Markie D, The Fire Chief and the Big Mystery

(Continued from last time) Sept 1969

"Going by the Blasers...Now the McClains. Hi Mac how ya doing?  Now by the Bibles Hey Pat, Cathy... beautiful day!  Now a jaunt by Campbell's court around the corner in front of Doctor Arnold's. Hey Doc!"

My dad, "Mr. D" was in the living room jogging in place and talked to himself. He pretended to run around the block and say "hi" to all the neighbors that he passed on his short imaginary journey that took far less time to accomplish than a real run down around Harding Avenue, Grandview, Venice Boulevard, Naples and back.

I had fully intended on jumping on one of the motorcycles out in front and driving it over to the Venice Fire station, but since I had just turned 13 and dad was home - I opted to ride over on the handlebars of Jimmy's custom Stingray "Krate" with the 3 speed gear-shift-lever.  



The only problem with the cool gear-shift-lever is that if you ever slipped off the pedal "OUCH!" Boy did that black knob hurt the "vitals."  (Don't tell Jimmy, but every now and then I jammed on the brakes pretending it was purely accidental, hoping I could get him to jam his boy parts on the shifter! This morning on the way to the Fire Station it worked twice and poor Jimmy could barely walk by the time we arrived).

Anyway, I walked into the station with my list of arson suspects with poor Jimmy hobbling behind and asked to see the Chief. Knowing that he had been at a loss since Young and Manson had officially been removed as prime suspects (last post), I showed him my list of suspects and explained everyone's motives.

1) Chet Young
2) Charles Manson and gang
3) Mr. Blaser
4) A couple of my brothers and a long-haired friend
5) Susie Grant
6)  Mr. D (my dad).
7) Johnny Gillemot
8) The Catholic Nuns
9) Leeland
10) Walter Daniels
11) The Nargies
12) Tommy Blaser
13)  Mr. Malon

Though my neighbor, Don Blaser, had helped in the rescue, he had as much motive to burn the house to the ground as did most of the hard working responsible adults on our street. It was a plight and it needed to go!
The Chief's eyes widened and seemed very interested in Mr. Blaser- until I explained what I thought, unfortunately, was a pretty iron-clad alibi. We were right next door to the Blaser's and our house was an even worse plight.

I had an old couple from Nebraska pull up in front of my house one time and ask me if our dilapidated old thing was a hippie commune. With all the junk and the cars and the long-hairs hanging around. I have to admit, we did look like a commune which certainly had to drive down the prices of real estate on our street. Besides the fleas, the mosquitoes and the escaping rattlesnakes - Escaping Rattlesnakes and Iguana Del Diablo (click here) being right next door to the Blasers...this gave Mr. Blaser more motive to burn our house to the ground.




                                 click here for: Infamous Trash Towers of Venice






Judging by these pictures you might understand why the Fire chief could have felt why Don Blaser would have wanted our house to go up in flames first.

The Fire Chief had written his name down as a person of interest and then sadly scratched it off seeing the logic that if Don Blaser was going to burn anyone's house down-  it definitely would have been ours first!

1) Chet Young
2) Charles Manson and gang
3) Mr. Blaser 

My 4th suspect wasn't just one person, but was really three of the older boys who had been rejected in their cross-dressing scheme hoping to fake out the phony "frat guys" in order to gain acceptance into the place (this was what they had to do for losing a bet).

Again he was interested! I think the city of Venice was looking for any good reason to lock us up, but I explained that it probably wasn't the older long-hairs who had dressed up as girls to get into spurious  "Frat House" - because the guys had all taken their girl friends on another one of their notorious "Albino hikes" Click here for : Albinos and Vampires and finished off the night out back in the hippie-hutch-hut we called "Wall Drug."



That explained the reason why we couldn't wake them up right away when all of the explosions were going off.  They had just gotten to bed and probably had a little too much of this and a little too much of that....

                                Even more sadly, he crossed them off too!

4) Chewbacca. Puke-Breath. Primo. 
5) Next was Susie. Although, she was young, she had every reason to burn the place down. It wasn't because she necessarily wanted to see the place go up in flames, but rather because she wanted to punish her older brother for dropping her on her head on more than one occasion.  (I asked the Chief if he had seen the movie The Bad Seed and told him that I think she could have done it).  He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and wanted to hear more.



"Isn't that right Jimmy?" I said, calling on my star witness. "Jimmy, tell the Chief why you believe it could have been Susie. (He was there when Cameron dropped kicked Susie from the second floor balcony of the "Fraternity house" and saw the whole thing). "Jimmy!"




Jimmy was over on the bench, apparently consumed with rubbing life back into his numb boy parts and hadn't been paying attention to one thing were were talking about.

I could tell this investigation was going nowhere without me, and now, the Fire Chief  was beginning to realized  how much he needed my eyes and ears if we were ever going to solve this mystery.

Next time: Susie off the hook and Johnny Gillemot's alibi!  



 

Ten Trapped Rats:and a naked kid!

Speaking of studies done on the overcrowded condition of laboratory rats, the four days the 10 of us spent caged in the close quarters of our 1963 Econoline van proved the scientific hypothesis that postulated the outcome of: anger, hostility, and sever distress.

In trying to get us to our destination as quickly as possible and to avoid as much contact with the outside world, dad tried as hard as he could to minimize the potty stops along the way. Mom and the two girls had to crawl behind the back seat and pee in an old Folger's Coffee can; the boys just peed in bottles. Occasionally one of the older boys stuck their poo-poo out a window and peed indiscriminately along the Interstate. Mostly, that was to make mom and dad mad. It worked. 

Mom would start screaming, "Pull that thing in from the window, this instant! Under pain of mortal sin." And one time, one of the older boys pretending to be obedient, did exactly what she said, intentionally forgetting to turn off the faucet and made sure to spray most of us inside the van.  Everyone started fighting... Chewbacca made sure to slug me in the upper thigh as hard as he could to test out my theory that I didn't bruise.

Dad tried to yell over the din, "Silence is golden!" and as a warning gripped his hand on the back of the front passenger seat where mom was sitting.  The unspoken warning meant something like this: The next person who makes a peep will be whacked with the full force of that white-knuckled hand that had a death grip on the passenger seat.

The only  problem was, his hand only had a range of about a three foot circumference which included me and two other siblings who were sitting on the second row bench-seat. The older boys were smart, they sat in the very back (on the bench seat - just in front of where the Folger cans and bottles of warm, sloshing pee-pee were stored).

I had been strategically placed. The hand came out. The entire van got quiet. Then, it was back to the Lab-Rat experiments where Dooh-Dooh Pants was commissioned to "cut the cheese" to make me gag or barf so that dad would whack me. If Dooh-Dooh Pants failed to spontaneously produce one of his patented fat-greasy-farts, then it was "Plan B."  He would pull off one of his shoes. The second he did that - everyone knew.  He had gangrene or something like that - which made his feet smell like rotting flesh.  My parents just claimed it was athlete's feet and was "nothing to worry about!"  Gustav had told us secretly that it was leprosy and we were all waiting for his toes to fall off.  ANYWAY,  I smelled it and gagged, but didn't see what was coming next. With incredible precision, he wrapped his foot around from behind and stuck that fungal-crusted big toe...right in my mouth. 

Dad didn't see him do his heinous act of terrorism and only heard me gag and scream. Well... that was all it took. WHAM...went his hand to the back of my head!  The way everyone looked at it was - that it was my fault, I had been warned!  The way I looked at it - that thumping on head was a gift to everyone else in the van, because it short-circuited my superpowers momentarily and stopped me from vomiting all over everybody in our tightly packed "sardine can" on wheels.

This is the way it was all the way across the "Fruited Plain."   

On our diet of stale Triscuits and old cheese, we managed to survive on about a hundered calories a day for about the past four days and by the time we rolled into the inner-city Catholic school in Detroit where my Aunt Mary was presently serving, we were dehydrated, tired, malnourished, dirty, angry, smelled like pee/gangrene...and ready to fight junkyard dogs!  

While the nuns in the "nunnery" (that's Catholic talk for a convent)... scrambled to feed the pillaging migrant infestation from Venice California we poured out of the van and kissed the ground like drunken sailors that had been out to sea for far too long.

This was where the fantastic discovery was made. Gustav found red ants.  We don't have red ants in Venice and this was a new phenomenon for us to investigate. Gustav believed these biting fire ants had the potential for a practical joke of ginormous proportions. He just had to figure out how to bag about 300 of them and who his next victim would be.  Gustav and Chewbacca had given Puke-Breath so many "wedgies" (where they had pulled Puke-Breath's underwear up his crack so many times) that Puke-Breath had begun to outsmart them by NOT WEARING UNDERWEAR.  

 "So There!" Puke Breath said the last time they tried to give him a wedgie! "In your face! I'm not wearing any underwear!"  (I feel I need to say this, "that was probably not the best thing he could have said").

Since Puke-Breath seemed to have his hands in his pockets all time...checking in every five seconds with his boy parts and his latest stage of puberty....the two older boys figured they'd really give him something to check in on.

And boy did they ever!      ONLY...

...ONLY the entire convent of Nuns got involved in his rescue. 

“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”  Mark Twain