The Story of My Keychain: part 2

Blog post: The story of my key chain: part 2- "My friends have a van"

Joe Johnson, while riding for GT, Candybar air at height, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, 1989.  Still from video I shot.

 
I got a call one day, about a month after the spring 1986 AFA Masters contest at the Cal State Dominguez Velodrome.  I was upstairs in my room, I still lived with my parents in San Jose then, but we had moved to a two story house, about a half mile from the first apartment.  I was 19, and still working nights at Pizza Hut.  I usually got off work between 11:00 pm to midnight, and often I'd ride my bike home.   When I got home, I'd work on my zine at night, or practice balance tricks in my bedroom, until about 3:00 am.  I usually woke up about 10:30 am ate some breakfast, ran some errands with my mom, and then went out riding solo in the afternoons.

On the day in March 1986, my mom called me from downstairs, and I picked up the upstairs phone, because that's how we did it back then, before cell phones.  Much to my surprise, it was Andy Jenkins, the editor of FREESTYLIN' magazine.  He said, "Hi," and asked me if I was planning on going to the upcoming AFA Masters contest in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I'd saved up my Pizza Hut money, and was planning to go to compete in flatland, and cover it for my zine.  Andy asked, "Do you want to write the article about the contest for FREESTYLIN?"  I was floored.

When I started doing my zine, there was an actual printed zine, a newsprint mini-magazine, published by this kid named Bill Batchelor in SoCal.  He was 13 or 14, and put out this really professional looking zine called Shreddin'.  That was about 20 large size pages.  I thought that maybe... someday, that kid with amazing publishing skills, might ask me to write a little piece for him.  That was as big as my ambitions would allow me to dream as a zine publisher.  Honestly, it never occurred to me that writing for a magazine was a possibility.  So when Andy Jenkins of FREESTYLIN' asked me to write an article for the magazine, a magazine I literally read every word of each month, including the ad copy, I had no context for it.  Writing for FREESTYLIN' magazine wasn't a dream, because I never thought it was even possible.  All I really remember was that I hung up the phone, and ran downstairs, I jumped down the stairs to the landing, halfway down, and the jumped down the rest.  I couldn't believe it.  But the freelance job was mine, and I was determined to do a good job.  I think I hopped on my bike and just rode around for an hour, trying to believe it.

So I flew solo for the first time about three weeks later.  I had a big box for my bike, but it was only about half the size of a typical bike box.  Tall and skinny, like a standard bike box, but only half as long.  If you looked at it, there didn't seem to be any way a bike could fit in it.  Before traveling, I asked Skyway pros Robert Peterson and Maurice Meyer, for tips on traveling cheap, and traveling with a bike.  I'd never flown with a bike, and I was operating on a Pizza Hut income, which I think was about $3.50 an hour then. So I needed to cut some corners.

Bert told me that I would get charged $30 or something, if I said I had a bike in the box.  So his tip was to tell the airlines my box had "camping  equipment" in it.  There was no fee for that.  When I went looking for a bike box, I got this half-sized one, with no writing on the outside.  Everyone thought of bikes as "ten speeds," the common name for road bikes then, since 20 inch bikes were "kid's bikes."  So my box didn't look like anything an adult-sized bike would fit in.

I took my handlebars off the of stem, took my wheels off, and pulled the seat and seat post out, and packed everything but my wheels in the box, packed my tools in it, and stuffed paper in it so it wouldn't rattle very much.  Then I used a big old suitcase, the old school style made of thick plastic, with a single handle, and no wheels.  I put my wheels in the suitcase, and packed clothes and stuff around them.  That suitcase and odd sized box saved me from paying the airlines bike fee for the trip, and several trips after that.  I used that same box for well over a year, it worked so well.

Obviously, I wasn't a seasoned traveler.  I was focused on trying to write a decent article that would actually be printed in a real magazine.  I thought a lot about who to talk to at the contest, what questions to ask, and all of that.  I didn't think much about the trip itself.  So I flew by myself from San Jose to a layover in Dallas/Fort Worth.  My dad flew occasionally for business, and warned me about how big DFW airport was, and to not waste time finding the next terminal.  He said that if you landed on one end, and flew out of the other, it could take half an hour figure out where your gate was, and to walk the distance.

I landed in DFW, no carry on, because I didn't think of one, everything was in the box and the suitcase, packed in the cargo.  I had my ticket, and found the gate I needed to get to, and hurried to it, a 15 minute walk or so.  I was nervous about everything back then, being the uptight, anal retentive dork that was, except about the things I should have been nervous about.  I didn't know the name of the venue where the contest was being held.  I wasn't old enough to rent a car, and couldn't afford one, anyhow.  I didn't know how far it was from the airport to the venue.  I didn't have hotel reservations.  I just figured there would be all kinds of guys with bike boxes at the airport, and I'd hitch a ride with one of those guys or groups, and find a hotel floor in someone's room to crash on. In other words, I was a typical low budget freestyler.  From the previous couple of contests, I knew anyone with a room usually let a few other guys crash on their floor to save money.

As I sat during my layover, about ten minutes before the flight was supposed to board, I saw a couple of familiar faces walk up and stand across the big airport walkway.  I recognized GT pro freestylers Eddie Fiola and Martin Aparijo.  Eddie was best known as the original King of the Skateparks, the biggest name in the sport at the time, judging by magazine coverage.  Martin was one of the two best flatland pros then, along with Woody Itson.  There was a blond guy, about my age, that I didn't recognize, with them.  I took a deep breath, and got my courage up.  I was deathly shy in those days, and introducing myself to anyone was hard for me.  Introducing myself to two of the top pros I'd been reading about in the magazines for a couple of years, was super scary.  But I walked over and did it.

Eddie and Martin were totally cool, and I told them I was hired by FREESTYLIN' to write an article for the contest.  They said, "Cool," or something like that, and introduced me to the blond guy with them.  "This is Josh White, " they said, "he's amazing on ramps.  He just did a big photo shoot for FREESTYLIN'."  That photo shoot not only change Josh's life, it changed vert riding.  Josh took high air variations, and extension to a new level.  But only Eddie and Martin and a couple others knew just how good Josh was then.  We talked for the next ten minutes, up until the final final boarding call.  I was totally nervous about missing the plane, but they were casual, so I hung out until we all walked over, and were the last ones to board the plane.

We sat quite a ways apart, and I didn't see them again until the Tulsa airport, claiming my luggage.  I asked if they could give me a ride to the venue, but Eddie and Martin said they had a mid-sized rental car, and with them and the three bike boxes, the car was filled up.  I said, "Cool, see you guys tomorrow."  I got one of those airport luggage carts, and waited for the next group of guys with bike boxes to show up, so I could asked them for a ride.  I waited... and waited, for about an hour, and I was getting really nervous by that time.  I realized that there were not hundreds of guys flying in for the contest, and that's when it finally occurred to me that I didn't even know where the contest was. 

Finally I saw a quite normal looking guy with dark hair, maybe a year or two younger than me, get a bike box from the conveyor belt.  I went over and introduced myself, and he said his name was Joe.  I asked if he was going to the contest.  He said he was, and I asked if I could catch a ride to the venue.  Joe said, "My friends are picking me up, they have a van, and they can probably give you a ride."  So Joe got a luggage cart, and we wheeled our stuff out through the airport, out the door, to the pick up area.

He said we had about an hour until they were supposed to show up.  Joe seemed pretty quiet, too, so the conversation was a bit slow at first.  Then we started goofing around, and doing tricks on our luggage cars, like infinity rolls.  The conversation flowed a bit smoother then, and Joe said he was from Massachusetts, and rode for Haro.  I figured he meant he had a co-sponsorship from Haro, and got a free bike and some stickers, and maybe a uniform to wear at local contests.  I'd never heard of Joe in the magazines, or from the zine publishers I traded with, so how good could he actually be? 

After over an hour of hanging out, the Haro factory team tour van pulled up.  My jaw dropped.  Legendary Haro pro Ron Wilkerson hopped out of the driver's seat, and shouted across the front of the van, "Hey Joe, what's up!"  I soon learned that the mild mannered Joe Johnson from the East Coast was a brand new, full factory Haro rider.  Like Josh White, he'd just been picked up, and no magazine photos of him had come out yet.  Joe asked if they could give me a ride, when the side door  of the van opened, and told them I was writing the contest article for FREESTYLIN'.  I saw about 7 or 8 people already in the van.

Ron said, "Sure, jam the bike boxes wherever you can.  There were 6 or 7 bikes in the very back, we jammed the bike boxes down one side above them, and I wound up sitting on top of the bike frames, my legs hanging over the mass of handlebars, crammed into the Haro tour van, with Ron Wilkerson, team manager Billy Hop (sitting shotgun), Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, assistant team manager Jon Peterson, Joe, and about three other guys.  The van smelled like a locker room, and nobody cared.  Ron jumped back in the driver's seat, and took off towards the hotel at speed.

At that point, I was 8 months out from being a dorky freestyle kid in Idaho, who only saw pro freestylers in the magazines.  Yeah, I had become friends with the Curb Dogs and Skyway team riders in the months since Boise, but the Haro and GT freestyle teams were the top pros of the sport then, and I'd never met any of them.  Somehow, on my first solo trip, I'd met most of those guys, before even getting to the hotel or the contest site.  On the rough ride to the hotel, Jon Peterson started talking to me, asking where I came from, and said he'd take me around to meet everyone I needed to, and help me however he could.  It didn't feel like I was a young guy with a cool side gig.  It suddenly felt like I had won a BMX freestyle lottery trip or something.  I had no idea how much fun that trip was going to wind up being, as I rode in the Haro team van to the Holiday Inn where most of the riders were staying.

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The Reaction to my RAD movie blog post

Over a couple of days, that previous post about the movie RAD got 1343 pageviews from the Old School BMX world.  I also got more comments from that post, across multiple Facebook groups, than from any post in years.  My whole point in writing it was that, when RAD came out, BMX freestyle was this weird little "sport," largely unknown to the mainstream world, and it meant everything to me.  I was 19 years old, couldn't afford college, and everyone in my life thought I was completely nuts for wasting every day learning tricks on a "little kid's bike."  I was a complete dork, I was really uptight, and I had to continually justify to everyone why this weird sport meant so much to me.  In my heart, I knew it was where I belonged, but no one else believed that then.  I was hoping that having a real movie made about the sport would legitimize my weird habit of riding to those around me.  In addition, I think I had just written my first freelance article for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Because of assignment, I was able to hang out with pro riders at the Tulsa AFA Masters that year, and got my first taste of being an actual part of the freestyle world.  I was looking to RAD to explain to non-riders why I rode BMX bikes all day, then did my shift at Pizza Hut, then typed my zines all night.

RAD was a pretty typical Hollywood movie, written and produced by people who didn't ride, to entertain a mass audience.  My personal expectations of RAD were completely unrealistic.  That was the point of my post.  In the comments, a few riders, at similar levels in their BMX freestyle life, thought the same thing I did.  But not everyone.

Some riders didn't even see RAD, and it had no effect on them.  Some just saw it as entertainment, didn't expect much of it, and thought it was alright.  But the riders who either saw RAD when they were really young, or saw it before they even got into riding, loved it.  To younger kids, RAD made BMX look awesome, and probably got a lot of kids into riding BMX bikes in the first place.

When I wrote the blog post, I expected a few comments.  But the number of people who commented, and the wide range of opinions amazed, and really stoked, me.  One guy called me a douchebag in a comment, then thought better of it, and was editing the comment as I tried to respond.  So I thanked him in another comment, because I could totally see where he was coming from, especially how I talked about the whole "Bacon Number" bit in Hollywood.  We actually had a cool comment discussion after that.

In another comment, I wondered out loud if RAD had any effect on rider/video producer Eddie Roman, since his first school project BMX video, "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting," came out that same year.  Eddie, who I think was doing missionary work in the Caribbean this past week, responded, saying it didn't.  His love for comics and kung fu movies,, along with his love for freestyle did.

One comment had took me back to the reason I write old school BMX stories in my various blogs in the first place.  I shot a lot of video in the late 1980's for Vision, and from 1990 on, for myself.  I shot and produced The Ultimate Weekend in 1990.  Some of my footage wound up in the first two S&M Bikes videos.  But most of my raw footage was never seen by anyone, except me.  I had one of the best collections of Mid School BMX footage, from 1990-2007, that existed.  I was planning to make a BMX freestyle documentary in 2010, the 20th anniversary of  The Ultimate Weekend.  I was able to keep most of my footage safe (some disappeared while stored in the S&M Bikes warehouse around '93), through years of homelessness and other tough times.

But when circumstances forced me to move to North Carolina, where my family ended up living, in 2008, I lost everything.  My master tapes of videos I'd produced, all my raw footage, my BMX/skate/rock climbing magazine collection, including a complete collection of FREESTYLIN' magazine, and all my other creative work.  I had nothing left but memories.  So I started blogging.  My BMX blog posts are my documentary. 

I was a goofy kid living in Boise, Idaho who got into BMX in 1982, and freestyle in '83.  Against all odds, I somehow stumbled into the BMX (and later skateboard) industry, thanks to my first zine.  I met everyone, and worked side by side with the Wizard Publications crew, Bob Morales at the AFA, Don Hoffman at Unreel Productions, Scot Breithaupt on TV shows, and then Chris Moeller in the early days of S&M Bikes.  I hung with freestyle mentor/punk rock encyclopedia Mike Sarrail at the Huntington Beach Pier, and with freestyle skaters Pierre Andre and Don Brown there as well.  I was a professional sidekick, helping the people who were making the sport happen, and watching a lot of it happen firsthand.  I didn't have the personality back then to start my own business.  But that made me a great witness as all this cool stuff happened around me.

There's an old saying, "History is written by the victors."  That's not really true.  History is actually written by the scribes, monks, journalists, editors, zine publishers, photographers, and DIY video producers who are standing near the victors.  In the mid to late 1980's, in the BMX freestyle world, I was one of those guys.  That's why I blog, that's why I'll keep telling my BMX and skate stories, and that's why I really appreciate all the other Old and Mid School Riders taking the time to read my blog posts, and to comment and add your own memories and thoughts to the mix.

I'm still learning from this sport that shaped so much of who I am 30-some years ago.  Oh, and if you write the word "Rad" in a facebook comment, weird little thumbs-up asteroids shoot across your screen.  Who knew?

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