Bob Osborn, known to us Old School BMX guys as Oz, was the founder and publisher of BMX Action, FREESTYLIN', and Go magazines in the 1970's and 1980's, and early 90's. My "big break" as a young guy came from Andy Jenkins asking Oz to give me a shot at Wizard Publications in 1986. Like every BMXer from that era, Oz changed the way I looked at the world.
This is going to be a series of blog posts, maybe two or three. I just realized that as ideas flooded my head. Peter Caruso just shared a great photo on Facebook, a shot of Oz squatting down at the top of the roll-in at Pipeline Skatepark's Combi Pool. Oz was snapping a low, wide angle shot of Mike Dominguez airing over the roll-in. The photo shared was snapped by rider Donovan Ritter, and is a great shot in its own right. In the comments, someone asked, "What's Bob Osborn doing now?"
One smart ass (not me, a different one), told the commenter to Google Oz. I shared a short YouTube video I came across of Oz, a shorter version of this clip above. When I searched YouTube for that clip, I found this one, and two longer videos about Bob, that I haven't watched yet (blog posts 2 & 3, most likely). I immediately bookmarked them, and being a blogger, I knew there was an Oz blog post or two (or 5) in my future. So this is the first one.
When I think of Oz, my first thought is my interview with Oz, Windy, Andy Jenkins, Gork, and Mark "Lew" Lewman, in the conference room of Wizard Publications. It was a good sized room, tucked in the corner of the "L" shaped rows of small offices in the Wizard warehouse. I'd flown down to LAX, after my Pizza Hut shift, and hung out overnight, sleeping on Gork and Lew's couch (given to them by Scot Breithaupt). It was fun, I was blown away they thought I was somebody worthy of working at the magazines. It was early July of 1986, and I was just turning 20, and living in San Jose, California. I sat near one end of the big, folding tables, and all of them were along the other end. I felt like I was on trial, and honestly, I was scared shitless. I was pretty sure I was going to screw that opportunity up, somehow.
I'd met everyone, and then this thin man in jeans and a pretty casual shirt walked in. Bob Osborn, Oz himself. Seriously, meeting the guy who ran those magazines felt like Dorothy and her posse meeting Oz in the Wizard of Oz. I never dreamed that working at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' was a possibility. I was trying to become a pro freestyler some day. As a general rule, I never notice people's eyes, but Oz walked in, and then turned and looked at me. His eyes were a bright blue, and had an intensity that felt like he was reading who I was at a glance. That's what sticks out to me, like he looked at me and knew who I was in a moment. He was friendly, but serious. They all asked me different questions, and I can't remember any of those questions now. The mood improved, I was still nervous, but relaxed some as we talked about my zine, and the potential job I was being considered for.
At the end, Oz had one last question. He looked me dead in the eyes and asked, "Steve, are you sure you'd like to work here?" Yes, as a BMXer, I realize how insane that question is. I replied, "Yeah, I made 57 pizzas in 4 hours at Pizza Hut last night, I'd LOVE to work here." That answer surprised him, but he laughed. They all laughed. And yes, I actually counted how many pizzas I made at my job the night before, for some reason. Oz got up, excused himself, and said it was nice to meet me, or something like that, and walked out. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was seriously one of the intense experiences I'd had, in a work environment. Andy said, it seemed like Oz liked me, and that was good. My zine, San Jose Stylin', was the reason they were giving me a chance. I was a diehard BMX freestyler, if not a great rider. I had ridden with and interviewed the Golden Gate Park/Curb Dog/Skyway guys in the zine, Vander, Drob, Robert Peterson, and the others, and apparently seemed smart enough to take over the proofreading part of the job, from Don Toshach, who was leaving.
While Bob Osborn, Oz to most of us from that era, is known as the photographer/writer/publisher of the BMX mags. I just now realized it was Oz the lifelong photographer, that sized me up in an instant, with those piercing blue eyes. He not only raised R.L. and Windy Osborn, both legends in the BMX world, but he gave young Bob Haro a chance as a cartoonist. He gave Andy Jenkins, a Wyoming racer/art student, the editor's job a FREESTYLIN' because he liked a thank you note Andy wrote, after Andy won a bike in a contest. Oz hired, then later fired, Steve "Guy-B" Giberson. He picked Gork zine publisher and AFA employee, to editor of BMX Action. Oz hired Lew, after Andy and Lew became pen pals, and plucked Lew from Michigan. He hired me. When I didn't click really well in the office, I got laid off and he hired a punk kid, BMXer/skater named Spike Jonze, from Maryland. A few years later came Jeff Tremaine, as art director of Go. Those are just the names you know, the other staff members all rocked, as well. A few of us have talked about this list of people Bob Osborn plucked from obscurity over the years. The people on that list have had a serious influence on the BMX world, and most have done pretty cool things since.
Bob Osborn didn't give a shit about a resume'. I didn't have to take a written test to see if I was capable of learning to proofread two magazines in a couple weeks time, and get them out to the world with zero typos. Bob Osborn sized people up with the eye of a veteran photographer, and a weird life that had given him great intuition into people. He was a fireman when R.L. got into BMX, about 15 years earlier. All photos aside, and photos are his passion, his gift for picking people is one of his most amazing qualities. And then there are his amazing photographs, like the real world cowboys and Indians in the clip above.
One of my all time favorite photos of Oz is this one below, which means a lot to me, because it was on the cover of the first FREESTYLIN' magazine I got when I subscribed, the first issue of FREESTYLIN' I ever saw, issue #3.
A young Todd Anderson, in front of the SE Bikes office, blasting a one footed tabletop over a bug full of legends. And Fred Blood*.
Here's that list of Oz's kids and former employees at his small publishing company.
A modern scrapyard in action. Who wants a chance to operate the crane, pick up a few junked cars, and toss them into the car crusher? I do.
In this post on my other blog, I wrote about how my dad got me a go-kart for free, back in about 1978. It started when my dad bought some junk in a corner of the factory floor at work. It was a factory in Plymouth, Ohio, called Plymouth locomotive works, and they made... you guessed it... locomotives. But they didn't make the huge locomotives you see pulling freight trains, or Amtrak trains. Plymouth made custom locomotives, for special purposes. They made locomotives to work in mines, like this one. They made locomotives for narrow gauge tracks, or switching at switch yards, like this one. My dad, Tom Emig, was a design engineer there from 1976 to 1980, and designed parts of and occasionally whole locomotives.
One day the owners walked through the factory, and got pissed off at the random parts, scrap metal, and junk lying around the shop floor. So a memo was typed up, and people who worked there could buy the unused stuff, and do what they wanted with it. My dad offered the shop foreman $15 for a small pile of junk in one, little offset corner. It was a few boxes and some scrap metal, so the foreman, told my dad, "Deal, get it out of here in a couple of days."
My dad brought the junk home, and unloaded it in our basement, with my help. I was about 12 at the time. We first sorted out the scrap metal. There was maybe 250 or 300 pounds of steel pieces, and some pieces of copper and aluminum. The next weekend, I helped my dad load it up in the trunk of his car, and went with him to a junkyard/scrapyard near Mansfield, Ohio. I'd never been to the scrapyard side of the place before. We had to drive the car over a big truck scale on the way in. My dad got a paper, with the car's loaded weight, from a guy standing just past the scale. He asked my dad what kind of metal we had, and my dad told him. The guy said, "Take the copper over there," pointing to a small building, across the piles of scrap metal, broken cars, and other metal junk. "then take the aluminum over there, and the steel over there." The guy pointed to the other places.
So my dad drove down the dirt trail to the first little building, pulled the copper out, and a guy weighed it. Then we drove to the aluminum building. I helped my dad pull the aluminum pieces out, put them in a container, and another guy weighed those. He wrote down the weight of the aluminum, and wrote it on my dad's paper. Then we drove to the steel unloading spot, and my dad and the guy pulled the big steel sheets out, and tossed them on the pile.
Then we drove slowly back up towards the office, and the truck scale. There were a couple of pickup trucks ahead of us as we got to the scale. My dad got a weird smile, and reached into his pocket. He pulled some change out of a rubber coin purse, and said, "Go get yourself a Coke." That was in a day long before Big Gulps, and we didn't get Cokes, or any pop, as we called soda in Ohio, very often. So I grabbed the change, and walked up to the office. There was a real scary, junkyard dog just inside the office door, and it growled a little as I walked in. The dog scared me, but somebody told it to shut up, and it put it's head back down on the dog bed it was laying on.
I went to the Coke machine, it was the old kind where there was a tall, skinny door on one side. I put 35 cents into the machine, then opened the door, and pulled a 16 ounce glass bottle out of the machine, by grabbing the cap end and pulling. There was a bottle opener on the front of the machine, and I popped the cap off of the bottle, and started drinking my Coke, keeping a close eye on the mean dog.
A couple minutes later, dad walked into the office. He handed the lady behind the counter his piece of paper. On it was the weight of the copper we unloaded, the weight of the aluminum, and the beginning and ending car weight. The lady figured out how much total weight we unloaded, then subtracted the weight of the copper and aluminum. The remaining weight was the weight of the steel we unloaded. The woman figured it out, told my dad the rates they paid for each metal, and his total payment for the metal. I looked around the cluttered, dingy office, and the evil junkyard dog caught my eye, and growled again.
My dad got a little over $45 for the scrap metal, more than three times for the junk from the corner at work. He was happy, he still had a bunch of bolts, nuts, and machine parts he could sell for more money. Ultimately, he got me a go kart in trade, as well. He took the cash from the lady, and some change. Dad walked over to the Coke machine, and bought himself a Coke. He sat down in an old, battered, wooden chair, right next to the mean dog. The dog looked up suspiciously at dad. He looked down at the dog, and said, "Oh, what's the matter?" and started scratching the mean junkyard dog behind the ears. The dog loved it. Dad took a sip of his Coke, and I sat down beside him, away from the dog.
Dad scratched the mean dog, and joked with a couple people in the office for a few minutes. Then he stood up, "OK, let's go," he told me. The damn dog growled at me again as I walked by it. We got in the car outside, and headed out the main gate, and he got that funny smile again. "How much to you weigh?" he asked me. "About 110 pounds," I replied, "Why?" Dad smiled, "I just sold you for scrap steel." I was confused. He said, "think about it."
I realized that by having me get out of the car before the car was weighed the second time, my 110 pounds was subtracted from the total weight, which meant he got paid my weight, for another 110 pounds of scrap steel. I told dad how he did it, and we both laughed. Suddenly I was his accomplice in getting one over on the scrapyard, so we both were smiling. "How much did you get paid for me?" Dad said, "11 cents a 100 pounds." "So about 12 cents," I figured. "Dad laughed, "You're worth 12 cents... as scrap steel." We got another good laugh out of it.
Then it dawned on me, "You gave me 35 cents for the Coke, so you lost money selling me." Dad said, "Hmmm... I would have bought you a Coke anyway, you helped me out today." And we drove home. When we got in the house, my mom was in the kitchen, as usual. "Dad sold me for scrap steel!" I said with a big smile. Mom didn't get it, and dad had to explain the whole thing to her. "Now we know, Steve's worth... about 12 cents." She wasn't happy. Dad came out in the living room, where I was, and we wondered if there was any other way to sell me, and what I might be worth.
In 1990, I self-produced a BMX freestyle video, becoming one of the first actual riders to produce a video. Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, Jeremy Alder, and myself were the first actual riders to produce our own, individual BMX videos. Before that, in the mid 1980's, a business, like BMX Plus, BMX Action, hired video production companies, usually ones that made local TV commercials or industrial videos. A high end pro Betacam video camera cost $50,000 then. A good video editing system cost $500,000. So it cost a lot to make a video. In the late 1980's, Stacy Peralta at Powell-Peralta skateboards, and Don Hoffman (my former boss) under the Vision Skateboards umbrella, produced skateboard videos. GT Bikes also produced a couple videos.
Consumer video equipment came out, and then it got upgraded. S-VHS video was a better than VHS, though a long way from pro quality, and suddenly regular people could make a video. So a few of us started doing that. Bob Morales had me produce contest videos for the AFA in 1987, working with Unreel Productions (Vision), who shot video of our contests. That's how I got started in video. I wound up going to work at Unreel, basically a production assistant, not a producer. During that time, in early 1989, Ron Wilkerson at 2-hip hired me to produce the contest season video for the 1988 season. So I was learning about video production on the job, and Eddie Roman was doing a similar thing down in San Diego.
As video equipment got less expensive, and as us riders got sick of how the larger company videos were put together, something crazy happened. We started making the kind of videos we would want to watch. Without really thinking about it, Eddie, Mark, Jeremy and me started a revolution. We just wanted to make the kind of videos we wanted to watch. By doing that, we showed other riders that it was possible to make our own videos. By 1992-1993, as small companies began to pop up, everyone started making their own videos.
In early 1989, the bicycle industry gave up on BMX and freestyle, and shifted their attention, and money into the new big trend, mountain bikes. BMX freestyle went into recession, then a year later, the whole country went into a recession. Riding went underground. But it kept progressing. Street riding was really taking off. Dirt jumping was just beginning into its whole thing. Riding was progressing at an incredible pace when I decide to make The Ultimate Weekend, so I wound up getting quite a few firsts in this video, as did the other videos of the era. Here's a list of the things that were a first in The Ultimate Weekend,to the best of my knowledge. All times given are in the video, embedded above.
-The first mini-ramps in a BMX video- H-Ramp at 2:30, Primo & Diane's ramp, 19:48, Mouse's ramp, 38:13. As crazy as it sounds now, mini-ramps were a new thing in 1990, the first one I ever heard of, the Towne Street ramp in Costa Mesa, CA, home of some Schmitt Stix skaters, was built in 1988, I think.
-The first time the Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach was in a BMX video, 11:26. It's 11 feet high, a little under vert, it's a great spot.
-The first time someone used a skateboard for a "dolly shot" in a video, 5:30. I showed the shots of Andy Mucahy and Red doing rolling tricks, where I skated along close to them with the camera, to professional video people in Hollywood. They couldn't figure how I got those shots. The idea of skating next to someone with a camera was new to the TV industry then.
-The Slater Ditch, aka Cancer Ditch, near the Bolsa Chica wetlands in Huntington Beach, 9:55. This ditch is about 100 yards from today's Wetlands Trails, used by several top BMX and MTB jumpers.
-Oreo pancakes in a BMX video, 11:09. Pretty proud of this one.
-First time pro freestyle skater Pierre Andre' Senizergues, the Etnies, E's, Emerica shoe company founder, was in a BMX video, 13:33. Don Brown would have been in the video, he just wasn't there the day I took my video camera to the H.B. Pier.
-First time Magnolia Trails in Huntington Beach was in a video, 13:59.
-First flatland tailwhip on a bank, Alan Valek, 16:26.
-First backyard "skatepark" in a BMX video, Primo and Diane Desiderio's house, 19:48. Here's Primo and Diane doing their skate thing a couple years earlier.
-First spine ramp in a BMX video, 19:48
-First 360 over a spine in a BMX video, Keith Treanor at 21:12, then Gary Laurent at 22:55.
-Tailtap to nosepick on a mini-ramp, Gary Laurent, 23:08.
-The second double peg grind on a ledge, me (Steve Emig),
-Oceanview flyout jump, Huntington Beach, 23:24. Keith Treanor flat out RULED this jump in 1990.
-First time the the Nude Bowl was in a BMX video, 27:24. In 1990, THERE WERE NO SKATEPARKS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. We either had to find and take our chances of a bust in backyard pools, or drive an hour and a half out into the desert to the Nude Bowl. The name comes because it was an abandoned nudist colony. Stoked I got Brian Blyther and Xavier Mendez to come out for that session on a 105 degree day, along with our typical crew, Keith Treanor, John Povah, Mike Sarrail, and myself.
-First Smith disaster on a quarterpipe, Jess Dyrenforth, 30:27. On Martin Aparijo's quarterpipe.
-First icepick on a quarterpipe, Keith Treanor, 30:40. Martin's quarterpipe.
-First time the Santa Ana Civic Center was in a BMX video, 31:08. This place is still ridable, I saw a couple shots there in the recent Odyssey video.
-First street rail icepick slide, John Povah, 32:43.
-First handrail double peg handrail grind down steps, Keith Treanor, 33:18. Eddie Roman got the first street double peg grind in a BMX video, not sure who the rider is, in the 2-Hip Ride Like a Man video, 3-4 months before The Ultimate Weekend came out. That was a rail next to a walkway, with a little downhill to it.
-First S&M Bikes shield logo in a BMX video, 33:51, spray painted on the side of the VW bus. I assure you none of us had any idea how iconic that logo would become in the future.
-First time the P.O.W House (Pro's Of Westminster, the first BMX rider house) was in a BMX video, 34:00. Also the first time backyard BMX jumps were in s video.
-First tailwhip jump over doubles, Mike "Crazy Red" Carlson, 35:51. It's a tow dragger, but we'll take it. For years I thought this was the first tailwhip in any BMX video. But Mike Krnaich nailed that one in the Bully Slow Ride video, which I never saw back then.
-Edison Trails, Huntington Beach. Before Sheep Hills was built, Edison was the spot for the serious H.B. area jumpers, like Chris Moeller, the S&M riders, and P.O.W House guys.
-First 1 hand, 1 foot 1/2 barspin air, Bob Kohl, 43:46. His halfpipe, outside Chicago.
-First backflip jump(into water) by an actual freestyler (not Jose Yanez, the flip inventor), Jeff Cotter, 44:24. Jeff, best known as a flatlander to us, worked with Jose in the circus in Japan, and learned flips from Jose. He actually learned them ramp to ramp, right before I started editing, but I was on deadline, and refused to shoot video of it. My mistake. Also, I had footage of Mat Hoffman doing the first backflip fakie attempt in the U.S., in Indiana at the 2-Hip comp. Ron Wilkerson asked me not to use that footage, he wanted it only in the next 2-hip video. So I didn't use that shot in The Ultimate Weekend.
-First one hand backflip jump, into water, Jeff Cotter, 45:16. I asked Jeff if he'd ever tried flip variations, while we were shooting, and he said, he hadn't. So he gave it a shot, and the one hander went well.
-First no handed backflip attempt... ANYWHERE in a video, Jeff Cotter, into water, 45:16.
-First music by Howie Mandell's stage band, in a BMX video. The Stain, led by Jon Stainbrook in Toledo, was a chameleon of a band. The played punk shows as a band in the Toledo area. Every major punk band stayed at Jon's house, when in the Toledo area, in those days. He knows everyone in punk. All the musicians did their own personal music (used in this video), and they were also Howie Mandell's stage band when he did comedy shows in that region. The shots of Jeff and Mark playing back stage were at a Howie show at University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in the summer of 1990. Jeff Kollman is still working as a musician today.
So that's it, that's the "firsts" I think I can safely claim from The Ultimate Weekend, back in 1990. I watched Eddie Roman's/2-Hip's Ride Like a Man, and Bully's Slow Ride, to double check this list, and took several things off the list, that they had in their videos first. The Ultimate Weekend came out in October 1990, and those videos, both really progressive as well, came out in the summer of 1990.
I got arrested, and spent three days in jail, for buying donuts. Seriously. Hey, it was in North Carolina, and let's face it, The South is still The South.
In the summer of 2017, unable to find any job, I made a little money selling my Sharpie drawings online. I left the toxic environment where I lived with my mom, in the small town of Kernersville, NC, and went to live in a tent, in the woods, in nearby Winston-Salem. They had a cool little art scene there, centered on Trade Street, downtown. I planned to become a part of that scene.
Why was I living with my mom, in North Carolina, at age 51? Because of an incredible amaount of pressure from hundreds of undercover federal agents, police officers, and many intelligence agency pysops teams, over 16 1/2 years, to fuck up my life that much. The pressure started when my bank account was suddenly closed, for no apparent reason, about three weeks after 9/11, back in 2001. It felt like I was fighting ghosts, that's the best way to describe it. When 9/11 happened, I was on somebody's list, for some reason, I still don't know why. The most recent story is that I have the highest legitimately documented IQ in the U.S., a score of 216 (from 1985), roughly 198 in today's world. I find that story really, really hard to believe. If that's somehow true, someone, somewhere, thinks I'm obligated to work for their agenda. I disagree.
Anyhow, it was a struggle to simply survive, as I had pressure from many levels come down on me, I scraped by as a taxi driver for some years, with undercover cops/agents taking rides every couple of weeks, asking if I did drugs, sold drugs, got people hookers, and every other possible criminal activity, including being a terrorist. I don't do any of those things. I stopped keeping a running count of the number of these undercover people at about 600. That was in maybe 2006 or so. The total number is at least double that. There were hundreds of uniform officers, from many agencies, tasked with giving me a hard time, as well.
This is real. This happened. Yeah, I may be crazy, I mean, no truly sane person would be a taxi driver. But this happened, none-the-less. And this is why I haven't made a decent living for two decades. The pressure on me was always pushing me to the political far right, not today's far right, but the George W. Bush era, NeoCon type of political Far Right. I also had a ridiculous amount of evangelical "Christians" come into my life, trying to recruit me to one of their churches in SoCal, in those early years, 2002-2007. It became very apparent that the Christian Right power structure, a lot of members of the U.S. intelligence agencies, and someone who could get police to put pressure on people in SoCal, were all closely tied together. I never had an undercover say, "Hey, you're smart, you should join Greenpeace," or, "How about that Rachel Maddow show last night?" All the pressure on me was towards evangelical Christianity, and far Right Republican ideology. Yes, I know this statement will rile up many of you, including several friends. But I'm tired of pretending this didn't happen, and tired of not being able to explain why I've struggled to escape homelessness for so many years. This is what happened.
About 2003, I started getting random people in the taxi trying to push me to move to North Carolina
where my parents, and my sister and brother-in-law wound up living. At that time, I was a taxi driver, a Has Been BMX freestyler/skateboard industry guy, living in (my cab) in the Huntington Beach area.
When you live in Southern California, North Carolina is not a place you think of moving to. North Carolina is a place smart, creative, and talented people ESCAPE. Ask artist Shephard Fairey, who grew up in South Carolina. The pressure finally got to the point, after taxi driving died, my health got really bad, and after living a year on the streets, that I accepted my family's offer to fly to NC to stay for a bit. That was mid-November 2008. Remember that time? Not a good time to find a job in a new town. Or anywhere, kind of like now. I got trapped there, and couldn't make enough money to come back to SoCal. So in late 2017, I was living with my mom, in a very toxic environment. I left, and wound up living in a tent in the woods, in Winston-Salem.
The only thing that made me any money then, were my Sharpie drawings, which I sold online. So I would draw at McDonald's, or the library, most of each day. For food money, I went to one of the two Aldi grocery stores in Winston. At Aldi's, you have to put a quarter in a slot to unchain the shopping cart from the rest of them. OK, they call shopping carts "buggies" in NC. When you unload your groceries into your car, you have to push the cart back, click it into the line of carts, and you get your quarter back. That way Aldi's doesn't have to pay a person to push carts. Pretty ingenious.
So I would walk up to people unloading their groceries into their cars, and say, "I'm out of work, can I push your cart back and keep the quarter?" Technically, that's not panhandling. Loitering, maybe, but not panhandling. Most people were happy to let me do that. I'd push carts for 45 minutes or an hour, every couple of days, and get $5-6 for food and bus fare. I spent the rest of my time drawing my Sharpie drawings, planning to work into the Winston-Salem art scene, and to sell my drawings online. That's exactly what happened in the next few months.
Both Aldi stores in Winston had off duty, uniformed police officers, working security. Most of the officers let me push carts for an hour, and occasionally would say, "OK, 'bout time to move on," and I'd leave. But one officer just didn't like me, and he told me to leave the property one afternoon. I was just starting to sell my artwork, and it looked like I might not have to push carts anymore, which was good, from my point of view.
But I ran out of money a couple of weeks later, and went back to push carts. I pushed one cart, got a quarter, and the officer saw me. He got all mad, and told me to leave the property. So I did. I walked a little ways down the road and assessed my situation. I had a quarter. I was hungry. I had an EBT (food stamp) card. It was about 95 degrees out, 300% humidity (give of take), and I didn't have bus fare. It was a 2 1/2 or 3 mile walk to my campsite.
I decided that if I went back into Aldi, and just bought something to eat on my card, and walked straight off the property, I wouldn't be breaking any laws. The cop wouldn't like it, but I'd buy something to eat, eat it at a nearby bus stop, and then see if I could panhandle bus fare or something. So I walked back into the store, the officer saw me, and started to follow me, then walked away. He wound up standing right by the front door, and watched me stand in line, buy a box of 12 donuts, and I walked past him out the door, heading off the property. As I left the front door (where there were no security cameras), he grabbed my shoulder from behind, swung me around, and screamed "You're under arrest!" On instinct, I swung my arm up, and twisted away from him. He grabbed me again, and I realized he was actually going to arrest me, so I let him do it. He threw the donuts on the ground, cuffed me (way too tight, of course), and put me in the back of his police car, and hauled ass to Forsyth County jail, in downtown Winston.
I had no criminal record, at all, at age 51. I got taken into jail and spent a couple hours in a holding cell once, in California, on a traffic ticket warrant that I didn't realize I had. That was my only experience in jail. So I got processed in, and put in a cell. For whatever reason, we were in a 23 and 1 lock down, the whole pod. 23 hours in the cell, alone in my case, and one hour out to take a shower, watch TV, or make phone calls, in the common area.
I was on depression medication at the time, and they didn't give me my psych meds. There's a reason you're not supposed to quit depression meds cold turkey, you go into a detox mode, and get really freaked out and edgy. So that didn't help. I started killing time by playing word games with the jail graffiti. I sat there figuring out how many words I could spell with the letters in "Free Jizzle" or the other tags on the wall. I paced back and forth in the small cell for half and hour or so at a time. I did push-ups against the wall. I was about 325 pounds, I think, way too fat for real push-ups.
But I'm a highly creative, motivated person, and like to keep busy doing something creative, art and writing, mostly. I had no pen, no pencil, no paper. But I had a stack of old, styrofoam dixie cups, plus a new one from each meal. I soon figured out that I could take my tiny toothpaste tube, and use the sharp corner to carve lines in the dixie cups. So I started doing Sharpie-style doodle art, carving lines in the dixie cups. It would take 45 minutes to an hour to do a full cup, and that became my main way to pass the time, as I sat alone in my cell. I did that the first two days.
Here's one of my recent Sharpie doodle art drawings. the designs I was carving into the dixie cups were something like this.
I had no money to bail myself out, and neither did my mom, or the one friend I talked to in that area. So I didn't call anyone. No one knew I'd been arrested. By the end of my second evening in Forsyth County Jail, I had 10 or 11 dixie cups carved with different designs. I had a video court appearance that day, and they dropped the bullshit "resisting" charge. Even the lawyer said it was simply a reflex action, after watching the cops bodycam footage (which the public is NEVER allowed to see in that area). So I had one charge of 2nd degree trespassing," and it looked like I'd be released on my own O.R. the next day, most likely.
That evening, my cell door suddenly opened, and a young black guy, maybe 25 or so, was pushed into my cell. He was really pissed off about something, and started yelling out the cell door as soon as it shut. His buddy was put in the next cell, and he was trying to get the guards to put them together, because they had the same court date, and similar charges. I sat quietly on the bottom bunk as he yelled and thrashed around the cell, thinking to myself, "Well... this could end badly."
The guy ranted and yelled for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, and finally realized he was stuck with some old, fat, sketchy looking white dude as a cell mate. He finally calmed down a little, and then started asking jail questions I didn't know the answers to. "When can we make phone calls?" When do we get canteen?" I told him we were all in the cells for 23 hours a day, and he got pretty mad and ranted a bit more. He told me he'd been in s holding cell all day, had half a sandwich for lunch, and was headed back to federal prison on what he considered a bullshit parole violation.
I finally did what seemed to be the dumbest thing you can do in jail. I said, "Look, I've never been in jail before, I can't answer your questions, but we're in here 23 hours a day and won't get our hour out until about 10:00 am tomorrow morning." He wasn't happy to hear that, but he calmed down a bit. He seemed to at least appreciate I was being straight with him.
"What the hell you been doin' for two days?" he asked.
"Drawing designs on dixie cups, mostly," I answered.
"Wait... what?" I repeated it.
"Show me one," he asked.
Now you can draw your own conclusions on why a young black man, who turned out to be heading back into federal prison on a parole violation, was thrown in my cell, a goofy, old white dude and first timer in jail. My guess is that someone wanted to "teach me a lesson." But who knows?
I grabbed one of the dixie cups with the designs, and handed it up to him, on the top bunk.
"Damn, that's tight!" he replied, after checking out the dixie cup. "Show me another one." So I handed him another one, then about five more. Me, the fat, middle aged, artistic white dude, and the young black ex-con, headed back to a year or two in federal prison, started talking about art. I told him about how I invented Sharpie scribble style, and drew pictures of people like Cam Newton, and rock stars. We wound up talking about all kinds of stuff, for the next hour and a half, or two.
The guy calmed down, the conversation faded, and we fell asleep. By then I was pretty damn sure I wasn't going to have any trouble with him. We got along pretty well once we got talking. So that's how art, designs on dixie cups,saved my ass in jail. I did sleep with my butt against the wall, though, just in case. But things were cool. He actually apologized the next morning, and thanked me for being cool and talking him down when he had been "feelin' some kinda way."
The next morning, a guard came to take me to another video court appearance. I'm pretty sure they expected to find a pool of blood, and pieces of me strewn about the cell. The guard looked surprised when he opened the cell, I walked over, and my cellmate fist bumped me and said, "Keep doin' that art man, and stay outta trouble." I never got the guy's name. I got the OK for release, and they put me in another cell, alone, for the hour or two until the paper work was done and I headed out.
Much to my surprise, I found some footage of the T.O.L. Ramp, the Tower of Love, named after the Huey Lewis song, "Power of Love." It played on the ghetto blaster one day while R.L. Osborn and Ron Wilton (or was it Mke Buff?) were building the ramp in the Wizard Publications parking lot. This is Eddie Fiola, Josh White, and Dino Deluca shredding the TOL a couple of years later, for the G-TVvideo, put out by GT Bikes.
One morning, in the fall of 1986, I think it was on a coffee break, FREESTYLIN' magazine editor Andy Jenikins told Mark "Lew" Lewman, Gork, and myself, that we were going to have a little meeting in the parking lot, after work. He told us he was thinking about pitching the idea of making a second Wizard Publications video, a FREESTYLIN' video, to our boss, Bob Osborn. Oz, as we called him then, was the publisher of two magazines, BMX Action, then ten years old, and FREESTYLIN', about a year and a half old. Andy told us to come up with some ideas for a video, and to keep it quiet, and we'd talk it over that night.
The reason why Andy wanted us to be low key, is because BMX Action magazine, and R.L.'s BMX Action Trick Team made a video about a year earlier, this video:
In those days, in 1985, only pro video production companies had the equipment to make high quality videos. Consumer VHS and Betamax videos were sketchy quality, and "pro-sumer" equipment didn't exist yet. So to make a video, you hired a production company, usually one that spent most of its time making industrial videos, TV commercials for local businesses, and stuff like that. A pro quality video camera then could cost $50,000, and an editing system, easily $250,000 to $500,000. Because of that, making videos, of any kind, was really expensive. I don't know how much the BMX Action video, Rippin', cost, but we suspected it was around $40,000. That is what we heard BMX Plus spent making their freestyle videos. That's like $100,000 or more in today's money. Anyhow, when you hire people who know nothing about the brand new sport of BMX freestyle to make a freestyle video, they make a high quality, well shot, well edited video... that isn't very watchable by 15-year-olds. So the BMX Action video lost a lot of money, and Oz didn't like the subject of videos being brought up. He, like all good businessmen, did not like to lose money.
But a few weeks before our meeting in the parking lot, someone loaned Gork an 8mm video camera, the pre-cursor to Hi-8 video. He started shooting stuff, and since Gork, Lew, and I were roommates, and Andy lived nearby, we experimented with the video camera, did some goofy, funny skits, and shot a little footage of ourselves riding. Then Gork got super motivated for a few days, and edited our best stuff into a little video, we called it the Gork Video. After watching this pretty funny video we made, for no money, Andy had an idea. A good idea. He thought he might be able to sell Oz on the idea of making a FREESTYLIN' video, but doing most of it ourselves, for almost no money. That would make it much more likely to make some money, or at least break even, while promoting the magazine.
So that evening, after Oz and most of the staff had left, Andy, Gork, Lew, and me sat down on the curb, in the shade of the TOL Ramp, and tossed out our ideas for a video. I forget what the other ideas were. My idea was pretty simple, it was pretty much how we lived. We'd leave work on a Friday evening, and just go ride as many different places, with as many different riders as we could, all weekend. It would be the ultimate weekend. Then we'd drag in to the office Monday morning, and go back to work.
Lew and I rode flatland at The Spot in Redondo Beach almost every night, with Craig Grasso and Chris Day. Gork came down to ride 3-4 nights a week. As the editor of BMX Action, he had more responsibility, and more work, then Lew and I. But he got his freestyle on often, anyhow. R.L. Osborn came down there often, and McGoo, then CW freestyle team manager, swung by once in a while, often with Ceppie Maes and John "Dizz" Hicks. Right there were some sessions any freestyler in the country would love to attend... or watch on video.
If there was a contest locally, we'd pack up Gork's van with our posse, and go ride with the best rider in SoCal. Sometimes we'd go session with other groups and scenes, or maybe someone's ramp. So my video idea was just to pack all those sessions we had anyhow, into one weekend, for the video. That idea was soundly rejected by the other three guys. They tossed out their ideas, which I don't remember, and the meeting ended. Andy said he'd do some thinking, and decide whether we should hit up Oz with the idea.
I got laid off a couple of months later, and as far as I know, they never hit up Oz to do another video. This other idea of Lew's, a little thing called Club Homeboy, came along instead. But the thought of doing a video of what seemed like the ultimate weekend, stayed in the back of my mind as I went on to work at the AFA for a year, and then Unreel Productions/Vision, for 2 1/2 more years. In 1990, I self-produced The Ultimate Weekend myself. Now, in 2020, it's the 30 year anniversary of that video, and I'm getting going on the 30th anniversary sequel, The Ultimate Weekend II. Stay tuned...
The insane intro to the 2006 remake of the James Bond classic, Casino Royale. Looking up this clip after the movie came out is how I learned what parkour was. Personally, this is probably my favorite chase scene in any movie ever. The scene I saw last night was pretty much the opposite of this scene.
As you all know, I'm homeless right now. Working making and selling art, I'm scraping by through this Covid-19 shutdown like everyone, but I just can't afford to pay rent for the time being. I sleep on a sidewalk in front of a retail location that seems to be permanently being remodeled. While there are a handful of working people, late night tweekers, and the occasional homeless zombies that wander by at night, people mostly leave me alone.
I was asleep last night, when I woke suddenly to the sound of heavy running footsteps. I leaned up on one elbow, and pushed back the top of my sleeping bag. A stocky guy in boots ran by me. I heard another set of footsteps coming towards me from up the street. I groggily realized that the stocky guy was being chased, but I wasn't sure why, or by whom. A security guard, a solid guy himself, but in much better shape, dressed in all black, ran by me. The stocky guy dove into the open side door of a minivan, parked 50 feet away. Well, "dove" isn't the right word. It's more liked he flopped headfirst onto the floor of the minivan, legs still outside the van. He screamed "Go! Go! Go!" to the driver.
The security guard stopped about ten feet past me, as the minivan started to take off. But the stocky guy was only half in, so as the van tried to roll away, his feet dragged on the ground, nearly pulling him out of the van, and he yelled something. It was like a comedy chase scene from a movie or something. The van was trying to take off, but the fat guy was being dragged along, halfway in, halfway out. Imagine Chris Farley doing a spoof of the Casino Royale scene above, it was something like that.
About that time, my head cleared enough to realize that the security guard was from the weed, excuse me, cannabis dispensary a couple buildings up, and the stocky guy trying to make a getaway was stealing weed, apparently. The security guard could have tackled the stocky guy, while he was hanging out of the van, and I think he would have won that scuffle. But he stopped. From his point of view, there could have been three people in the van, a gun, a knife, a pit bull, who knows. So he ultimately made the smart move. But hey, I was just a spectator, I wanted to see him go balls out and tackle the guy.
The minivan slammed on the brakes, the stocky guy got his arms and legs all going, like a baby sea turtle, swimming for the protection of the sea. He climbed further into the van, and it hit the gas and took off. Not a clean getawat at all, but a getaway none-the-less. I was laying there, propped up on my elbow, sort of laughing at the crazy scene, and the security guard turned and looked back at me. H didn't say anything, but it was like he was mad at me. I was thinking, "Hey, I'm not the one getting paid to protect the weed, man, that's your job." He walked back up to their door, and started talking to another worker.
I didn't even realize that place was a dispensary until recently, since it's mixed in with a bunch of entertainment industry businesses. I thought it was some kind of studio. People would work late, and occasionally cars would stop and go in. But this weekend, with the holiday after the Covid-19 shelter at home period, the place was cranking. It seemed everybody was needing some weed.
I've seen weird shit on the streets, but that was one of the funniest looking incidents. OK, who wants a Sharpie drawing? I really need to rent a room. Shit's weird outside at night.
The main skateboard montage from the 2001 movie Extreme Days. You can see the bigger of the two launch ramps I built at :43 and 1:29 in the clip, when they ollie and air the dumpster off it. The skate montage is decent, for the time. The movie, however, is one of the worst ever made.
I was sitting in the Denny's at Beach and Ellis in Huntington Beach, in the spring of 2000. I was freshly back from one of the coolest weeks of my life. A few weeks before, I went to a book signing with activist Julia "Butterfly" Hill, seen here, coming down after living for two years in a redwood tree, to keep the 600 year old tree from being cut down. I heard about the book signing in Santa Monica on KPFK radio, and went there one night in my taxi. Much to my surprise, longtime BMX industry guy, Frank Scura, was there, working with Julia. He's the one who introduced me to her.
After meeting her, and hearing her talk that night, I read her book, about living for two years, 180 feet up in a tree. I spent much of my childhood wandering around the local woods. But I'd never seen the huge redwoods in person. I decided I needed to drive up the California coast, which I'd never done, solo, and go see the giant redwood trees. The next day, I dropped off my taxi, packed up my Datsun 280ZX, and headed north.
It was one of the most epic weeks of my life, but that's a story for another day. I shot video of the trip, and later made a 20 minute video of me driving up the coast, seeing young elephant seals, going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where I saw wild sea otters and a seal, in addition to the fish inside. I went to Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco, after driving across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time. That's where I saw my first redwood trees. Then I continued north, and spent a few more days driving around redwood country, walking around, and even inside, huge redwoods. You can't even begin to comprehend those huge, old trees in photos or video. You have to see them in person. I hit Pinnacles National Park on the way back south, and then headed back to Huntington Beach, where I had been living in my taxi for a few months.
With a kind of mellow natural high going, I headed to Denny's for a big meal. I was going to figure out what to do next. The plan was to maybe get a room for the night, and then go back to taxi driving the next morning.
Then I overheard a couple of guys talking at a nearby table. They were part of a crew making a movie, and the director wanted some skateboard ramps built for it. I'd heard that kind of talk a lot while working in the Studio City/North Hollywood area, years before. But it was unusual to hear in Huntington Beach.
The director wanted a ramp, so skateboarders could jump over a bunch of barrels. You know, because that's what skateboarders do naturally, build ramps and jump over barrels. Apparently the guy had seen one of those old videos of Tom Sims or someone jumping barrels in 1972. I decided to ask the guys what they really needed. So I walked over, said, "Hi," and told them I overheard them, and that I used to work for a skateboard company. They told me what their director wanted, and even they knew jumping barrels was dumb, but hey, directors ask for dumb shit all the time. They had no idea where to find a skateboard ramp builder. The internet still wasn't widely used for things like that in 2000. I knew how to build launch ramps, which is what they needed, I'd worked in the TV industry a few years before, so I knew how production worked. I just happened to be the right guy, at the right time, with the right skills. That's how you find work in "Hollywood." Except I wasn't even looking.
I walked out of Denny's with a verbal contract to build two big skateboard launch ramps, and a "handrail," for $500. In typical Hollywood fashion, I had 48 hours to get the job done, and deliver it to a site in Hollywood. No problem. Of course, I was living in my car, a 280ZX, and had no real carpentry tools, and no place to work. Details. I'd worked on 300 TV episodes of several TV shows, I knew that doing the impossible immediately was standard operating procedure. Luckily, I did have some money in the bank, which made the job possible.
I drove over to my old apartment on 15th street, in downtown H.B., and asked my former roommates if I could borrow the driveway out back for a day. They were both cool guys... and stoners... so they were mellow, and said, "Go for it." My next stop was Home Depot, where I bought a couple of power saws, plywood, 2 X 4's, a screw gun, screws, and other things I needed. I went back to 15th street, and got to work. The producer guys I talked to said they wanted ramps four feet high, which is huge for a skate launch ramps or. I also had no idea what they would really be jumping over, or onto. So I decided on a short, steep ramp, and a longer, mellow one. So I made a 6 foot transition, 4 foot high ramp, and a 9 or 10 foot transition (I forget exactly), 4 foot tall ramp. I got the transitions drawn out, and and everything ready to go, and left it in my old roommates' garage. I got a motel room for the night, got a pizza and a good night's sleep, and came out ready to work the next day.
Working alone, it took longer than I expected, and I got the wood cut, and started putting them together in the early afternoon. But my old roommates lived in a sixplex, where 5 cars packed into the little driveway area every night. As afternoon came along, I realized I needed to move everything, I also needed a U-Haul to transport the ramps, and I needed a place to work late into the night. It was going to be a tough night to get the ramps done, and take them to Hollywood, by the 7 am call time the next morning.
I packed everything up, and bought my old roommates a 12 pack for letting me use their driveway. I drove up to a place in the San Fernando Valley. In fact, it's only about a block from where I'm sitting right now, pirating wifi, to write this blog post. There's a huge banked wall I used to ride my bike on, behind a shopping center. The place has huge lights on it all night. Out of sight, and well lit. Perfect. I pulled the U-Haul behind the building, and got to work plying the ramps. I called around earlier that day, trying to find a portable grind rail, but couldn't find one that somebody had pre-built, so I just blew it off.
A couple of people wandered behind the shopping center, and asked what I was doing. I told them I was making skateboard ramps for a movie, and needed a well lit place to finish working. They were cool with that, and there was no drama. I finished the ramps about 2:30 am, as I recall. With no traffic, and half asleep, I drove back over the hill to Hollywood. The location was a church, right in Hollywood itself. (Yes, there are churches in Hollywood, city of "sinners"). I pulled into the church parking lot, and fell asleep in the cab of the U-Haul.
I woke up to the sounds of somebody talking nearby. The first couple of producers showed up about 6:30 am, and started getting things organized. They wanted me to just leave the ramps. But I wanted to stay and see who was skating on them, and just hang out on the shoot. For one thing, I knew what a craft service table was, there's always free food on movie shoots. I asked them if they had people to move the ramps, which were big and heavy? The producers looked at each other. "Tell you what," I said, "I'll stay and move them wherever you want, no charge." They were cool with that, so I stayed.
An hour or so later, the skaters showed up, three of them. The only one I'd heard of was Chet Thomas, part of Powell Peralta's Bones Brigade then, as I recall. The steep ramp was good for rock 'n rolls, but way to steep to launch to flat. But the big, mellow ramp worked well. They ended up ollie-ing and airing over a dumpster, off the ramp. You can see that in the clip above. They also ollied over a VW Thing car, with the stars of the movie in it. So I hung out, had fun, and got a little crap about not getting a rail. But I got a couple of free meals, the shoot bought me a bunch of tools, and one of the producers wanted the steeper ramp for his kid. We put it in his pick-up. I took the other ramp back to Huntington Beach. I wound up donating it to a little skate park in Seal Beach, where it lived happily ever after. Hey, it's a movie story, it has to have a happy ending, right? I got paid my $500 a couple of weeks later, and that was my first and only movie job (as opposed to TV production), on an absolutely horrible movie. That's Hollywood.
Here's a better example of Chet Thomas skating. As a bonus, a couple of these shots are from Huntington Beach. Cool. Full circle.
