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
