Here's a regular at the AFA local California contests in 1987, Jeff Cotter, with a smokin' hot flatland routine in 1988. Jeff and his younger brother Tim were at pretty much every American Freestyle Association contest in Southern California, local or Masters Series. He was part of what we called the Lakewood crew, which included Ron McCoy, Nathan Shimizu, Ron Camero, and a few others. By 1988, he was sponsored by Ozone and Vision Street Wear.
Since I'm (more or less) living up in the San Fernando Valley again, one local AFA contest from 1987 popped into my had recently. During my stint as the newsletter editor/photographer for the American Freestyle Association newsletter in 1987, I did a whole bunch of other stuff as well, because that's what happens in a small business with only 3 or 4 employees. Two or three months into my work at the AFA, owner Bob Morales bought a 30 foot long box trailer from Gary Turner, the "G. T." behind GT Bikes. Gary owned a dragster at that point, and Bob bought his old dragster trailer when Gary upgraded to a better one. It was about twice as big of a trailer as we needed to haul the basic AFA gear to a contest, but the price was right.
I had never pulled a trailer behind a car or truck before, and I was the main driver of the AFA Ford van, and I had to quickly learn how to drive with a huge ass trailer following me. That was one time being uptight and completely anal retentive was a good trait. I was super careful, and managed to never scratch that monster trailer, and got pretty dang good at driving with a trailer over the next several months.
Another aspect of having a trailer, is how to load it. To go to an AFA local contest, we had our 8 foot high, wooden Socko quarterpipe, a couple of four foot high, really heavy speakers, two or three boxes of T-shirts, little posts and rope rope off the contest area, and some folding tables and chairs. The quarterpipe, with kickers off, we could roll into the trailer, and it fit right over the wheel wells inside. It locked right in place, which was really cool. Then we would just put all the other stuff in the back of the trailer, behind the quaterpipe, that made it all easy to unload.
The AFA Ford van with the big, 30 foot box trailer, became a 49 foot long rig. That's not as long as a standard tractor trailer rig, but it's bigger than most things on the freeway. My first, trip of any length, was a night drive up the 405 freeway to Northridge. For those of you not in or from Southern California, Northridge is best known as the site of the big, 6.7 magnitude earthquake, in 1994. That's the most destructive earthquake that has happened in the 34 years since I first moved to SoCal. But this story happened in 1987, seven years before the big earthquake.
We had an AFA local contest scheduled for the next morning, in a corner of a big parking lot, at a fairgrounds-type place, where the Devonshire downs BMX track was located. We decided to drive up the night before, rather than battle 50 miles of traffic, potentially 4 hours in traffic, on Saturday morning. Bob drove his BMW, following me and our two "roadies," a couple of Huntington Beach local skinheads. Yeah, skinheads. While we didn't agree with their ideology, they worked cheap, and were pretty cool for the most part. In those days, a lot of young guys had friends who became skinheads, so they became skinheads, but weren't walking being racist assholes all the time. That's kind of how these two were. They looked the part, but were more just punkers than crazy racists. The cool thing about young skinheads was that they would gladly do $5 worth of work for $2 worth of beer. Saving money was a priority at the AFA, and Bob was a master a getting things done cheap.
We took off, and not long after I got going on the freeway, I realized that our new trailer was kind of squirrelly over about 45 miles an hour. As I got going at about 55 mph, the big trailer started swaying side to side a little bit, maybe a foot each way. I did my best to keep the rig riding well, but it was nervewracking, and I just cruised along at about 50, as other cars swerved around us, and honked on a regular basis.
Somewhere around LAX airport, the thing I was hoping to avoid happened, I saw flashing lights in the rear view mirror. I pulled over, and Bob and his then girlfriend Suzy Q, pulled over behind the CHP car. The highway patrol officer walked up, and asked the basic questions to see if I was drunk or something. I told him the trailer was just kind of squirrelly, and I was doing my best to keep it in my lane. That, of course, wasn't good enough. A second CHP car pulled up, and Bob talked to the two officers, told him he owned the van and trailer, and tried to work things out. Just to make things even more fun, I really had to take a leak, and was hoping they'd decide to just give me a warning... quickly. Then I could pull over and take a leak at a restaurant or something.
Nope, that wasn't in the cards. As I joked with the skinheads about just taking a leak on the side of the road, and taking the second ticket, we waited. The officers took a full 45 minutes or so to actually flip through a copy of the California Vehicle Code (pre-internet days), and find a code they could ticket me for. As my dad would say, I had to whiz so bad that my back teeth were floating and my eye teeth were singing "Anchors Away," by the time they handed me a ticket to sign. I accepted the citation for the obscure offense of "trailer not tracking properly," and we got back underway. We stopped to hit the restroom shortly afterwards, and then made it up to the Devonshire Downs site without incident.
The parking lot reserved for our flatland a ramp contest was rough asphalt, and really old asphalt. And there were potholes. I'm not talking little six inch diameter potholes an inch or two deep, there were six or eight inch deep holes in the parking lot, big enough to ride a BMX bike into and then jump out the other side. It was ridiculous. Bob found our contact, and tried to negotiate a better chunk of parking lot, but it was a no go. So, in the dark, we set up the quarterpipe, with as straight as possible run up to it. We set up our stanchions, roped off the contest area, and set up the speakers and sound system. There was a fair, or carnival type thing, going on, and their security was supposed to keep an eye on our stuff until the fair shut down for the night.
I think Bob and Suzy had a hotel room for the night, and the skinheads and I were going to crash in the van, on site, to keep an eye on our ramp and equipment after the fair closed for the night. With everything set up, Bob and Suzy headed off to the hotel, and the skinheads and me were hungry. There was no cheap fast food in sight. One of the guys flagged down a car, and a couple of upscale guys said there were a couple fast food places a mile or so away. Somehow, one of the skinheads talked these yuppie guys into giving our grungy asses a ride. The guys talked non-stop, and we realized they were pretty much coked out. They dropped us off as Carl's Jr. or Del Taco, or whatever it was, and claimed they were going to run a couple errands, and then come back by, and give us a ride back to the event site.
The three of us had a cheap dinner, and the skinheads took their money Bob paid them, and bought a couple of 40's of beer. Surprisingly, the two yuppie guys came back, but they got really paranoid about us, and didn't want to give us a ride back. The skinheads said they must have chalked up another line and drifted off into coke paranoia. Since it was dark when they gave a ride to the restaurant, we hadn't paid attention, and didn't even know how to get back to the event site. The paranoid yuppies pointed us in the right direction, and took off. So the skinheads and I walked a mile and a half or so, back to our contest site. Luckily no police rolled by, since the skinheads started working on their beers as we walked.
Back at the AFA van, they chilled out to drink the rest of their 40's, and I was able to get a wristband from our contact, and I wandered around the fair for a while. I wound up watching a really good cover band, playing a stage near the back gate, close to our contest area. I remember the banded ended their set with a kick ass cover of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," and I headed out the back gate as fair closed down.
Back in our van, the skinheads were happily buzzed, and telling stories and were pretty mellow. I grabbed my bike, and rode a little, jumping out of the crazy potholes and joking with the skinheads. It was a pretty warm night, and as we started thinking about crashing out for the night, I joked, "I should sleep on top of the quarterpipe tonight." It quickly went from a joke, to what seemed like a cool idea. So I grabbed my sleeping bag, climbed up on the 4' by 8' deck of the quarterpipe, laid out my sleeping bag, and went to sleep. The skinheads crashed out in the van, not far away.
The next thing I remember was feeling the wood below me rock, hear the buzz of tires on the ramp, and heard someone yell, "Whoa!" I opened my eyes, half asleep, trying to figure out where the hell I was. I looked out of my sleeping bag, and all I saw was sky all around me. From somewhere below, I heard a voice say, "There's someone sleeping on top of the ramp." The voices below wondered if some bum had climbed up on the ramp overnight, and I woke up enough to remember I was sleeping on top of the AFA quarterpipe. I sat up, and the guys below said, "Hey, it's Steve!" and started laughing. I forget which riders it was, but it was one of the small groups of riders that was at every local AFA contest. It may have been the Lakewood guys, because I remember when I sat up, I saw Jeff Cotter roll into one of the potholes, and jump out, doing a small no footer. Jeff was a hardcore flatlander, and I knew he had a quaterpipe at home, but I'd never seen him jump anything. Still waking up, I remember thinking, "Whoa, Cotter can jump?"
By that time, several of the riders rolled over and started asking me if I actually slept on the quarterpipe all night, which they thought was pretty funny. I started talking to those guys standing there, as other riders started hitting the quarterpipe, while I was sitting on top. Someone asked why I slept on the ramp, and I told them the skinheads were crashed out in the van. So immediately, a couple guys started knocking on the sides of the van to wake up the skinheads, who were not very happy with the wake-up call, since they were kind of hung over.
I climbed down from the deck of the ramp, and everyone started practicing on the ramp, and joking about the horrible potholes in the parking lot. That turned quickly into little trains hitting the bigger potholes and jumping out, trying can-cans, no footers, X-ups, and lookbacks. After that it turned into a normal, local AFA contest. But it's the only AFA contest that year where riders were actually jumping out of potholes and doing variations during their flatland runs. That was the joke of the day.
We held the contest, and as usual, I worked during it, then jumped on my bike and competed in flatland, and then helped tear everything down, along with our skinhead roadies and Bob, Suzy, and probably Riki, Bob's sister, who worked at the AFA. We made the long trip back to Huntington Beach that night. The big trailer and van were squirrelly, again, but we made it back without incident. Then we took the skinheads bowling.
Check out my new mash-up book/blog thing about the future:
Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now
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