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?

Murder On The Humboldt Express

Spring 1970: By the time school began the older boys had been cured of leprosy. The red rash, the puss, the swelling, the boils and the pain had all subsided and they returned to the normal course of Hippie Life on Harding Avenue. In the meantime, my first day at Saint Monica's proved to be the 4th most embarrassing day of my my life (more about that later).

Karl had bought a new boat... well, new to us (pictured below).

It didn't have a motor yet, but it was fiberglass over wood -  though it was something from the early 1960's we felt like we were uptown Santa Monica or Beverly Hills... Beverly Hill Billies that is.  It needed a new interior - on second thought it needed a new everything.

But it was better than the old leaky-wood boat (which I loathed for good reasons and called a "controlled sinking"... pictured to the left). The old boat was under the palm tree in the front yard... next to the 16 foot sailboat and the 12 foot racing sailboat.


We had to make room for Karl's newest thing and had to shuffle around Mario's Borg-Warner, Karl's Morris-Minor and Erick's green MG (slightly pictured above) to make room for the new addition




We moved the scout bus to the driveway since we cleared space by sending the 16 foot travel-trailer up north to a remote place in the thick forest of Humboldt county with Kurt and Mario.

The "Salton Sea Flyer" had now become the "Humboldt Express."

Kurt and his good 'O Saint Monica's water polo chum, Mario, decided that dorm life had been too tame and cost too much money and had been too lame for the burgeoning hippies in their second year at Humboldt.

They thought the humble trailer was not just their ticket for living off campus, but also allowed them to live for FREE!

Besides... with all of the horticulture success in our backyard in Venice... a couple of free spirited entrepreneurs could grow all kinds of stuff in that heavily forested tundra...stuff that might have been frown on by Humboldt State University... Never-the-less this living arrangement could provide a little extra income for a pair of starving students.







The running joke in Venice was, "Would they be able to survive in such close quarters - since they both had deadly gas."  12 feet by six feet by six feet is only 432 cubit square feet of oxygen - easily burned up in a single explosion of flatulence.

Dad laughed and told them not to fart in the presence of lit pilot light...

We made fun of the two of them thinking that one of them just might not make it back alive... Little did we realize how ominous our thinking was that set the stage for murder.


YOU HEARD ME RIGHT.    MURDER!
Does this stuff ever happen to a Lennon or a Blaser? Not really... it could only happen to a Dahlin.

We got the phone call from a detective of the Arcata police...saying that Kurt was being held for questioning regarding a murder that involved his trailer that had been hidden deep in the woods.

Tune in next time: Whose bloody hand-print was on the door?  Where was the body? And will Kurt get sentenced to LIFE?

The Infamous "Tuna Canyon" Story part 1: The Quest to Belong

This next part is the lead into one of the classic Dahlin stories which happens to include just about every hippie in Venice and every twenty-something aged person on Harding Avenue. It is a story that is told over and over and over again at every Dahlin function... like the Salton Sea Story.. or the LA Zoo monkey story... or the Good Friday story... or the Fire Escape Pole story... or the Del Diablo story... or the Edna and the Whiffle Ball story... the UFO Story... the Albino Camp stories... McElliot's Pool or of being electrocuted or the story of electrocuting a nun...       

Every man who came back from the military had a nickname. And so it was part of the DNA of my parents generation to give nicknames to friends and to those who fought with you in the trenches.  I never knew my dad's military nickname, but he was the best at dishing out inventive pseudonyms to just about every person he had come in contact with. Jack Underwood, for example, became "Underwater."
Every person who had the last name of McClain or McCelland or McCarthy was called "Mac." Every Ferguson was "Fergy." 

Dad had christened the people in his real estate office after some personality trait or character flaw... "Slim," "Bubbles," and "Liver Lips."  

For the hippies in our neighborhood who hung around our house he gave them names like... "Hercamer Skeeziks," "Kleghorn," "Freeloader," "Sleepy," Girly-Man," "Quaker," "Spongecake" and list goes on and on.  

It was the normative cultural practice at the time. 

And so, this is why all of our friends had a tag-line as a nickname: "Primo," "Sleezy," "Booty" "Pinky," "Monkey boy," "Face," and why my brothers had given each one of us a childhood nickname. This endearing practice quickly degenerated in our house from and were tossed around like hand grenades - meant to inflict harm.  

You could probably figure out the meaning of the insult behind each of  these new names launched by my older brothers (this part doesn't take rocket science).  

In order, our nicknames looked something like this...

Brothers:

            "Zit King"

            "Girly-Man" (BTW, this has nothing to do with being effeminate - only the length of hair). In the                                         early years he was affectionately called, "The Crip." The Crip was the shortened                                         form of The Cripple, because of all the broken bones he had together at one time.                                         Later he was just called "Chewbacca." 

            "Mad-Dog"   

            "Puke-Breath" (if not self-explanatory - he wore a retainer and had the world's worst breath)        

            "Dooh-Dooh-Pants" My 4th or 5th oldest brother(depending on if you counted "Mad-Dog or not)                                                     began early on with this name (because he was always cutting the cheese                                                       and smelled like he had poop in his pants ). This made it easy to find when                                                     we were playing Hide N Seek. 

                                       Then he was called "Lardo" at about 13, because he may have been a                                                               whole 10 pounds over weight! "Lardo" was the shortened form of                                                                "Tub of Lard"(The crueler the better)!    

            "Flea-Bait" (making fun of his short stature). 

Sister: 

             "TQOTW"  (poking fun of her sense of self-importance).

Me: 

          "Marky Sparky" the mailman across the street, Frank                          Nargie, called me this, ( I wished that one had stuck).  

                   My brothers however, has a long list... 

           "Hyper-Boy" "Mosquito-Bait" "Rubber-Band Man"            "Retard... aka 'Tard" (that's the short list...but you get                                                         the idea).

Baby Sister: 

                 She was so far down the food-chain, that she didn't get                    a proper derogatory nick-name...the poor thing. She                        was the only person in our family called by their real                        name ... 

          "Karin." 

   

Following suit (since the Boys Scouts of America was a para-military organization), every kid in our troop had a nick name. Only, most of them had been corrupted by the same viral infection of our human nature (I don't know - maybe it had something to do with the creeping influences of the black ooze) that always seemed to make things flow downhill.

After the infamous camping trip at Camp Slauson we called our skewered and dangling, Senior Patrol Leader, Ray, "Lucky." "Lucky" was intended as a ironic jab and was more sardonic than it was sarcastic, employed in a way to make fun of the poor guy... who was indeed the unluckiest person in the world.

Behind his back, we called our Scout Master, Mr. Degotbee.  Degotbee was the phonetic pronunciation of the acronym, D G O T B, which means "Don't Go Over The Bridge" (which he did). 

Here I am, a 13-year-old late-bloomer and easy target. Not only do I feel insecure in my place in the world, but feel like an outsider in own family desperately trying to fit in.

I'm short for my age...don't have one strand of hair under my arm pits... I'm not a dope-smoking hippie and just don't fit in with the older boys...ie. The Wolf Pack. 

I am not welcome in hippie hooch-hut out back... I am too young to be invited to the hippie parties on Hollister ave in Santa Monica. 

I am not old enough, big enough or good enough to be part of the Venice Pinners softball team.

                       And... I didn't surf! 

I don't have my scuba certification like the rest of the older  boys and just don't belong! 

One time they took me on a scuba trip and tied me to the inner-tube they floated offshore as a marker (I made it "more visible"- they said laughing and "if carried away by a swell or wind, then it would be no loss. We tried to get rid of you at Salton Sea, but that didn't work - remember?"). 

They said things they thought were funny... and used cruel nicknames that deeply cut the heart of a little kid, who had longed for a sense of belonging in his own tribe.           THEY DIDN'T KNOW ME.

They told the Salton Sea story as a joke and laughed at each embellished rendition around family gatherings... to newcomers. I laughed too. But it made me feel like the biggest crisis in a life a nine-year-old was of no concern to them - it hurt! 

Here's the weird thing... the more I felt like I didn't belong - the more I felt like I needed to belong. 

That's why I said, "yes" to everything. "Yes, I'll go into the hamper."  "Yes, you can bury me in a pit."

"Yes, I'll hold this wire."  "Yes' I'll stick my finger in this hole." "Yes, I'll do underwater laps." 

And..."ARE YOU KIDDING ME? OF COURSE, I'LL GO ON A HIPPIE HIKE TO MALIBU CANYON WITH YOU GUYS! And the desperate (maybe even psychotic) 13-year-old said, "YES, I'LL GLADLY FIND A ROPE AND BRING IT."

Which brings me to another infamous story, a Dahlin classic. A story I pretend to laugh at and is used as a from of subtle torture at family gatherings!

Here is how it Began...   

Poochie laid out on the warmth of the soft, tar street as cars began assembling on the driveway and on the front lawn on a perfect Saturday morning.  

Hippies! Hundreds and thousands of them.  Maybe not hundreds and thousands... but 30 or 40 would be no exaggeration... gathered on the front lawn of the Harding House...  

     AND Markie D  WAS INVITED!  

 ....and I was even called by my real name...   

They liked me... everything was good in the world.  

                                            I Belonged!  

                                                                                                                                                              At least I thought so...