My Best Halloween Story

The first year I worked Halloween in Huntington Beach, California as a taxi driver, I really wasn't expecting much.  My first call of the night came from an apartment in the city/state streets, a few blocks from downtown.  My customers came walking out, laughing, already a couple drinks into the night's festivities.  The two 20-something women were both really attractive, and dressed as sexy Catholic school girls.  Their boyfriends followed them out, both in what looked like black choir robes.  "What are you guys?" I asked.  One of the guys answered, "They're naughty Catholic schoolgirls, and we're priests."  Both guys held up small wooden paddle ball paddles they had on lanyards around their necks."  The women bent over, allowing the guys to give them a couple taps on the butt with the paddles.  They were a fun group to talk to, and as I dropped them off, I realized that driving a taxi on Halloween might be a really cool thing.  It was.  Everyone was in costume, joking around and laughing, with a lot less drama than most nights. Halloween became one of my favorite nights of the year to be a taxi driver.

The next year, I was living in my taxi, working 7 days a week, and thinking about dressing up.  The best idea I could think of would be to dress up as a crash test dummy.  I thought that would be pretty funny in the cab all night.  But I worked way to many hours a day, and couldn't get it together.  So I decided to dress up as Travis Bickle, the crazy role Robert Deniro played in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver.  That's him in the drawing above, I drew that to commemorate by time as a taxi driver.  I went to a hair salon, and an Asian lady had a hell of a good time shaving my head into a Mohawk.  She'd never been asked to do that before, and couldn't believe I really wanted it, even for Halloween.  To be honest, she cut it a bit long, and I looked a little more like Howard Jones than Deniro.  I bought a camo T-shirt, because I was too fat for the Army field jacket that Deniro wore.  Then I got a cheap pair of "Unabomber" mirror sunglasses, to finish it off.  I drove around downtown HB, waiting for my first call.  A lot of people noticed my costume and got a laugh out of it as I drove around.

But, apparently not everyone was laughing.  My first call was at a real nice house in the suburbland near Springdale and Talbert.  A solidly built guy, not in costume, walked out.  As I drive him downtown, he immediately asked about my look.  I told him I was dressing as Robert Deniro in Taxi Driver, the most iconic taxi character of all time.  The man told me he was an off-duty HB police officer.  "You're not going to wear that costume around Huntington Beach."  I thought it was a question, so I responded, "Sure I am, that's where the business is."  In a much more forceful voice, he repeated, "Your ARE NOT going to wear that costume driving a cab in Huntington Beach."  I realized he was being serious.  If you lived in HB in the 80's or 90's, you know what I mean.  "C'mon, man, I said, "it's Halloween!"  I dropped him off downtown, and he obviously wasn't happy I was there.  But most of my passengers loved the costume.

Later that night, about midnight or so, I picked up a guy dressed as a pimp.  He was a 20-something white guy, in a crazy purple suit, with a huge, large brimmed hat with fur around the edge.  He'd drank his fill, and was heading home to Costa Mesa early. 

I headed up Adams street, and had a green light to cross Brookhurst when a raised, Toyota pick-up came screaming out of the parking lot on the left, about 100 yards in front of us.  The truck peeled out to the right, hit a median strip he apparently didn't see, then shot across three lanes in front of my cab.  The truck hit swerved back to the left, side swiped the curb, and rolled over onto its side, then its top on the sidewalk.  I hit the brakes as we approached, and the truck rolled back onto its right side. 

The pimp and I both screamed, "Oh Shit!"  I looked back at him.  "Sorry man, this is serious, I gotta stop."  He nodded, and I pulled over near the truck and turned on my flashers.  Nobody thinks of it, but when you're driving around constantly as a taxi driver, you wind up being the first responder to accidents on a regular basis.  I was afraid I'd walk up and find an arm or something hanging out of the truck.  The roof was partially smashed in, but not completely.  Before I could even get my phone up, a skinny kid, about 18, slid out the right passenger window, upside down, head first, which was right by the ground.  Much to my surprise, he jumped up to his feet, and yelled at me, "Help me get my truck rolled back over before the cops come, I got an empty 12 pack in the cab."

I looked back at the pimp, ten feet behind me on the sidewalk.  He, too was shaking his head, wondering how this kid had even survived.  I looked across the street, a woman was already on her cell phone calling 911.  I looked at the kid, "Dude, there's no way your getting out of this one... seriously, are you OK?" 


The pimp really wanted to get home, but we stayed, taxi meter turned off, until the police showed up a few minutes later.  As I drove off, the pimp said, "I'm glad we weren't 100 yards farther up the road, that crazy fool would've T-boned us."  "Me too," I replied.  The rest of that Halloween night in the cab was fun, but my Halloween story trumped all those of my passengers that night.

The Dream of Living in a Warehouse

The BMX movie Rad and the bicycle messenger movie Quicksilver both came out around the same time, 1986, as I recall.  Even though I was a hardcore BMX freestyler then, I was really bummed out by Rad, because it was such a ridiculous story.  At the time, I was much more stoked on Quicksilver, which had an actual freestyle jam circle scene in it, even if it was with road and fixed gear bikes.  It did have Woody Itson and Martin Aparijo doing what they could on the big wheel bikes, along with veteran stunt rider Pat Romano.

Then there was this corny dance scene, which really sparked something in me.  No, I wasn't dreaming of dating a ballet dancer.  Well, not that often, anyhow.  But I loved the idea of living in a huge open area in a warehouse, like this scene.  I thought it would be so cool to be able to ride flatland in my living room.  I didn't tell anyone, but I secretly wished I could someday live in a space like that.

That idea was actually sparked when I was a kid by the TV detective show Vegas.  Dan Tanna, the private detective in the show, drove a red, '57 Ford T-Bird, and parked it in his living room, which was in a non-descript warehouse in Las Vegas.  My dad always watched the show, and we both thought that was the coolest place to live... open the car door, get out of the car, grab a drink, and sit on the couch a few feet away.

Only months after Quicksilver came out, I got hired at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, and started a new life in the BMX industry in Southern California.  As expensive as SoCal real estate was, it was obvious the warehouse life wasn't going to happen.  Like so many dreams we all have at one time or another, it faded into the deep recesses of my mind.  I went on to live many different places, have well over a hundred roommates, and did many different types of work.

After an injury in 1999, I became a taxi driver, which was a tough way to make a living.  I wound up living in my taxi for a few months, and taking showers at the gym as I learned the ropes.  Once I did, things went pretty well, and I lived most of the year 2000 in Huntington Beach, California, able to support myself by working only weekends in the cab.  Things were looking up.  Then a accident at the DMV invalidated my driver's license by mistake.  Things got sketchy quick, and I spent a couple years telemarketing and working at a restaurant while I got the mess worked out.

On Labor Day weekend, 2003, I went back to taxi driving.  It took about a month to get back in the groove and figure out where the nightlife was, which was where I made my money giving rides.  Just as I started making decent money, the taxi company took out our radios and replaced them with dispatching computers.  The whole business changed literally overnight.  I was living in the cab and working seven days a week, 14 to 18 hours most days.  In the next two years I only took five full days off.  I gained 100 pounds, lost all  energy, and my focused on nothing but making money day after day.  I had given up all creative pursuits and became a cranky taxi driver struggling to pay the taxi lease each week.  Most people don't realize that taxi drivers have to pay about $600 a week to rent the cab, and pay out another $300 a week in gas.  It's a tough gig.

Then, in late summer 2005, a taxi driver I knew named Richard offered me a different deal.  In addition to driving a taxi, he owned an indie art gallery named AAA Electra 99.  I rented wall space in the gallery to put up poems I'd written years before.  By 2005, the gallery had moved to a small industrial unit in Anaheim.  Richard's deal was this, I would rent his taxi on the weekends, work the bars and clubs like I always did, then I could live in the gallery during the week real cheap.  I thought about it for a few days, then took him up on it.  You can get a look at Electra here.

It took me about a day to actually realize that my dream of living in a warehouse not only came true, but it was a warehouse crammed full of art and kitsch, a creative environment if I ever saw one.  The only downside was that I didn't have a freestyle bike, but I was too fat to ride one anyhow then.

On my second night at the empty gallery, I was sitting in the tiny bathroom taking a dump.  The bathroom there was plastered with band flyers on all four walls and the ceiling.  I didn't really have to take anything in to read, because it was cool to just check out the flyers.  But for some reason, I'd taken a pencil and post-it note pad in with me.  I think I was making a list of things I had to do that week as I adjusted to me new home.  I sat there and drew a little drawing of Mickey Mouse (I was in Anaheim, after all) watching a concert and throwing the heavy metal sign with his three fingered hand.  It felt so good just to draw again.

When I finished, I got some Scotch tape and taped the Mickey drawing on the bathroom wall.  From then my creative juices just started pouring out.  I slept about 14 hours a day the first couple of weeks, trying to make up for two years of sleeping 4 to 5 hours a day in a parking lot in the cab.  I ordered pizza, and just started making posters of my poems.  I played with different ways of coloring with markers.  One day, my "scribble style" Sharpie drawing just happened.  I liked the way it let me shade with markers, and I've been drawing in that way for the 11 years since.  I never gave up on creativity again after my months living at Electra.  When I did go back to driving a cab full time, I drew pictures while sitting in the cab on my downtime.  It was my time living my dream in a warehouse art gallery, and drawing as P.A., the gallery momma cat and her six kittens roamed around my feet, that led to actually making a few bucks from my artwork over the past year.  Here's my latest, my take on a classic photo of street rider Vic Murphy launching an incredible 1 footed tabletop off a curb.  It's funny how things work out.

The End of Pipeline Skatepark

There's a documentary out, and a damn good one, about Mat Hoffman called The Birth of Big Air.  I imagine most of you reading this have seen it.  But it's about the birth of mega airs off mega ramps.  The real birth of big air started at Pipeline Skatepark with Eddie Fiola.  In the clip above we see Eddie in his heyday, rockin' a sticker Mohawk and 1 3/8" rims just to add a little flair to the whole thing.  Eddie wasn't the first guy to do airs.  Bob Haro did airs in early skateparks and later on the first quarterpipes.  R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff did airs.  But Eddie Fiola, in the incredibly gnarly Pipe Bowl at Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, took the aerial to a whole new level.  From three or foot airs on a quarterpipe, Eddie pushed it to the seven and eight foot out range.  And it wasn't on a six foot QP.  The Pipe Bowl had eight foot transition and four solid feet of vert.  How many of the guys doing insanely high airs today can get eight foot out of a transition with four feet of vert?  Soon after Brian Blyther and Mike Dominguez were blasting that high too.  NorCal crazy man Hugo Gonzales, local Jeff Carroll and upstart Steve McCloud got up in that range as well.

There were other contests at other skateparks in the early 80's put on by Bob Morales, but the biggest air always seemed to be at Pipeline.  I first saw magazine photos of the skatepark and riders in BMX Plus! in '82 or '83 as a high school kid in Idaho.  I thought those guys were completely nuts.  I couldn't even imagine riding those huge pools, let alone airing out of them.  Somehow, in a course of events that still amazes me, I wound up part of the BMX/freestyle industry in the late 1980's.  Even crazier, my boss in 1988 and '89 was Don Hoffman, whose parents owned Pipeline.  I bought Mike Sarrail's old truck a couple weeks before Pipeline closed, and made it up there five or six times in those last couple weeks.  That was enough to learn one line in the Pipe bowl and one line in the insane Combi Pool.  I couldn't even come close to airing out, but I could carve tile in the round half of the combi and where tile would be in the Pipe Bowl, as well as get a bit over vert in the full pipe.

But the real fun for me came after the park closed.  Don was the head producer at Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  I was The Dub Guy at Unreel, meaning I spent most of my time making copies of different videos for people throughout the Vision empire.  But I was also the lowest guy on the totem pole, and I got asked whenever someone needed a little help.  Don had all kinds of video ideas he wanted to try before Pipeline got bulldozed.  At the same time, several skaters in the Vision woodshop were Pipeline locals; Chuck Hultz, Kelly Belmar, and Chris Robinson, too, I think.  So Don and I would head up to Pipeline nearly every weekend to shoot video of those guys and Steve and Micke Alba, Eric Nash and a few others.

I wasn't getting paid for helping out, but I was allowed to bring my bike in and ride.  So I'd shoot a little video of the skaters, help Don trying different ideas, and then I'd be able to go ride Pipeline... all alone most of the time for a half hour or so.  Then I'd go back to shooting video of the skaters again.  It was epic all the way around.

I also got to call a couple of riders, mainly Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther, to see if they wanted to session a while.  So at times I would be inside the Pipe Bowl, a 35 pound, $50,000 betacam on my shoulder, while Eddie and Brian swooped by me at speed and did their lines and airs around the pool.  Then I'd ride a little on my own.  Then I'd get the SVHS camera, and shoot wide shots of the skaters in the Combi.  Meanwhile, Don was trying to get some "point of view" or P.O.V. footage of the skaters.  At one point we literally bolted an SVHS-C camera to the top of a skate helmet.  But the camera weighed 3 or 4 pounds, which messed with the skaters' balance.  We also quickly learned that skaters don't look where they're skating half the time.  So that footage sucked.  Then Don got Micke and Steve Alba to do their old doubles lines, with the guy in back holding the camera in his hand, pointing at the guy in front, and that looked really cool.  This was decades before ultra-light GoPro cameras that make this kind of video so easy to shoot today.  And Unreel couldn't afford the expensive "lipstick" camera set-ups that were the smallest video cameras out back then.

During this time that we were having these weekend sessions, Don's parents, Stan and Jean, were starting the process of cleaning out the pro shop, and getting the park ready for its demolition.  That included taking down the fences around and in between the bowls.  On one hand, this allowed for some lines and transfers that head never been possible before.  On the other hand, it messed up some lines.  One weekend Eddie showed up, put his helmet on, and rolled into the Pipe bowl like he always had.  If you watch the video above, you'll see that doing a footplant on the fence behind the full pipe was part of Eddie's line.  What he didn't realize when he rolled in was that Stan had taken down that fence that week.  I was sitting on my bike in by the front of the bowl, and I heard this "AAAAAaaaaaaauuggh!" from Eddie. I couldn't figure out what had happened.  Eddie flew out for his typical footplant on the five foot high fence, only to find there was no fence.  So he did an awkward kickstand landing on the concrete from over five feet out.  He tried riding a bit more, but finally said that he relied so much on that fence being there, that it totally messed up his lines.  He didn't come back after that.

I think Brian was trying 720 flyouts out of the Pipe bowl, possible because a fence had been taken down.  As crazy as it sounds, I wasn't watching.  I think I was busy shooting video of the skaters, and saw him out of the corner of my eye.  I think he pulled a few, but I can't remember for sure.  720's, even on a flyout jump, were amazing in 1989.  As for myself, I found a cool line out of one of the small bowls in the back.  It was either the 4 foot or 6 foot deep bowl.  I would get some speed, roll through it, flyout and land in a short nosewheelie then go into the ditch.  It was a ten or twelve foot gap, not huge by any means, but I'd never seen anyone jump a few feet, do a short nosewheelie, and then go straight to landing in the ditch.  So it felt really good.  I kept tagging my back wheel on the edge of the ditch, but it was still cool.

Eddie and Brian came by to ride a few times, but then they took off on their tours or something.  So the last few weekends it was Don, me, and 6 or 8 pool skaters.  Don got to try a whole bunch of new videos ideas, and got some really cool footage out of it.  I got to ride Pipeline all by myself several times, and with Eddie and Brian a few times.  And the OG pool skaters got their last epic sessions in the most legendary skatepark bowl ever.

One time after everyone was pretty tired, we all just sat on the edge of the square part of the Combi pool, feet dangling into it.  Steve Alba.  Micke Alba.  The wood shop guys I mentioned earlier.  We were all drinking Gatorade or something, and the skaters were looking for lines they'd never tried before.  And they found a bunch.  I just watched as one would point, "what if I did a grind over there... then carved this way, then hit that wall..."  It was a fly on the wall moment for me, one of those times when it's just a magical moment... and you actually realize at the time it is, so you just let it happen.  Then they got up and actually tried a few of those new lines as Don and I shot video.  One my last day there, several of the skaters pulled blue tiles from the shallow end as a keepsake.  Once they walked away, I pried off 6 or 8 blue tiles for myself.  Those tiles sat in my nightstand drawer for more than a decade, before finally getting lost in a move.

Then it ended.  I didn't go up to the skatepark for the final session.  The Pipe bowl was already gone at that point, and we'd shot all the video we would ever use... and then some.  Then it was gone.

Here's video of the last skate session in Pipeline's Combi Pool, followed by a clip of Jeff Grosso and Steve Alba talking about those days.

Last session at Pipeline

Jeff Grosso 's Loveletters to skateboarding: Badlands part 1

Random Stories From a Weird Life

I went out to lunch with a friend today who I've known for about three years.  Somehow we got on the subject of TV shows, and I started telling him a few random stories about my days working on the crew of American Gladiators and a couple other shows in the early 1990's.  After one story he said something like "I've never heard you talk about that before."  My response was something along the lines of, "Yeah, I've got tons of weird stories.  One of my old skate friends keeps telling me I should write a book about my taxi driving days, but I never get around to it."  I've joked now and then about having hardly any money but tons of stories.  I know, everyone has stories.  But not stories of people having sex in their taxi for an hour, or moving Harry Potter's castle (twice) or seeing a mountain lion up close while being homeless.  Oh yeah... and the taxi driver stories, the TV crew guy stories, the furniture mover stories (seriously, there needs to be a furniture mover "reality" show), and homelessness stories, not to mention stories from my BMX and skate industry days.  I've written over 700 BMX stories in previous blogs, and only made it from 1982 to 1987.  In this blog I'll just wander through the memory banks and see what pops up.  Anything to keep you entertained in your cubicle when you're supposed to be working.  We'll see how it goes...