"Egads - Just look at 'em!"
Terrified by James Moore’s proposal, my brain nearly shut down from sensory overload. The words of Chicken Little, “The Sky is falling. The Sky is falling,” loudly rattled off the walls of my semi-porous gray cells.
Last time I left off was in the Fall of 1972 in the illustrious misadventures of Markie D and his primal urge for belonging and acceptance with the mysterious vanishing at Salton Sea.
At Saint Monica’s I had a new tribe; water polo and swim team friends—people I felt who accepted me—maybe, even more importantly—liked me.
They say, “blood is thicker than water” but I’m not sure. Water, like fire, purifies and my experience in the pool was like a right of passage as if baptism into a tribe of my own.
I heard the unspoken things that rattled around in my brain, yet at the same time, I was a terrible listener. The Curse. I could never follow a conversation to the end, never fully track and was usually sent off in a world of my own before the other person finished.
I paid attention to the world in a different way. Fully Present, yet not there at all as I attempted to focus on everything at the same time.
I could never make it to the end of a song and only knew four words to a song I heard one million times—maybe six words, "I want to hold your hand."
Debi Gas knew the words of every song – I envied regular people who could do that – so I whistled (I was a slave to the beat, who needed words).
James Moore was just like me. Short. Late bloomer. Pain. He has a lot of unspoken words behind his eyes and needed acceptance just like me. We were the same, only different.
The words that terrified me were his assertive self-invitation to spend the night at the Dahlin House.
Among the thousands of impulses raging in my brain stem were: fear, dread and trembling. None of the emotions had anything to do with joy. Sleepovers were for children and grammar school friends, but for high-schoolers this was weird. Right? Did he have some sinister ulterior motive?
WHY?
What did he want – REALLY?
I had a lot to lose.
Would he continue to like me if he visited my haunted house and stepped in the dark ooze or on a carburetor on the black entry steps or slip on an oil slick from one of Erick’s car that he often drove and parked right in the way of the front porch stairs?
“The sky is falling—the mess!”
The boats under the palm tree.
and boat motors running in trashcans
and the car parts.
and the carport shoved full of junk and basement stacked to the brim...
and the mountain of clothes and piles of laundry and pieces of motorcycles, and leaning towers of newspapers.
The bamboo towers in the backyard and Marijuana plants and the Veloci-Rooster, the mosquito-laden pond and the alligator, the Wall Drug hippie-hooch-hut and the esters of skunk-weed carried into our unkempt, leaning, turn-of-the-century home by the ocean breeze.
I felt like it left me exposed and vulnerable like my identity was wrapped up in it.
Maybe this was a field trip. They had their fair share of hippies in Topanga but I image that he had never run into one in person. That's what people did; they came to Venice to see the hippies and most of them lived in my house.
We were both growing out hair longer as junior hippies but would he confuse my long-haired, shirtless, jean-wearing-half-naked-brothers with troglodytes.
James could see that I stopped listening to him a long time ago and was patiently waiting for a response.
I visualized the task in front of me. James asked if it could be this weekend.
Panic.
It would take me two weeks of solid work to clean up the front porch. It would be like the equivalent of an arduous archaeologically dig to unbury the years of strata stacked on the grand staircase, not to mention the eons of sediment laid down by the evolutionary forces of erosion that cluttered the second floor.
Would he see me differently?
Would he be affected by the Ooze and would that hideous dark substance of my upside-down world of Stranger Things follow him back to Topanga?
Would he cast me into a different category of people – who lived with cars on blocks on the front lawn and who had to move an entire armada of trash barges from one side of the street to the other each Wednesday and Thursday for Street cleaning – a law passed because of us. Would he see us as backwoods rednecks or like the Beverly Hillbillies and those who seem to be blissfully unaware of our unsightly blight?
My brothers didn’t seem to care—hippies didn’t know their poop stank.
Then there was the safety issue—would his life be in danger?
Would he live through it? Would he be hazed by my older brothers—roped and tied, put into a pit or electrocuted? What might they do to him? I was used to it and thrived on it—physical pain tolerance was my adrenaline superpowers.
He stood and waited and watched the machinations of my brain.
How would my older sister take it—if he went back to school and reported what he saw? My older sister recently changed her name (in the current wave of name-spelling-rage) and had begun to tell her Santa Monica friends that she was from Marina Del Rey.
Mind racing – it was jammed with the million bits of information it was trying to process. Stuttering, hemming, and hawing I made some lame excuses trying to put off my friend's visit with things like, “our parakeet is suffering from diarrhea” and “the Asian bird flu” I said and then offered a real one that I thought might scare him away, "another rattlesnake escaped."
We didn’t have parakeets – only a mutant, attack Veloci-Rooster in the backyard, a four-letter-word spewing, foul-mouthed Minah bird, and Johnny, the flying-parasite-host of a disgusting pigeon, that lived on the refrigerator. GROSS!
Undistracted, he stared.
Meanwhile, I wondered if I could I move mountains...
...or if I could part the Red Sea without Moses’ magical staff...
How many trips to the Sepulveda dump would it require moving this amount accumulated debris?
Adrenaline pumping (my drug of choice) – coursing through my veins, I knew it would be a herculean task. Could I make a dent if working night and day—every night and every day straight for 52 years (probably not). This was my fix—I was feeling supercharged.
Markie D? Yes, me! I could pull off the impossible and was determined to shovel everything into the third floors junk rooms, everything else could be crammed in some minuscule vacant space in the carport or cart the crap off to the far corner of the backyard next to the marijuana plants.
Like The Little That Could, I said, “I think I can, I know I can – I know I can.”
“What?” he said.
“Oh,” I said as if just returning to planet earth or coming up from underneath the surface of the water. “um…two weeks…um sure. That would be great.” I lied.
This would set the stage for the context of the life-changing episode three weeks later in January. The near-fatal event at the start of the new swim season that would impact my life—that will land me a fleeting $286.00—the most regrettable $286.00
A $286.00 shame story that makes me vomit to this day and hate myself for not fighting.
What was wrong with me—I fought with older brothers and the Little-Angry-Man crew and could hold my own with bullies?
I would live with self-loathing and second-guessing and the ongoing late-night questioning why I didn’t take a full swing and punch the short, pasty-white adult in the face.
I thought I was, “meaner than a junkyard dog” (five words of Jim Croce’s song). I thought I was bulletproof—maybe not so much.
In the meantime, I would have to sneak over the Blaser’s house, the regular people next door, and borrow a snow shovel or some other tools. Mr. Blaser painted everything in their garage with a bright orange B, to keep us Dahlins from inadvertently acquiring their stuff that was said to “disappear into the black hole at our house."
After the heist, I grit my teeth – picked up the shovel and began clearing a path to the front door. “Whistle while you work Markie D” dig in and maybe you can keep the “Sky from Falling” and protect the little Topanga, brainiac kid from the ooze.
