Happy Late Night, my Darling,
I see you have another client (Cody) about to head out on tour. Not sure which band he's with, or if you are doing part of the tour with them, but if so have a blast! I know you are working non-stop these days, and I also saw the post of the car with the Fall II Rise sticker on it's window. That is super cool, and that's your band!
What a Summer it's been. (and it's still got two more weeks to go, never let 'em gyp you with the "Summer's over after Labor Day" routine. You've gotta get your money's worth...)
Tonight we are back once again at the Armer Theater at CSUN for our 8th year of fantastic film retrospectives. 8 years, it just blows my mind how fast it seems, my goodness. This semester we are doing one of my top five directors, Robert Bresson, who also directed my favorite foreign film : "Diary Of A Country Priest", which is on a lot of critic's all-time lists as well. But every Bresson film I've seen is a masterpiece, and so tonight - opening night - was a special treat because we saw a Bresson film I hadn't seen; his first film "Angels Of Sin" (the Americanised title, I couldn't find the French title at IMDB).
Anyway, what a beautiful and tremendous film, about a convent of French nuns whose mission it is to reform female convicts at a local prison and offer them shelter and conversion to Sisterhood upon their release. It's actually not all sweetness and light, but hard boiled and dramatic, and it centers on one Sister who had not been a convict but came voluntarily from a wealthy family. She wants to find meaning in her life and begins an attempt to turn around the life of the most rebellious and angry woman in the prison.
Even with such a dramatic plotline, all of this could be standard fare if it were not a film by Robert Bresson, who was known as The Poet Of Cinema (and there are other Poets, like Ozu, Tarkovsky, Dreyer....), but Bresson was the master. And this film blew me away, just a perfect movie. It's not just about the story, but the way it is shot, lit, and performed. A "10" on all counts.
Well, I am tired again as always at this time of night, but I've gotta keep my investigation going, even if I just examine one detail per night, and so tonight I am gonna keep working on The Person With The Starter Pistol. In reading the McVeigh books, I've seen how detailed an investigation can get. At the time, in 1995, it was the biggest investigation in American history, with reports running into thousands and thousands of pages. What I am learning as an investigator on my own case is that you've got to run your evidence back and forth, like you would run a washed shirt through a wringer. If you just run it through once, you aren't gonna squeeze all the water out of it, and likewise, with evidence, you've got to ponder it from one angle, and then wait, and then ponder it from another angle, and then wait.......and yet another angle will become clear that you haven't pondered yet. Especially in a case such as 1989, in which amnesia was a factor, and a cover-up and desire to keep it all a secret was another overwhelming factor, especially considering the resources, technology and power of the secret aspect of the Federal government and American military.
Also, because my investigation has been ongoing now for 23 years (I had amnesia the first four years, from September 1989 to October 1993), I have had plenty of time to "run things back and forth through the evidentiary wringer". It's a lot of work, but somebody's got to do it.
So, in getting back to Starter Pistol Person (who, for the record, I have no hard feelings against), what I want to begin to examine tonight was what he said to me much later, in 2006 when I ran into him at CSUN. This was now 17 years later. Grimsley, as mentioned previously, had told this person what I had said about him, from my memories, which had come back in 1996-97. Huge spans of time are involved, from the return of memories, to when I began to write about them, to when anyone would listen to me besides my Mom.
I began to talk about me memories in 1997, and everybody I talked to called me crazy, using one form of language or another. But I always knew I was telling the truth.
And so, fast forward to 2006. Grimsley had met this person at a concert, and had told him what I'd said about the Starter Pistol incident. I have a feeling he knew I was gonna be taking my walk at CSUN, as I always do every night since 1999, and so I ran into him (he was "strategically placed", perhaps), and he asked me about what Grimsley had told him, and I answered, by telling him the story of our encounter on my street corner at 9032 in September 1989.
"Don't you remember? You shot me in the head with a starter pistol".
Now, this is admittedly a bizarre accusation, on the surface. Here I was, accusing my friend of a very strange act of simulated violence against me, that had happened 17 years prior.
17 years prior.
And even thus, I hadn't accused him of the "ordinary" act of pulling a gun on me, for whatever reason. No - I had specified that it was a Starter Pistol, and that he had made a point of showing me it shot blanks so that I would not worry (even though I had been out of my mind with fear for days by that time).
In short, when I ran into him at CSUN in 2006, he asked me about a very, very unusual accusation I had made against him (to Grimsley), an accusation that had occurred 17 years earlier, and instead of calling me crazy - as everyone else had who'd heard my tales thus far (and many of them disingenuously), my friend then responded by saying : "It seems like a dream".
He didn't say he had no memory of it.
He didn't say, "what are you talking about"?
He didn't say "that's the craziest thing I've ever heard".
He said : "It seems like a dream".
And then he said no more about it. Talking about it had made him very nervous, it was obvious as he skated in circles on his roller skates.
However, he was the first - and to this day the only -person to overtly acknowledge his participation in What Happened In Northridge. I saw how nervous he was - and it was also his birthday - and so I asked him no more about it, then or ever since.
Grimsley, however, did press him about it in 2007 or thereabouts, after I told Grim about what he'd said, that "it seemed like a dream".
And that time, when Grim questioned him, he denied it completely. He denied he'd said that, denied he'd had any participation in What Happened In Northridge, and went even further by saying that the whole thing sounded crazy, and that I probably had "organic brain damage" from taking speed in the 90s.
He said all of that because he was scared of the truth, and also because he only partially, only vaguely remembered it. He had some degree of amnesia, just as I'd had (mine was total).
The difference was, he was a participant.
I was the victim, the person at whom the entire event was directed.
And so, while I was grateful when my amnesia broke, and though I found it frightening, strange and intimidating beyond belief to have my memories come back, he was - in turn - very, very afraid when his memory, of his participation, was refreshed for him.
At first, he spontaneously but grudgingly admitted it, by saying that it "seems like a dream". And I believed him that it seemed that way, because of my own experience with amnesia.
But then a year later, when confronted by Grimsley, he denied having said that, and denied the whole thing and called me "brain damaged". That only showed how his fear had grown.
He had been involved with drug dealing at a middle level, but with fairly high dollar amounts. And in 1989 he had to answer to Gary Patterson, who was his supplier. And Gary was emotionally dead, a full-on sociopath. My friend had gotten in over his head in cocaine dealing, and had gotten caught, and for some unusual reason, he was sent to my house to "mock execute" me right there on my street corner. He told me "they were gonna klll" him if he didn't. I don't know if he meant simulated kill or really kill him, but he certainly was scared. And I have no idea who he meant by "They".
As I said last night, how bizarre is that whole experience anyway?
The point I wanted to examine tonight was his apparent degree of amnesia, as evidenced by his "seems like a dream" remark.
I am too tired to go into it tonight, and I know I always get pulled in tangents, but that's the nature of running your evidence back and forth through the wringer. :)
See you in the morning, SB. I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
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