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

 

President Johnson - Naked Boys and Snapping Turtles!

"Snapping turtles! Snapping turtles..." President Johnson said laughing slightly on his death bed trailing off  from this life to the next as the receiver slipped from his hand. The senior Secret Service agent on the other end laughed along knowing this was the President's way of saying goodbye. "Snapping turtles"he chuckled. How could he forget? He remembered the incident so vividly and smiled knowing how the story of those 'snapping turtles' that often brought a chuckle and a modicum of solace to a rather tumultuous presidency which had been rocked by the riotous disapproval to the Viet Nam War. 

President Johnston's last few minutes on this earth didn't necessarily end that way... but it could have. As "Rosebud" was to Citizen Cain, "snapping turtles" was to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

No matter how far fetched this next story sounds, WHAT I'M ABOUT TO TELL YOU,  IS THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH (plus or minus a 2% margin allowed for literary license) 

I'm in seventh grade in Sister's Edith Mary's class and over the summer we took one of our wild adventures across country to visit my dad's Swedish relatives in Michigan. Only this time, my mom thought she would  spare the girls the arduous journey by sending them ahead on an adventure of their own.  So my 14-year-old brother, Ulrich, escorted my 12-year-old and my 7 year-old sisters on a once in a life-time train ride across this fruited plain. 

My mom wasn't taking the trip this year which meant that in our brand new,  "top of the line" 1967 Ford Country Sedan station-wagon that had a 390 motor, electric windows, a two way tailgate (which was very cool) and even had FM stereo radio - we would have only 6 bodies for a change.

Only SIX BODIES!       

That meant only two people would be in front, two would be in the second set of seats and 2 got to stretch out comfortably in back on a fluffy stack of sleeping bags that put The Princess and the Pea to shame! What made this trip so groovy, and so awesome, was the fact that there was no Ulrich beating me up every mile of the 3000 mile journey back East. And Secondly, because I wasn't shoved in someone's armpit or crammed in a corner, stuck between a metal ice chest and pressed up against a cold window at night and a hot window by day. We had never traveled across country this way before - it was heavenly (I always tried to bring my guardian angel along and this time there was room for him). 

None of that changed the fact that my dad still had a very frugal operating system. Without mom and the girls, this meant that he could cut back on luxuries like meals and potty stops. Dad  figured he could change drivers with a couple of the older teenage boys, we could pee in old Folgers cans and keep right on going. My dad reasoned that with the money he spent on the train, he would make it up in food cost by starving us to death until we got to Michigan, where we would gorge ourselves at a different aunt and uncle's houses - every night of the week  - eating like Viking Warriors returning from a pillaging conquest. 

On the seat next to him was a box of Triscuits and a block of Jack cheese. My dad would pull out his well used fishing knife, cut off thin squares of cheese that we would sandwich between those baked wheat cracker-like-things.  This was about all the food he planned for for our entire journey...as we chocked down cheese that had turned a yellowish-brown as it hardened more and more - each successive day. By the time we had arrived in Michigan it was like trying to tear off a piece of an ice hockey puck with your teeth,  I wonder if this is what the Israelites felt like having to eat manna for 40 years. I don't know who was luckier - us or them?

Once my dad started somewhere, he never liked to stop... that's why he was so upset with the Highway Patrol Officer who demanded that he GO BACK  to SALTON SEA and PICK ME UP- where they had left me behind (BLOG POST 5/13/2013). 

Anyway, by the time we got rolling through the top of Texas on the I-40 something in the car started smelling pretty skanky.  Since this was a "guys-only" trip, no one knew it if the rank smell was the rotting cheese my dad kept in the box of Triscuits, if it was Dooh-Dooh Pants "Cutting the Cheese" or if was simply the grody smell of ripe teenage armpits! Didn't matter - might have been a combination, never-the-less, it was gross. "How bad was it?" you ask! Bad enough for my dad to pull our station-wagon over, so the boys and I could skinny-dip in some murky Texas river.  There we were, far away from everywhere, parked under the shade of an overpass trying to escape the awful heat of that Texas sun; 5 naked, blonde-haired boys frolicking in that mucky shallow brown river.

Being in our birthday suits we were a bit nervous at first when we heard the caravan of cars overhead, but really began to freak out when they circled off and a line of black limos pulled up behind my dad (who, had been sitting in the station wagon). The fact that my bothers were hippies made it seem like the police never really liked us very much, and therefore, by default, felt that we were in some-kind of big trouble.

Worst was...these armed "Men in Black" cautiously approached our direction, followed by this tall fella in a dark suit. We could see from where we were splashing around that my dad nearly had a seizure. This only served to confirm our suspicions and began to think that this just might be one of those infamous "two-lane-highway, in-the-middle-of-nowhere, alien-abductions."

That distinguished looking fella with gray hair (the one who seemed to be in charge) walked down to the edge of that murky water and screamed a warning to us with the sound of terror in his voice and a sense of urgency.

"Hey, you guys...there. Be careful of your worms. Don't you know, this river is full of snapping turtles!" he shouted with resolute hands firmly planted on his hips then turned and laughed all the way back to his presidential motorcade with this small army, who also were having a good chuckle at our expense.  As a good democrat, my dad stood and saluted as the boys cupped their hands over their taliwakers, charged out of the dangerous waters and ran bare-bunned across that dirt field to the car where dad sat laughing.

My escape wasn't so quick!  My feet were stuck in the molasses-type-mud and had a much more difficult time breaking the suction of that mud than did the older boys. With all those turtles and only one worm left in  that 'O brown stream, I panicked... grabbed my boy parts and sluggishly my way back through the mucky bottomed-bog. 

When dad told us who it was...Chewbacca nearly had a conniption fit.  As a pacifist Anti-War hippy,  he had sent his draft card back to the President and believed this to be another conspiracy and a plot of the President to get back at a couple those "draft-dodging hippies from Venice." 

If there were no turtles and just a practical joke - Good one President Johnson. Good One!

TRUE STORY!

If it wasn't a joke - and indeed a valid waring, it was funny just the same. Imagine what might have happened if we had not headed his advice...HA!  I guess we could have been "The Venice Choir Boys" along the line of The Vienna Choir Boys (if you catch my meaning in that). 

Maybe this is where that expression "Snap!" comes from. It's really just short for snapping turtles.

"Rosebud" "Snapping Turtles"  "Dude"

Next:  My Biggest Nightmare!