Show and Tell and the Ebola Outbreak

(continued from last time) Sunday night before the big day at the Saint Marks eight grade "Show and Tell" I pulled out a paper and began brainstorming.
  
There had to be something from the insane zoo we had at our house that I could bring that would impress the love of my life:   Alligator too dangerous (already wrestled with the hideous beast that crawled out of the primordial swap of evolution)The 12-year-old and the Alligator

Grandpa the giant frog - too management intensive, needs slimy-green, mosquito-laden water - yuck (gagging thinking about it).
 Grandpa the Mutant Bullfrog






Fat Pinky:  NO. No. No. NO! It's not right.  He would know why I brought him and would probably sit on me (my brothers tried to keep him in the house as much as possible)









The monkey was my best option - until I remembered how it liked to fondle itself, and in a moment of clarity, figured I couldn't subject the kids to that kind of graphic imagery involving boy parts.

Poochie the "The Wonder Dog" had been missing for 3 days and I was stuck! None of kids would be impressed by a brown beagle (even if I could find the missing companion) and none of our other animals were safe to go to a Catholic School. Iguana Del Diablo Escapes



I decided that I would try to get one of my 8 older hippie brothers to come with me to school tomorrow for Show and Tell.  The other kids had to love that..right?  Besides, I don't think any of them had ever seen a real hippie before...


Chewbacca was out of school and I thought maybe the other kids would like to see one "up close and personal," they could touch his hair and ask him questions about his eating and grooming habits.


YES! Brilliant...who would think of that! This would make me famous and Andrea would have to take notice of me for sure (as Chewbacca would say, "Like..it's all copacetic...man." He used "man" and "like" as if they were punctuation marks.)

I asked, Chewbacca if he would like to come to school with me and after he caught me held me down and tortured me to death by tickling - I had to tell the truth. I told him it was for Show and Tell. And when he forced me to explain that it was because he was a hippie he squeezed my forehead and gave me a "template." Chewbacca and the Template Torture

I woke up from my unconscious state with nothing on but my chonies - and freaked out when I discovered that he and Ulrich had taken off my clothes and covered my entire body in red spots with a indelible red marker.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise - Now I had some communicable disease that would make it impossible for me to go to school - at least until after the Thanksgiving break!

I put my hand on a light bulb, faintly grabbed my mom's hand and barely managed to get out the name of my sickness - "chicken pox leprosy" and dramatically collapsed just after saying that I couldn't go to school in the morning.

She said, "You're Swedish...I don't want to hear your excuses! You're getting up and going to school in the morning"

This went from bad to very worst...I had no animal for Show and Tell... my body is covered in red spots from head to toe... AND mom is making me go to school! I THINK mom thought that I had painted myself like this and wanted me to suffer the consequences... UGGGHHHHHHhhhh!  She even quoted my eight grade teacher, Sister Schultz, "You shouldn't have put yourself in that position" double ugh!

That Monday morning I woke up early to take care of my "trash day" duties (because the lazy hippies sleep until noon) when the crazy monster from hell - the Veloci-Rooster, broke our agreement and attacked me on the way back from the alley to the house. Now I had five deep holes in my leg and was dripping with fresh blood. This was only getting better. I smeared the blood on my face and arms and tore off the leg of one of Ulrich's hand-me-down uniform pants. I looked like nothing you had ever seen before - A ZOMBIE. This was better than the "The Wolf Boy" 12 second preview of Wolf Boy 

I bandaged my head, picked up my old crutches from last year where I nearly died Markie's Death and pathetically hobbled to school with the fresh stream of blood running down from knee cap to sock- looking one of the "pagan-children" in an improvised country you gave money at church to sponsor.  I slowly passed by Sister Superior's office making sure to catch her attention... and I guessed it worked. She screamed, intercepted me, turned me around and said, "Where do you think you are going young man."

"To class" said I, in my best Tiny Tim impression..."despite this case of bleeding Ebola or fatal leprosy or whatever this is...." voice fading as though I could die at any minute - then pretended to try turn back as if I wanted to be in school.

"Over my dead body" she replied, emphatically planting her feet and hands firmly on hips - blocking my way taking a step back for fear of making physical contact with me... "Go home!" she demanded pointing out the door like I was a rabid dog.

"I can't. I need a note from my mother!" I said with puppy dog eyes as though I was always this obedient.

"Leave this instant and I'll talk to your mother!"


Thank you Chewbacca
Thank you Veloci-Rooster
Thank you Sister Superior

I got to skip school and didn't have to show up for the stupid Show and Tell... Hallelujah! Her expulsion saved me from embarrassment of being seen with red dots.

Maybe I still had a chance with Andrea.

Maybe I still had a chance to find out what this thing called love was all about.

Like the dude that was healed by Jesus in the gospels...I picked up my crutches and ran.

Hippies, Skunk Weed and Baseball!

I apologize to my faithful friends and followers world over...this has been an extremely busy and very trying week at my house, where nothing has gone according to plan.

Now, I want to get back to the story of Markie d.

Laying in bed wondering if I'd ever walk again, I figured that my less-than-illustrious little-league baseball career was over. By this time in seventh grade all my friends had moved up from Minors to the Majors - expect for me. "Gherhing the Great" had grown an inch over the summer and now I was officially the shortest boy in the seventh grade class at Saint Marks School. Heck - as far as I knew, I might have been the shortest seventh grader in the whole world.

              That's Gherhing the Great on the far right.   →

The people in the league let me stay down a division even though was too old, because I was so small; I knew it and I knew everyone else knew it too. The most embarrassing thing is that they nominated me to play in the All-Star game and I had to show up pretending that I was something, when I knew I just a skinny, little fraud in a hand-me-down uniform that was too big.


Oh well, before my accident at McIlliot's pool, I played first base in my first and last "All Star" game and got some kind of trophy. I don't know if I really earned it or not, so I hid the trophy away from my family in the big, o' steamer-trunk buried under junk in the front room on the second story - where the "John the Baptist" fox furs had been decaying for the past billion years (Video blog post...Oct 28 2013).

Since no one in my family came to see me play in the all star game - I guess my secret was safe. 

By this time, my leg was healing and I could crutch myself not only to to the bathroom and back, but had finally gotten enough strength to go back to school. Because of this new gift of mobility I was lucky enough to join the family downstairs for our annual catastrophic upheaval of joking, name-calling and inevitable food fight -  known in other normal households by another name - "Thanksgiving."

After much of the chaos in our house had calmed down to the mere roar of a War-Zone, Dooh-Dooh Pants flung moist turkey dressing on my neck that he had pulled out of his mouth. Not knowing exactly what the brown, icky, stinky stuff was, I couldn't crutch quick enough to the toilet and vomited all the way to the bathroom. That was the creme de la creme... the climatic crescendo that delighted the entire Wolf Pack. Thanksgiving was now complete at our house.

Everyone laughed. Laughing at people was what they liked to do best of all (that's why I didn't dare tell them about my trophy- they would have made sure to totally humiliate me).  

Crutches were kind of cool. Horrible for school, but really good for defending oneself against older brothers who tried to torture me. They were lucky that I was too busy hobbling to the bathroom on those wooden weapons than to use them for my protection. Trust me - No, trust "Flea-Bait!" He could tell you that I was a lot better with those old wooden crutches than I was with a wooden baseball bat any day.
         
Wolf Pack be warned.   Yeah, I know I sound tough, right? But the older boys didn't take my threats very serious when it was always like 10 against one.. and especially now that they had bigger fish to fry!

The bigger fish was the Veloci-Rooster!   

The hippies had to figure out how to get back to the Mexican Tomato Plants and to Wall Drug without being attacked. If the cunning bird of prey allowed them free access to the ivy cave, it was only because the fowl thing was setting a trap on them like he did with the "The Chicken Lady"

Only...only they were usually high on the loco-weed when they discovered their exit (their means of escape) had been completely cut off.

It was funny! At least dad and I thought it was. We sat in the house and rolled with with laughter when they tried to negotiate with "Tomahawk attack helicopter" as if it were one of them.

"Hey, there little fella. Its like, it's all good...happy, happy?" They asked  "Like dude, man it's all groovy...you know...we're all one with the same cosmic universe man!"

"Bro...like, it's all copacetic...man."  

"Yeah dude...bro...peach and love and granola and flower power man"  Kjersten, dad and I couldn't help but laugh, because we knew what was going to happen next.

They thought they had talked the vigilante bird (with the "sidewinder missiles") down with all their mellow hippie nonsense.

"Like man...we're just like you. You want to be understood like us...you know man - Love is where it's at."

The next second, under attack,  we hear 7 of the hippies screeching in pain and laughing at each other at the same time. And then falling, and then stumbling, and then laughing at each other, and then screaming, and then begging their bird-friend-brother child-of-the-cosmos to stop. Oh my goodness, this was better than the Star Trek episode a couple weeks ago when William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols shared the first interracial kiss on US television.

The skunk smelling boys would desperately rush up the back steps - pulling and pushing each other to get in the back door to safety, then seeing us they would walk in and act calm as if pretending like they weren't just out back in the hippie-hideout of Wall Drug smoking it up.  And the funny thing was, I don't think they knew what just happened.  I think that "what-ever-it-was" they were smoking, made them forget EVERY TIME. And every time it was the same: they would emerge from the hollow - try to talk down the crazy rooster with razor-sharp talons having forgotten the results from the last negotiation failure.

For those of you with androids   TV's first interracial kiss

I'm getting to the story of the "Great Fire" of '68.  I'm just setting the stage for the events leading up to it.