The Crack of Dawn

Volume #138

10/25/22

Newletter138

The Crack of Dawn

The Tall Target (1951) with Dick Powell and directed by Anthony Mann should have been a good movie, but it wasn’t.  Nevertheless, it’s a very interesting true story.  The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1861, with his outspoken anti-slavery stance, was the last straw for the south and would cause the onset of the Civil War.  However, even before Lincoln took office, there was a plot to assassinate him.  The plotter’s idea was to shoot Lincoln on the train as he made his way down to Washington, D.C. from Illinois.  Since there was no Secret Service then, private Pinkerton detectives were hired to guard the president (and ultimately did a shitty job).  The Pinkerton guarding Lincoln, who in fact busted an assassination plot, was named John Kennedy.

When I lived in a bungalow on McCadden St. in Hollywood in 1988 – the place where Quentin Tarantino used to hang out – there was a bird that drove me nuts.  I don’t what kind of bird this was – it looked like a regular old bird to me – but it had this awful chirp that drove me crazy.  It wasn’t a chirp; it sounded more like an old dog wheezing in a high register – hee hee hee.  There was a lot of tension in that little bungalow between us three inhabitants, who probably didn’t have $100 between us, and making our $400 rent each month was an angry shit show.  And the addition of the sound of that bird was simply too much for me.  Early one morning I was awakened by the bird’s high-pitched wheezing right outside my bedroom window.  My right eye began to twitch involuntarily.  I gathered up all the money I had or could find – in the glovebox and under the floormats in my car – and marched over to G.I Joe’s Army Surplus on Hollywood Blvd.  I had just enough money to purchase a wrist rocket for $9.99.  A wrist rocket is a sling-shot with a wrist brace that uses medical-grade rubber tubing.  As I walked home I collected gumball-sized pebbles from the street and put them in the paper bag with the wrist rocket.  When I arrived back at the bungalow the bag was full.  The bird was in the tree next door.  I couldn’t see it due to the leaves, but I could certainly hear it.  I picked out one likely stone, placed it in the leather holder, pulled back the tubing as far as it would stretch, and let go.  The stone whipped through the leaves, and a second later a dead bird dropped to the ground.  I used a shovel, scooped it up and pitched it in the dumpster in the alley.  It took one rock.  I dumped out all of the others, marched back to G.I. Joe’s, and returned the wrist rocket.  At least that problem was solved.

I left that bungalow soon thereafter, way back there in 1988 (when we partied like it was 1999).  And because I’m an asshole, as I carried my few belongings out of the tiny dwelling, Scott Spiegel hollered at me, “My new movie, The Nutt House, is going to get a theatrical release with 600 prints!”  I take no joy in reporting that the film was released four years later in 1992 on video. 

That’s Hollywood, folks.

Good morning, Vietnam.