 “Y-BEE-NORMAL?”© Copyright 4-03-2007 By Dana Shino, The Purple Phoenix, LLC www.thepurplephoenix.com The first time Bob met Dave, they were young boys. Dave was noisily dragging an old World War II empty bomb shell casing behind him on his skateboard. This was just the beginning... The bees didn’t like Dave playing with their hive, so they stung him multiple times one summer day in Anchorage, Alaska. Dave was only a toddler when these hundreds of stings profusely covered his body, filling his blood with bee toxins. Dave’s parents rushed him to the hospital where he was given blood transfusions, replacing the bee blood with new blood. Dave lived. But the bee stings and bee blood must have subtly changed him. It was as if Dave’s internal metronome was now dialed up a half notch. Over the years, as Dave’s siblings grew thick and overweight like their parents, Dave remained sinewy and skinny. Dave was the lightweight among the family of five. Yet, there was more to this physiological familial contrast. Dave, simply put, was kinetic. He was always in motion: always looking left, looking right, and buzz buzz buzzing with something going on. And Dave’s intense buzz was anything but conventional. The bumper sticker Dave later put on his red fendered, black and white checkered, red roofed (with a hand jig sawed sun window), VW Bug said, “Why be normal?” So, one day, during high school lunch period, it was no surprise when Dave grinned his crazy grin at his two friends, Bob and Woodsy, who were riding with him, and punched the VW’s accelerator. He warned, “Hang on. I’m going to hit this. I do it all the time. It’ll be cool!” Bob and Woodsy yelled that it wouldn’t be cool, but braced themselves anyway. Dave hit the curb caddy corner at fourty-five miles per hour with his VW Bug. It should’ve popped the tires, but it didn’t. Then Dave aimed his VW for the ten foot long, eight foot high dirt ramp embankment built up to a flat pad. It was prepped for building a condominium. All Dave saw was a VW jump ramp. He punched the VW’s accelerator again and hit the thirty degree ramp sideways with momentum. The left side of the vehicle remarkably and gracefully followed the right side into the air. The VW landed right front tire first, twenty eight feet from take off. Dave and his friends knew the distance because they roughly measured it in arm spans where the tire tracks showed easily in three fresh inches of snow. Dave cycled through over a dozen vehicles in high school while he played and experimented with them. He liked using road barricades to slam shut his opened driver side Jeep Cherokee doors when he drove by them at high speeds. If you rode with Dave, you were expected to do the same on the passenger side. If Dave was alone, sometimes he’d kick open the passenger door from his driver’s seat to achieve the same effect. It beat up the cars pretty quickly. Dave was well known to make repairs and modifications to his vehicles with ingenious fabrications. He tipped his 900 pound, 3 cylinder mini-Honda on its side (using his sister’s mattress to cushion it from dents and scratches) so he could replace the rusted floorboards with road signs. Just once, when Dave was without a vehicle, Dave’s father loaned his Volvo to him. Dave promptly visited his friend, Bob, who lived at a home with a garage. Dave and his father lived in a condominium that had no garage. Dave needed a space to fabricate a paint booth to paint his father’s Volvo in black and white checker board style with red fenders. Bob and Dave created a viscuene taped paint booth in the family garage. Dave painted the Volvo the rest of the day and late into the night. Halfway through the paint job, Louis, Bob’s dad, asked Dave, “Does your father know you’re painting the Volvo in checkerboards?” Dave said, “No, I’m going to surprise him.” Then Bob asked, “Isn’t the Volvo your Dad’s car?” Dave said, “Yes,” and Bob asked, “Won’t he be angry?” Dave paused to think about it, as if it hadn’t occurred to him (because it probably hadn’t), and said “Oh, yea, probably,” and continued painting. This may have been why Dave escaped his ventures so many times unharmed and avoiding trouble. He nonchalantly possessed a stunning grasp of humble, honest, directness. When Dave did things, people seemed to be okay with it – like the Anchorage Police, when they pulled Dave over for driving without the benefit of his two rear wheel tires. Dave owned a couple of old rims and decided he wanted to see what would happen if he drove on them without tires. He switched out the rims and tires on his VW Bug for the old set of rims. When he gave his Beetle the gas, the rear rims spun, letting off twin rooster tails of sparks behind. “Cool!” he yelled and turned out of the driveway, going down the street at a snail’s pace, spewing sparks behind him. Dave drove five miles from his home when he decided it was time to turn around. On his return trip, he passed two police officers parked in their cruiser. The way the story goes, Dave waved at them as he drove by spewing sparks. They dropped their jaws with an expression of “You’ve got to be kidding me!” They pulled Dave over and this was the conversation: Police Officer: “You know you don’t have tires on your rear wheels?” Dave: “Yea, I know.” Police Officer: “What happened to your tires?” Dave: “They’re at home. I’ll put ‘em back on when I get there.” Police Officer: “Where do you live?” Dave: “Just a few more blocks up the street.” And the police officers let him go without a ticket! When Dave pulled into the driveway, only several inches of metal were left on the rims. Not all of Dave’s experiments included vehicles, either. Sometimes, they included the family cat. Dave wanted to jump from airplanes and parachute. Since those resources were not available to him, he opted to volunteer the family cat for Jump School. Dave fashioned the parachute out of several garbage sacks stabilizing it with heavy fibered tape. He fashioned a cat harness out of a pair of old long johns, cutting holes for the cat’s legs. Though undeterred to toss the family cat from Anchorage’s highest tower, Dave was still concerned about the cat’s ultimate safety so he custom molded a fiberglass kitty helmet for the cat. One afternoon, Dave and his friends (and the cat) trespassed onto the local abandoned missile base (remnants of the Cold War) that housed old towers, the highest point in the area. They climbed the old radar tower and prepared the cat for launch: long johns-check, helmet-check, parachute-check. When they tossed the cat from the triangular window of the golf ball shaped tower’s dome, the chute opened beautifully, but the sway from the release swung the cat back towards the tower where it clawed in desperation at the metal framework. Eventually, the parachuted cat drifted downward and safely landed, immediately splaying all four legs, hugging the ground, immobile. Unfortunately, so many of Dave’s classmates misunderstood his intense nature, unconventional ideas and activities. They mentally chose the easy route, automatically allowing what they didn’t understand to frighten them. It didn’t help matters that Dave could bench press, with super human strength, the entire weight set, at a lithe 140 pounds, what only three other meaty football players could. It also didn’t help when Dave stood up unscathed after a vehicle hit him in his butt at high school, launching him twenty feet into a ditch. He flew, tucked, rolled and came up sputtering cuss words at the stunned driver. It was an accident that easily would have sent anyone else to the hospital. Dave’s ‘Why be normal?’ buzz, nuttiness and mystique created a rift between him and others, when actually, he was just a nice, helpful, interesting guy. He was the kind of guy who celebrated Christmas by decorating his Jeep Cherokee with six strings of Christmas lights and evergreen. He was the kind of guy who would help someone he didn’t know very well by reviving a dead car battery with a jump. But Dave didn’t let what other people thought about him keep him from his ‘outside the box’ ways. Early one winter, when the snow began falling in Anchorage, Dave was riding a cheap ten-speed to and from high school. In the snow, Dave needed traction the ten-speed wheels weren’t granting. To create traction, Dave wrapped bailing wire around the tires and rims (between the spokes). Since the brakes on the bike were rim brakes, the wires impeded the brake action. So, Dave removed the bike brakes and road brakeless. This was not a problem on the way to school since Dave lived at the bottom of a fairly steep hill. The difficulty was the return trip. One day, a couple of Dave’s friends followed him home for lunch. When the three reached the top of the hill, Dave didn’t pause. Knowing Dave’s bike didn’t have brakes, his friends watched in concern as Dave barreled down the hill yelling, “It’s cool! It works great!” At the bottom, Dave steered the front end of his bike straight into a four foot snow bank, flew off the bike over the handlebars, purposefully spread-eagling into a front flip and landed on his back on top of the snow pile. When his friend’s arrived they saw approximately ten other wheel indentations in the snow bank. Dave didn’t change much after high school. When he left Anchorage, Alaska, about twelve years later to train for smoke jumping (fighting forest fires), he left behind at a friend’s house a couch with 6 skis attached to its bottom. He’d jerry rigged two 2x4’s on either side of the couch as brakes and guiding paddles. When the hilly road outside his place was covered in snow and ice, he and his friends would ride the couch, ski-sledding down the hill, in the middle of the road as if it were perfectly normal.  Your contributions help support The Purple Phoenix Press.
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