It’s been a year since the Capitol Hill Massacre, and a motley crew has gathered in the Seattle Center’s Fisher Pavilion to remember the victims. “Diverse” doesn’t do justice to the assortment of folks who came to pay their respects. Mayor Greg Nickels and Chief Gil Kerlikowske are here to promote stricter gun control legislation. Candy ravers are here to mourn, and also for a famous DJ who’s going to spin later on. But Margie King is only here for Sushi.

“Do you know how he got that name?” she asks with a lurid smile. “It’s for a different kind of fish.” She then informs me of the gynecological nature of the title, coined for victim Justin Schwartz years ago, after he lovingly described the details of a particularly funky tryst as akin to dining on raw seafood.

King is a 25-year-old veteran of Seattle’s street community. She’s spent many of those years living on pavement, from University to Broadway, downtown-dwelling, sometimes booze-guzzling or crank-tweaking, now sober-style coffee-drinking. She used to go by the name Violent. That got changed to Violet when she quit meth and took up smoking purple Kush pot.

Now, on caffeine and nicotine only, she just goes by Margie.

“Most people don’t realize that 65 percent of the people here today are street kids,” she says, referring to what King sees as an unacknowledged element in the massacre. “There were a bunch of our kids in that house,” she adds.

Our kids? “Our kids, homeless kids,” she explains. Apparently the house at 2112 E. Republican St. was a hangout for more than just rave kids and clowns. With its tenants purveying over a space that was decidely non-judgmental as well a good place to find drug connections, street kids with substance issues often found themselves there. Justin “Sushi” Schwartz was one of them, according to King.

“Sushi knew what it was to actually give,” King remembers. “But he had a dark side too, when he’d tweak.”

She’d seen it, King said, during the numerous times she helped him through near-overdoses. But she hadn’t seen it during the early morning when Schwartz, in a jovial mood, asked her if she wanted to join him at the house party. She had declined, preferring to sleep in her camp. Since Schwartz had, according to King, been barred from his parent’s house, he had no home to jet to. So he sought refuge and fun at 2112.

“This is the part of the story they don’t want to tell,” she insists, perhaps because it’s not a very pretty detail in the wake of Kyle Huff’s murderous rampage. Even the Seattle P-I’s article on Schwartz after the shootings in March 2006 is murky about Schwartz’s housing status:

“His mother said Schwartz has been living at home,” the article says. “[A friend] said Schwartz had also stayed some nights at a shelter in the University District or on friends’ couches.” Another P-I article mentions that he frequented a “homeless service center.”

“I’ve seen so many of my friends die,” Margie says, with a matter-of-fact stare. She had come here this Saturday, March 25 to remember the one with the fishy name that always makes her laugh when she hears it. To remember that they had something in common. n