Bang Bang

20 years ago tonight, Seattle experienced the mini-version of the riots in L.A.. After the verdict in the Rodney King case had been read & news of the reaction in L.A. had reached Seattle, people were breaking windows & looting, but mostly the city was conducting business as usual.

I had stepped outside the restaurant where I was the weekend manager to drop some bags of garbage in the dumpster. I heard a sound like a child’s cap gun go off followed by a quick bright sound & the sting of metal. A car drove away down the small curvy side street.

I looked a few inches away from where I was standing to discover a small dent in the dumpster. I leaned over & picked up the bullet, still warm, & held it in my palm. It all came together in brain, I had just missed getting shot by a few inches. I still have that bullet. It is in a display case along with arrowheads, pins, shards & assorted jetsam & flotsam from my life.

My little case of treasures is in the middle foreground in this shot of my work space

I feel that I have used up my quota of personal violence, having experienced being mugged, shot, shot at & fag bashed during my considerably long life. None of those events compare to the freight induced by the release, 35years ago, of You Light Up My Life, recorded by Debbie Boone, which stayed at #1 for 10 weeks & became the most successful single of the 1970s. That was personal violence that I can still not recover from.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun

In the summer of 1991, I did a film in which I had a very juicy part. It was really the best film role I had been cast in at that point. Too bad the film turned out to be so bad that it went straight to video. Still, it was very fun to play a character that kills several people, gets hog-tied to a log over a stream in the woods & then dies from a booby-trapped stack of logs. Really. The film- Edge Of Honor starred Corey Feldman ( who was behaving very badly), Don Swayze (brother of Patrick), & the very talented Ken Jenkins. I played a white supremacist who kills a group of Boy Scout’s that had stumbled onto his cache of weapons.

I have always been anti-gun. As a vegetarian, I find the notion of hunting difficult to comprehend. I grew up with guns, locked in a cabinet & I was never even vaguely interested. I believe in strict gun control while recognizing the 2nd amendment to our Constitution (with its controversies & ambiguities). So, I needed to find some strength of character to deal with the fact that I would be using real firearms for the filming. I had, of course, lied at the audition & had told the casting director that I was very familiar with using guns (I once had boasted that I knew how to fly a helicopter at an audition, thinking I could learn to fly before filming began, if I were cast).

On a union (SAG) film set, there is a gun wrangler who keeps, maintains, & handles the firearms. They are placed in the actor's hand before the camera rolls & taken from them the moment the director says “cut”. My wrangler taught me how to handle & fire a rifle so that it would appear that I knew what I was doing. I had a half day of shooting lessons. After decades of freely giving my opinion about the evil of guns in our country, when it came time to actually use one, I pulled that trigger, felt the kick back against my shoulder, heard the noise made by the blank… & I was thrilled. Really thrilled. I spent 10 days of filming looking forward to every moment with my gun. I wanted to touch it & hold it. It made me feel really sexy. I loved my gun. When filming was over I made a promise to myself to take lessons & continue to practice at a firing range. but, when I returned to my civilian life, I quickly forgot my love for my gun & returned to my liberal peacenik- ban the guns persona. Actually, that is a good thing. As a guy that is given to total outrage, I don't need to be holding a weapon. Trust me on this one.