The Nuns Claimed They Had an Alibi

The Great Disaster of 1969...continued from last post!

The last time I didn't have the Nuns or the Daniels on the suspect list for the tragic fire on Harding Ave. I would venture a guess that living directly behind the "Frat-House," would automatically put both of them my long list of possible suspects. 

1) My tribe...the Wolf Pack
2) Mr. Blaser
3) Mr. D (that's my dad)
4) Mr. Lennon
5) Frank Nargie
6) Rita Nargie
7) Sea-Shell
8) Leeland
9) Weenie Tripp
10) Johnny Gillemot
11 Tommy Blaser
12) Four boys dressed as girls
13) The Nuns at Saint Marks who lived just behind the house.
14) Walter Daniels 
15) Crazy, Anti-War, Peace-loving members from a real Fraternity

 and NUMBER 16 was "The Conspiracy Theory" - not a man on the grassy knoll, but...
 16) The Owner of the property - himself.

At first when I heard the sound of explosions and saw the black smoke of car tires that had caught on Fire, I thought the Nunnery was burning (the Nunnery is the Saint Marks Convent where the Sisters lived - sort of like a Monastery). I spent the night next door at the Blaser's house in Tommy's "way groovy" two-story fort with the sleeping-loft and asphalt shingle roof.  Screaming like a firetruck - I hopped over the fence into my backyard - avoided the Veloci-Rooster and began ringing the old rusted fire bell in order to awaken the neighborhood (the same fire alarm, procured by spurious means, which had been screwed to the back porch of our home that my mom used to call the Wolf  Pack in for feeding time). 

It was in the middle of the night and I guess it was good thing I did clang that bell, because the burning house was full of motley college "want-a-be's" who were trapped inside.

Someone threw a fire bomb through the large front window of the ancient house and it went up like a dry box of matches. The fire quickly spread up the grand staircase in the entry, cutting off the only means of escape for those caught on the second story.

A week later, as the house laid waste in a pile of burnt rubble and the neighborhood still smelled of smoke...I took my detective notepad and paid the Nuns a visit! To tell you the truth, I really hoped it was one of the Catholic Sisters, because they were mean to me...and I had a secret desire that at least one of them would end up in prison.

By the time I got to the 3th grade, and the 4th grade, and the 5th grade, and the 7th grade, they already had 7 Dahlins come through their classrooms giving the nuns so much grief that they felt it was time for payback... AGAINST ME!

They especially felt justified because of my special condition, lack of focus, and what they called "hyper-activity." I had always thought it was a superpower until I heard them talking about it behind my back. That might help explain the whole "Cloak-Room thing" I did behind Sister Edith's back (See blog post 9/2/13)

I guess I really shouldn't have blamed them, and later went to confession telling Father Sheldon of my secret sin. Only after 32 "Our Father's," 63 "Hail Mary's" and a couple dozen "Confiteors" the guilt of my sin was finally absolved. I wanted a letter from the Pope, but that never came. 

But still, if it had been Sister Godzilla who lit the fire - I might have turned her in.

The Nuns probably had the greatest motive of anyone on the list: Loud partying, carousing, cursing, drinking, drugs, girls and boys living together in sin...every single night - practically right there on their backdoor steps.

A quick slip out the backdoor - and bam - one of the penguin clad nuns under the darkness of night could start the fire and slip back in practically unnoticed.

Upon investigative inquiry by interrogating the nuns... one by one they corroborated each others testimony and had an iron clad alibi. Turns out, that none of the Catholic Sisters had any knowledge of how to make an incendiary device of this kind and other than communion wine - had no access to the specific type of alcohol for the creation of a Molotov Cocktail. Sister Godzilla did tell me in private that if she knew how to make one, the "Fraternity house" would have been gone long ago (I'm sure that will take some "Our Father's and Hail Mary's"). 

 Shucks, they were my best suspects and were now off the list.

Although they lived right behind the "Frat-House," Walter and his family dropped off the list - because he liked to party there on occasion and would have done anything to, "keep it all copacetic...man"

When I told told Four-Eyes about the things the nuns said which I wrote down on my little pad...he said he thought it might make some good song lyrics. I thought he was crazy. He typed them up and sent them to a Mr. John Fogerty of some hippie group called Creedence Clearwater Revival. I told him he was stupid and those words would never make it into a song - Not Ever!

The Nuns talked about how every time they looked out their backdoor they saw strange, bizarre and weird stuff that looked like giants doing cartwheels late at night - they saw things that looked like statues wearing High Heels (I think that may have been my brothers dressed up like girls trying to get in) and of course happy creatures dancing on the lawn (that part was true).

This is what Four Eyes scripted...   
"Doo, doo, doo, Looking out my back door.
There's a giant doing cartwheels,
A statue wearing high heels.
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn... " and some other nonsensical stuff like that.

The doo-doo part was compliments of Johnny Gillemonster...

I will have to tell you that story of intrigue and dog-poop that would eventually clear his name from the list below.
 

1) My tribe...the Wolf Pack

2) Mr. Blaser

3) Mr. D (that's my dad)

4) Mr. Lennon

5) Frank Nargie

6) Rita Nargie

7) Sea-Shell

8) Leeland

9) Weenie Tripp

10) Johnny Gillemot

11 Tommy Blaser

12) Four boys dressed as girls

13) The Nuns at Saint Marks who lived just behind the house.

14) Walter Daniels 

15) Crazy, Anti-War, Peace-loving members from an opposing Fraternity

16) The Owner of the property.

In the mean time- everyone's name needs to be cleared, since I was running the investigation and I guess I'll have to tell you about the details of the gruesome 4-alarm fire...the daring rescue and how a a pair of underwear i.e. whitie-tighties help clear one suspect from the list.

Until next time...  sleep safe... say your prayers and.... vet att du är älskad

                                                                                     
Android users Lookin' out my backdoor 

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