Steve Emig: The White Bear blog- 676 posts, 2 1/2 years, over 96,000 pageviews, and...
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Saturday, February 22, 2020
The shit I never blog about...
Gotta listen to the lyrics at the start. It was either this or "Beds are Burning" by Midnight Oil.
As most of you know, I'm currently homeless again, after a 2 month reprieve staying in a friend's spare room in Newport Beach. It was supposed to (and did) rain last night, so I was next to a road, under a bridge, out of the rain, under my trusty, $9 U-Haul blanket, and a sleeping bag. Pretty decent and warm set-up, as homelessness goes.
"Put your ass over his head and take a selfie," I heard early this morning. I had my covers over my head, and I've heard more weird shit than you can possibly imagine, while living on the streets, so priority one was figuring out if I was awake or not. I just laid there. More voices, young guys, sounded like 3 or 4, maybe 60-80 feet away, pretty belligerent sounding. "That homeless guy over there, put your ass over his head and take a selfie," one guy dared another. Real voices, I was awake. Not a dream. Fuck. Then laughter. Yep, I was awake, I could hear hardly any traffic, and it was pretty quiet out, which meant early morning, 3 or 4 am, was my guess.
"No, take a shit on his head and take a picture." OK, hearing stupid people, most likely drunk, is not great in the morning for average people, especially if you're a nun, or live alone. Hearing somebody talking about taking a shit on your head for an Instagram post is just plain fucked up. But they were a ways away, so I stayed where I was. I'm old and fat, and it's hard enough to get up when half awake, and I've learned usually just waiting to see how things play out is the best thing to do. Plus I was fucking tired, and wanted to go back to sleep... if possible.
"Let's light him on fire!" What the fuck? I peaked out of my covers, twisted at a weird angle, and I could see three young guys, they looked high school age, maybe college age, white kids, on a corner nearby. They were joking around and acting like the drunk idiots they were. I thought about just waiting under my covers, pretending to still be asleep, and then screaming something crazy, as loud as possible, if they came close. But they seemed to stay on that corner.
I pulled my covers back over my head, and waited. The drunk laughter faded soon after. A few minutes later I heard a quick blip of a police siren on the freeway nearby, then a voice over the P.A., "Hey, you guys get out of the road!" Apparently they were running drunk across the freeway, never a great idea. I didn't hear any more sirens, so I'm assuming none of them got hit, and hopefully they caught an Uber home and are miserable and hung over right about now.
I'm homeless because, well, it's a long fucking story. It really started with taxi driving many years ago, and things have been sketchy since. I make about the same money selling artwork every month as I would getting a fast food job, if I could even get one. So "getting a job" is not the answer.
To rent a weekly room, the next reasonable step in my current situation, which costs about $400 a week, I need to actually bring in about $2,500 to $3,000 a month as a little art business. That would be enough to rent a room, buy art supplies, ship out the stuff I need to ship, and save a bunch of money to pay taxes in April.
There's no "real job" I could get right now, after the ten fucked up years of not being able to get hired for ANYTHING in North Carolina. I have no work history, anymore. I'm 53, a little under 300 pounds, and have fucked up teeth, so working in retail, construction, or as a male stripper, is not really in the cards. So I keep making artwork, I sell most of it sooner or later, and I scrape by. I'm working on a plan to help small businesses with content creation and social media promotion, things I've learned promoting my artwork. Those talents hold the most promise at the moment, I just need to scrape up some money to give it a realistic shot.
While hearing drunk people talking about setting me on fire at 4 am is unusual, as a homeless guy, I have stupid shit happen every single day, the kind of stuff most people would spend days talking about. I don't blog about all the day to day homeless nonsense, because no one wants to hear it.
If you've read this blog from way back, you may remember me blogging about the bug that got lodged in my ear (for a month), the snake I found in my tent on my birthday in 2017, and a few other things. But I haven't written about the the cold and rain, the wild turkey, the mountain lion, the bobcat, the 7-8 foot python I almost stepped on (released pet, I assume), the raccoons, the opossums, the cops, the thugs, the crackheads, the night I slept out in Richmond when it snowed 10 inches, or the temperatures down to 11-12 degrees. Those are just a few of the things I've encountered in years in years of homelessness. Nobody really wants to hear about that day to day bullshit. Unless I write a really cool, and funny, memoir book about it someday. But weird shit happens, pretty much on a daily basis. I keep pushing on, doing creative work, and working slowly to get to where I can make a reasonable income, and rent a place to live. It's a long, slow, grinding path.
So there's my rant about a slightly more crazy than normal morning, as a creative, working, homeless guy, who doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, and drinks way to much Diet Coke. Rant over.
Oh, and here are some of my latest doodle drawings, which I do when bored, in addition to my Sharpie scribble style drawings...
Saturday, February 15, 2020
The Legend of the Jinx Bank
Here's Brian Tunney at the Jinx Bank, last year (2019), talking about the impression two photos from the Jinx Bank, 30-some years ago, left on him.
As usual in my BMX posts, I'm going back 34 years into the foggy memory banks, but here's how I remember it happening. If you have read very many of my BMX posts in my assorted blogs, you know my 1985-86 zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at Wizard Publications in August of 1986. Officially, I was the sole editorial assistant, so I was an assistant to Craig "Gork" Barrette, editor of BMX Action, and Andy Jenkins and Mark "Lew" Lewman, the guys writing FREESTYLIN' magazine. Unofficially, I took over for Don Toshach, who actually had an English degree, and was the proofreader for both magazines. I was also the official driver of photographer Windy Osborn, driving her to many of the photo shoots, and being her assistant on those,. I went from a NorCal freesytler, making 57 pizzas in 4 hours at Pizza Hut, to working at THE MAGAZINES (!!!!) in one day. Huge life change, and I flew to L.A. with my bike (Skyway T/A), a suitcase, and $80. That move change the entire course of my life.
I wound up roommates with Gork and Lew, in Redondo Beach, 3-4 miles from the Wizard offices. We worked more-or-less 9 to 5ish, and put in extra hours near the magazine deadlines. On Saturdays and Sundays, if there wasn't a local contest somewhere, we all did our own thing, mostly. My weekends started with waking up, making a HUGE plate of about 12-15 small pancakes, and chowing those down while watching Lew's VHS copy of Bones Brigade II: Future Primitive. In the intro of that video is this great sentence by C.R. Stecyk:
"200 years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground, and it took the minds of 12-year-olds to realize its potential."
Every Saturday and every Sunday, I'd carbo load on pancakes, watch Bones II, then grab my bike, and head out on an all day "scouting mission," as I called them. I'd just go exploring my new world on my bike, Redondo Beach, and the South Bay area of Southern California. Street riding was something we all did then, but it was in its infancy as a "thing" that actually had a name. Street skating, pioneered by then Vision skater Mark Gonzales, Curb Dog/Bones Brigade skater Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas, was just a year and a half old. Those guys were just beginning to explore the urban world as one big skatepark, waiting to be sessioned. Us BMX freestylers, and particularly Andy J. and Lew at FREESTYLIN', were heavily influenced by those early street skaters.
My favorite part of Bones II was (and still is) Tommy Guerrero's section, right at the beginning. I'd seen Tommy jump launch ramps in Golden Gate Park, and even shot photos of him for my zine, and he blew my mind with how high he launched off jump ramps, and his style, along with the other NorCal street skaters. I never really got to know him, but his use of the insane San Francisco terrain for skating made me want to go find cool shit around Redondo, and then session it on my bike. So that's what I did, weekend after weekend. I'd head off in one direction, usually to a known street spot to start, and then I'd wander in some area I'd never been to, and ride down alleys, behind shopping centers, and into weird little nooks and crannies, looking for cool stuff to ride.
One day, driving Windy and Ron Wilkerson to a photo shoot, at a quarterpipe behind a bike shop, on PCH in Redondo, we went 2 or 3 blocks too far, and so we rolled back two or three blocks down this alley, up the hill from Pacific Coast Highway. It was the photo shoot for some weird new Wilkerson trick, called the abubaca. we didn't know what that was, Ron had invented it on tour. Windy and Ron were talking as I drove the Wizard Astro van down the alley. Off to one side, I saw this weird, but awesome, bank next to a wall, in a little parking lot. My rider mind made a mental note, and I then drove on and found the quarterpipe we were looking for.
Two or three weeks later, as I headed out after my pancakes and Bones II, that bank popped into my head. So I headed up to PCH, and headed south. It wound up being a few blocks past where I thought it was. I was kind of lost, and came from a totally different direction, when I first saw it in the van. It took an hour or so, but I found the bank.
I'd never seen one like it, and I'd never heard Gork or Lew mention it, and they rode that area all the time. I went up a hill from PCH, behind this building, to the back parking lot. From that side street, the parking lot went down fairly steeply. The asphalt bank started as flat, and gradually got taller as the parking lot dropped down. At the high end, it was 5 to 6 feet high. I did a couple carves and kickturns on it, and scoped out the transition. It wasn't too kinked, and rode pretty well. This probably happened in September 1986, somewhere around there.
To put things in perspective, wall rides on bikes didn't exist yet... officially. On a photo shoot with Windy in Huntington Beach, I saw English bloke Dave Curry do a tiny wall ride. More of a wall bounce/slide. It blew my mind. But he was popping off a tiny, one foot high bank, and slapping both tires against the wall about a foot up. At the time it was amazing, but Windy didn't think it was worth a photo that day, and it was getting late, anyway. So Dave Curry didn't get the first wall ride photo in a magazine, which ultimately, is probably a good thing. Nothing against Dave, but I'll get to that in a bit.
At that time, in 1986, I was big on doing footplants when street riding. I would bunnyhop and footplant on ledges, benches, and wherever. I got that idea from both Dave Vanderspek and the Curb Dogs, and from Eddie Roman, another Skyway rider. So I started doing footplants, riding up the big end of this new bank, bunnyhopping, and planting my right foot on the wall. There was a business in that building, like paint store, or electric supply store, something like that. But they never came out and yelled at me as I bounced on their wall. So I kept riding.
Within half an hour, I was hitting the tallest part of the bank, around fivefeet high, and doing a footplant on the wall two or three feet above that. That bank was made for those. I was having a blast. That is, until I landed hard, and snapped my cheap ass, one piece cranks. I think that was the only time I ever snapped a pair of cranks.
So that ended my session, and I had to "scooter" my bike back to the apartment, more than a mile, dropcrank, pushing with the other foot. When I got back to the pad, Lew asked what happened. I told him I found this amazing bank to ride, was doing huge wall footplants, and snapped my crank. Lew went through all the banks he knew in the area, but this new bank was one he had never seen. So I told him I'd have to take him there sometime.
The next Monday, I found a pair of used cranks in a box in the rafters at Wizard, and I was back in action. The next weekend, I was back at the new bank, doing big footplants, kickturns, little bunnyhop bank "airs," and having more fun, another solo session. I came down hard from a footplant, and I cracked my fork dropout. It started to clink and wobble, and I didn't want my front wheel to fall off. I had that happen once, and it's not a good thing. So I headed back to the homestead. The next Monday, I found an old pair of Randy Tischman's forks up in the rafters, purple Kuwahara ones, I think, with weird little stands on the top of the curves. I put them on, and was ready to ride again.
It took a couple of weeks, but I finally got Lew to follow me to this new bank one Saturday. He did a few kickturns or something, to get the feel of the bank. I started doing my footplants, and Lew said they looked way gnarlier than what he had imagined when I described them. Lew started trying footplants, or something, and got sketchy on one landing, crashed, and rolled his ankle. It was a mild, but painful, sprain. That ended our session. As we started heading slowly home, Lew was pedaling gingerly on his sore ankle. He said something like, "First you snapped your cranks, then your forks, now I sprained my ankle, this bank is jinxed." And that's how the Jinx Bank got its name.
The next Monday at work, Lew actually told everyone how gnarly my footplants were, and said Windy should shoot photos of me there. I was stoked, because I was absolutely desperate to get a photo of me riding in the FREESTYLIN'. But Lew was known for exaggeration, which Andy called "The Lew Factor." Andy J. said, "Lew says these footplants are really gnarly, but when we add in The Lew Factor, that makes them kind of gnarly." One of these days we'll get Windy to check them out, but no photo shoot right now. We never made it back out there for Windy to see them. And Lew never went back to ride the Jinx Bank, it did its number on his psyche. Myself, I went back every couple of weeks, and took Craig Grasso there often. Grasso and I had many more great sessions at the Jinx Bank, and neither of us broke bike parts or body parts. No more Jinxes from the Jinx Bank, after it had been named. We told R.L. Osborn about it once, and he had actually been there years earlier, after hearing about it from some skaters. But he never went back.
I got laid off from Wizard at the end of December 1986, and never got a photo of me riding the Jinx Bank. I did make it back up there for 3 or 4 more sessions, over the next few years. The last time I went, the building owners had made the small asphalt curb at the bottom, making it hard to ride and skate, without some plywood to lay over the curb. You can see that in Brian's video above.
Later they added the weird wood thing on the wall, which you can also see in Brian's video above. That made it largely session proof, for either bikes or skates. But the coolest thing about the Jinx Bank for me was that when I left, Gork and Lew knew it was there. Because of that, about nine months later, this photo of Eddie Roman, doing the first wall ride ever in a magazine(since Dave Curry missed his shot) was taken, by Windy, at the Jinx Bank. It's one of those epic Windy Osborn photos. This photo changed bike riding instantly, and forever. With that one photo, suddenly wall rides were possible, and walls, especially banks to walls, were in play.
Eddie Roman, first BMX wall ride photo, at the Jinx Bank, 1987, I believe.
While I never got a photo there, and was never a great rider, my Tommy Guerrero and pancake fueled solo scouting missions found the Jinx Bank, a spot that later changed BMX freestyle history. Not much, but I was stoked the first wall ride photo happened there. A while after that, Craig Campbell also got an epic wall ride photo there, as Brian shows in the video above.
Street riding progressed rapidly over the next several years, and turned into its own genre eventually, as we all know. Craig Grasso added his flavor to street, many times over the years. Here he is on another local bank, a favorite photo of mine.
Craig Grasso, bank backside boneless.
I may not have had a riding photo in FREESTYLIN', but in BMX DIY fashion, I gave myself a quick, but decent, wall ride clip in my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend. And a stylized version of this sketchy video still below is on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now, 34 years after rediscovering the Jinx Bank. Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, Blues Brothers Wall, Huntington Beach, 1990. May the "minds of 12-year-olds" in all of us never stop discovering cool shit to ride in our urban environment.
I've started a new blog, as of May 2022, Check it out:
Steve Emig's Street Life- Dealing with change and building a new life in the 2020's.
Friday, February 14, 2020
Little Kid Big Ollie in Long Beach
I was walking to a bus stop in Long Beach last night, heading back down to Newport Beach, after taking some stuff up to L.A., when I saw this kid sizing up a big ollie off a ledge about 5 feet high, over his head. He had a couple 20-something people with him, older sister and brother maybe? I'm not sure. Anyhow, it took him about 20 minutes to psych himself up, and 7 or 8 tries, but he landed this one. Yes, my photo is way to early, but catching action on an old iPhone is tough. Kind of a cool looking photo anyway. His name was Dwayne. Props Dwayne.
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Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Simple Session 2020 Men's BMX highlights
Simple Session 2020 happened this past weekend in Tallinn, Estonia.Watched this last night. This course looks so fun, wish we had something like this to ride BITD. But on the other hand, it's nice being old sometimes, the level of comp riding today is insane. Levi Weidmann lands a smooth 1080 over the ginormous box jump... and comes in 12th? Crazy. There's some amazing shit in this clip. Check it out. If you've got time on your hands, here's the full men's BMX park comp from Simple Session 2020.
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Simple Session 2020 Women's Highlights
The Simple Session 2020 happened last weekend in Tallinn, Estonia. This still above isn't a bail, she lands these things. It's freakin' amazing how much the women are tearing it up these days. Above is a good look at the highlights. Here's the link to the full Simple Session 2020 Sister Session.
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Tuesday, February 11, 2020
The Bones Brigade: fucked up kids that changed the world- Part 1
Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, the epic 2012 documentary by skate legend and original Zephyr Team skateboarder, Stacy Peralta. I finally found it free on YouTube, and watched it. It got to me. These guys were big influences on me, like all skater/punk/action sports kids in the 1980's.
The Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade team was legendary in the skateboard, punk rock, and action sports subcultures in the 1980's. This is the guys behind that crew, telling the parts they didn't tell along the way.
While mostly known as a Has Been BMX industry guy, I actually started skateboarding in 1976, three or four years before I even knew BMX bikes existed. I lived in the small, rural town of Willard, Ohio. My friend showed me a pressed aluminum skateboard his dad made at the shop at work, with steel roller skate wheels and no grip tape. I thought he was lying when he said his dad made it, it looked factory made, like a lawnmower. But I've never seen another board like it.
His name was Jeff. Jeff put it down on the flat rocks of the walkway, in front of his house. We didn't walk out to the actual sidewalk, for some reason. We were on the walkway through their front yard, made of big flat stones, most were a foot and a half, or two feet across, and there was grass growing between the rocks. Jeff put the skateboard down, put one foot on it, and pushed off with the other. He rolled across one stone, then onto the next stone, rolling about three feet. I said, "Whoa." So he let me try. I put my left foot on top, pushed off with my right foot, pulled my right foot up on the deck. I rolled about a foot, and the front wheel hit a crack in the stone. The board stopped, I got thrown forward, and fell to the ground, slamming a knee and scraping it. I was a complete wuss as a kid, I hated pain. I stood up and said, "Skateboarding is dumb." That was my introduction to skateboarding, the first time I ever saw a skateboard. I walked away with a scraped knee and turned off on skateboards. It was the corner of Laurel and Clark streets, I just looked it up on Google Maps, bottom right corner there, It looks like those big flat rocks are still in front of that house.
That was during fourth grade for me, I lived a block and a half away, down Laurel Street, from Jeff. A couple months later, another friend got a plastic skateboard, with urethane wheels. I tried that board, on a smooth piece of sidewalk, and found that riding skateboards was actually fun. Another friend got a skateboard, it was the mid 1970's, when the skateboarding fad swept across the United States. That was the second big wave of skateboards, after the 1965-66 rise, a decade earlier. Skateboarding turned into one of those things we did as 9-year-old kids. We played backyard baseball, football, swam in the city pool a couple blocks away, and we rode skateboards.
We didn't have magazines to look at then. There was one book, a hardcover book, about skateboarding, in the Willard Library. We took turns checking that book out, which had a bunch of the late 60's and early 70's skaters. We looked over each other's shoulders as one kid flipped through the pages. Those were the only tricks we knew existed. 360's. Wheelies. Daffys. The Coffin. Sitting on our board sideways, with our feet on our friend's board, and his feet on our board, going down a big hill.
I decided I needed a skateboard. I got 50 cents a week allowance from my parents... sometimes. After buying some penny candy downtown, that cost 2 cents each, I saved up my extra change. For nine fucking months, I saved quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. I saved up to buy a green plastic Scamp skateboard, at the Western Auto store on Myrtle Street, the main street in "downtown" Willard. That was the first thing I ever saved up money for in my life.
Finally I had a board, and my friend Steve and I wound up at the parking lot of my Lutheran church, which had a decent sized hill, by 10-year-old standards. Steve's board was blue plastic, and had a double kicktail. We figured out that we could put my board backwards, on top of Steve's board, and then took turns trying to make it all the way down the hill, riding the stacked boards. We both made it to the bottom of the hill within an hour. That was skateboarding for us, then 10 year olds, in Willard, Ohio, in 1977. Like old guys always say, skateboarding if it was ever mentioned on TV, it was nearly always compared to hula hoops, and called a "fad," like the hula hoops our sisters had.
There were no skateboard videos, we only had three main channels of TV then. Us kids only got to see skateboard magazines twice, I think. One of Jeff's older brothers skated, and had a few skateboard magazines. But us"little kids" never got to look at them. A couple of times, that brother gave us little kids five or ten minutes to look through his skateboard magazines. There were four or five of us, we each grabbed a magazine, and flipped through them like maniacs, as fast as possible, so we could find the coolest photos during those few minutes. That was the first time any of us saw photos of kids in California riding skateboards in pools. But it was just this quick glimpse of some kids, way out west in California, skateboarding in pools. We didn't know that there were skateparks. We weren't sure where those pools were, or why there was no water in them. But those were those far away kids... way out in California. We didn't know any of their names. They might as well have been on the moon.
The next year, in 1978, my family went to a flea market, in a parking garage, in Mansfield, the city my mom was from. We had a booth, selling random stuff, like a garage sale. I had a lot of time to wander around and check out the other booths. I found some high school kid in his parents' booth who was selling a skateboard he made, for $2.00. It was made out of a 3/4" thick oak board, about 5 1/2" wide. No kicktail, it was flat. It had a pointed nose, curved sides, and a narrow tail. It had GT trucks which were really narrow, but, the maroon wheels were each 2 1/2" wide. The wheels stuck out over the edges of the board. That became my skateboard, and I skated that thing for a decade. I took it down to the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987 or early 1988, when I was a BMX freestyler, hanging out with Pierre Andre, Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and the HB local skaters. We all took turns trying to ollie my old $2 board, and finally broke the trucks.
As my family moved form town to town, I would go out on the street, and do rock walks, toe drag 360's, and backside G-turns, which I didn't realize were called G-turns. Every new house we lived in, I met the kids in the new neighborhood on that $2 skateboard. I would go skate in the driveway, and down the street, and that's how I started meeting the neighbor kids.
When we first moved to Boise in 1981, I would put Joan Jett's "I Love Rock n' Roll" cassette on my cheesy ghetto blaster in our garage, and do rockwalks and G-turns for hours. I'd still never bought a skateboard magazine. Our house was a incredibly psychologically tense place, and miserable, by and large. Skateboarding wasn't a sport to me, because I sucked at sports. It wasn't anything that I ever imagined to do after high school. It wasn't a thing that anyone made money at, as far as I knew. For me, skateboarding was another escape, a physical way to cope with my constant depression and the drama of everyday life. As a screwed up teenager, in a family that was more fucked up than most, I would read, run off and wander the woods (later he desert), ride my bike around, or skateboard. Those were my escapes.
Skateboarding had died, it wasn't cool anymore. I didn't care. Skateboarding was a way to cope. That's who rode skateboards in those days, fucked up kids from families that were more dysfunctional that most. It was never something that was going to lead to anything else. Skateboarding was a way to cope with daily life. That's it.
This video took me back to those early days. As my life wandered in weird directions, I wound up working in the BMX and skateboard industries, and the Bones Brigade riders were a huge influence on me in my 20's, and since. I was in that world, met a couple of them, and this story they tell touches my story, like tens of thousands of other kids and young people in the 1980's, and millions of kids in the 1990's.
None of this was supposed to happen. We weren't supposed to follow that weird intuition that drew us to bikes and skateboards, and the other action sports. We rebelled, we bucked the system. We just needed to follow this other, weird thing, and see where it led. It led us to places that none of us could have imagined back then.
But then that's the thing about creativity, it leads to brand new places, brand new things, and new "sports," new businesses, and new industries. Those weird little things have now spread to so many people around the world, that the fucking Olympics has added, is adding more BMX and skateboarding. None of this was supposed to happen. But, then again, it was supposed to happen. The Universe likes to fuck with the status quo every now and then, using weird, fucked up, driven, creative goofballs like the Bones Brigade, and all of us who followed.
More to come...
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Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Sessioning Gilligan's Lagoon on my bike
Gilligan's Island intro from season 2 on, I think. The initial intro was in black & white and was shot in different locations. If you're part of Generation X, you spent many hours laying on your stomach in the thick, earth tone shag carpet, on the living room floor, elbows out, your head propped up on your hands, watching Gilligan's Island episodes. At :38 in the intro, and then under the head shots of the cast, we see the familiar sight of the lagoon, as they called it on the show. The S.S. Minnow is washed up on the sandy beach, big rocks by the holes in the hull. In many episodes, the castaways went to that little beach, surrounded by trees, for one reason or another.
But that area in the shot isn't really a beach. It's TV set, which was set up on the back part of the CBS-MTM Studio lot. Officially, it was, and still is, called CBS Studio Center. That's what we called it when I got a job as a spotter on American Gladiators in the summer of 1992. What's a spotter? On American Gladiators, we were a crew of 8 guys, and most of the time we helped the grips (TV industry construction guys) move set pieces around. If you watched American Gladiators in the late 1980's and early 1990's, you know there were several different games, where the contenders competed against the gladiators. Each game had a whole bunch of pieces that had to be moved in from outside, and set up, with a live audience watching. If you freeze this clip at :24, that's me in the black, in the background on Wesley "2 Scoops" Berry's tower. Wesley is the single best athlete I've ever met, and a really cool guy as well.
One of the older crew guys told me the Gladiators stage crew did the biggest set changes in the history of TV, and we did them 7 times each day. I don't know if that was true, but we worked hard on that show. How many other people you know who've actually moved an entire pyramid, on a daily basis, and that puppy weighed like 22,000 pounds or something. So a big part of our job was moving heavy things on and off the stage, or Gladiators Arena, as it was called.
We taped the whole season of American Gladiators in about 7 weeks total, in the summer. Most TV shows shoot for a nine month season, roughly September through May, like a school year. In the summers, nearly everyone was gone, "on hiatus," and we had the whole big lot pretty much to ourselves. Gladiators was housed in Stage 3, said to be the second biggest sound stage in the whole Hollywood/L.A. area. The CBS-MTM lot is actually in Studio City, over the hill from the famous Hollywood sign, and a couple miles to the west. It's off Radford street, near the intersection of Ventura and Laurel Canyon, for you SoCal people. When I was up in the area recently, people refer to the lot as the Radford Studios these days.
For the first 7 or 8 days of working on set, we would set up the games, usually a couple at once, and both the contenders and gladiators would practice. Since it was a TV show, and a progressive, competition show, the producers didn't want either the gladiators or the contenders to get hurt. So us spotters got to play most of the games with them. As part of our job, we learned to take stunt falls into the crash pads from veteran stuntman Bob Yerkes, who was in his 70's then. We learned how to fight with pugil sticks from Marine Corps drill sergeants from the San Diego bootcamp You can see me under th eleft tower at 1:01 in that clip). Then we would be contenders for the gladiators to practice, and gladiators for the contenders to practice. So I got my ass kicked by both groups, which was pretty fun, most of the time.
Like any big budget TV show, we had an hour for a catered lunch each day, which meant eating cafeteria style, on a smaller stage, and then we had time to chill or wander around a bit. One day at lunch, someone mentioned the old mill. I said, "what old mill? The crew guy said, follow me, check this out. There was a line of trees behind Stages 1/2, 3 (our stage), and the next couple. I knew there was a hill below the trees, but never wandered back there. So I follow this guy into a little cut in the trees, and there's a wooden walkway that went into the back of wood framed building. We walked into a bare, empty wooden room, with two windows on the other side. The guy said, "look out the window." He walked to one, I walked to the other. Suddenly I was looking out the window of an old fashioned mill, from a second story window. There was a big mill wheel on the side of the mill, and a pond below. The pond was surrounded by big asphalt banks, so you could walk around the edge of the pond. The banks were 6 or 7 feet high, and dropped down to the flat ground of a parking area below. It looked something like this, from below, when there was no water in the pond.
The main thing the old mill was used for during gladiators was for people to sneak out into it, since it was pretty secluded, and make-out or get a blowjob. While I never managed to get lucky there, I did wander out there once in a while. It was a cool set, and right behind our stage.
At the time, I was either living in the P.O.W. House in Westminster, which you old school BMXers know of, or roommates with Chris Moeller and others in one apartment or another, down in Huntington Beach. Those places were 50 miles away. I worked 7 days a week on the show, with only 2 or 3 days off in 6 or 7 weeks. I didn't have a car then. So I would rent a cheap motel room by the week, which was about a mile and a half away. I rode my BMX bike, an S&M Dirt Bike, to work each day. I parked it back stage, and sometimes rode it over to lunch. One time I gave Ice the Gladiator a ride to lunch on my handlebars. I was riding by to lunch and she said, "Hey, give me a ride."
Our spotter crew worked pretty hard most of the day, so I didn't have much energy to go session after work. But I would occasionally do a few tricks at lunch. Anyhow, one day I wandered over into the old mill at lunch, looked out the window, and the pond was empty. Even better, it was a big, banked pool, with 6-7 foot high banks. There was even a mellow hip. So after work, I asked someone if anyone would freak out if I rode it a bit. The people on my crew said, "Probably not." So I rode down the driveway into the parking area, and rode the big banked pool for half an hour or so. I loved riding banks back then. I could do little hip jumps, maybe a foot, foot and a half off the ground, but they were fun. I did some kickturns, and a bunch of backside bonelesses, a favorite bank trick of mine. I could to 180 and 360 flyouts onto the top of the bank. Nothing was insane, but it was a blast to ride. Best of all, security rolled by in their golf carts, and didn't care.
Over four seasons, I had maybe 8 or 10 solo sessions, in the mill pond after days on the Gladiators crew. One day one of the guys who worked for the studio itself came by. "You know that's Gilligan's Lagoon, right?" he asked. No, I didn't know. He assured me it was. The little inlet, to the left of the mill, was where they put the sand, and the S.S. Minnow, to shoot the intro, and other scenes, for Gilligan's lagoon. So, as far as I know, I was the first, and only, BMXer to ride Gilligan's lagoon banks, while it was dry. I mentioned that fact in a Facebook comment last weekend. Much to my surprise, Eddie Fiola responded, saying I shouldn't say I was the only BMXer to session the lagoon banks. "Don't forget, I work in Hollywood, too," Eddie said. So it sounds like Eddie found it too, at some point.
According to the CBS Studio Center wikipedia page linked above, Gilligan's Lagoon was demolished, and paved over to make a parking structure, in the mid-1990's. I last rode it in 1995, I think, my last time working there on American Gladiators, and I know the lower area, by the lagoon, got really built up later on. I snuck my sister and her friend on the lot a couple years later, while I gave them a tour of Hollywood, and we parked in that area. I think the lagoon was still there then, maybe 1996 or 1997. In any case, I think I'm the first BMXer to session Gilligan's lagoon banks, and one of only a couple who ever did.
Jon Peterson, the Haro assistant team manager, who introduced me to the freestyle industry in Tulsa in 1986, also commented on the Facebook post where I mentioned the lagoon. He said he digs my weird stories, so I wold him I'd write this one up.
I didn't know much about the history of the CBS-MTM lot when I worked there, except that Rosanne taped on Stage 1, next door to our stage. That was where the Mary Tyler Moore show, the "MTM" in CBS-MTM, taped many years earlier. But here's a cool little look around the lot with Bob Vila from This Ol' House, a few years later.
I have a couple of new blogs I'm getting going on. Check them out: