Stro

[Greg]

I'm skipping ahead to Friday November 17th. Some day I'll return to the New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts saga.

It's been a cranky week for me. I was in San Diego on Monday and Tuesday. I was driving in a lot of Los Angeles traffic on Wednesday and Thursday. I'm out of practice with dealing with it so it was bugging me.

On Thursday evening, we interviewed Nilo Otero, one of Michael's students from Halberstadt and also the man who took the last lesson ever from Stro at the Westside Fencing Club in Los Angeles. It was a pretty good interview. He had lots of good profanity laced stories about the Halberstadt days. But in the end he screwed me.

We had all the gear packed up. We were saying our goodbyes at the door to Nilo's apartment and HK hands Nilo his business card, the one with the 'Stro' logo on it. Nilo looks at the card and says "Oh, do you want to know how Stro got his nickname?" Oh, fuck you. All the gear is packed and you are going to solve one of the key stories in our narrative off camera? Fuck you.

I told him I would come back. He thought I was joking. He doesn't know me well.

And I was getting grumpy with HK. I was getting really tired of HK telling stories about himself during the interviews. Or even worse sharing his opinions about D'Asaro in long winded discourses. I almost wish he knew nothing about D'Asaro so he would spend the time learning about Michael from these people we were talking to. The problem stems from the fact that HK loves this interview show on the Audition network with Sam Jones. In it, Sam Jones interviews famous people and Jones shares his insights, too. It's a two camera show shot in Black and White. Very artistic. 

But our interviews aren't two cameras. There is no point in hearing what HK has to say. The point of the exercise is to get auditory pictures of Michael. Anything beyond that is is self indulgent naval gazing.

So, Friday morning as I'm on my walk, I spend the majority of the walk trying to figure out a way to get HK to focus on the task at hand in the most diplomatic of ways. I couldn't find one.

Our first interview of the day was with Michael's sister, Barbara. She lived on the other end of a freeway full of traffic. She confessed on the phone she didn't know much about Michael except she was angry at him for being their mother's favorite. I was worried she wasn't going to be there when HK and I arrived. I had sent two emails and called her to no response. I thought she might be scared and was going to blow us off.

I said as much to HK after I had rung the door bell on Barbara's front porch.

But surprise. She opened the door and was sort of happy to see us. She again confessed that she didn't have much to say about Michael because of the five year difference in their ages.

We sat down at her living room table and she started talking. And she talked for about an hour straight. She talked about everything in sort of a shotgun stream of conscious fashion. We heard about her favorite show Four Weddings. We heard about her bowling league. We heard about the immigrant problem. She talked about her son.

At one point, I managed to ask if she had read the questions I had sent her. She said no. I handed her the list for her to go over. She did but she then started to answer the questions to us. I tried to get her to stop and maybe just answer them once I had the cameras set up. That lasted about a minute before she continued down the list, answering the questions as she went.

And her answers weren't all that great or authoritative. She really didn't know much about Michael's life except for a few almost worthwhile snippets.

I was starting to think I would just let her ramble on and then find a graceful way to make my exit. HK started to pick up my hints that we weren't going to be filming Barbara.

So, HK asked if he could set up his scanner to scan the four pictures she had showed us when we walked in. Barbara said sure.

I continued to talk while HK scanned. 

And then Barbara said she had a picture of her son at Michael and Gay's wedding where her son wore Michael's hat while her son was getting him some punch. Me, being the crack journalist that I am, asked if I could see that picture. She went to the hallway and brought out one of those frames that has multiple pictures in it behind mattes. As she pointed to her son, I noticed a small black and white picture as well. Barbara said that was her and Michael when Michael appeared to be ten. Then she pointed to a picture of Michael, Gay, and Michael's father.

My immediate terrible thought was how to get these photos out of the frame so we could scan them. I couldn't photograph them through the glass because the glass was dirty.

Then Barbara mentioned she had pictures of Michael, I think, at his prom with his first wife, Leonora Federico. Wait! What? 


I asked if we could see those, too. Barbara got up and went into her den. I followed. She pulled out a plastic drawer that was full of pictures. Holy crap. It turns out her father took lots of pictures. LOTS OF PICTURES. Yeah. The day got better.

I stood by Barbara at the dining room table as she hunted through the drawer looking for the prom pictures. And she would find pictures from Michael's confirmation and set them aside, since they weren't the prom pictures she was looking for. I kept grabbing them from her and handing them to HK to scan. She kept telling me I didn't want this picture or that picture. I kept contradicting her. At one point, all I wanted to do was push her out of the way and sort through the photos myself. Because she would look at the top photo in a batch and decide not to look at any more of them. I was desperate to sort through each of them. I also asked if I could pull the photos out of the frame. Bless you, Barbara, for saying 'Sure".

HK had quite the stack of photos to scan.

You would think that would be the big win for the day. No. Not even close.

Written on several of the books, were the descriptions as well as the dates of when the photos were taken. Barbara read one of the descriptions and laughed. She asked if we wanted to know Michael's nickname as a kid.

The silent dog whistle brought both HK and I to immediate attention.

His childhood nickname? Please oh please oh please oh please.

She told us. It was unbelievable. It was the least flattering nickname ever. And that's what the family called him. Barbara would answer the phone from Michael's friends and she would yell out "Hey, ___________, your friend is on the phone" with the impression that Michael's friends would hear it and know it.

The nickname is priceless, especially since it is in stark contrast to the image of Michael in later years. Best of all it's in the description on the photo books. I made HK scan the description so we could have it.

Now, the cameras had to come out. Here was a story that needed to be recorded. HK and I dragged the gear out of the car and set up. Barbara told the story perfectly. 

It was like the clouds parted and the sun warmed us all. All my bad thoughts drifted off. And for one shining moment, I was really happy.

All because I knew Stro's first nickname.