anymore.

My brain was processing—slow—too slow. “Andrea?”

“Why didn’t go after her?” Marilyn said looking down at me.

Blank stare…processing…processing…This was like Brother Coleman asking me to translate some Latin. Omnes viae Romam ducunt—I didn't have a clue, it was like a foreign language to me.

The building shook. People panicked and screamed. I didn’t know. I wasn’t there. I was still back in that corner being interrogated by the hungry cheetahs.

“Well?” Theresa said trying that line of questioning again.

Three words squeezed out as I stared up past the boobs, which were at eye level and distracting (the advantage and disadvantages of being short), “Go after her?”

“Yes,” Marilyn said frustrated.

Like magma flowing down the side of the agitated volcano, “That whole thing in the school yard,” Theresa said, “was for you.”

“The whole thing?” I carefully asked more confused than ever. "Me?"

“When Andrea hugged that boy, over by gym...that was for you.”

“That was her cousin, stupid. She was trying to make you jealous.”

One thousand thoughts flooded my brain cells. HOPE! I felt like not all was lost because “someone liked me?”  Me?

The whole leg-lift and head-tilt thing Andrea did. The hug of 1971 was intended to make me jealous. I was jealous and hurt but now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to get her phone number or how to approach a girl or what the next step is. “Ugh…I just wished these two girls would get their boobs out of my face and tell me what to do next”

Help me, I pleaded. I guess spoken words on my part would have been better. I am a looser, but a happy one because someone liked me.

Coming back to planet earth, I looked to see all the people in Hensheys clutching the floor and crammed in doorways. It was a big aftershock, but I had no idea that the old building had been violently swaying back and forth.

I calmly walked over to the cashiers table where a pile of red clothes were stacked up and asked what all the commotion was about.

Incredulously, three ladies stared at me as my Mother explained that we had just experienced another earthquake.

“What Earthquake?” I asked.

My mom laughed knowing that I had been totally oblivious. She knew that  it was because I had been moving more than the building and that I had probably disappeared into one of my out-of-body day-dreaming experiences. The others ladies joined in and soon everyone on the Fifth Floor was pointing at me and laughing. Fun on the Fifth Floor. It didn't matter—but it did.

On the way home, from the back seat of the car, I told my mom and Mrs. Exstromer that I really didn’t feel like the whole Europe thing was real yet—that’s why I was so calm.

“Calm!” my mother chortled from the driver’s seat, breaking out in laughter.

“Calm!” Mrs. Exstromer barely managed to get out after spraying her Tab cola all over the inside of the windshield when the two of them broke into a hysteria of laughter.

The two of them laughed so hard that mom couldn’t see because of the Tab cola and the tears in her eyes and had to pull the car over.

Gasping for breath like both of them could die of laughter, they volleyed the “calm” word back and forth between them.
(Pictured L-R Mom, Herb Williamson, Mrs. Blaser, and Mrs. Extromer. Mrs. Extromer was the Secretary for Saint Marks grammar school in Venice).

I sat in the back of a car in the parking lot of Kenny’s shoes watching the two ladies who I felt might have need medical attention at any moment.

Embarrassing…hello! This was the first time I had ever seen adults wet their pants.

Happens to the best of us, I guess. Oh well, at least with my new red Hang Ten shorts, and my red Hang Ten T-shirt, and my red Hang Ten socks I’ll be the best dressed kid in Germany. This had to be better than the stupid reverse turtleneck with the zipper on my first day of High School.

On the following Friday, my big, squishy, beautiful Irene, saw me dressed in my red Hang Ten "outfit" and said that it was probably better that I was going to wear this in Europe rather than in Watts, where she was from (I didn't know what she meant, but we both laughed).



Hormones were kicking in...being booby-trapped wasn't so bad... :)

Maybe not "Straight out of Venice."
Via Europam Amantissima ac spei plenus

Pictures Credit : Hensheys of Santa Monica posted on Facebook by Michael Hayashi; May 16, 2016 “You know you're from Santa Monica if”

Hormones. Hodads. Harding: Nothing Makes Sense

The more I try to make sense of the world, it seems that the more nothing makes sense.

I am short and skinny and look like I’m a seventh-grader.

Impatiently I pray at night for more reluctant hair to show up under my arm pits—infuriated at the practical joke God was playing on me. Here I am, FOURTEEN in high school among towering mature oaks—gorillas with hair all over their bodies. 

I’m in love withAndrea, walk among the apes and have only two freaking hairs under my right arm pit. The small pond of choice at Saint Mark’s has grown into a very large sea at Saint Monica High School. 

I am frightened that Andrea now had the option of picking from the slick-surfers donning mustaches from the Palisades. I am merely minnow in the vast ocean.

It was spring – something was happening in my body that I couldn’t explain other than the fact that I was officially twitterpated.  It is time to take matters into my own hands. I wrote her a love letter (Though Paul Anka and Annette Funicello may see it as nothing more than puppy love – It is real to ME!). Never-the-less, this is a secret to keep from the Wolf-Pack. Couldn’t let my family find out about my secret crush–they would most certainly use this information against me somehow.

I tucked the note into my Pee-chee folder and was determined to give it to her at school.

Lunch.  

At lunch!  

That was my plan. 

I begged AlexDelgadillo for food.  As with our new tradition, he opened the bun on the hamburger his mother made him and handed me the pickles. 

“STOP!” James Moore charlie-horsed me in the thigh, to stop the nervous jitters of my leg that had been driving him crazy. 

“Hyper” I said, as an excuse—never knowing when it was happening.  Everyone had been calling me hyper for so long that I figured I might as well use it as my alibi. 

This. Was. It.

This was the moment of truth. 

I saw her—she looked my way. My heart stopped or my breathing or something.  Shock.  Excitement. Nervous. She still had a thing for me. YES! I still had a chance.

I stood. She walked in my direction. I fumbled pulling the folded paper out of my pee-chee folder. I crushed it in my fist. I breathed—I tried to.  Nervously, collecting my thoughts I took a step towards her and looked down for one second at the hand that held my undying declaration of love for her way back since sixth grade. I looked up as she walked right past me and right up to a guy standing in the ally way between the gym and the music room.

She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past me. I glared. She smiled and giggled and even tilted her head. TILTED HER HEAD. Did you hear what I just said? You know the tilt girls do when they are “in-like.” She tilted her head to a stupid surfer kid from Santa Monica. 

UGHhhhhh...someone help me please! 

I was ruined. Where were you in the spring of 1971? If you were anywhere on the West-coast, the odds are, you probably heard the sound of my heart breaking?  

Minnow yes—plankton maybe –in a large ocean filled with sharks, hairy apes and giant oaks. I placed one of Alex’s pickles in the love-letter and ate it. The swim-team guys thought I was retarded.  Nothing made sense—not love—not hormones or puberty—NOT girls.

Words I thought I’d never say: “Today I need you Wolf Pack.” I was numb. “I needed to be put in a pit or hung out of a window. I needed to be electrocuted or tied up in a straight jacket and thrown over a cliff. I needed to get into a fight with someone.  I needed Richard to steal my chocolate. I needed Erick and the band of Angry-Little-Men to ambush me.” 

I am a Zombie in need. I was drifting. I needed James Moore to try to hit me in the leg one more time.

Despondent, I skipped swim practice and hitchhiked—home, half-hoping to be kidnapped, and got only as far as POP.

Surf-rats turned skater-rats were hanging out at the ruins. 

Dude it was on. 

Here I was in my catholic uniform completely out of my element right where I needed to be. Two rough looking kids screamed profanity at me and walked up as if I had invaded sacred territory—in surf talk—a “hodad.” This was my day to die. This was my chance to be pummeled, to feel pain, to feel alive.

“Dahlin?” one of them asked.  

I came straight out of the Dahlin cookie-cutter mold and looked just like my brother Karl who, along with Bruce Grant and Jeff Ho, surfed there all the time. I nodded. 

"Cool." Knowing I was a Dahlin from Venice this kid, Tony, offered me a toke of a joint they were smoking.   

                      I had a decision to make. 

To toke or not to toke that is the question?

Oh BTW two years later...  

On March 15, 1972, DJ Robert W. Morgan played the Donny Osmond version of Puppy Love for 90 minutes straight on KHJ in Los Angeles. The LAPD mistakenly raided the station studios after receiving numerous calls from listeners. Confused, the officers left without making any arrests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_Love_(Paul_Anka_song)     (It was right for people to call the cops it was torture)!

Pee chee folder Picture credit https://www.flickr.com/groups/peecheefolderart/pool/

POP picture 1 credit: Facebook post the rise and fall of Pacific Ocean Park 

POP picture 2  credit: Facebook post ?