And There Was That One Time I Ate Roadkill Squirrel

Several years ago I produced an instructional video series on survival skills; we grouped these videos under the term "neo-tribal": taking modern, easily-scrounged materials and using primitive or less-modern skills to make them into tools.

We made the rebar knife in this video series, among many other useful things. I also learned shiv-making, weaving discarded plastic bags into rope at least as strong as nylon cord, how to knap and flake stone and glass to make cutting implements, and a lot more. 

While we were finishing a scene on cooling a forged, red-hot knife in ash rather than oil, the author's wife came in, holding a dead squirrel in a handkerchief. Half of its head had been crushed, and its remaining eye stared at us like an onyx marble.

"A UPS truck ran over it right outside the house," she told us. "It's still warm!"

After some discussion, we decided to use the dead squirrel to show how our knapped pieces of glass could be used to dress a small animal. So, in the waning light of mid-afternoon, we went outside and filmed the author skinning the squirrel and removing its organs with flaked shards of glass.  As I was not familiar with the process, never having watched or done it myself, I found it an interesting experience.  There wasn't as much blood as you might expect, though I was a little bothered by the sight of the squirrel's guts sort of dangling from its esophagus and rectum when the author lifted the skinned corpse up.

Later that day, as we packed up for the evening, the author's wife came back to the workshop with a plate bearing a small pile of little gray pieces of meat, cooked and glistening.

It was the squirrel, you see.  She had butchered and fried it in a pan.

"Try some," said the author, smiling.

The gleam in his eye told me he was testing us to see if the citified boys from Colorado would actually chow down on roadkill squirrel. My production assistant and I shared a look. I shrugged, nodded, and picked one of the larger pieces. It was mostly bone, and a bit greasy, but not bad. The andouillette sausage I had eaten in Paris was much, much worse, consisting of stinking flaps of intestine and tripe.  This was just little bits of rodent meat.

I didn't suffer any ill effects (that I know of), and the rest of the shoot went swimmingly. I would probably eat squirrel again if offered, though I have no plans to make it a frequent meal unless circumstances require it.

An Unpleasant Side-Effect of Being the Boss

Nothing in particular has elicited this post; it's just something that I've been thinking about for years and I want to get it out there so it no longer has to take up space in my intellectual attic.

When I worked in the video production department of a small but notorious publishing company, the department had a staff of two: the Video Production Manager and me.  My job title changed depending on the mood of the manager: sometimes I was a Video Production Associate, sometimes a Video Producer.

Sometimes something unprintable.

We worked closely with many authors to develop video projects.  With a staff of two, we did everything: contracting, set design, lighting, sound, camerawork, video editing, marketing, still photography.  We shot video in the studio and on-location across the country (and sometimes in Canada; remind me to tell you about the Canadian carnet).  I enjoyed the work.  We went to all sorts of places and met all kinds of incredible people with remarkable skills.


Eventually I became the Video Production Manager.  My workload increased tenfold, but I still enjoyed it, and it showed in increased sales and production quality.  I wasn't a parent at the time, so the travel and longer hours weren't so much a problem.  (If you're reading this, my beloved wife, I did miss you on those on-location shoots!)  There's no such thing as having a bad day on a limited-budget video shoot: you have to be 100% mentally and physically all day long and into the night.  Great stuff.  I learned that any limits I had were entirely self-imposed, a lesson that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

However, there was one troubling aspect to the job: it changed my relationship with certain people, and not for the better.  Some of the authors whom I'd worked with as a Video Production Associate were markedly nicer and more friendly once I became Video Production Manager.  Not all, but some.  To some extent, this is natural: you want to be close to people who can do more things for you.  Still, I had worked closely with these people through production and post-production and thought that I'd had them figured out.

I noticed this difference of attitude early on, made a note of it, and didn't let it affect my decision-making.  But it did teach me another very valuable lesson: determine who your real friends are.  It's a thing you have to experience for yourself.  Learn how to separate people into categories, as unpleasant as that sounds.  A real friend is someone who doesn't want anything from you except your presence in his life.  The others, the ones who will call you friend but just want things from you, they'll fool you.  It takes time and life experience to determine the difference.  Some people never do.

I still retain some very good friends from my time in publishing, men and women I'm honored to know and speak with.  So I have no complaints.  And I make new friends in my new endeavors all the time.  I'm very fortunate.

Is this cynicism, or experience?

War Stories: Battlefield Pankration

One of the projects I'm most proud of during my time as the director of video production for a small but notorious publisher was the book and video project Battlefield Pankration by Jim Arvanitis.  It's a turnkey personal defense system, including everything from pre-combat de-escalation techniques to handling weapons like sticks and knives.  Jim stands out among a hugely overpopulated crowd not just for his skill, knowledge base, and devotion to fitness, but also his personal experience in actual fighting.  Until you know how you'll react to being hit in the face, you have no business teaching self-defense.  Jim Arvanitis is the real deal.  

I'd worked with him before on his video Secrets of Pankration, so I was pleased when he'd approached us with a new project, one that bridged the gap between MMA sport and streetfighting reality.  We'd blocked out a week's worth of shooting, put it on the schedule, and worked out the details until he arrived.

Little did I know that the project would be one of the most difficult studio shoots of my career.

The first shoot day had gone splendidly.  Jim's one of those rare authors who doesn't need a second take.  Without getting too deep into the nuts and bolts of the shooting process (a subject worth discussing in future pieces), we did the usual thing which was to shoot through lunch and end the day in the late afternoon to give the author time to rest and me time to review some of the footage.  In those days I got to the office around 4:45 in the morning and left between 4 and 5 PM.  I loved the work.

And then around mid-morning on the second day, Jim strained a hamstring doing a side kick and we weren't sure if we could complete the shoot, let alone finish the day's work.  (I may have the exact details of the injury wrong, but it was definitely a leg thing.)  Jim's as tough as nails, the rub-some-dirt-on-it kind of man, but if you can't perform, you can't perform.  It was the worst luck imaginable.  Two weeks prior, we'd had to cut short another shoot because the author had rolled his ankle and could barely walk.  A great deal of money and time had been invested, and a work stoppage represented a real hardship.  

Pleasantly, the next day Jim was able to return to work, and things went well; you'd never know he was nursing an injury.  The morning after, I had some trouble starting my edit suite (a Final Cut Pro machine), but it finally did boot after a few odd error messages.  I made an offhand comment about it to one of Jim's assistants, who happened to be a computer engineer.  He told me that my edit suite was about to shit the bed (without using those exact words).  Macs don't have the same problems as PCs, and the errors I'd gotten were clear indicators that the hard drive was dying.

The next morning, it wouldn't start at all.  A large part of my job wasn't just shooting the videos, but editing them, too.  Without an edit suite, post-production ground to a halt.  So in the midst of a shoot where we were already behind due to injury, I had to deal with Mac repairs as well.  

In the end, we shot all the video parts, but couldn't finish the hundreds of still photos for the book, despite very long days and few breaks.

My wife's family lived not far from where Jim lives, so a couple months later during a vacation to Florida, I spent the day with Jim, his son Brandon, and his friend Bob to shoot the remaining photos.  Jim was in the midst of suffering a nasty flu bug, but it didn't slow him down at all.  Being the friendly, giving sort he is, I caught the bug myself and spent the plane ride home trying not to die from what I called the Greek Flu.  Fever, chills, coughing, you name it.  It sucked.

Despite everything, we produced a great piece of work that I'm proud of.  Out of the many authors I became friendly with during my time in publishing, Jim's one of the few I'm honored to still call a friend.  Even though he gave me the Greek Flu and almost killed me.

On the Night Crew - Three Pieces of Flash Non-fiction

For over ten years I worked in supermarket retail, doing various jobs.  I worked my way through high school and later through an indifferent college career and beyond.  There were parts of it I very much enjoyed, and parts I loathed, which is pretty much typical when it comes to working.

Night crew was a blast, despite the hours.  Most of us were young and strong, and the work was very easy.  We got time and a half on Sundays in those days.  Because it was a union store, we weren't paid on performance, only longevity.  It's very difficult to get fired when you're in a union.  Here are a few night crew highlights, which I'm calling flash non-fiction so they just won't seem like dumb little stories of things that happened:

• Howard was an older man: moved slowly, talked very little, and had more seniority than the rest of us put together.  This is meaningful when you're working in a union store.  A likable enough fellow.  He would start every ten to six shift with two two-liter bottles of Seagram's wine coolers, and over the course of the night would polish them both off.  Every shift.  None of us commented on it when he was around.  That was what he needed to maintain.  Howard was, in our parlance, hard-core. 
• Some of us did whippits.  Not all the time, but when you've done all the work allotted to an eight-hour shift in four hours, you need to fill up the rest of the time.  There was a trick to it: if you shook up the bottle, all you'd get was whipped cream up your nose.  So you had to get one that hadn't been shaken up.  We used the store brand whipped cream, but not because the nitrous oxide in it was any better; it was on the bizarre premise that people expected a poor product from the store brand versus the more "premium" Reddi-Wip.  Nobody got addicted that I know of, and nobody died, at least when clocked in.
• Turkey bowling was a thing, but not as much fun as you'd imagine.  They didn't wax the floors more than once a month in our store, and if you skated a frozen turkey across a waxed floor, you'd start scraping the wax off the tiles.  That would create grooves for dirt to get into which made it difficult for the other guys to clean.  The unwritten rule was to have fun, but not make more work for anyone else.  So we had to do turkey bowling in the dairy aisle, which had grouted, unwaxed tiles.  The rough "alley" made for a difficult game, and we only did it just to say we did it (turkey bowling and stories of it have been around at least since the 1980's).  

Those were the days.

War Stories: Little Melvin

We had gone to Maryland to shoot a martial arts video with someone you might have heard of; he was an actor on the show WMAC Masters and had once been featured on an A&E program about former felons who had gotten their lives back on track.  His name is Willie "Bam" Johnson. I had worked with him on a self-defense project ten years earlier and found him to be a very strong, fit, and decent man.  So when it came time for us to shoot another video, I jumped at the chance.

On the morning of the first day of shooting, we drove into downtown Baltimore to film an interview with him and a pastor who had helped him turn his life around.  At the time, on-location shoots were done with a crew of two: me as the director/producer/sound engineer/lighting expert/1st camera/location scout, and another man who helped.  As we were packing up the equipment after the interview, Johnson said that there was one more interview he wanted to do, and asked us to follow him in our car.  I asked where we were going, and he grinned and said he didn't want to tell us, but it would be worth our time.  

Soon we found ourselves driving through an extremely bad part of Baltimore.  My alma mater is Temple University, so I know what bad neighborhoods look like.  This was about as bad as it got.  We were driving a black Suburban; our heavy shooting schedule had permitted us a free upgrade from the minivans we usually rented.  As comfortable as it was to drive, it attracted attention, though not as much as Johnson's Hummer.  

We eventually pulled up at a large building suspiciously free of graffiti, and spent the next several minutes hauling camera bags and Pelican cases from the SUV to the building's entrance.  A smiling man in white greeted us with handshakes, and we went inside the darkened building to the back.  It was then that we were introduced to Little Melvin.

Melvin Williams, AKA Little Melvin, was the real-life inspiration behind the Avon Barksdale character in HBO's show The Wire.  He was tall, with muddy brown eyes that had something very sharp going on behind them.  I'm not trying to be literary or melodramatic: you took a look at him and knew that despite his mild demeanor, he took in everything.  At the time, I hadn't watched The Wire, so I wasn't at all starstruck.  I was just there to do a job.

Johnson conducted the interview and talked about Little Melvin's interest in martial arts and how it helped him in his career.  It didn't take terribly long, and we were soon packing up to go to the next location: Johnson's dojo.  

As we packed up, I chatted a bit with Little Melvin and his friend, a man whose name I've forgotten but struck me as a nice, personable fellow with a sense of humor.  They kidded us about how we stuck out in the neighborhood a bit.  Little Melvin told us a few stories about how he had been railroaded into prison, and how just the rumor of him being angry about his portrayal in the film Liberty Heights had scared director Barry Levinson into almost canceling the movie's release (Orlando Jones played Little Melvin in the film).

My colleague got a picture with Little Melvin and his friend while I finished packing up. 

On the way back to the dojo, we turned on the radio.  It's very likely that we were the only people in that part of Baltimore listening to Jimmy Buffett.  To this day, I don't know if the video was ever released.

War Stories: Keys Are for Pussies

During my tenure with "the most dangerous press in America," I got to see a lot of very interesting things, talk to some fascinating people, and take part in activities the average person rarely gets to witness.  All of it legal, of course.  When it came time for me to describe some of what I learned in the books The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse and, to a lesser extent, The Blessed Man and the Witch, my younger brother told me, "When I read your books, I know that the fight scenes are realistic."  I appreciated that; it's very difficult to show real-world combat tactics through fiction in a way that makes sense to a reader regularly exposed to media representations of violence.  What follows is an example of an experience I had that would be considered atypical.

We were in the production phase of a shotgun video intended to take the viewer from firearm selection to the penetrating power of various rounds (slug vs. birdshot vs. buckshot) to bare-bones shooting tactics.  Across the board, it was a great instructional video, and arguably the best of its kind.  

Near the end of the first day of production, we drove to the on-site shoot house to show the power of a door-breaching round on an exterior door you'd find on a typical suburban home.  Most people won't ever have to blow a door open with a shotgun, but we had the ammunition and door, and part of the video was about exploding various shotgun myths (like the notion that you can just stand in a doorway and blow scores of people away with one shot).  So we went for it.  

The problem was that we'd forgotten to get the key to the shoot house.  A shoot house (also called a kill house) is a purpose-designed building used for teaching close-range firearms tactics.  Depending on your budget, it might be furnished (to give the trainee a more realistic experience), have a roof, and even video cameras to record the training.  This shoot house was about as good an example as you'd want to train in and included a grate-style ceiling on which the trainer/RO (Range Officer) could walk and observe the drills being practiced.  

But we didn't have the key.  It was back at the main building.  

Rather than go through the rigmarole of getting into the truck and driving the onerous two minutes or so to get it, one of the men with us said he had his lockpicks in the glove box of his car.  In less than a minute he had the lock open and we were setting up our cameras.  The man who'd done it wasn't a professional locksmith or super-secret spy: he was using skills he'd learned and practiced over time to solve a problem.  Most, if not all, of the other men there could have done the same thing.  It wasn't a big deal.  Just thirty seconds with a rake pick and tension tool.

Typical Monday.