You Can Stick It to Them in Style With ‘Nun-Chucks’

I saw the movie “Colors,” so I know that cops are pretty macho guys.

When Robert Duvall was showing the gang punks that he was just as macho as they were, he would whip out his side-handle baton, otherwise known as a billy club, and start rapping it, slowly, in the palm of his hand.

David Dye, a senior police officer in Costa Mesa, tells me that Duvall had it right. When Dye tells me about the macho cops he knows, he makes a fist and slugs it into the palm of his other hand.

This apparently is a variation on the Duvall-executed macho sign, but it is one I understand equally as well. Macho types, even if they are women, feel especially macho when they are brandishing something with the potential to inflict pain.

But Dye says that the baton has its drawbacks. It’s bulky, heavy and not all that versatile. Plus even civilian machos can pick it up and hit someone. Maybe even the arresting officer.

So Dye is spreading the word about nunchakus , which you may remember from the macho cult films of martial-arts master Bruce Lee.

The Costa Mesa Police Department has been using them for more than two years now. Laguna Beach and Seal Beach have them and so do those lone rangers of the Orange County Transit District police in the event that a disgruntled bus passenger gets especially unruly.

Nunchakus, in fact, seem to be catching on like wildfire. San Diego just made them standard issue and Dye, a freckle-face redhead who looks about as much like Bruce Lee as I do, is in demand these days as a media spokesman and expert on the things.

Affectionately dubbed “nun-chucks” by the guys who tote them, the nunchakus are two 12-inch, polycarbon plastic sticks connected by a double nylon cord. The whole thing weighs 12 ounces.

A plainclothes detective can carry it inside a suit jacket just as easily as an aerospace engineer might stash a slide rule or a six-pack of pocket pens.

True, these nun-chucks don’t look like much, but when you stare at them for a while, your mind tends to conjure up all sorts of potentially painful uses.

And if it’s macho you’re talking, mirror, mirror on the wall, the nunchakus are the most macho of them all.

Just take in some Bruce Lee films --”Enter the Dragon” is a good place to start--and you can see their potential for sweatless destruction. When the master swings his nunchakus at his foes, his arms take on the lethal force of a chain saw.

And to hear Dye tell it, these two sticks have psychic powers as well, having given the cops of Costa Mesa the inner peace of Zen masters.

“The officers feel confident,” Dye says. “When people see the nunchakus , they have a respect for them. Bruce Lee is the first thing they think of.”

Dye, who incidentally, is a black belt of varying degrees in aikido, aikijujutsu, judo and karate, does a few demonstrations for me.

He twists my wrist, vise-like, between the sticks and calls it the chopstick maneuver. He poses, Bruce Lee style, with his nun-chucks in the defensive postion. Then he whips them around in something like a high-speed loop-the-loop.

I am impressed. I want some. I am imagining all sorts of practical household uses.

When my daughter refuses to relinquish the tube of toothpaste that she is smearing all over the rug, I can whip out the nunchakus and quickly dislodge her hand from around the offending tube.

Like the officers in more than 30 police departments in seven states, thanks to the nunchakus , I will have accomplished my mission quickly without resulting harm to the suspect or to myself.

When my husband is standing there with his arms crossed in front of his chest telling me, “No, I don’t want to go to the mall with you. The Hawks are playing the Celtics,” I can wedge the nunchakus between his arms and twist it behind his back. I think about making him say “uncle,” but maybe I’ll make him say something like, “whatever you want.”

But Dye quickly squashes my fantasy. He says that unless I am a police officer or am enrolled in some martial-arts class, it would be a felony for me to be caught with the nunchakus .

I can buy them, he says, at a martial-arts supply store. I just can’t possess them.

I should have figured as much. Possess the nunchakus and one possesses the epitome of macho.

How’s that for Zen?

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.