The "Ballad of Evel Knievel," from the 1974 record album put out to promote the upcoming Snake River Canyon Jump that Evel attempted on September 8th, 1974. As you all know, Travis Pastrana just did three classic, Evel Knievel jumps in one night, in a tribute to the man in red, white, and blue leathers himself. It seemed time for me to tell an Evel story of my own. But first, here's some highlights of those two motorcycle jumpers.
"The best thing you can say about a man is that his word is good as gold."
-Evel Knievel - on the the1974 record album
Evel Knievel jumps over the fountains at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas
Evel Knievel jumps 14 Greyhound buses
Evel Knievel jumps 50 smashed cars
Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump attempt- 1974
Gary Wells' jump over the fountains at Caesar's Palace
Robbie Knievel's jump over the fountains at Caesar's Palace
Robbie Knievel's jump over the Grand Canyon side canyon
Eddie Braun's rocket jump over the Snake River Canyon
Travis Pastrana's jump over 52 smashed cars
Travis Pastrana's jump over 16 Greyhound buses
Travis Pastrana's jump over the Caesar's Palace fountains
(on an Indian motorcycle with only 4" of suspension)
I was in third grade in 1974, when word came out that daredevil Evel Knievel intended to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho on in a rocket called a Sky Cycle. Out in Oklahoma, a kid named Mathew Hoffman was 2 1/2 years old. Nine years later, a kid named Travis Pastrana would be born.
Like many of my friends, I had the little Evel Knievel guy on the motorcycle with the crank to make him take off and go. Evel was our biggest hero in those days, much to our parents' dismay. Far bigger and seeming way more badass than any traditional sports star, the motorcycle jumper and incredible self-promoter inspired our whole generation to build jumps and start jumping our banana seat bikes. The only person close to his stature as a hero to young kids then was martial arts movie star Bruce Lee, who died suddenly the year before.
One day my parents came home form shopping somewhere, and said they got me something. They pulled out an Evel Knievel record album, like in the video still above. It was Evel, but it was something I didn't even know existed, and it wasn't one of toys all the boys my age were hoping for. So I was less than excited, which my mom wasn't happy about. After all, the thing cost $12 or something outrageous for 1974.
Eventually, I took the record up to my room. My family moved nearly every year, and that year we lived in a house in Coshocton, Ohio, and the entire top floor was my bedroom. It was actually the best bedroom I had as a kid. There was a ceiling vaulted in the middle, and sloping down with the steep roof in the front and rear. Four windows protruded out, and my dad had a desk near one of them. That's where I set up my stylish, blue and white, kids record player to listen to the Evel Knievel record, and all of my mom's old 45's.
That was a tough year for me. Actually, with the constant psychological tension in our house, every year was tough. It took me years to figure out that it wasn't just me. But in third grade, teachers suggested I might need to be held back. They thought I might be mildly retarded. So I'd hear my mom at the bottom of the steps by my bedroom door at night telling my dad, "There's something wrong with him." That doesn't lead to good nights of sleep. I was intensely shy, except around my few good friends. I worked really, REALLY slow in school, which is why they thought I was retarded. After hearing adults talking for weeks about what needed to be done with me, I was taken to a psychologist. He seemed like a nice man, but it was still really intimidating being questioned alone by an adult I didn't know. He asked me a bunch of questions, and all I remember is him telling me long strings of numbers, waiting a minute, then asking me to repeat them. No big deal.
As it turned out, they found out I wasn't retarded at all. I was actually smart. Really smart. I did my school work in my head, worked really slowly, and got the answers right most of the time. But when it came to homework, my teacher would assign us 25 math problems to do, for instance. I'd do 3 or 4 of them, and get to the point where I understood the concept, and then I wouldn't do any more. I thought, "OK, I get this, no point in doing a bunch more." In reality, I probably had a good case of Aspberger's Syndrome, which is like being a bit more social than Rainman, but having similar intellectual attributes. In my case, I memorized about a third of the Guiness Book of World Records. You could ask me random records, and I'd tell you the answer. Longest earth worms? Four feet long from New Zealand (longer ones have been found since). World record for eating a bicycle? 41 days. Yeah, that was actually a record in the 70's. Please don't try this at home, eating metal is really bad for you.
There was more drama than usual that year, and when I got really down, which was nearly every day, I put on the Evel Knievel record album and listened to the whole thing. Evel Knievel's words helped motivate my 8-year-old mind to keep struggling through my life. That record album got me through some of the toughest days of my childhood.
The thing about record albums is that they break really easily. Yet somehow, through dozens of moves, my Evel Knievel record album survived and still played. The other thing about it was that I NEVER saw another one. In all the cities and towns I lived in, no one had the Evel Knievel record album. I never met anyone else who had one. As the years passed, I realized I had one of the most rare and most cool Evel Knievel items produced.
So when I got fired from my video duplication job in 1991for logging the porn footage Chris Moeller wanted to use in the first S&M Bikes video, "Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer," I wound up sleeping on his floor. It was Chris in the bedroom, a guy named Shaggy on the small couch, and me on the floor of Chris' one bedroom, Huntington Beach apartment. The whole place was only 8 feet wide, the building owner had chopped the back off of garages, and built a tiny apartment to rent out. We called the place the place the Winnebago, because it felt like that's what we were living in. It was 1991, the BMX industry had all but died, and the fledgling bike company, S&M Bikes, was housed in the single car garage.
That was a long time ago, and Chris Moeller is a family man now, and I imagine he's mellowed over the years. But back then, getting money to get to races was a main focus of his. And Chris was the master of scrounging money, selling anything to anyone, and flat out conning people out of stuff to sell to someone else. There was a story about BMX pro Harry Leary's helmet, I think, that Chris asked Harry for, and then immediately sold to some kid for money to get home from a race. Chris was smart, manipulative, business savvy, and had absolutely no conscience when it came to stuff like that back then. Getting to the next race, or getting the next batch of 20 Slam Bars built, those were the priorities, no matter what it took.
As a freestyler, I had a lot less contests to go to, and I didn't travel to national ones then. So I was basically selling S&M stuff to bike shops for a commission, and moving furniture for rent and food money.
One weekend, I went to a contest, probably with Keith Treanor and John Povah. I can't really remember. When I got back, I noticed that my Evel Knievel record album wasn't in the box in the living room where we all had a few albums stored. I asked Chris about it. He said he told Mat Hoffman about my album at some event, and Mat wanted to borrow it. Everyone knew Mat was a huge Evel fan, so I didn't think much about it. A couple weeks later, I asked him when Mat was going to give it back. Chris gave me some answer that he just forgot to ask Mat for it when he saw him. That went on for a couple of months, and I finally forgot about it.
I ended up being roommates with Chris, on and off, in different houses and apartments, for over 4 years. Near the end of the time, 1995, I think, we were sitting around talking about record albums with a couple other people. I mentioned that I had the Evel Knievel record album. So I asked Chris what happened to it. He just laughed. His reply was something like, "You dumbass, I SOLD that thing to Mat for gas money to get to a race." I was fucking pissed, and I think I cussed him out and it turned into a big argument. That happened a lot in those days. But, that was it, the weird Evel Knievel record album that got me through so many tough days as a grade school kid, was long gone. Or so I thought.
Many years later, I ran across Mat Hoffman's book, The Ride of My Life, in a library. So I read it. How could I not read a book that has a chapter called, "The Sound of the Bone Drill." Much to my surprise, in a photo of Mat's office in the book, there was an Evel Kneivel record album sitting there. My old Evel album. The same record album that got me through so many tough days as a kid, wound up in Mat Hoffman's office, in the hands of someone who actually became personal friends with Evel. It's weird how things work out sometimes.
Most of you reading this have read a bunch of my old school BMX freestyle stories over the past decade. Many of you have read dozens, maybe even hundreds of those tales. I've written somewhere around 800 of them in my various blogs. I took most of them down in 2012, when I hit a really dark patch of my life, shortly after my dad died. But a some of the stories are still around to read. I write about a lot of other things as well, future trends, economics, taxi driving, building creative scenes (bike/skate/art, etc.) and other big picture issues going on in the world. I read lots of books most people don't want to read, I blend what I learn there with what I observe, learn from talks and lectures on TV or online, and my own life experience. And like I learned when I was in 3rd grade, I'm actually pretty smart.
In reality, I've been told I'm smarter than I'd like to admit. Because, let's face it, you sound like a total douchebag if you walk around and tell people you have a super high I.Q.. When I first moved North Carolina, and then came to Winston-Salem to look for work, I stayed in a homeless shelter while I looked. In the first couple weeks, I had three or four guys that followed me around, one at a time, annoying me and asking too many questions. I realized quickly they were local snitches. What tripped me out was that they all asked the same, really weird question. They asked what I what I thought it would be like to have an I.Q. of 170 to 180. I told them I didn't know. I took an I.Q. test in 7th grade, and my I.Q. was 132. I worked slow, and I didn't finish the test, I had 1 1/2 or 2 pages left, I think, but as far as I knew, my I.Q. was 132. Above average, but not genius material. If I would have finished that test, maybe I could have beat skateboarder Tony Hawk's 144 I.Q., or maybe other highly intelligent celebrities. Or maybe not. Who knows.
It came up a couple of times when I was homeless, mentioned by people who asked too many questions, probably undercover cops looking for bums dealing drugs or women prostituting. One plain clothes cop flat out told me that I was a terrorist suspect just because I had a high I.Q. and I was homeless. At the time I brushed it off. After all, an I.Q. test is just one test, on one day, that's geared so certain types of people will do well on it. It's just a test score, and I've always been good at tests.
But when the third homeless guy here in Winston-Salem asked the weird question about having a 170-180 I.Q., I asked him why they kept asking me that. His reply."The counselors told us you have an I.Q. of 170-180, and they want to know why the hell you're in a homeless shelter." I told them that was news to me, and I was looking for a job. In 2009, a LOT of people were looking for jobs. I began to wonder if I ever took another I.Q. test.
I realized that I might have taken an I.Q., or perhaps an equivalent test, when I joined the Marines in late 1984. I enlisted to go into the Marine Reserves, and get money for college. It's a really weird story, but I wound up getting dropped from the delayed entry program. The day I was supposed to ship out to boot camp from the Boise MEPS center, I was told that to get a security clearance needed for many jobs, the Marines would likely go talk to all my friends. That was news to me. So I 'fessed up, and told them I had sold drugs for a couple of months in high school. I never got in trouble, it was low level "speed," probably ephedrine, and I had stopped on my own a couple of years earlier. But my friends all knew about it, and someone would have mentioned it. I thought it was best to be straight with them. After a six hour "interrogation," my recruiter, staff sergeant Lechnar, and a gunnery sergeant, they took in front of their colonel, and told him they believed my story. That put my enlistment into a week long holding pattern.
I was told a colonel in San Frnacisco was fighting to get me into the Corps. But the craziest part was that my recruiter told me that the final decision on my case was made by the CMC. I didn't know what that was, so I asked. He told me that stood for the Commandant of the Marine Corps. I never could figure out why the head of the entire Marine Corps would even know about some kid from Boise, Idaho who was joining, much less read my file and decide himself if I could join. Unless I scored really, really, STUPID high on the I.Q. test or the equivalent. I was definitely not a standout in physical ability. I'm still baffled by this chain of events (there was more to it as well), so if anyone looks into this, let me know what you find.
In the 30+ years since I took the Marine entrance tests, a lot of really crazy stuff has happened in my life. Most of that took place form about 2000 on. I've made plenty of mistakes on my own. But there has also been an absurd amount of outside influence on my life. As I look back over dozens of weird little incidents over decades, it appears that scoring high on one test in early 1985 (or in 7th grade?) has had a horrible effect on my life. I don't want to believe this. But it appears to be the case. The craziness continues to this day.
I haven't been able to find a "real job" in ten years of living in North Carolina, after applying to 140 or more, except for driving a taxi for a year. For 2 1/2 years now, after starting with literally nothing, I've been building my Sharpie artwork into a small business. I now make a small, but steady, income doing my unique Sharpie drawings. I have a big backlog of work to do. I even have actual "collectors" of my art, who think it will be worth a lot someday. But it's time to step up the game.
I'm starting 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.
Here's one of my latest Sharpie drawings, 18" X 24."
I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack now, check it out:
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