I pass out. My stepdad Skip happens to walk in. He rips the belt from his trousers, makes a makeshift tourniquet, and puts it around my leg to slow the bleeding. They immediately call for an ambulance.
I come to when the paramedics are loading me into the ambulance to take me to the emergency room at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. I remember asking the ambulance driver, “Can you turn on the siren?” just before passing out again.
In the ER, I wake up to see my jeans cut off and a pretty nurse standing over me, flushing chunks of asphalt out of the wound on my leg. She’s holding what looks like a nailbrush and shoving it up near my shin bone to remove all the asphalt that’s packed down in there. Fortunately, my tendons are okay. The only serious damage is to one of my main leg arteries, which is why there is so much blood.
Mom later tells me what the ambulance driver said to her as the paramedics loaded me into the ambulance: “Miss Dahl, I have never seen a leg as badly damaged as your son’s—one that’s still attached, anyway.”
Had it not been for my stepfather Skip, I might not be here today to tell the story. He really saved my life by putting that tourniquet around my leg. I owe him more than mere words can say.
While we were living in New York, Mom got me a dog—a soft, floppy-eared, short-legged beagle I name George. I guess Mom hopes having the responsibility will settle me down. I love George like a best friend immediately, and he becomes a great companion for me. He is four years old by the time we move back to our California home in Villa Grove. He loves to run and play in the large backyard and enjoy all that open space, unlike in Manhattan, where the closest thing to grass is the nearest public park. George especially enjoys taking off into the Santa Monica Mountains for a day, but he always returns. Except for one day, when he doesn’t. I whistle and call his name. I go searching for him. I stand out back, hoping for him to suddenly appear. Days go by; George never returns. Most likely, coyotes got him. I am just heartbroken. I miss him so much.
Every passing day, my life feels empty without him. I do nothing but mope around most days. Finally, Mom calls Emmy’s stepsister Evelyn, a breeder who shows miniature poodles in dog shows, and says, “Can we find Lorenzo another dog?”
Evelyn is happy to oblige. “I’ll take him with me to the next show,” she says, “and we’ll find him a new dog.”
I love going to the shows with Evelyn and her son, Jeff, who sometimes shows their poodles along with her. At one show, after Evelyn and Jeff introduce me to a breeder of Great Danes, I fall in love with a crazy fawn-colored puppy and bring him home. Mom has a fit. “Holy smokes,” she says, “look at the size of his feet. He’s going to be huge!”
“Yeah, Mom,” I explain. “He’s a Great Dane.”
“Couldn’t you have found a smaller dog?”
“No, I really wanted him.”
I just love Caesar—that’s the name I give him—his expressive face and eyes, his friendly and energetic personality, and his strength and elegance. We instantly become best buds. As Caesar grows, Evelyn takes me along with her to dog shows where I show him in breed and win several blue ribbons.
At six o’clock on the morning of February 9, 1971, I am getting ready for school in my room when I suddenly feel a sharp jolt and then a rumbling under my feet. It intensifies with each second and grows louder, like a locomotive speeding through my room. My whole room starts to rock and sway. My bed begins to shake. My books fall from their shelf, while my toy Batman collection starts doing the mambo on my desk. It is an earthquake—and not an ordinary one. This feels like a major tremor. Caesar immediately dives under my bed. Meanwhile, my stepdad Skip rushes into my room.
“Lorenzo,” he orders as the ground beneath us shakes violently, “we have to get out of the house right now!”
My room has a door to the backyard. I tell Skip, “Okay, cool!”
I grab Caesar’s leash and attach it to his collar but cannot get him to move out from under my bed. He is trembling and shaking and will not budge.
I shout, “Caesar, come! Caesar, come!”
Caesar is unresponsive. He is a year old now and weighs about one hundred pounds. With all my might, I keep trying to pull him out as I hear Mom scream, “Everybody out!”
My family runs out the front door of the house as everything around them shakes and rattles out of control. As the force of the quake builds to a crescendo, I finally pull Caesar out by the collar instead of the leash. Like a wild horse, he races out my door into the backyard, pulling me along with him. After coming to a quick stop, we end up on the grass. The tremor finally subsides, and the ground stops rumbling and shaking. At that moment Skip comes into the backyard and demands, “Where were you?”
I point to the ground on which I stand. “Right here.”
Skip is clearly agitated. “I told you to come out the front door.”
“I never heard that,” I explain. “I had a door and just went out the door.”
Long story short, everybody is safe. The only serious damage is to a sliding-glass patio door that shattered. As it turns out, the earthquake is a magnitude 6.6 centered in the San Fernando–Sylmar region of Los Angeles and felt throughout Southern California and into western Arizona and southern Nevada. Aftershocks occur for several months, but the original quake causes widespread damage to many older buildings in nearby Beverly Hills and the surrounding suburbs of Burbank and Glendale. Because of structural damage to highway overpasses, roads, and bridges, and concerns over more aftershocks in the area, schools close for the day, including mine. I am oblivious to it all. With no school, my friends Bill and Dave and I go hiking up the Santa Monica Mountains for the day. Only later do I discover just how lucky we really are.
Later, during my eighth-grade year at Paul Revere Junior High School, I start running around with a bunch of crazy guys doing those crazy things eighth graders do. I’m trying to be part of the in-crowd, to be “one of the boys.” Some stunts we pull I know are dead wrong, but I do them anyway, so the kids will say, “Hey, Lorenzo’s crazy. He’s okay.”
The leader of the group comes up with a stunt sure to get everybody’s attention: set the school lockers on fire. I go along with the idea. It sounds cool. Everything goes as planned. Except for the part where they catch us and expel us, including yours truly—overall the third school to give me the boot. Mom finally steps in to put an end to my shenanigans.
“You’re going to military school,” she announces.
“Military school? What’s that?” I ask, dreading the answer.
“You’ll see,” she says.
As long as I can still see Dad and my friends, I figure everything will be okay. I love everything about California, especially its glorious sunshine, sandy beaches, majestic mountains, and, yes, all its pretty girls (although they do not yet know I exist). I simply can’t imagine living anywhere else. It is home. My father, my friends, and everything familiar to me are there. Mom, of course, has other ideas. She enrolls me in a school as far away from my father and my friends and California and as close to her as possible: Admiral Farragut Academy, an all-boys military school, in New Jersey.
Mom ships me off to the academy before moving back to New York to promote her cosmetic company, Arlene Dahl Enterprises, with its new line of wigs she’ll market through Sears Roebuck and its Manhattan advertising agency, Kenyon & Eckhart.
