I'm glad this 1986 news clip featuring Maurice Meyer is one of the videos still around 35 years later. Maurice, aka, Drob, is one of the coolest people from the 80's BMX freestyle world. He's the NorCal pro I actually talked to the most in my time up there, along with Robert Peterson. This video was shot at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in the summer of 1986, and it's the only video of me riding in the 80's. To be clear, I was never a Curb Dog or part of the Ground Control team, but I hung out and rode with these guys on the weekends in 1985-1986. Along with Maurice, you can see Chris and Karl Rothe, Mark McKee, Tim Traecy (doing a backyard a year before the trick got popular), and Darcy Langlois. I'm the dork chasing my bike at 5:07, a trick I did in parades while living in Idaho. As far as I know, I was nicknameless for that year. It's about the only time I didn't have some nickname going.
When you're a dorky kid, you usually get tagged with a nickname, and not a very good one. I was a chubby, unathletic kid growing up, moving from town to town around rural Ohio. I changed schools nearly every year, and I never told the new kids the nicknames I got tagged with at the previous school. But my last name is an unusual, short, German background name, Emig. Teachers almost always mispronounced it EE-mig, with a long E sound. Then I'd correct the teacher (never a great way to start in a new school), and say "No, it's Em-ig, like the letter "M," then "ig." And the teacher would still call me EEE-mig, for the first couple of weeks.
I was kind of fat, so at school after school, I got tagged with Empig, by the other kids. I'm not sure why, but in Ohio in the 1970's, we rarely called each other by our first names, we called each other by our last names, and those often got turned into nicknames. Empig was a pretty easy one to figure out, and school after school, that became my nickname, after the first few days. At Willard Junior High, in Willard, Ohio (Go Flashes!), Emicrud was another variation someone came up with.
I played football poorly in 8th grade at Willard. I was always really short for my age, but chubby. Since I wasn't really into team sports, but I wanted to not suck at one, I signed up for football. I played right guard, though after practice I probably smelled more like a left sock. One day while practicing blocking, the coaches split up the little guys and the big guys. I was short like the little scrawny guys, so I practiced against them at first. They were small and wiry, and bounced off me. For some reason, one of the coaches, said something like, "Hey, Steve's kind of stocky, let's try him against the big guys." So I got in the line to practice blocking the bigger, athletic guys, the ones who scared the shit out of me every day in the hallways.
Being short, there was no way I could stop them with standard blocking techniques (forearms and elbows, no grabbing in those days). So when I lined up against one of our team's good running backs, I reverted to my backyard football style. When the whistle blew, I dove sideways at his knees and he fell over me onto the ground. This amused the coaches, who had me pegged as the unathletic pussy that I really was. But I knew it was easy to knock big guys down by just taking them out at the knees. So I did it over and over that day. By the end of the practice, the coaches were calling me The Mighty Midget. That was the first cool nickname I ever had.
In our next game, with my newfound nickname and unorthodox blocking style, I got more time playing. I kept taking out a big linebacker, just long enough so our backs could get out of the pocket. The coaches and guys loved it, and were rooting for me on the sidelines. So the other team double teamed me. Then I took both defenders out, put them on the ground the same way. Although I was deathly afraid of physical pain as a kid, with all the football pads, it didn't really hurt to dive into guys knees, and have them fall over me onto the ground. Eventually the other coach triple teamed me, and I took all three guys out with my sideways dive. I got pulled out after that, and patted on the back on the sidelines, with guys yelling, "The Mighty Midget!" For a kid who sucked at all sports, that moment was pretty cool.
Then all the other small kids learned to dive and block big guys, and by the end of the season, everyone small got called the Mighty Midget at some point. I gave up on football, and went back to just being Empig or Emicrud.
In Boise I got into BMX, jumping, then racing, then freestyle, which was just turning into its own sport in 1983-84. To my high school friends, I was usually just Emig, no nickname. My family moved to San Jose, California, in 1985, the year after I graduated high school. I went from having a couple of good freestylers to ride with in Boise, to having about a dozen really good riders, they guys in the video above, plus the rest of the NorCal crew, from September 1985 through July 1986. I improved a lot, and I made a zine about the NorCal freestyle scene. As I'm written many times before, that zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, beginning August 1986. I moved into my new co-workers apartment, with Craig "Gork" Barrette, and Mark "Lew" Lewman. Though we were all dorks by normal standards, I was the dorkiest dork of the bunch. FREESTYLIN' editor Andy Jenkins started giving me little nicknames in the magazine by lines, like "written by E. Mig or M.Ig.
Then one night, we had a party at our apartment. In typical dork fashion, I drank too much beer, too early, in order to gain beer muscles and hopefully (finally) get laid. I was still a virgin at 20, much to my dismay. Instead, I got sick. I jumped up off the couch, and ran to the bathroom door, trying not to puke. The door was locked, someone was in there. In desperation, I ran into my bedroom, slid open the window (there was no screen), and puked out my window, down the stucco wall. Our neighbor's kitchen window was straight across from that wall, about five feet away, but lower, since beach apartment buildings take up as much land as possible, and are really close together in California. So when they looked out their kitchen window the next morning, they saw an 8 foot long puke stain on the wall below my bedroom window.
As I lay hungover in bed, they told Gork and Lew, "hey, looks like your roommate drank a bit too much last night." I had to wash off the wall after my head cleared, and Gork promptly tagged me with the nickname Heevin' Steven. It turned out there was a Garbage Pail kid card with that name, which someone found soon after, which was funny. But Heevin' Steven has way too many syllables for daily use, so Gork just started calling me Heave. I'm pretty sure there's a by line "by Heave Emig" somewhere in one or two of those BMX Action issues (November 1986- April 1987).
I got laid off at the magazines, mostly because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy, and I was a dork in general. I went to work writing and shooting photos for the AFA newsletter, and doing a bit of everything working for Bob Morales. Bob later hired a young woman to be our receptionist, and she and I hit it off. She was 25, and she broke me in, got me past the 21-year-old virgin plague, and we dated for several months. She was also a singer in a local rock band, and I started trying to write some hit song lyrics for her. In December of 1987, I got a job at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboard video company, and she followed, becoming the receptionist there for a while. She was a few years older than me, and liked to party way more than me, so I was doomed. When she eventually slept with one of my good friends, and then later dumped me, I was crushed. I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of The White Bear."
Three different girlfriends had said I kind of reminded them of a bear, I had a bear-like nose or something. So in the poem, I used the metaphor The White Bear for me, and she was The Black Leopard. She wasn't black, it was never a racial thing. I thought of being naive as like new fallen snow, pure and white, and then once you mix it up, and get involved with people, you dig into the dark side of life (partying, sex, drugs, whatever). You lose that naivety, you're never "pure white" and ignorant again, you've been "stained" with the heartache and dark side of relationships, and we're all some mix of black and white from then on. That was the idea in the poem. "Nothing's right or wrong, in our world today, nothing's black or white, it's all shades of gray," was the refrain. I've lost all copies of that poem, and almost all of the other 400 or 500 poems I've written. Anyhow, it turned into a pretty good poem. But only dork's wrote poetry, in my mind, so I wrote that poem in 1988, and it sat in notebooks in my closet, with about 200 other poems, for about 4 years.
While at Unreel Productions, my main job was making dubs, making copies of one video or another, on all kinds of formats, for everyone in the Vision empire that needed a video for something. One day, someone visiting asked what my job was, and I said, "I'm the Dub Guy." That became my unofficial title around Unreel, from 1988 through 1990.
During that time, Vision closed down Unreel Productions, and I moved into the main Vision office, and didn't have much to do. I eventually quit, and blew a bunch of money, and ran up my credit cards self-producing my own freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990. I worked a while for a surf video distributor, then got on the crew of the Supercross and Monster truck TV shows in early 1991. I got that job because Laura, a woman I worked with at Unreel, got on the crew there, in the production office. They needed someone to log footage for a day, and she knew I was a good worker, so she called me. I drove up to a building on Cahuenga, right across the freeway from Universal Studios, and spent ten hours watching interviews and footage of monster truck and mud racer drivers, and taking notes. We called that "logging footage" back in those days. I'd write down which of the three mini-interview takes was the best, and any funny lines they might say. They asked me to come back the next day, and the next. After about a month, I was officially a "production assistant." mostly working in the office, 5 days a week. But I did work on four supercross events in Anaheim, San Diego, and Las Vegas, that year.
On the first one, I ran errands around Anaheim stadium all day, for several hours before the actual supercross event in the evening. When it came time for the actual race, John, the producer told me I'd be working with the cameramen, "pulling cable." Yes, that sounds dirty, but it really means just coiling up the long cable behind the camerman, as he moved around the side of the track. Think Supercorss races are fun to watch live? You should see one from the edge of the whoops, five feet from the riders, it's epic. Anyhow, John said, "The camera crew is eating dinner, right now, so go eat, and then work with them during the race." I headed to the meal room, where they were having lasagna. I'd been working my ass off all day, and I was starving, so gorged myself two big plates of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread.
Then I met the cameraman I was working with, and he showed me what I needed to do. I was out on the field, and as he moved around, I coiled and uncoiled the cable, to keep other people from tripping over it, or whatever. Unfortunately, I ate too much lasagna, it was a physical job, and I really needed to go take a dump. But there was no time, so I had a seriously upset stomach, and a seriously bad look on my face all night. John walked by me at one point, and asked why I was mad. I didn't tell him the truth, since I had only worked there a couple of weeks. After seeing me with a mean look on my face, he joked and called me "Smilin' Steve." When the race was over 3 1/2 hours later, I told the cameraman, and he told me to run and hit the restroom.
After a much needed dump, I felt 100 times better, and helped pick up all the cables and camera equipment. The cameraman joked, after I told him how much lasagna I ate. He said, "Yeah, if I wasn't running around with a camera all night, I would have had a second helping, too. But when you work on our crew, you need to eat light." Lesson learned. I became, "Smilin' Steve" at the office from then on. John actually felt bad,when I told him I was sick that whole first race, and that's why I looked so mean. He was actually one of the coolest bosses I ever worked for.
One of my other jobs at the monster truck/supercross production office became labeling every video tape that came in, and organizing them in our "tape library," a big closet. I was in charge of keeping track of every single tape, as they went out to edit or get copies made. Laura knew I did this to the 3,000 poorly labels tapes at Unreel, and totally organized the place, so I got the job. My overly uptight attitude worked well for keeping track of the various tapes coming in and out. For those who don't know, video tapes, VHS, betamax, 3/4", betacam, whatever, are big cassettes with reals of plastic "tape," and that tape is coated in iron oxide, which is a basically a cool form of rust. That's what the electric signals on video tape are recorded on, in the oxide on the tape.
One day, Craig, a very loud, borderline arrogant, and funny producer, came to me to get tapes for his next edit session. He walked into the office I was in and said, "Oh Gatekeeper of All That Is Oxide, I need a tape." For a couple of weeks, I was nicknamed "The Gatekeeper," because I was the gatekeeper to get tapes, and kept good track of them, so they didn't get lost. When your office produces two TV shows a week, losing footage can be a real bad thing.
I wound up living in a flop house in North Hollywood, in late 1991, working second shift at a video duplicator, and going street riding alone every day, around the San Fernando Valley. At that time, about 50 miles away, back in Huntington Beach, BMX racer/jumper/entrepreneur, Chris Moeller bought out his original partner, Greg Scott (The "S" in S&M Bikes, Scott & Moeller), and was running the tiny bike company from his garage. Chris decided it was time to make an official video for S&M Bikes. The year before I had self-produced a bike video called The Ultimate Weekend, and Chris, and a few of the S&M riders and P.O.W. House guys were in it. He found my phone number somewhere, and called me up in North Hollywood. Chris had this crazy idea for the first S&M Bikes video, and it sounded fun. He started coming up and hauling me down to H.B. on the weekends, to hang out at his apartment, and shoot video footage, since I didn't have a car. The result was the video, Feel My Leg Muscles... I'm a Racer. I shot the footage on my RCA S-VHS camera, and Chris bought a prosumer S-VHS VCR to edit it. Not counting the VCR, the total budget to make Leg Muscles was about $250, mostly beer money.
As things worked out, I got fired from my job as a result of making Leg Muscles, which is a long story of its own. That story became a BMX industry urban legend for years, getting crazier with each retelling. I'll save that for another day. Anyhow, I wound up sleeping on the floor of Chris' tiny, "Winnebago" apartment in Huntington Beach. He called it the Winnebago because the whole apartment was 8 feet wide, with almost no windows. So it felt like we were living in a motorhome. A guy named Shaggy had the small couch in the living room, I slept on the floor, Chris had the one bedroom, and S&M Bikes was run out of the garage. It was a weird scene, with lots of punk rock on cassette, ramen noodles, slices of pizza at Papa Joe's, cheap beer, and riding in the afternoons and nights.
One morning in 1992, Chris walked out of his room, talking about this cool book he just got of Henry Rollins' poetry. One poem in particular, was about Rollins doing what single guys do when alone, while looking in the bathroom mirror. I'd never polished the old rocket while standing at the bathroom sink, looking in the mirror, but Rollins said in the poem, "I look in the mirror, and see Superman... sort of." When Chris finished the book, called Black Coffee Blues, I believe, he loaned it to me. I read Rollins' poems. Henry Rollins is a smart guy, and the poetry was real raw and cool. Suddenly, being a "poet" seemed much less lame. Knowing I had a couple hundred poems hidden away in notebooks, I said, "I could write a poem book like this. Hell, I already have written more poems than this."
I got my notebooks out of storage, along with my typewriter, and edited and typed up a huge zine of nearly 100 of my poems. The zine was so thick, I had to bind it with duct tape, staples wouldn't go through it all, it had like 60 or 70 zine pages. It took over a month to get it all together and published. The zine of poetry was called "We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing." I drew a bad picture of a brain riding on top of a 747 airplane while it crashed for the cover.
I gave the first copy to Chris Moeller, pretty sure he would find a lot to make fun of me with in it. Much to my surprise he came out his room the next morning and said it really surprised him, it was so honest and kind of raw. Not as cool as Henry Rollins' poems, but better than he expected. That was the first day. I think it was the next day, he started giving me a hard time, saying "I am The White Bear and she is the tigress." I said, "No she's the black leopard, it's a metaphor." The word cougar to describe a woman dating younger guys hadn't become a thing yet, but that girlfriend definitely had that feline quality. Anyhow, day after day, Chris kept calling me The White Bear. Then people in our group of friends started calling me The White Bear. It was always THE White Bear, not just White Bear.
When Chris Moeller tags you with a nickname, he keeps pushing it until it sticks. Ask Belt Buckle Barry, Porta John, or Child Molester Gary. So I became The White Bear to the BMX world of the 1990's. Chris' girlfriend at the time, Shelly, would come out in the mornings when she slept over, heading off to work, and have to step over me in my sleeping bag,since the living room walkway was so small. Every morning she'd say, "Morning The White Bear," and I'd look up, "Morning Shelly." as she stepped over me.
At some point in 1992, I can't remember why, I moved into the P.O.W. House, the Pros of Westminster. The house then was Dave Clymer, Alan Foster, John Paul Rogers, Lawan Cunningham, Chris Sales, Jay Lonergan, Scotty, Bill Naggy, John Salamne, and probably someone I'm forgetting. I think Todd Lyons had just moved out, but he hung out there almost every night. Most of the time I lived there, I worked as furniture mover part time. So while everyone else slept in hung over, I'd get up kind of early, go out to the nasty brown Lazy Boy recliner in the back yard, and read books in the morning sun. When I was at the house, I'd just sit in one place reading a lot. At some point, someone started calling me Sluggo. apparently because I just sat there like a slug, I guess. But nobody told me that they called me Sluggo behind my back.
I moved out, and then back a few months later, after working the summer on the American Gladiators crew. Alan's little brother, Brian Foster was living in the house then, as well. Keith Treanor never lived there, but hung out most nights, and went riding with all of us daily. One day we were heading out to ride somewhere, and Keith said, "Hey Sluggo, you coming?" The other guys looked weird for a minute. "Nobody knows we call him Sluggo," someone said. "Keith was like, "Really?" He looked at me and laughed, "Damn, we've been calling you Sluggo for almost a year now." I laughed it off. After all the other nicknames, it didn't phase me. When I'd practice with my nunchucks at the house after that, I told them I was practicing Sluggitsu, the Way of the Slug, you look so pathetic no one wants to fuck with you. That got a few laughs.
So in most of the BMX world, to this day, I get called The White Bear. If I run into Todd Lyons, Alan Foster, or Brian Foster, they'll still call me Sluggo. Since The White Bear actually sounded kind of cool, I took it as my pen name when I published poetry, and some zines. As the old saying goes, I don't really care what people call me, just don't call me late for dinner.
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