1-26-97
[click on photos for full-size and caption]
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Dave woke me up to see a beautiful sunrise in Joshua Tree National Park. We camped out there on the 23rd, I gotta say camping in the desert is FRESH. We drove through the park, digging cacti and the mountains and the joshua trees. We even saw a little coyote trotting through the brush and we climbed some big boulders with our eyes peeled for rattlesnakes. After that we were back on I-10 for the third time on this trip, headed for LA, the mecca of backyard pools.
We got close and started making phone calls from gas stations but we couldn't hook up with any friends to stash our gear and go skate. We called Matt and Nate in San Diego at about noon and a guy named Doug answered the phone, "Get down here, we've been expecting you. I'm drinking shots of tequila right now." Suede (from Daytona) had called them. Full on Southern hospitality. We got back on the "freeway" and passed many sweet ditches all the way to San Diego. Following the sound of Matt's voice we arrived at their flop. 5-7 guys live in this one-bedroom apartment, as Matt put it, "barracks-style." The sink in the bathroom was filled with some sort of brown liquid but other than that the place seemed pretty clean. As it should happen in a true skateboarder compund, they got us tweaked right off the bat. When Nate got home we furthered the cause then headed for the Graffix warehouse. They have a super-wide vert ramp (built by Twister and co) and some quarter pipes with pool or big metal coping. The session was raging, at least a couple pros were in the house (I recognized Darren Navarrette and Alfonzo Rawls) and there was a whole pack of rippers on the vert ramp. It was hard to get runs and the elliptical transitions sort of threw me off but it was fun. Dave just missed a head on collision by falling off the side of the ramp and hurt his knee. After Graffix, Nate took us to a friend's house so he could take a shower and I played with the raddest rotweiler x chow puppy. Back at the barracks we partied it up with a whole posse of skaters then Nate took us to 3 bars on skateboards. Nate slammed so hard skating home drunk but the next morning he couldn't remember why the whole side of his body ached. Through the course of the night we met more friendly skaters than you could shake a stick at: Twister and Rhino from Boston, Drake and Bacon, Chris, Doug from Springfield, Darren the 16yr old sponsored surfer (who did sick bomb-drop 50-50s on the coffee table), Sean the surfer with the rad puppy and shower, and probably more but that night got pretty hazy if ya know what I mean.
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The next morning Nate showed us the cliffs and took us to a kill Mexican restaurant for breakfast. Oh yes we had fire in the belly that morning. We tracked down Rhino and headed for Huntington Beach. We were only on the highway (whoops I mean freeway) about 15 minutes before the rain started coming down in big splattering drops. Nate switched freeways as we followed in the Subaru. From the signs I deduced we were headed for Temecula but more rain in that direction led us to another exit. I think we were in Escondido. Rhino and Nate showed us two sweet backyard pools on seemingly no-bust properties. One was black-bottomed and rough with a grindable loveseat and very gnarly coping (square, pebbled, stuck out 1/2 inch). It was too wet to skate.
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The other was a white 'roman-shaped' pool with lots of goofy graffiti and a whole bunch of water and shit in the deep end. So, after driving all afternoon in the heart of skateboard-mecca we hadn't even pulled our stuntwoods out of the hatchback. We hung out at Rhino's and watched videos. Dave insisted we catch the sunset over the cliffs in Ocean Beach (SD) but it was so cloudy it just went from light gray to dark gray, really great.
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Dave and I drove to LA that night and stayed with my childhood friend Susannah. She lives with her boyfriend, he's real exciting and enthusiastic. Dave and I ate all his cereal, ha ha. The next 3 days were filled with the all-out quest of skating the Huntington Beach pools. The first day, Super Bowl Sunday, Rhino guided us via payphone to the Basic clover. It was full of water and popping out of the ground so we decided to try our luck at Chicken's. He wasn't home so I left a note. We saw some boppin jazz that night with Susannah at a bar called the Cat & Fiddle.
The next day, Monday, we went to _ _ and met Chicken himself. He told us how to drain all the water out of his pool and how to get to Kelly Belmar's. So while the pump was running at Chicken's we vacuumed Dave's car (it was pretty messy after travelling coast to coast) and bailed out Kelly's. Dave didn't want to stay at Kelly's and wait for it to dry so we went back to Chicken's and skated the shallow end while the deep end finished drying.
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I did my first grinds over a death box. Dave was working sick lines through the corners using only the shallow end and doing big sick f/s grinds. As the wet spot grew smaller in the deep end Dave started carving around it. Just as the deep end became fully skateable Dave announced that he needed food. He acted all salty when I told him I wasn't hungry and wanted to stay so I ended up going with him. Besides, I didn't want to skate by myself and end up cracking my skull open. When we got back there was only enough time for a few quick runs before it got dark. (If you ever intend to take a big road trip in January don't overlook the fact that it gets darker a lot earlier than in the Summer. And, the only time it rains a lot in Southern California is January-February, DOH!)
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The next morning we arrived at Chicken's at the same time as Smiley, Tate, Chris, and some other ripper that looked like Ozzy. We were greeted once again by two of the friendliest pitt-bulls and Eddie Reatigui. For the 3rd time Eddie fed us the line, "I'm going to go set up a board" then didn't skate. The other guys were killing it though. Ozzy did big ollies in the deep, Tate did f/s slide'nrolls on the big round wall, and Smiley did smith grinds through the tight corner among other tricks. Dave was stylin his Skatopia lines, f/s ollies and grinds deep to shallow, whipping his body all over the place. I got some 50-50s in the deep end. We lacked the resources to fully get in the zone. Smiley, Tate, and co split to get some lunch and we told them we'd meet them at Kelly's. Salba was supposed to show up that afternoon and after that they were heading to Birdland, Tony Hawk's new ramp.
About 2 minutes after they left Dave got up from the bench he was resting on and started whipping around the pool again. He did a frontside carve through the tight corner (something he'd done a zillion times) and fell from the tiles to the flat bottom, cement. He absorbed the full weight of the fall with his eyebrows and nose and the knee he had ganked at Graffix. He sat on the jacuzzi bleeding as Eddie brought him ice and water. [Based on his dazed state I think it's safe to say he had a concussion. I found out recently he had surgery on his nose and his outer skull is cracked, fortunately this is just cosmetic. Wear your helmets kiddies!] I brought him back to Susannah's and he watched a tape of the Simpsons the rest of the night.
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The next day we drove back to Huntington Beach and bailed Kelly's pool once again. He likes to fill it each day with a bucket or two of water so anyone can skate if they do a little work. That way they won't take a backyard pool for granted. I skated by myself for about an hour. The pool is rad and tight although I think the channel comes down really low, taking up a lot of wall space. I guess if you're good enough to air over the channel it just makes it burlier. I couldn't get stoked or see the lines by myself; I settled for some carving, little grinds, and edgers.
I felt like a puppy with it's tail between it's legs as we did our about-face and pointed the Subaru East for the first time. We drove to Phoenix that night to visit my friend Greg. We got drunk and ate fried tuna sandwiches. The rest of the trip was tense, to say the least, so I think I'll end the story here. We made it back to Pittsburgh (from Phoenix) by Friday night, January 31st.
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