Jump to content

Figbuck Chronicles...


Figbuck

Recommended Posts

Dear America.

We Is all FUCKED UP.

 

 

Every few generations the same call goes out. In the sixties the young people rejected their father's values and rebelled against authority and where everything was heading. I found the following interesting to listen to (but don't necessarily believe or support the JBS) ....

 

Link to comment
  • Replies 295
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Top Posters In This Topic

Every few generations the same call goes out. In the sixties the young people rejected their father's values and rebelled against authority and where everything was heading. I found the following interesting to listen to (but don't necessarily believe or support the JBS) ....

 

 

 

wasn't there someone in the late 60's who came up with a theory of what stages ALL governments go through?? i believe socialism was after democracy. My 8th grade English teacher showed me the stages, he was a baby boomer. lol

Link to comment

wasn't there someone in the late 60's who came up with a theory of what stages ALL governments go through?? i believe socialism was after democracy. My 8th grade English teacher showed me the stages, he was a baby boomer. lol

 

We wen't from democracy to faggotry, now were diving into Police State.

Link to comment

My old friend and mentor Howard Gallaway just passed away finally. He was going to be 102 this Spring. I was looking through my boxes of construction photographs for pictures to send in memorial. I came across some other photographs that hit me like a ton of bricks and reminded me of my partner in crime David. He worked for the Galloways with me, and remained in touch with them through the years, where I drifted off into other things. The last time I saw either of them was about ten years ago. It's hard to comprehend being that old and hard for me to think that David died right after that at about 45.

 

(Me and The David circa 1980 working on a seven bedroom six bath, 6000sf house in Los Altos, California. Getting ready to run subfloor.)

 

DaveTyrrelClary80.jpg

 

When I first met David I did not like him at all. It took me a while to see beyond his gruff, intolerant demeanor and figure out where he was coming from. It wasn't until years later that I saw beneath the persona he projected and realized how good a friend he was to me. David was Ratsun. Dave was a Ratsunista before there was Ratsun. (think early Wolfman... reet) Well, I was Ratsun before he was... but he was way more Ratsun than I was... in the end... I guess, what ever that means.

 

After I got out of the Army in the summer of '75, I began trying to make a living as a musician. There were many gigs, but it was hard and they didn't pay much. I was young, had lots of energy and I had never really considered that I couldn't or wouldn't be able to make a living as a musician. Just payin' dues. I never really even thought that I should consider making money some other way, or that it was even a possibility some how.

 

My girlfriend knew a hippie who made a bunch of money growing Alpha Sprouts and delivered them to stores and restaurants. This guy almost single-handedly created an industry. He lived in and old Victorian style house in San Mateo built in 1895. It survived the '06 SF quake and many subsequent ones too. Cool place, it was a diamond in the rough. A rundown rental unit that needed lots of work, but it was basically intact and not messed up.

 

The Sprout Man wanted to get a loan to fix the place up and build a green house on the property in back. In order to do that, the house needed to be bolted to a concrete foundation in order to qualify. The house was so old, it was "Baloon Framed" built on planks of redwood called mud sills. The sills were laid right on the earth and functioned quite well for a ninety years.

 

Sprout Man ask around if there was anybody who wanted to do temporary labor work on the house. I heard about it and went over there one morning. There was a small crew of guys tearing the living daylights out of this place. I guess I never saw a building get 'demoed'. Sprout Man had a few employees in his business and he said the starting pay was $3.50 and hour. Minimum Wage was like $2.75. He said, I need you to clean up behind the carpenters outside and help me inside the house.

 

I didn't know any better and thought that was all right! What they were doing was jacking the house up, digging trenches for a T type foundation, forming and placing concrete, then dropping the house back on the foundation and bolting it down. Sprout Man spent most of his time at his old sprout farm, so I ended up at the disposal of BB, the guy who was like the contractor. I cleaned up, put debris in the dumpster and stockpiled dirt from under the house, then he left too and put me to work with ' The David'. After the first week sprout man gave me a payroll check... I was taking home $2.79 per hour.

 

David yelled at everybody like it was imperative that his orders be followed with field expediency. This guy could have been a platoon sargent. He could tell in a heartbeat that I had no idea what I was doing. I really didn't. He was yelling at me to dig a shallow trench along a string line right around the inside perimeter of the house. He was yelling at the other guys to look at the chump with the cut off shovel who didn't even know how to dig a hole in the ground. Little did I know I would be in the same situation for years to come as a contractor, where I couldn't believe some poor laborer couldn't dig a fucking trench or hole right.

 

The contractor guy, BB, came back, handed me a carpenter pencil and a scrap of plywood. He said go around and take lunch orders from everybody... I want a pint of peproncini Italian peppers and a six-pack of Tuborg beer... and walked away. I was thinking whaaaz goin' on here. BB yelled the new guy is taking the lunch orders. David came right over and said, I want a quart of Coors and a quart of Chocolate Milk, then gave me five dollars. I went around and got money and sandwich orders from the other carpenters, then BB ask if I had a ride. I had walked over there so he ask if I could drive a stick and pointed to his Butterscotch Datsun 521 with a beat old camper on it.

 

I learned the right way and wrong way to dig ditches and holes. At quarter to noon every day, I got a shingle or a piece of sheetrock and wrote down the lunch order for everybody, then ran out to the nearest deli. BB and David the same every day, six-pack of Tuborg and hot peppers, quart of Coors and chocolate milk.

 

David grew up in Salt Lake City and started framing tract houses on piecework crews. They got paid by the house. So they usually framed up a house, starting Monday and finishing on Saturday. Dave said he built so many tract houses, starting on 75th street and within a few years, by the time he moved to California, he was on 125th Street.

 

David was six feet, wiry, thin but stronger than he looked and scrappy. He chain smoked Camel straits and tore the filters off if he had to bum a smoke. David's hygiene was not a top concern for him. He took showers a couple of times a week but never used deodorant, brushed his teeth or hair which was a rat's nest. He would show up for work still reeking drunk from the night before, hooking down a big thermos of black coffee hen smoking joints and Camels. He still had dirt on his cheeks or forehead from the day before, wearing clothes out before he would ever wash them.

 

David had a Beagle dog named Watson. Watson and David were inseparable. He was the job mascot. Nothing bothered him. He would find a shady place under the house or else on the seat of David's '65 Chevy work truck. In these years, I'm pretty sure he slept in his clothes with the dog at night. (Dave 'n Watson with a guy that lasted about three days and was dying trying to keep up with The David)

 

DavidWatson.jpg

 

Really this story is the story of how I came to be a carpenter then a contractor. If it wasn't for David I never would have kept on. BB was responsible for giving me my first real job, but David taught me how to cut and nail, how to take apart the most fucked-up Chinese jigsaw puzzles of remodel, then snap 'em back together as fast and easy as possible, yet never cut corners on quality of workmanship. BB went on to be a multimillionaire commercial contractor. Dave, me and all the guys on that original crew went on to get contracting licenses and find our own work. Mostly custom residential work, design/build one-off jobs for individuals. (Me trimming subfloor in Los Altos, 1980)

 

CPs144Clarycuttingsubfloor.jpg

 

 

Yeah, I mean coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, Coors 'n chocolate milk for lunch and burgers for dinner, then go to a bar and drink until closing, pretty much seven days a week. After Sprout Man's job was done, BB hired me to help them to do foundation corrections for three more houses. $5 an hour cash. It took a while but after a few months of working with this crew, I observed the process and ask questions so I basically under stood what the desired end result was. Dave decided he taught me enough stuff that he should take advantage of it and have me be his personal helper, so mostly I worked with Dave every day.

 

BB would get contacted by clients to do small jobs, or maybe jobs he didn't want to do, so he gave them to David to do on his own as 'side jobs' on the weekend. My deal with BB was that he didn't want to commit to giving me 40 hours a week or that he could even use me at all when they didn't have enough work for six guys. I said, I'm only doing this until I get in a good band or a couple good gigs. There were days that I showed up at eight AM after getting home from a gig at two thirty. Great employee.

 

There was a time when BB was slowed in getting new work permitted. David had a bunch of this side work, and asked me if I would help him some weekends. I had bought carpenter's nail bags, a hammer and some basic hand tools. He said, I'm charging $50 a day cash for me, so I'm just going to tell the owners that you cost the same. BB was paying me $5 an hour and David $7.50... cash on the tailgate every Friday.

 

(We didn't know it at the time, but BB was charging $20 per hour for us so he was making three or four times what he was paying us of each guys... there were weeks that I know he cleared off four, five, six grand cash. (This went on for a few years... but that story is a three book trilogy.)

 

The thing about working on the weekends was that we always started by woofing a giant spliff with hot coffee about 7 AM then by 7:30 have a hot Skillsaw in our hands ready to mow. We usually drank lunch at noon and worked until we got as much done as we could. Work all week and all week-end, get paid cash... it kept us out of trouble... well kinda, mostly... for the most part.

 

So, BB turned David on to a 60-year-old woman who owned an old house just off Highway 1, a little north of the little farm town of Half Moon Bay, at a place called Miramar. Cool place just south from where I learned to surf at Pillar Point, before they built the breakwater. There were a street off the highway through the fields, with about a dozen old places, left from what was must have been a little farm community by the ocean. A mix of turn of the century houses and cottages for weekend or retirement retreats. You could walk to the beach in a minute and hear the surf all the time.

 

She was in Sproutman's situation where she wanted a loan to remodel her place, but it had no foundation, so she couldn't get qualified. We did that a lot back then when the codes and laws were much different. We ended up getting a foundation under that little house for less than $25oo. It increased the worth of the place from maybe a hundred grand to three hundred grand, just bolting it to a modern foundation.

 

Dave told me about the place and said the lady was really nice. She owned a donut shop in San Francisco for many years and was going to sell it and retire in her little cottage by the Pacific Ocean there. Donut Lady worked seven days a week and so I never met her until a month later. He thought, we should be able to jack the house up in one weekend, dig the footings and form the foundation walls the second weekend, then place concrete and strip forms the third, finally frame a new rim joist and underpinnings the fourth weekend... piece of cake he used to say. Cake work! Cakey man. $400 each!

 

After working all week, I played a gig Friday night and didn't get home until two AM with my ears ringing so hard. I show up early Saturday morning on three hours sleep and we look at the situation. It is clear right off the bat what had happened. At some point they graded the driveway along the kitchen side of the place. The house is only about 30' x 30' and they pushed the dirt about 14" up against the house so that the floor of the house is only one 4" step above the ground. Remodelers would call this situation 'below grade'.

 

The wood floor framing is below the exterior paving. It sloped towards the back of the house so that we could actually look under the floor joists and see that the house was still only about 12" from the dirt in the crawl space to the bottom of the floor joists and the exterior walls were sitting on mud sills buried in the ground. Most of this lumber had been eaten by termites... vaporized, gone. Hard to know what was holding the thing up.

 

Dave said, it's the force man! The force of habit... ba-doom-chick!!!

 

One of The David's nicknames on the crew was Wild Man or Wild Dave. Actually it came from this unorthodox way that he swung a framing hammer. Dave could do things to nails with a hammer like I can blow be-bop licks on chord changes. He was an artist with a hammer, but was really scary watching David swing it the first time. Almost any tradesman that came onto our job sites made some kind of comment about it. It's hard to describe, but his first name was Wavey Davey, because his head and the head of the hammer would swerve back and forth. Plus he always gripped it from the very end of the handle and hit with all his conviction every time. Wild Wavin' David.

 

(Los Altos, Me, the owner Bob, helper and The David.)

 

CPs143BobKlonoffcrew.jpg

 

David was pretty fucking crazy by any other normal person's standards... period. Like I said, I didn't like Dave at first, but as I got to know him, he was a pretty simple guy. It was summed up by one word, "Show". The framing crews he came up working on talked about "Footage" or getting some "Show. They were paid either buy the square foot or else by the piece. Footage referring to the more lineal feet built the more money made... or if it was by the house then, they wanted to "Stand Up Walls and Stack Roof". The more wall or roof framing visible at the end of the day... the more the work 'showed'. The David was all about the Big Show. Cut and nail a much material as possible every day. Make units of lumber and plywood disappear every day... make it show.

 

The David, build shit every day, got stoned every night... and he had his dog Watson. He was a no bullshit person. Well, he might have bullshitted himself, but he was always straight with me. There was more than one period in our lives, one of us had a major melt down, and we were able to be there for each other.

 

Dave having been through this process so many time before, looked at the unforeseen conditions as a minor inconvienience. A bummer that we had to deal with... Grrrr, just grit our teeth and get on with it. He had a much clearer vision of what needed to be done in the progression of jobs. The first thing was to dig a shallow trench from the back of the house towards the front. Slide on our bellies scooping dirt into 5 gallon buckets with short handled hoes.

 

Once we had about sixteen or eighteen inches clearance we figured out where we could position three long beams to lift the house on... and layout spots where we would position the jacks. We needed to dig holes for the jacks so we could get the beams in place and begin to lift the house. The earth was hard dusty clay that was just like scooping frozen ice cream. You didn't dig it you cut it out on you stomach. Needless to say it was a nasty dirty job with all kinds of bugs, insects and other critters running for cover.

 

I was so young and ignorant and stupid... seriously green in the trades. I was thinking, if I can make a hundred bucks cash this weekend... I'm gonna get tickets to Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass, then go over to Tower Records in the City!! You know...? That's where I was coming from. I started digging and hauling dirt out from under and Dave went to rent every single bottle jack in the county. I think we had 24, which was probably a dozen short for what we really needed. I know that now... but this is how I learned the wrong way.

 

Once we got three beams in position and jacks along two of them, the plan was to jack up the first one, cut new 4x4 posts and reposition the jacks the the third beam... then jack the second beam level with the first and keep repeating. Once we got the thing three or four inches in the air, there was more room to crawl, more light to see and cut the sewer and water lines. It would have been easier if we had three sets of jacks but... even though the process was slow, tedious, it was working OK to begin with.

 

If we had enough jacks to lift the three beam, then it would have been a piece of cake. But we only had two rows and had to crib up each jack then move them to the other beam and repeat the process.

 

By the end of Saturday we had jacked it around 28" in the air, but had run out of cribbing, pads, posts to shore up. Sunday, early we went to BB's and got a bunch of scrap lumber for more shoring, then got to the house about seven-thirty. We needed to move the jacks one last time and then we were going to have to get rid of the temporary posts we were using. We would build six cribs to hold the whole house up on the three beams, higher than the top of the new foundation, keeping some jacks in place so we could drop it back down on the completed concrete wall later.

 

There was a string line that we shot with level, at about the elevation we decided for the top of the foundation. We were nearly there on David's side and so he started spinning his set of jacks on his side. Remember we are on our stomachs or backs in the dirt, under this house cranking these big screw jacks with giant tire irons. They can lift 20 tons but as you lift, it gets harder and harder to crank until they have reached the limit of their mechanical advantage. You need place a spare jack next to the one you want to move or re support. Then block it up with wood pads or cribs, then crib up the location, screw the jack back in and then you have another six to eight inch 'reach' for the jack.

 

It's slow, tedious and back-breaking work cranking jacks. I go to David, "Dude, I'm at the end of my travel, I'm going to change these six jacks out." He goes, "Nah man, We are just about good!" He is huffing and puffing, I got it... well mostly... I go, I know man, look at my jacks... we are way sloped, and I am out of turns. I'm gong to jump out and get cribs." David crawls over and starts to crank my jack closest to him. I yell, "Dave, stop man, we are getting too un-level. Your good on your side, but I have two inches to go. "

 

I get out from under and he is yelling, yeah, yeah, I almost got it... uh, no I guess not." I put my hand on the house as I get up and out. The whole thing sways like it's sitting on a tipping point and I can move it with one finger!!! I yell, " David fucking stop!! I hear him trying the next jack. "DAVID STOP right now orrrr.... aaaaaAAAAHHHH!!!!!"

 

CeRaaaaasssSSSSSSHHHHaaaaAAAABOOOM!!!

 

The whole house falls over in slow motion, shaking the ground like an earthquake when it hit the cribbing. (Me right after I realized that nobody got killed!)

 

ClaryMiramar77.jpg

 

It sounded more like a KAAAFFOOOOM. Next thing I know is my adrenaline pumping and thinking David just got crushed under the house. I start yelling at the top of my lungs running around the house to see if I could see. There is dust every where. DAVID, DAVID, DAVID!!!

 

Next thing I know, there are a hundred people standing around looking at me. It's eight thirty on Sunday morning. People are in pajamas and robes. There is a fucking mushroom cloud of dust a hundred feet in the air! The nearest house is a hundred yards away, where did all these people come from. God Dammit... we are ratting this job in with out a permit... got to be cool so we don't get popped by the building department.

 

I'm still running around the other side of the house to see if I can see The David and calling. I get over there and when the house landed, it broke a water pipe so water is spraying. I look and yell David one last time... then I hear him say, "What the fuck? ... Over?", coming from behind me. I'm astonished! I go, Dave where were you? I thought you we dead! He goes, I was in the back of my truck trying to find a wrench to shut the water meter off, and dives into a little hole under the house whit a plug, wrench... lighting a smoke.

 

No, uh I mean... he goes flying under the house and in a minute has the pipe plugged. I see that he totally lucked out and was between two of the cribs that weren't crushed.

 

People are asking, "What happened?" Dave is going, "Oh, a pipe broke." The house didn't really look too much different from the street and you could see we were doing something there... working on the pipes, you know? It would't be apparent that we just dropped the house about 14 to 18" down, depending on how it landed, and horizontally about 16 to 22"... out of square!!

 

I go fuck David I told you to hold up and stop jacking! Where you under there?? He said, I could see it starting to move in slow motion and I crawled my ass outta there fast as I could and barely made it. After awhile, all the people just walked away mumbling... gee doesn't seem like a pipe would...

  • Like 1
Link to comment

I had an Army buddy, Gary who was a flute and tenor sax player. He had just been discharged, was on his way home from Japan, and spent a week with me. I told him what we were up to and he said he thought it would be cool to come and help us.

 

Here was the sleazy thing about this job; This old house existed right on the property line, so it was a non-conforming structure. To conform it had to be six feet away in what is called the setback. The house not only fell down, and out of square... but over the property line onto the neighbor's lot!

 

The house wasn't worth anything because you couldn't get a permit to put a foundation under it unless you moved it to the setback. If it magically had a foundation then the bank would loan on it, and it would be grandfathered in, because it existed before lot lines were drawn. At least that was the plan to help the old lady out.

 

I was so pissed at David, but he was already walking around looking at the situation, grabbed a tape measure and was figuring out where the house landed in relation to the property line. My buddy Gary is looking at The David like he is insane. Well, uh. yeaauh!! WILD MAN!

 

(The David and Mr. 'C', Miramar 'circa 1976)

 

DavidClary.jpg

 

 

I'm thinking we are so screwed. David says, let's jack it up then push it back over. I thought he was kidding, but he starts barking commands... come on lets dig the beams out and set them up again!!

 

After about four hours we jacked the house back up in the air, had a series of cribs set up to catch the house, and only allow it to drop a foot. The structure was sitting on a minimum number of temporary 4 x 4 posts and very scary unstable as we were under it spinning jacks. We crawled out and went to the back of the house. The three of use stuck out our index fingers and pushed the whole house back over! With three fingers... KERRBOOOOOMMMMMMmmm...

 

(Piece 'o Cake... The David, Gary and Me, Miramar circa 1976)

 

DavidClaryGary.jpg

 

By this time in the afternoon nobody even noticed. By the end of the day we had the whole house jacked relatively up to the height we needed and sitting on cribs. We were so dirty and exhausted from cranking jacks all day. The next weekends we formed and placed concrete, fixed the underpinnings and dropped it down off the shoring. I think she even gave us a couple hundred extra bucks at the end.

 

About 25 years later I was driving out on the coast with a girlfriend and see Miramar Road. We had lunch at Princeton Harbor and I tell her this story about dropping the house on David. On the way home we stop to see the house and there are two young guys tearing the shit out of it, adding a monster addition. We stopped to take a look and talked to them. I ask them if they had problems working on the old house, was everything level, square and plumb? Then said, the foundation is level but nothing else is right about it.

 

They bought it from the old lady who we worked for. She had just passed away. Eventually when the monster addition was built, the old house was torn down to the sub floor and rebuilt two stories. I told them the story, but they thought I was exaggerating.

 

Dave and I worked for BB for a couple years and made him a lot of cash money which he used to start a real contracting business and get big time. I got hurt very badly twice on BBs jobs. He had no license, or insurance, so I quit and worked for a couple other small residential builders. When Dave quit BB, he took a bunch of his clients and contacts too. They realized that BB was weasel and Dave was the one actually doing the work. Dave called me and we built and bunch of new custom houses for a few years. Eventually we each had our own contractor's license numbers and developed our own clients and businesses. David became an electrical contractor too.

 

I cut the shit out of my leg with a Skillsaw on one of BBs jobs. 27 stitches and the ER Dr. said, another quarter inch and you would have cut the femoral artery and bled out before you could dial the phone. Lucky boy. So I quit BB and then stumbled into a great band and began working in clubs all the time. Eventually I got my contracting license. I thought if BB can do it, so can I.

 

David bought a house in the old part of Redwood City. There was a rail spur that ran right down the middle of the street to the Port of Redwood City and there were many ugly utility poles and wires. The neighborhood was surrounded by industrial buildings and the other houses and apartment building were run down rental units. Mostly hispanic families were moving in and white families out. Eventually, The David was one of the only white guys in the Barrio.

 

DavidChestnutStreet.jpg

 

It was a huge lot and the original crappy stucco house that fronted the street looked trashed. There were some giant sprawling additions to the house in back so that four big families were living in there. The day that Dave got possession of the property, we met the utility guys to get water, gas and electric turned on. There were three women with about eight kids living in the uninsulated garage way in the back. They couldn't speak English and thought we were trying to collect more rent... they already paid money to somebody who said they could stay there.

 

I watched David go thought some really crazy times. He was a full blown alcoholic. No matter what time he got home, he would be up at six smoking a cigarette and making coffee. At seven-thirty or eight he was on the job ready to rock. Of all the carpenters and tradesman I have run across, David could work 99% of them into the ground. By five in the evening David was in a bar drinking Wild Turkey over until closing.

 

When my band started to get good and had a following around '77 or so, David used to come to the gig and sit at the bar. I noticed that he had become buddies with a local coke dealer. One day after work I went to Dave's house to borrow a nail gun. The place was a disaster. He had gutted the old house and left all the debris in the driveway. There were Red Tag notices from the building department to cease and desist, utility shut off notices. There was no back door so I went in and walked around. There was no kitchen, he was flushing a toilet with a garden hose and had a sleeping bag on a filthy mattress, empty beer cans everywhere.

 

I found David down at the bar. He told me he met a lady and was staying with her. I ask him if he saw the Red Tags and what was up. He said, he knew about it because his insurance guy happened to drive by and called him to say they would cancel his insurance if he didn't clean up the fire hazard.

 

It's not too hard to imagine the toll that drug and booze took on The David. One Sunday morning I got a call from him about five thirty. He rolled his old straight six '65 Chevy work truck out in the mountains. He was driving back from some bar in La Honda at two AM. He blacked out, rolled it and crashed down a ravine up against a big Redwood tree. His camper is a hundred yards up the road all smashed and there is a trail of carpenter's tools... Skillsaws, levels, Sawzall, drills, routers, jigsaws all strewn down the highway. He wakes up on the front seat of the truck with the radio still on. He blacked out and didn't remember a thing.

 

I roll up about in my Datsun about seven-thirty and here is the David sitting on a table saw tipped on it's side with his beagle dog Watson laying in the middle of the road scratching himself. The truck is not visible it's so far down the ravine. The sun is just coming up, forming rays of light through the morning fog and Redwood trees. It's other worldly. Here is The David with a joint in one hand, a cigarette in the other drinking a warm Bud. We picked up his tools, he took the plates off the truck and left it.

 

Oh fuck. Well, eventually David meets a lady who gets The David. He was starting to screw up on all fronts including work, so I think he was getting the message to get his act together also. You can't snort blow all day and drink a bottle of Wild Turkey for very long. Well you can... but it will kill you... or make you wish you were dead. His new girlfriend turned him completely around.

 

In a couple years he worked on the house a bunch and turned it into an architectural landmark. No lie, but that is another story, David's legacy. They got married, had three cute daughters that did well in school and went to college. He started a contracting business, had a had few guys who worked for him for many years. David would do electrical sub contracting work for me as a General Contractor on my projects.

 

When The David rolled his Chevy he went out and bought a '78 Datsun King Cab. I don't ever think I have seen a new vehicle get trashed faster than that truck. The last time I saw it, there was not one place that wasn't bent, dented worn or rusted through. Right before I moved to Oregon I did a remodel job for one of my best clients and David worked with me for a few days installing a new electrical service, then wiring the renovation work. He told me he had found a house worth potentially eight hundred grand that he could get for under five. Great neighborhood in the hills, great view. The house he bought for $38K and worked on using salvaged materials from his jobs, was listed for five hundred thousand. Someone bought it and he was waiting for a counter offer on the new place.

 

He said, you never saw the upstairs or the big deck I built, you should come over and hang tonight. Dave showed me the whole house all cleaned up, decorated to sell. I was blown away, because I remember what it was like in the beginning. The city replaced the sidewalks, removed all the utility poles and fixed the train tracks and the street, then built a kids playground park across the street. It went from ghetto to suburbia in a 30 years.

 

We went up to his nicely furnished office, drank some beers and reminisced about all the insane stuff we built and told contracting stories about crazy jobs we each did. Dave said he was going to buy a new work truck and retire his 620KC after finally killing it. I said, how much do you want for it, I want the L20 and 5speed out of it. He laughed and said he would give it to me, but I didn't want it, it was toasted. I just got rid of a house, moved all my stuff to Portland and was about to move my cabinet shop too. It was a ridiculous thought. I wish I would have grabbed it, so it goes.

 

It was getting late and I told Dave, I'm glad we could hang man, You know I'm really proud of you David. You have been married, raised three great kids, built a business, been responsible for employees and produced jobs. I don't know what the fuck is going to happen when I move. I'm not going to say I won't be back but I probably won't come back for the foreseeable future... I'm out of here man. You and I have been though some shit dude. You are always going to be my friend no matter what. He said, Good luck Mr.C, you are my friend, keep in touch, you always have a place to stay.

 

A few months after I had been living here, I got a phone call from David's sister. He was dead. She didn't know details and I just assumed that years of chain smoking and alcohol did him in.

 

A week later I got another call and it looks like The David was working on a remodel. He said see you tomorrow to his three long time eomployees, got into his truck and left. A few minutes later he stopped on Interstate 280 and jumped off the Eugene A. Doran Bridge, across San Mateo Creek at the Crystal Springs Reservoir. He fell about 400 feet.

 

It was thought that David contracted hepatitis C at some point. It is thought that he didn't know this. He had been having seizures or spasms but he ignored them. The Medical Examiner thought that one scenario could be that Hep C creates a condition of excess ammonia in the blood which causes temporary psychosis.

 

I don't know, this is what I heard. I feel so bad for his wife, kids and family. None of them got the chance that I did to say goodbye to The David.

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...

Hola Skibb! Como esta?

 

This is partly a Datsun Story story, but part mythology too, because I grew up being fascinated by cars like any red blooded American boy. It was American Iron in the beginning. It was very rare to see imported cars. My first knowledge of imported cars was from buying kids trading cards packaged with bubble gum like baseball cards. Alfa, Citroen, Mercedes Gull Wing coupes, MGs, Jaguars... all kinds of obscure Eastern European 'toy' cars like Minis or Fiats that you never heard. The first imported cars I ever saw were VWs before anything else.

 

Our first family car I remember was a '53 Ford oMatic. Then my Grandpa retired at about 80 and was driving his '49 Plymouth down in San Brunno and somehow managed to hit a light pole in front of the Police station on El Camino Real. His excuse; I'm old and I can't see shit anymore. They didn't even give him a ticket but my Dad and Aunt put their foot down and took his car away!! He just went, I don't need a car anyway!

 

That was our second car when it was almost unheard of to have two cars. Most people didn't have cars in the City. When it needed work in a few years, the Ford became the 2nd car and like many middle class families through they '60s got a new cars just because they could. We had a bunch of different cars, but then my Dad saw this little Datsun truck on a Rambler dealer's lot. They had just started selling Datsuns. We were one of the first families to have an imported car... and a Japanese one at that.

 

DatsunDadCirca68.jpg

 

This was the first car my brother and I learned to drive in and I got my license in 1968. Never should have sold it! We were idiots. No, we didn't know. Hey, the '72 620 that replaced it was like $1800 new and my 620 was $1950... VWs were fifteen hundred bucks new.

 

This photograph came into my possession when my Mom passed away a few years ago. Blew me away to see it. It looks just like me about fifteen years ago!! This is my Dad in front of the Bakery in San Francisco. My Grandpa built this building in the '20s and they lived up stairs. That window is where my crib was when my Grandma looked after me. I was watching cars before I even remember it.

 

2012Scans003.jpg

 

I never knew about this car. My dad would just say shit like, "When I was a bachelor I used to have my suits and shirts made down town. I use to go to Granat Brother's and buy Jewelry, wore Florshiem shoes, and nice hats. I used to go get a new car whenever a set of tires wore out. Just trade 'em in. I was mostly into convertibles, like Oldsmobiles and Buicks... I had a Pontiac hardtop that was a nice car too... I think it was just dirty when traded it for a new convertible. Girls like convertibles."

 

Around '77 I was working on a two story building where I could see over a stone wall into the back parking lot of a Catholic Church. There were two old Chevys sitting back there day after day, until I see a priest get in one and drive it away. The last day working there, I went over and found the priest, ask him if he wanted to sell the car. He said not the one he was driving which was kind of beat, but the nicer looking one that didn't run. I said, I'll give you two hundred bucks for it. He said, Give me, four hundred and I'll give two hundred to the church. I said, done deal.

 

I got it running and home. It needed a lot of work but all the body was straight, the curved glass was there, molding, fender skirts, baseball cap. ect. The interior was a thread bare Army blanket covering horse hair with steel springs sticking out. Headliner melting down with that old car smell of burnt oil, gas and sun-baked upholstery. There was virtually no rust and a Chip Foose Overhaulin' wet dream.

 

2012Scans154.jpg

 

 

My high school friend Paul's Dad had a '54 Chevy PowerGlide that he bought new and Paul drove from the time we were 16. Still has it all original. We pulled all kinds of hi-jinks and memorable trips in that car. He called it the 'Bomb'. What else would you call it. When gas was fifty cents a gallon, fixing up old cars made some kind of sense, plus there was no mandatory liability insurance so you have fifty cars and drive them all the time.

 

But you know, it was the first of many age old lessons you have to learn in life... "When you got the time, you don't have the money... when you got the money, you never have the time." So it was with the '51 Chevy Deluxe Hardtop. Paul showed me in his big coffee table book, The Book of Chevrolet... look dude, your car is in here! A little black and white photo of a '51 Deluxe and a one paragraph; The Deluxe's most notable feature was it's lack of horsepower.

 

I had it for a few years, tuned it up and made it run, but it was worn out. When Susan and I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I used to drive it around through the Redwoods on the narrow county roads and feel like I was in a different time. I drove it about ten miles down the road through the forest when I worked building the Gallaway's house. A couple times I saw Neil Young, in the same place about 8:30 in the morning, coming the other way in old Corvettes. Once he even waved.

 

That sucker was a boat. When I drove it off the mountain, I would shut the engine off and coast for miles, fast or faster than if I was on the gas!

 

One evening I dropped buy David's house in the Bario in Redwood City to give him some money or something. I was in there for like ten minutes and when I came out the fender skirts were gone and the bolts for the visor were half way out. I was bummed to say the least.

 

Paul knew some folks who had an upholstery shop out in Fallon Nevada. He took his Chevy out to them and they did his interior in all old new stock and reproduction material so that it was freakin' mint. They had about a fifteen thousand sf. building where they did furniture and antique restoration, then two other shops too. They had an air strip in back so that aircraft could taxi inside and have their cabins tricked out. Or the local farmers would bring brand new Jeeps in to have the interiors pimped to the max so they were sporting the most badd-assed deer huntin' rig in the county. While I was there, they got a brand new RV motor home to gut the interior and repimpify.

 

Over in one corner was a area where there was an old Cadillac V12. It belonged to a man in Carson Valley who owned casinos. He had a hundred thousand SF building full of old cars. He had a full time restoration staff who brought these guys a finished, painted car every year... they had done a dozen cars for him. They said, if he had to go back east somewhere, he had his guys put a couple cars in a tractor trailer, then drive them there, so he could park this jet, have his own Caddy and driver.

 

I got to a point where I needed to move and shed some belongings, so Paul's friends said they would trade me work for the car. I had an overstuffed chair that was my Grandma's and the bench seat in my Datsun was toast, so I traded them the car for upholstery work. I got a great deal. My truck seat held up for 25 years and I have been sitting in that chair all these years too. They showed me a sample book of fabrics and I picked out the first blue color there was. They never said a word. That material alone cost $900!

 

Paul and I drove the '51 up there and Susan and his girlfriend drove the 620. The car labored to climb all the way up Interstate 80 east over the mighty Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was blowing clouds of oil out that back bad. When we got to the top, I shut it off and free wheeled it all the way down past Donner Lake, through Truckee into Reno until I had to turn it on again. At first it was OK, but I realized too quickly that the brakes were over heating and fading really bad. I was ripping and couldn't slow down, weaving in and out around traffic and slow moving tractor trailers trying to keep the brakes cool. I know Paul was about to shit his pants, but to his credit, he trusted me and didn't make a peep the whole way.

 

2012Scans153.jpg

 

His friends, did a frame off restoration on the old '51. When they took it apart they said something had kicked up off the road, lodged in where it cut and bent one of the brake lines. They said all the brake fluid was run out. When they went to move it into the shop it had no brakes!!

 

I would rather be lucky than smart... lucky than be good.

 

They bartered upholstery work for mechanical, body and paint work. An old man that had come up out there in Fallon working on Model Ts and As, built the engine and tranny. He had a private junk yard full of insanely great stuff. He had piles of pistons stocked away to make one nice set. They even took apart the gauges and repainted the dials with phosphorescent paint.

 

It was charp mang. A charp chort. What's a chort? You know it's chorter dan walking, mang.

 

They had about twenty Chevrolets form just about ever decade. The air is so dry on there that if cars are covered from the sun they can live out there for ever and not rust. There was an all original '66 or '67 Chevelle with factory 396 and Hurst 4 speed, '30s cars, 40's cars '55, '56, '57, '58 Nomad, '59 and a '59 convertible... all beautiful, running, spotless cars.

 

The '51 Deluxe got painted the original yellow with black top. It was given to the 22 year old foxy as hell daughter of the family who ran a window covering business out of the shop. She used to cruise that thing over in Reno before and after they started Hot August Nights. Guys went nuts after her.

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

Maybe this is at the fringes of being a Datsun story, but Figbuck Mythology for sure. Last month I drove my 620 at least 1800 miles during a one week trip to California. It ran so good and I extensively tested my new front disc brakes. Thanks for all the help this year from my Ratsun friends.

 

I visited a bunch of old friends and places I used to live in San Francisco and the Peninsula. I'm getting gas in Redwood City when I see a beat old Chevy Astro Van that I know. Sure enough, it's a lady who used to be my landlord for a little over a year. I see her two twin boys, who were then little kids, in the back seat. They didn't seem to remember me. I ask her how her son Philip from her first marriage was. She said, he was killed in a car accident a dozen years ago way up in Northern California...

 

... and some other stuff... I wasn't really listening past that... I was blind sided, stunned, just failure to assimilate.

 

She had to go. She said some stuff about being Born Again Christians now, and that is how they got through it. Oh yeah, real nice to see you.

 

What do you say?

 

If there was ever a sweet guy that didn't deserve to have his life cut short, it was her son Phil Shao. The stuff she told me took a couple weeks to sink in.

 

You know how I like to tell stories... here goes.

 

In 1989 I came home one day in the middle of the day for my check book to pay my carpenters. I stumble on my girlfriend banging a guy from her church. They didn't know I saw them, and I never let on for a month, until I figured out what to do. She and I bought a fixer upper together. I had two years work, and $55k cash into... it sold for $580k eventually. Sticky situation.

 

A few weeks later I couldn't take it anymore. It was a nice spring Saturday morning. I picked up the morning paper and looked for houses to rent. The first add read: Cottage for one person, cable and utilities, incl., pets OK. $500. It was a mile away. I call and she says come look at it. Ten minutes later I'm standing a huge beautiful back yard looking at a giant doll house. Nice lawn with big mature trees. Somebody built a square little house out of salvaged true divided light windows and doors, plus all kinds of ginger bread millwork pieces. It had two rooms, with a little kitchen in one and a small enclosed bathroom so small, that when you sat on the toilet your head was in the shower. Too cute.

 

It was insulated and wired well, the little kitchen was great, it had a closet and was all painted and clean. I go, I'll take it. She starts to tell me about the kids playing in the yard and stuff but I said, I work all the time and ride motorcycles on the weekends. I don't think they will bother me at all. By five PM, I had unloaded my cats and TV from the Datsun. I just walked out and left everything else. Fuck that bitch.

 

So this place was a life saver. It was a miracle that I got it. It was cheap, behind a great big house in a really nice neighborhood, had speed channel on the cable, and this separate driveway that somebody put in for a long RV. I parked the Datsun and my company truck and never had to worry about parking. There was private path to the cottage.

 

Next day I'm sorting stuff and looking out the window. Way at the back of the lot down by a creek was this giant half pipe. You are thinking... yeah right, giant. No. I'm telling you this thing was wide and tall, freaking huge.

 

At noon a kid about fifteen with long dark hair and a plaster cast on his right arm started casually looping back and forth. Shuush... shuush... shuush. I go sit on the little patio and watch him for a while... shuuush... shuuuuuush... bam, bam, crash... OWWWWFUUUCK!

 

I hear from the house, Philip I told you not to skate! If you break your arm again, I will make you take that ramp apart!! The kid comes walking back up the grass with his skateboard. Oh hi, you going to live here? I go yeah my name is Clary. He goes, I'm Phil.

 

I ask him who built the half pipe. Philip goes, I did. I got a lot of free wood, but I spent $187 on plywood to make the curves. I was pretty impressed when I looked at it. He came up with some very good solutions for working with what he had. I was building tree houses when I was his age, I don't think I could have pulled it off by myself like he did.

 

There were a couple times when I lent him a Skillsaw and Sawzall to remodel it when stuff broke or wore out. He made the whole thing with a hand saw, hammer and nails. Mostly it was just Phil skating after school and for an hour between seven and eight when it was light. He was so natural in the way he moved, and until I saw some other guys try the tricks he was pulling off effortlessly, I didn't realize how high he was flying or how hard the tricks were.

 

It was much later that I got the whole story of what was going on. I was doing a remodel job just a few streets over during the summer, so sometimes I would go home to eat lunch. Philip had a bunch of friends over and they were making a lot of noise, skating up a storm and crashing all over the place. You know having big FUN! Some nieghbor lady way on the other side starts yelling at them to stop making noise.

 

Philip tells everybody that they are done and like bang right now, it's quiet and everybody starts picking up their stuff and walking up to the porch by the cottage to sit at my patio table and chairs. I go, what is the deal man, tell her to get fucked. They all go, no we got popped by the cops and they only let us have this, if we limit the time we skate and certain hours on certain days. I go that sucks.

 

I noticed that a bunch of the guys with Philip are way older that he is. They are talking about road trips to go to competitions as far away as L.A. and Seattle. I find out that Philip broke his arm at a competition and his parents had to spend a chunk of money to have surgery. They were pissed and didn't like the older kids he hung out with.

 

At first it was just a few of Philip's friends his age, but little by little, word of this giant ramp got around and older guys nobody knew were just crashing into the back yard and being dicks.

 

I was only a few years older that Phil's Mom and Step Dad. I couldn't blame them. Some of the guys had tattoos and really long hair. Oh yeah, Mom and Dad they don't smoke weed and drink beer... they are just skateboarders!! But the thang was, Phil wasn't 18 yet, no job and living with straight people. He is screwed... kinda.

 

Phil spent a lot of time skating by himself and working on tricks. Sometimes I would see him blasting down the streets and hills with bigger boards. One day I walked down the path and caught a bunch of guys smoking dope on the patio and scared the crap out of them. I said, what if your Step Dad caught you guys.

 

Phil tells me that he is not getting along to good with him because he did get caught. He is grounded for two months until school is out. They were all coming back from a competition in Merced or Fresno... some place out in the Valley. They all kicked ass. Five of them get pulled over in a VW squareback. There is a twelve pack of empties in the box in a bag in the back from a week ago they are going to recycle. They are all minors and Phil's parents have to drive down to Bumfuk to spring them. Whoops.

 

Plus they wanted him to sign up for Junior College or they were going to kick him out of the house. He didn't even want to graduate from highschool. I said, what would you do. They all go, Get sponsorship and go on the pro skate tour! Like that was all there was to it!

 

A couple weeks later I came home one Friday a little early. I was beat, sitting on the patio drinking a cold beer. Phil comes out and says hey man, wanna smoke some good dope, got any papers? I get some papes and said, ain't the folks about to come home? He tosses me a street board, jumps on another one and jets out the pathway.

 

I follow him down the hill around the corner where the creek goes under the street. There is a wooded area and some rocks to sit on... the fucking smoking veranda! I drove by that a million times and never saw it. We fire up and I ask him what's going on with the parents. I hadn't smoked in months I was getting creamed.

 

He says, he thinks his tricks are pretty good, and some of his buddies that he knows from San Jose, who are already making a bunch of pro money, think he has the stuff. I told him that when I was his age, all I wanted to do was be a musician, and my parents let me go to school to be a musician. The bummer is that I got a good education in music, but nobody ever told me that there was a music business and I would have to find a way to make a living in it. Or, that there were a ton of ways to make money in the business and not be a musician. Or, that it was really hard to make a living as professional musician even if you are really good.

 

I know you are not going to want to hear what I am going to tell you Phil... but dude, I am on your side. I think you should go for it whether it works out for you or not. It might be hard, but it's not impossible. There are cats you know that are doing it. At least you can say you gave it a shot, and maybe you just need to get that out of your system.

 

If I was you, and my parents wanted to pay for me to go to school and let me live here... I'd do it man. Working sucks! It won't be forever. You will be out of here before you know it and on your own. I had to work all week so I could pay bills and get some new tires for my motorcycle. Not fun, but I want to go blasting in the Sierras tomorrow! They are going to let you live here and pay for you to go to school?? Life is tough... you have the biggest private half pipe in the county in your back yard? Earth to Philip??

 

Think about this Philip. If I was you, I would take business stuff, bookkeeping, accounting and management stuff. Sounds boring right? Let's say you get discovered tomorrow, a skateboard manufacturer gives you a contract for $50k and you make another $50k in prize money... what would you do?

 

He gets all excited and says, I'd get a new van and a rad house to live in. I say, great but how do you buy a van? Ever buy a car or house before? No.

 

Every have a checking account or credit card? A stack of hundred dollar bills? No. Well dude, you know nothing about money.

 

If you are going to travel the world winning competitions, you are in business as a professional, you need to understand contracts, so at least you can have an intelligent conversation with whom you need to trust, like tax guys, lawyers and agents. You want to make money, you need to make money... but not just to have money. I work for lots of Silicon Valley rich-assed yuppies who do the dumbest shit with their money. Money is just a tool to give you free time and let you do what you want to with it.

 

He gets really quiet and we fire the roach. I tell him about all the guys I know from riding motorcycles that have club raced and pro raced with sponsorship money. It is a full time job. Plus after you drop a few bikes at speed, your body get beat up. You can't do it forever. Phil, your already sporting scars and orthopedic hardware. I said, don't limit your thinking. Shit hardly ever works out how you dream it... but if your intentions are good... sometimes things work out better that you ever thought. Don't worry about what other people think or do... get your own program tight, so it the opportunity presents itself, you can run with it.

 

I got busy and eventually moved when my house got sold. I never saw Philip Shao after that.

 

I did some searches, and this is some of what I found out.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Shao

 

http://www.redwoodcity.org/parks/parksandpools/skatepark.html

 

 

Phil Shao--RIP--1973-1998

 

Phil Shao

December 28, 1973–August 22, 1998

 

On August 22, 1998, at approximately 3:30 a.m., Phil Shao died in an automobile accident near the Oregon/California state line. The details are still hazy, but the gist of the tragedy is that Phil and a few Northern California friends were on a tour of skateparks along the West Coast. At 11:00 p.m. on Friday the 21st, most of the gang was asleep at a local skater’s house. Phil woke up a few of them to see if they wanted to go somewhere with him and a girl he’d recently met (nobody is sure where they were headed). Everybody was tired and declined the invitation. The girl was driving while intoxicated and drove off a cliff. The girl was not seriously injured. Phil died.

 

You can think of how ironic it is that this was Phil’s first major skate trip since rehabilitating his knee for almost a year (he had his anterior cruciate ligament replaced). You can think of how, before the tour, this veteran professional marked all the skate stops on the travel map like an excited kid. You can think of the pain his family and friends are going through. You can think of how his life—and death—has affected everybody in the skateboard industry, from people who barely knew him to close friends. You can think of his skating ability. And you can think of uncountable ways that he’ll be missed, and how much it sucks that Phil Shao died on August 22, 1998. But we all do think of him.

 

courtosy of transworld mandatory information

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HgUHQGWMA0

 

Watch this one all the way through. Like a lot of people I have met in my life, i always thought I would run into Phil again and we would laugh our asses off about everything in the past. It reminds me to appreciate the the real honest genuine people I come across in life... they can teach you lessons.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E4RVVAaLSA&feature=related

  • Like 4
Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...

So here we are again, spinning around in circles out in this part of the galaxy... starting to tip back the other way. I'm still so UP that when I look down... I see UP. I iz all UPed, but now I can feel the days getting longer and the winter is behind us. Mostly... it's snowing all over the North West while it was 85 degrees in Chicago. FTW? The cherry trees are all in bloom and daffodils are coming up in the snow here. Oregon for all it's gray and dark days is a beautiful place.

 

Yesterday I was busking, playing my horn at my usual location on the West side of the Ross Island Bridge. I made $15.86 in about two hours. Then my thumbs and the tips of my fingers lost feeling because it was so cold and it started to rain. I'm constantly blown away at the things that people do and the way that people treat each other. Saturday I went down to the Esplande and played for about three hours. I made $39 and a strawberry Tootsie Roll Pop. It is a trip for sure to watch people all day. I constantly have to remind myself not to judge people.

 

I got up this morning, just like most mornings, spent time trying to chase money with out any success. Then I wonder what else there is that I could or should be doing.

 

Until this year I never woke up and had to ask myself or wonder what I should do. But I don't have a business, or a shop or a house or a garage any more. I have a 15' storage unit packed front to back top to bottom with enough basic tools and equipment to build a house out of the ground. When I open the door shit falls on me.

 

I need to decide what to do with it because if there is any work going on... I ain't getting hooked up with it. It seems crazy to pay rent, just to have tools, if you can't make money with them. It's a very strange feeling, almost surreal sometimes to think that it's been almost three years, since I actually did a regular job, where I built a nice kitchen addition and made money. It's not that far fetched to think I might never be a carpenter ever again, or build stuff like cabinets and furniture.

 

It seems like such a waste, not being productive. I was, am, so conditioned to working and doing projects, making things, solving peoples problems. I had this thought yesterday that I haven't had to pay any taxes for three years and here goes another one by. I wouldn't mind paying taxes. It would mean I had an income. I know i didn't make over $600 playing on the streets last year. Reet.

 

So my ex-partner called me a while back and said he was running $30 million worth of work and had 35 employees. He said I should come down and work for him. The short version is that I live here. I would love to live in California, but unless your making a lot of money you can't. He isn't making money, just going through the motions and assuming the kind of risk that keeps you up at night. But I had to go down there to see if there was any sense in going just to work or move or something.

 

It's not fun being broke. It was not fun last year or the year before that. I ain't used to this shit. I worked my ass off for over 40 years. I always had money or at least a way to get it. It seems like fun has been cancelled for the foreseeable future. I hate sounding pessimistic... I mean, to be a building contractor you have to be an eternal optimist! I want to be optimistic, although it makes me feel like an idiot, a fool.

 

I can't just sit around. It doesn't feel right. I always had layers upon layers of projects all going on at the same time.

 

Fiddleluck asks me, 'Are you talking to yourself?' "Uh, yeah... am I doing it out loud?" 'It sounds like your talking back.' "Does that mean I'm really loosing it?" 'No you are already gone.'

 

But my answer to my question about what to do, is to play my saxophone. That is not unusual. There are a lot of people that do that. I know some really good players. But the reason I do it, is because it is cheap therapy. It's kind of like a meditation. A mechanism with which I can shut my conscious mind off by focusing on, creating vibrations that could be described as music.

 

I don't play for other people. Been there done that. Everyone has something they do that defines them or is part of what they are about. I am fascinated by the physics of sound, the twelve-tone system, composition, counterpoint, polyphony and improvisation. It is like a three dimensional chess game that is played against a clock. Beyond addictive, for me. We didn't have a TV so I didn't grow up playing video games. We did have a piano, so that was the game I came up playing. Still playing it.

 

I'm better player now than I was last week or last year. I ain't lighting the world on fire, but I'm chopping away at it. It is not something that you learn and then you are proficient. All of the greatest musicians or any artists, business people, race car drivers, stick and ball players all have the same story. They do what they do... all of the time.

 

Spring time every year, for years and years, I was forming foundations, or framing some kind of building. I miss the smell of wet framing lumber and stacks of plywood. Smells like money. It's not like I suck and have no skill, knowledge and experience. So it goes. I think I'm done. Pretty sure, I'm done.

 

My industry is destroyed. My partner said, "Society, the economy whatever, has decided that what we have been doing all our working lives is no longer worth anything or of the same value. I don't pay very much because my clients only want cheap, not quality. I haven't have one guy quit for over two and a half years. They know there aren't any steady jobs out there."

 

I took a lot of photos on the trip and I'm still sorting them out. I had some really intense stuff happen, both good and bad. Seven days that flew by so fast it made my head spin.

 

Once in a while I click on the Audacity recorder to listen to myself fucking around trying things out. I figured out how to turn a slide show into a mov. file. I didn't spend a lot of time doing this, here are some of the pics;

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e-YMAS-UJg

 

Bonus points for telling me why I'm smiling at around 5:00 and after. Clue; what's in the background?

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Remember to breath. I have to remember to breath.

 

Things are going in slow motion, but the days seem to fly by. It seems like I would have all this time. I have no more business, no job, no place to be...

 

I should be getting all kinds of things done that I want to do.

 

No money kills a lot of it, but just trying to summon up the emotional energy to do some of the simplest stuff, is more energy that it should take to actually do the thing.

 

I have been reading a lot, four or five books at a time and I found some guys doctoral thesis on counterpoint and harmony I have been chopping away at for months. Polyphony is the shit.

 

I have been learning so much cool stuff, so I'm not really wasting my time. But, it's a problem because all I think about is music. All I want to do is play music. All I can do any more is play music. All I can talk about is music. I have no more capacity for small talk. I want to fly into a rant when ever I hear people start complaining about the most inane crap that our TV culture has brainwashed people into thinking is important.

 

I'm trying my hardest to never talk about politics, religion, philosophy because it is simply in bad taste. Not that I can't debate and argue, or that I don't have views. Most of the people that don't share my values seem to exhibit three characteristics; Religious Zealotry, Identity Transference and Aggressive Ignorance. There is no sport in exposing that. The others I don't have to talk to, because it's like singing to the choir.

 

A couple weeks ago I was busking under the Morrison Bridge on a Saturday afternoon. There were hundreds of people strolling the Esplanade. I made almost $60 in four hours. I had a pretty good time and got to play my whole tune list down. I was getting a little tired, horn weighs a ton after a couple hours, and my chops were just about blown out. I notice a couple watching me off to the side. When I get distracted, I close my eyes to refocus on the music.

 

The next time I opened my eyes they were still there. I stop for a second to take a drink and this tall black guy maybe a little older than me, comes up smiling and telling me that I sound really good. He starts asking me about my horn, mouthpiece and reed set-up stuff. I know he is a player right away. He ask me where I'm working and who I'm playing with. I say, "I'm playing here." Well you sound really good man you should be gigging!

 

What a concept. Playing music for money. I heard that idea once. About thirty something years ago.

 

"Can you do that?, I ask.

 

He says, "I have been making a living playing music all my life." He came up playing in New Orleans, with the Batiste family, the Marsalis family and the Nevilles. He worked for the Heritage Festival for years. It makes me feel good to hear stuff like that and be complimented. I know people think they are being cool and supportive... but they are all just throwing out generalizations... like poof, you just do this and that and...

 

I think I said before, I don't really want this to be my blog, because I already have been blogging for two years now. While Figbuck Mythology is intertwined with Datsun Stories, I want to tell Datsun stories. Not stories about Datsuns per se, but about people. Cars are hunks of metal, they don't have soul, unless a person breaths life into it.

 

Sort of like, if someone want's to talk shit to me about what I'm playing... here you go bro... you got the chop? Let's hear your version! Put on your gorrilla suit and see if you can blow me off the stand... or just blow me. Horn is just a hunk of metal until someone breaths life into it.

 

In the early '90s I got a call from a wealthy client with a long time friend who needed to remodel her kitchen and bathrooms, new electrical service, new furnace, HWH and complete re-copper. She says her friend was so rich she could have gone first class around the world on the QEII for a year, and come back after I turned her house into a gold plated, diamond encrusted castle.

 

This job is a whole chapter in my book titled; Expensive Lessons-Contracting 101. It was very hard. to get her to make her mind up. She was so cheap. Everything was sticker shock. Didn't make sense. She got up every morning, read Barron's, the WSJ and then talked to her broker for an hour! At some point, her grown son named Brian came to visit and help her with the remodel. This guy saved my sanity.

 

He lived in South Lake Tahoe, but grew up in Palo Alto of the '50s and '60s, when Silicon Valley was just gathering steam. His Dad was a hot shot stock broker and made a crap load of money, but died in his 50s of smoking, three martini lunches and sitting on his ass rolling the dice with other people's money. Brian got into racing open wheel formula cars, like any self respecting white suburban rich kid. The best he did was field a full on pro IMSA GTO Corvette for a year and a half on the early '80s. The garage was stuffed full of Snap-On rolling chests from thrashing on race cars.

 

He went to San Jose State for a degree in Business and Golf. Not really, but he invented a putter that can be used left or right handed, and was the hot thing on the PGA for a while. During that time he worked a salesman at Palo Alto Ford. I think the way it happened was, the the owner of the Ford dealer opened a Datsun dealership. Brian went there as a sales manager and he was rocking and rolling during the '70s.

 

Somehow he ended up co-owning a Datsun dealership in South Shore Tahoe. He sold more Z Cars than he could get. He was the #1 dealer in the nation. Because he was on the Nevada side, he sold 49 state versions of the cars with out California smog equipment. Licensed them in Nevada, then owners changed the registration to California. Easy for a while. Made him rich.

 

Brian bought out his partner and raked in the bucks, sailing in the summer, skiing in the winter, casinos, new cars... sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. There was a point after Datsun turned to Nissan, the Z Cars were bloated boats and he decided to sell the dealership and retire at 40. Nobody was interested in the dealership because of very restrictive environmental regulations. He paid a quarter million bucks to have the ground tested, underground gas, diesel tanks had to be removed, the ground removed to a toxic waste site, clean fill and test wells to permanently monitor the ground water.

 

He ended up selling the property to K-mart. They needed a parking lot and the only way to build something new, was to own something old. They bought his property for a few million in cash, then erased everything back to the earth and built the same number of square feet parking lot by their store.

 

Somehow, after a few years, They wanted to sell this property, but felt they couldn't because either the seller, Brian or his contractor didn't clean the site properly, and they were trying to sue him for insane money. Me and two of my guys worked at that house for four months, the whole time Brian was going through this trial.

 

Brian had a car dealers license in California, so he could go to the auctions and buy cars. He would bring these really cool cars home every week, fix them, drive them and sell them. The first one was an all original, perfect early '50s Dodge Powerwagon. Kept that and started fixing nice late model cars. He got a cherry Volvo station Wagon for $3k with a blown turbo. He went to a place in San Jose that repairs truck turbos. The dealership wanted three grand or something for the part. The guy at the turbo place said, 'What a cute little pump." He went through it for a few hundred bucks and Brian cleared five grand in a couple days. The next car was white 300ZX with black interior and great stereo. It needed a rocker arm or something. It was basically free from the profit on the Volvo. It was like a little game for him, because the court case was making him look haggard and old in two months.

 

Really interesting guy. Really smart, well read, traveled and knew some really rich and wealthy old Palo Alto families. He has this mannerism that hope I can imitate. Brian would end his sentences with, "On that."

 

Hey that looks really nice, on that.

 

I'm going to get some lunch and hit some balls, I'll be back about four... on that.

 

Oh yikes look at that blonde... on that. On that.

 

He even started sentences with, On that...

 

Right, on that.

 

On that.

 

Eventually Brian represented himself in court against four $350 per hour corporate lawyers. It turns out the engineering contractor who did the work for Brian, was also the most experienced engineering contractor in Placer County, and wrote the guidelines for the environmental regulations. On top of that, he covered his ass buy designing the test wells so that it was clear that K-Mart was just trying to strong arm some little guy, and the legal team didn't do their homework. He was awarded his counter claim, court costs, damages and the judge admonished K-Mart's lawyers for misconduct and fined each of them $50k.

 

On that.

 

That was about fifteen years ago. On that. I saw him about ten years ago just as I was cleaning out my place to move to Oregon. It was a chance meeting, on that. He thanked me for putting up with his excentric old mother and doing a great job on the house. When she passed a few years later he sold it for a mil and a half. On that. His dad bought it as a new tract house for $31k. in the '50s. On that.

 

He told me that he just got back from Hawaii. The Japanese economy was tanking and many well to do Japanese had bought penthouse condos on the islands, but were unloading them... on that. He said he packed a suit case with his casual clothes and stayed in a cheap little hotel. He got up in the morning and went to the same little cafe for breakfast, talked with the waitresses and patrons. He went for walks or played golf at the municipal course. He went to the same little restaurant for dinner and hung at a working class bar. After a while he looked tan like a local and knew what was going on from the street up.

 

He said, that he went to talk to brokers and look at the penthouses. The market was dead, so he made lowball cash offers and walked out. He said the one he really wanted had a solarium on the east side so you could watch the sun come up all year and another solarium on the west side to see the sunset. 5Ksf and all the bells and whistles. They counter offered a great deal and it seemed like it would happen. I don't know what happened... on that.

 

He also said that he couldn't spent the whole year over there, so he bought a lot in Scotts Valley in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz. On that. He said, he wanted me to build a house there so he could play golf nearby. On that. He wanted my number. He could find me if he wanted to you know.

 

On that.

Link to comment

You know Figbuck, I often wonder if this world is really real and I'm just a part of it, or if it's a construct universe made just for me to live in with every blade of grass, every cloud, every other person merely stage props for my life story. It seems like the world grew up and got old along with me and the rate that it's aging it can't possibly survive another generation. Is it that fucked up, or am I just tired and my tired universe has (d)evolved to reflect that? I remember things were so fresh when I was younger and now looking back I see that year by year it became cheaper, cruder, anything goes. Excess is worshiped now as the new religion. Respect is expected when not demanded and seldom returned. Is it any fucking wonder I've become cynical of everything? Seriously, I'm going to have to have a talk with my production manager and the director. On that.

 

I stopped watching the news last August. Life is better without that shit. Don't watch much of the other shit either.

 

 

 

I got elastic bands keepin' my shoes on.

Got those swollen hand blues.

I Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from.

  • Like 2
Link to comment

Hope. Yeah I don't really know how that works yet. Every time I think I do...

 

any math guys out there? Hope over time gets you what? Hope times time elapsed gets you what? Hope plus time?

 

The good news is that it's never over. We get a fresh shot at it every day.

 

The trick is how to manifest the good. There is a dynamic that works, so hope is out of the equation, it's not needed. I know I have locked into that "zone". I don't remember how I got into it or why I snapped out of it, but I know that I ain't in it now!

 

Maybe these are the good old days. Every time and era had it's set of problems. How are we going to look back at this time?

 

Mike, it is hard not to be cynical... but in the end it's not productive. It must be one of the functions of getting old. You start seeing the same patterns repeat... a little different spin each time, but the same crap. The difference between being young and old is that the first go round you are wide eyed and bushy tailed... but after you seen the movie a couple times, you know the plot and can guess the ending. Right? There are only two or three movie plots... cowboy has horse, cowboy sees girl?

 

You are young... oh look man, that is how that worked out, A + B gets you C. But in reality, two out of five times you A + B it = Z. Not big enough sample if you have only lived to A + B = C. After you have lived the sample to see that 2 out of 20 times A + B = X, oh I guess I don't know shit... could 2 out of 100 times = Y?

 

Are we just witnessing the creep of entropy?

 

I was busking by the river and some homeless street kids started talking shit to me. They seem to think that they own the spot. Just as they thought they had hurled their best stuff at me... I said, "What's going to happen to you if you keep being rude, crude ignorant, obnoxious assholes... you are going to turn out like me... AN OLD... rude, crude, ignorant, obnoxious asshole!

 

Mike, I'm right there with ya... or having the same kinds of thought anyway.

 

The construct is, all our own.

 

I am totally responsible for creating my own reality.

 

 

 

On that...

Link to comment

I'm so lucky. Really.

 

"I just got a message that Doug a musician friend of mine had been riding a motorcycle in San Mateo California. A woman in a mini-van turned left into him. He was life-flighted to Stanford with a compound leg fracture, many broken ribs and all else that you would expect. Doug and me on top of Sugarloaf fall of '75. SF, Oakland, Berkley, San Lorenzo, Fremont, Hayward on the other side of the bay. Coyote Point, San Mateo fore ground.

 

ClarDoug1.jpg

 

I could not count the number of times I have crashed motorcycles... or even the number of bikes I've crashed. The last road bike I had, got put back together seven times in twelve years. I have had quite a few construction injuries and car wrecks. I can deal with getting hurt, cut and messed up... but when I see somebody else get hurt or even a paper cut... it makes me cringe. I can't watch those video shows where people are stepping on rakes, crashing toboggans or slipping on their butts. Bolts of electricity shoot through my nervous system to parts of my body that have sustained trauma and makes them jump.

 

About every ten minutes I think about Doug laying in a hospital bed and I cringe. I can't shut it off. I sat down and wrote a tune for him so I would stop think about it, a C minor 24 bar blues. I can't really reach out to him right now. Wish I could some way, but he has great family, tons of students, teaching colleagues and brothers in the music community around him. The thing I know about getting mutilated is that the first week is a bitch. It takes that long to slow down enough to hurt properly.

 

The first time that happens to you, you freak. After you have had your butt kicked a few times, you understand that time is your only friend. In time, things will get better... but you have to just lay there and hurt... be hurt. So mostly, things will grow back together the best that they can in about a year. A year ain't that long. Next year we will look back and think, seems that was just like yesterday!

 

ClarDoug2.jpg

 

Keep breathing. Remember to keep breathing. Sometimes that is about all you can do.

 

Partly I'm writing this for Doug. The doctors told him he could make a full recovery. He is a pretty strong guy in his early '60s. In a year he will be able to read this and...

 

ClarDoug3.jpg

 

... something, whatever. Right now there ain't shit I can do for you my friend. I hope you get a smile out of this man. Because I know that there will be some really boring long days and sleepless nights ahead. Hopefully this will provide a few minutes of diversion. If I told you, you were lucky... it wouldn't compute right now anyway.

 

In February 2012, I made a trip to San Francisco and San Mateo County here where I grew up and lived for 50 years. Early in the morning I retraced a route I took daily for many years through the Santa Cruz Mountains, then stopped at a place the locals call Four Corners. It's at the junction of Highway 35 Skyline Boulevard, and Highway 84 Woodside Road. Historically this place was a stage-coach stop. In '50s and '60s it became a hang out for sports car guys, then in the ''80s, motorcyclists dubbed it "Alice's", for the cafe and gas station there called Alice's Restaurant.

 

In the summer time, hundreds of motorcyclists from all over descend on this place to see and be seen. When I started riding out there in the '60s, I rarely saw other motorcycles. Then in the '80s some bonehead from LA wrote an article in a motorcycle magazine about all the roads through the Redwoods and Highway One. It was like a switch got flipped on. Within weeks, the parking lot in front of the market across from Alice's was bench racin' headquarters for hard-core motorcyclists in Northern California.

 

When I pulled up into the parking lot, there were only three or four hardy sport riders out. It was still early, foggy and damp. Not that fun to ride, but as the morning warms up, the roads gets good and there isn't much traffic. Later in the day, 'Squids' and other posers from the flat lands, infest the roads and crowd the parking lot.

 

I get out of the old 620 and it's starting to be a beautiful California day. I see a pretty cool looking Nissan sports car and begin to walk over to it, when I hear a guy say, "Wow, look at this old Datsun!" I'm looking at the Nissan and they are pointing to my truck.

 

NissanGTR.jpg

 

I say, "Dude, I want your engine!" He goes waa? I say, " I wanna stuff your engine in my truck!" The other guy in leathers says, really quick, "Oh Man, you would have to cut the fire wall!!" I go, "So?" We both crack up, and the guy who owns the Nissan doesn't really get what we are talking about. The cat in leathers tries to tell him, but when he gets it, he doesn't understand why we would want to do that.

 

Sports Car guy drives off. The other cat says he likes my wheels and tires, are they 14"s?, says he has a 510. I go, "You on Ratsun?" He goes, yeah, my name is Liam, MotoLiam. We talk about Datsuns and then Motorcycles. I should be on my way out to Pescadero, but I remembered all these stories about crazy shit that happened through the years up there in the hills. All these memories and emotions of stuff that got filed away a long time ago... now were being dragged back up for the first time in a long time.

 

FigbuckLiam.jpg

 

I go, Liam, I promise, last story man.

 

I think it was fall of 1998. I rode my Honda FVR down to Laguna Seca Raceway on Friday morning for the Qualifying sessions of the World Series of Indy Cars as it was called at the time. I rode home because I had concert tickets in SF, then got up Saturday morning early and rode a different way back for the second day of Qualifying and the Indy-Lights and Formula Atlantic races. Incredibly beautiful day to be out before traffic for a 100 mile sprint through the mountains and down the coast. I could easily have droned down the freeway 101 and entered Laguna through what was then Fort Ord Military Reservation. But why own a motorcycle? I quick couple of 125MPH rips through the artichoke fields by Castroville, I cut over on Reservation Road and went in the back way anyway, to stay away from camping and other race traffic qued up at the two front entrances in Monterey.

 

I had spectating at Laguna Seca races down to an art form. I knew how to get around Sheriffs or security directing traffic. I had a way to ride my motorcycle right next to the track, park it in the only flat spot around, behind the souviner shack. I put a cover on it and was standing twenty feet from the old bridge to the infield and Corkscrew. I hiked all around the track and through the paddock four times to see how drivers were able to adapt their car's setup to a very challenging track.

 

This year Mario Andretti retired as an Indy Car driver and it was dubbed the Farewell Mario Tour. Laguna was the last race of the year and the fans had come out to all the races all year long to see Mario drive and Monterey was seriously packed. This was maybe the heyday of CART Racing with over 100K people.

 

I made a last pass through the paddock to see if any of the teams were changing engines or to see drivers hanging out. Then the traffic subsided and I left, deciding to ride through Santa Cruz up the Cabrillo Highway 1. It was still hot out and in the eighties right by the ocean. Once past town, I realized that there was little traffic and laid down on my tank to relax and get out of the wind. The VFR went 80MPH @ 6KRPM =45 MPG. V-4, liquid cooled, four valve heads, gear driven cam train that delivered power like a sewing machine. Me on the gas coming out of the Mario Andretti Hairpin, the exit of Turn 2.

 

LagunaVFRexitT2.jpg

 

Mostly you couldn't hear the exhaust note, because it was behind you and nicely muffled... you heard the whine of the cam train and two distinct vibrations of the intake and exhaust valves. The windshield and faring created a pocket of tranquility. You could place the balls of your feet on the pegs, relax your legs, back and every thing except enough tension to hold the throttle open and your helmet up. The horsepower and torque curves crossed at 9,600 RPM and it redlined at eleven grand, so you could short shift and be going a buck and a quarter in 12 seconds. The V-4 exhaust note would freakin' howl at ten grand. Japanese Music. I loved that bike. I was like quiet comfortable couch on the freeway or long trips. A flying couch.

 

HondaMonoLine99copy.jpg

 

One of the coolest things about riding a bike on trips is that you are alone with yourself in your helmet, piloting an 86 HP extension of your imagination. It's not like being in a car, you smell and feel the air temperature, feel the road and traffic. I was lost in deep thought up by the Pigeon Point Light House, when the sheer beauty of the sun on its way down brought me back... to see, I was going over 100MPH at eight grand. Only difference between 80 and 120 is just more wind, this engine was so smooth.

 

Oh fuck, this is exactly where my buddy Jimmy got chased by a CHP who flipped a U-turn. It was a $260 ticket and he had to do some fast talking to keep from going to jail and impound.

I chopped the throttle and a second later... California Highway Patrol. I was as going 70 in a 55... he was going 85... in the other direction!

 

Still a few miles later, I was letting it out again in spots where I could see a ways up the road. Finally I crossed from Monterey County to San Mateo, and for some reason I decided to make a sprint through the back roads over to the Bay Area. I had intended to take advantage of the uncharacteristically warm weather to cruise up the San Mateo Coast to Woodside Road. But for some reason, I abruptly hauled on the brakes when I saw the sign for Pinky's, a roadhouse that had been closed for years, but was the landmark for Gazos Creek Road. I ripped that twisted one lane road up to Cloverdale Road then slipped it into sixth gear about 125MPH for a good 140 MPH romp for a minute.

  • Like 2
Link to comment

I came up to the junction of Pescadero Road and stopped at the stop sign. The sun was now down, there was bug-splat baked on my visor. I took off my sun glasses, gave my visor a quick wipe and started off into the dark of the forest.

 

I had a little talk to myself. OK... blasting up the coast all alone, ripping Gazos and Cloverdale and not a single car. I had more fun that allowed by law, now cool it and pay attention. I was tired from getting baked in the sun for two days and hiking all over, plus I had one more day to go. Take it easy.

 

As I make my way up winding Pescadero Road, I carefully passed the first car I came upon. Then the second and a third.

I knew these tight twisty roads so well I could pass anything, anywhere as I came upon it, without slowing. The problem with that kind of hooliganism is that you can scare people so bad they crash. You are gone out of sight by the time they even realize that something red went whoosh. Not nice. I was taking my time and not pushing at all.

 

The road starts to climb into rolling grassy fields with ancient oak trees. There are three long straights connected with horseshoe style corners. I resist the temptation to wind it out and dive into the first corner. This complex is so much fun either way you run through it, up or down the hill, but the corners are blind, so you really need to stay in your lane and off the yellow paint and Botts Dots. Also the apexes of these corners out here in the hills are many times strewn with rocks, dust and dirt dragged onto the pavement by trucks or little land slides where they cut the hill for the road.

 

I take the corner with a perfect line and really relaxed, I roll on the gas like I mean it, but then back off a bit out on the straight. I went into the next right hand corner perfectly relaxed, perfect line, quickly fall into the apex and smartly rolled on the throttle...

 

Ahaaa!!...

 

BAM!! SCRAAAAAAAAAAAPE. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!

 

I see a deer on the other side of the road a long ways before my target exit point. He has his butt to me on the shoulder and his head down. He turns around and runs right at me. It happened so fast that all I could do was grab a big handful of front brake.

I wasn't hanging off the bike, but my weight was committed to the corner as I pushed on the inside bar to make the bike fall into the corner. All I remember is seeing a four point buck eye-ball to wide eye-ball with these antlers pointed right at me just as I rolled on the throttle to pick the back back up on the exit.

 

I swear I had at least three nightmares where I had to wake up reliving hitting this deer. I hit him right in the mid section. 185 pound guy on 500 pound bike going 45 MPH hits a 150 pound deer. Couldn't have been great for him, but he took a couple of steps, jumped and cleared a wire fence on top of the embankment, about 12 feet, then was gone!! He probably was dinner for a mountain lion or bob cat.

 

I locked the front wheel up big time. The next day I drove back through there to retrieve some parts. I could see a lurid curved black stripe, then nine distinct hops where I was losing traction... then the spot where I hit him, the direction of the skid changing as I high sided. It happened so fast, I didn't get thrown off and ended up with the bike pitching me on my left shoulder and helmet, pinning my left leg under the bike as we slid to a stop.

 

Helmet saved my life. Studded kevlar race glove saved my hands. Still got contusions on my forearm under the body armor and race leather!! Race boots saved the foot peg from punching a hole in my ankle when it folded up as it dug into the pavement.

The throttle was stuck wide open and it was winding out and stalling a bit, until I could react enough to turn the key off, the kill switch was under the bike. I'm laying there thinking... "uh, shit this sucks... let's see... fingers, toes, arms, legs... oh wait shoulder unit to bridge, we is all fucked up up in here... ankle to bridge, damaged control reporting... I bet this in going to hurt tomorrow!

 

Then I hear a familiar sound of Nissan L engine winding in the distance. Oh shit, I'm laying here out here in the dark, in the middle of the road, in the exit of a blind corner! As the sound gets closer I manage to wriggle my boot loose and get out from under the bike, just in time to hop out of the way of a beat 4x4 Datsun 720, that comes flying around the corner just missing the bike.

 

It was a couple young local long-haired redneck loggers. The passenger leans out the window and asks, "What happened Man?" I said I hit a deer. The kid goes, "Good I hope you killed it... they are getting over populated as hell out here. Hey, you OK? Need a beer?"

 

I go, "Nah that sounds good, but think you could help me pick my bike up? A couple hops and I realized that I dislocated my shoulder again. The guys pull over and get out, empties falling out as they open the door. They walk over and each reach out a free hand like they could pick it up and not spill a drop. I go, here you, grab the seat handle, and you, grab this handle bar, I'll grab the other bar. We get it up and roll it onto the shoulder. They are so drunk they are about as useless as I am.

 

I looked it over and then got it started. One good thing about fully faired bikes is that they crash pretty well. It's expensive as hell, but unless something like clutch lever breaks off, or you bend the forks so bad it wont roll, they probably run and ride. The guys go, "You good Dude?"... and take off. I'm sitting there in the dark thinking how nice it would be to be drinking a cold beer and lying down. I'm in shock.

 

I look things over and decide to take off. I get my gloves back on and start the bike again. It seems fine and I have lights but no turn signals. Going into the first corner, I realized that my forks are fucked, but the brakes all work. This is going to be a ton of work to hustle this bike through tight twisty hills, after I basically just jumped off my bike onto the ground at speed... then had it land on me.

 

It wasn't but a couple miles that I found myself pushing to see how fast I could ride in one gear using no clutch, brake and steering with only the throttle hand... bent to fuck forks and crooked triple clamps. I love to go fast. Anyway, I get up to Four Corners and pull right about to the spot where Liam and are standing as I tell him this story.

 

It is still eighty degrees out and a big full moon has come up. Everything is closed up and pretty quiet. I'm looking the bike over better in the light from the parking lot. A moment later, I hear big displacement sport bike coming down Skyline from King's Mountain. The motorcycle comes directly over to where I am, the pilot hitting the kill switch and coasting to a stop.

 

The rider gets off shedding gloves and helmet. He says to me, "What a nice evening for a ride huh? Hey, nice bike man!" I go, 'Well it was... look at this", pointing to the side he couldn't see. It looked like somebody took a giant belt-sander to it. I'm still kind of hopping around holding my shoulder. He goes, "Doood, did this just happen??"

 

I go, "Yeah I finally hit a deer down on Pescadero Road. For all the years I been riding out here, I've had so many close calls with deer and raccoons and squirrels."

 

The guy says, "Man you are LUCKY!"

 

Huh?

 

"Man you are lucky, it could have been way worse."

 

Wait a minute here... I go, "I don't feel lucky.

 

I just threw away a $600 helmet, $400 boots, $150 gloves, roached my leathers and my bike! That ain't lucky!"

 

The guy starts to tell me this story;

 

"See this bike? I just picked it up this afternoon. It's a new Suzuki GSX1100. I had new GSX750, but I was coming home from work riding on Stevens Creek Blvd. in Cupertino, when a lady turned left across three lanes of traffic and hit me.

I wake up and see two people looking down at me. The man is saying, "You are going to be OK, you were lucky.

 

"WHAT THE FUCK? Where am I? Who are you? Hey where is my BIKE! What happened to my bike man!"

 

'Bike? We don't know about any bicycle. I am your doctor and you are in Valley Medical Center... You are a very lucky young man!'

 

"What? What are you talking about? Where am I? Hold up here, where is my bike?"

 

These people are telling me to relax and keep saying how lucky I am. I start to get up... I think I'm getting up to find out what this craziness is. I look down and feel I'm moving my arms and legs... but nothing is moving... it's just laying there.

 

The doctor tells me I've been in a coma for three weeks and that I'm paralyzed and may never regain function again. BUT, I was really LUCKY to be alive. Apparently I went flying 150 feet in the air and didn't actually hit the car or something.

 

I'm blown away and ask, "Are you kidding me? When was this??" He says, "About four months ago. I had to learn how to walk all over again. This is the first week I been back to work. I took the afternoon off to have my final doctor visit. I picked up the new bike and showed the doctor my new helmet." He ask, "What is that for?" I go, "Doc, check out my new bike! The doctor says, 'You are crazy man! I hope I never see you again!'

 

He saddled up, thumbed the starter then said, "Well man, take it easy and Good Luck!

 

I carefully got going and started off down 84 towards the Bay, negotiating the steepest tightest corners. I was in shock for sure because this was just crazy, but I kept thinking about crawling in bed and pulling the covers up and just kept going. It took a year to shake that little incident off.

 

The next day, I drove the Datsun down to Laguna as early as I could get on the road. The plan was to ride the bike and be able to split lanes through traffic and go where ever I wanted within the facility. This was plan B for sure. I got to the back gate on Reservation Road at six AM and found a line of race traffic a mile long. I didn't know it, but they were diverting traffic out of Salinas into the back way and the whole ten miles of Ft. Ord was race traffic. It took hours and hours of creeping along watching the clock. I missed seeing the whole morning's warm up, support races and into the noon hour, somehow they decided that all the parking space in the back of the track would be full so they changed direction just in front of me, and sent us all the way in front of the facility in sight of Highway 68, to the first parking area!!! It was insane, I was hurting so bad I couldn't wait to get out of the truck.

 

I had been listening to the FM closed circuit radio all morning and I knew the race was going to start on time at 1:00 PM because it was live on ESPN. I'm at the bottom of this hill and can barely walk. I hobble up to the closest place I could find out on the hill at the outside of Turn One just as the parade lap started. I would never think to go there. As spectating goes there are a million better places, but it turned out to be good spot.

 

Al Unser Jr. was the pole sitter, but got bumped going into turn three on the first lap. He rejoined in last place, then he mounted an incredible charge to pass everybody, was the fastest car on track with two laps to go in second place... when his engine quit. He could have won it. Can't remember who did. Lots of fanfare and parade laps for Mario... the only guy to win Formula One World's Championship, IndyCar National Championship, LeMans, Indy 500 and the Daytona 500!!!!... didn't qualify that well and he blew up, or caught fire in turn nine or something.

 

So I think about that guy on the Suzuki and being lucky all the time now. Just like green flag racing... sometimes your a champ and sometimes you still get points toward the season for finishing... sometimes you crash and burn.

 

Since that incident I have been really lucky. Only a couple more serious motorcycle crashes, a totaled car, falling 13 feet off a deck on my head that took a year out of my life, falling 20 feet off scaffold missing a fence post, getting shot with nail guns and staplers, getting metal splinters surgically removed from my eye, uh, you know work related lacerations and concussions.

 

Two years ago I cut through the tip of my left index finger on a table saw. The ER Doc said, "You are lucky man." Totally deadpan, I go. "Doc, will I play the saxophone again?" "Did you play before?" "Hell yes, I play the shit out of the saxophone." He goes,"I think you will be OK, you were lucky."

 

Yeah, I know.

 

Thanks for listening to my story Liam, and I hope you are feeling lucky too Doug.

 

Good luck to y'all too... we are going to need it. On that.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...

MAN! u have to write a book. a budy of mine had to move to my town and fly between home and work weekly. so he bsiclyy knew no one here and we worked to gether i showed him around,some cool places ,etc. a couple years later after he moved back home and i moved on to a different field alltogether , i get a call out of the blue and turns out he wants to send me something that belongs to me. Now im concerned and he sends to to the local department of acompany he now works for. Any ways what he sent me was a book he wrote with me as one of the carectors, using my full name and all. and the carecter is totally based on me as to how he saw me in and out of office. it was a brilliant book cause its based on true events of an actuall heighst that happend in his home town back in 1996 . it was the biggest heist in history. and then later on he sold the movie rights and earlier this year that movie came out. granted the movie is loosly based on the book and im not a caracter in the movie . but can u see where this is going. his busy with his 3rd book and the movie rights is already sold for that secon movie.

if he can fig U can. give it a go. u had a colouful past and u have a great way of telling the story.lol good luck and keep them coming.

Link to comment

Here we are again, spinning around out in this part of the earth's orbit once again. The wobble is about to turn back the other way and the days will start to get shorter again. Seems like we were just here out in this part of the orbit, not that long ago. What a disappointing year. I used to look forward to these longest days all year long and really savor them when they are happening.

 

I mean who knows, maybe many of the things I worked so hard to accomplish will eventually work out... but the view from here, now, is failure. I crashed, burned and now I'm just smoldering. It's hard to admit to failing. Worse, I worked so hard and feel like my intentions were good ones. I should have had some success.

 

It's not the first time I lost a business. It fucking hurt then too. So it goes. I did play my horn a lot this year and I think I made progress as an instrumentalists and a musician... but all that is so fleeting... if I don't keep playing every day and try to keep progressing, my chops and "head" chops are lost so fast. That is just the way music is. You make vibrations and they just decay out into the universe. Playing music seems like the only thing that makes me be so in the moment that, that is where I would rather exist. Dizzy said, "If I gotta 'spain it to ya, you ain't gonna git it anyway."

 

Sixty years ago today I came to this planet. There was some kind of resonant frequency that brought me to this little dream of reality in San Francisco, June of 1952.

 

I think I was fortunate to get a pretty good education growing up. The public schools I attended were more than adequate, but everybody learns differently and I did better in some subjects than others. As a young adult I began to realize that my interests changed and that my education was incomplete at best. So I have always read books, newspapers and magazines as an attempt to fill in the blanks.

 

The last two summers I read two college text books on physics. A subject that I missed. Big deal, I got them out of a hard bound book recycle dumpster. They were published in the '50s. The only way to read text books is a section every day. I take my time and understand everything in that section before going on.

 

It's made me look at everything a little differently for sure. I can get how humans perceive the physical world as solid while in reality it is mostly space. From the atomic level to the astronomical everything is vibrating or oscillating at some frequency in time.

 

You ever hear somebody tune a guitar? They play the same pitch on two strings. Either the same number of vibrations are produced each second... and they are said to be, in tune or resonating... or one is faster or slower that the other, and they are out of tune not in resonance.

 

I have been having these glimpses of how all the physical phenomena on this plane of human existence can exist simply as vibration. Our little solar system, our third rock from the sun with its moon, just a dinky little cosmic ripple of a vibration in the universe. Look out there tonight! All that stuff is ancient history. Are you kiddin' me, light years away? Half that stuff could be gone already and we don't know.

 

Last summer I read a book that was published in 1928 called the Art and Science of Music. It was looong on the science and had one chapter on art. It blew my mind. I had no idea how the human mind and body process sound let alone music. Mind bending stuff. All the years I have been alive, listening and playing music, I had no clue, total ignorance.

 

I have been keenly aware of sounds now and also I have been sensing an awareness of lower frequency vibrations of physical events, like clouds and the wind, waves at the ocean. They are just parts of bigger, longer frequency vibrations and huge wave lengths.

 

We are bombarded with high frequency waves that have huge power, yet are so small that they pass not only through our bodies and the earth itself without hitting anything. Cell phone microwave transmission towers, the transformer on the utility pole across the street and the sun's light bath us in energy and vibrations. I'm ready for the tin foil hat right?

 

I would like to think that there is one universal big vibration. All of us, and all of this stuff we have observed and called the world, are filtered through the individual personas we have fabricated for a frame of reference, with which we can experience it... are all manifested out if that vibe.

 

I guess that is where time comes in. No time... pure experience, pure being. Time splits that into the observer, us, and the observed, our world.

 

When you pluck a string on an instrument, you hear a fundamental vibration like the pitch A is 440 vibrations a second. (a measurement in time) The string also vibrates in sections, one half, one-quarter, and eighth until they very close. The half section vibrates at half the frequency, 220. The quarter string 110 and on, each vibration also decreasing in volume or amplitude, so that you are not only hearing the fundamental tone but 'upper partials' too.

 

So we may be all just small partial vibrations of the one big universal note. Figbuck's string theory. Reet... on that.

 

I haven't cared about my birthday for many years. I'm not having any party, I'm going down to the river and play the horn in the sunshine. It's a nice day out. In a few hours it will be tomorrow. Find a warm place to play and enjoy the sun. A few days Ago I was playing in the rain.

 

My parents and my parent's parents, all found resonant frequencies. And somehow I latched onto that frequency, and here I is after sixty laps around this mutha.

 

Speaking of laps. Back in the normal times before fun was cancelled, I used to ride my motorcycle from the Bay Area up the coast highway to Portland for world series of Indy Cars. The first year I made the trip was 1984 on a brand new Honda FV750F Interceptor. I was self-employed and worked all the time, so when I heard about the Indy Cars running at Portland International Raceway, I thought it would be a cool to take a could days off and blast the Interceptor up the endless roller coaster of Highway 1.

 

Ratmsg1001.jpg

 

I had so much fun and met so many huge race fans, that I gave myself the same present every year for the next 22 years. After a while I started to forget what day it was and there were years where I came back from the trip and remembered that the birthday came and went. I had to ask myself what I was even doing that day.

 

There are days that I call the best days of my life. From the second I wake up until I pass out again, they are pure fun. Doing the stuff I love and have worked my ass off to get free time to do! Some of those days were simply burning tankfulls of gas watching the scenery go by. Didn't have to talk to anybody or deal with anything except eating, drinking, gas and brakes. Some of my trips were days in a row like that.

 

 

Ratmsg1009.jpg

 

I was born on Father's Day on a Sunday. Every so often the date falls on Sunday again. Paul Newman and Carl Hass a long time team owner and North American importer of Lola race cars, fielded one of the first great CART teams when Mario and Michael Andretti were teammates. But the year before that they were adversaries.

 

This is an historic shot. If you know PIR, there was no catch fencing. Look how close I am to the track right at the pit entrance. A ten buck paddock pass... waay better that sitting the grandstands!

 

Ratmsg1013.jpg

 

I usually watched the start of the race from the inside of the final corner out onto the drag strip at PIR. If the cars were working in that corner, then they would get a good run at the straightaway and have a shot at overtaking. After about 20 laps or so I would walk down to the Paddock to watch pit stops in the hot pit lane from behind the teams. Man that was heart stopping action.

 

Ratmsg1012.jpg

 

I would go down to the last pit stall where I could see a timing a scoring monitor, the start/finish flag stand and see the cars going into turn one. I always had a transistor radio so I could hear the track commentary and know what was going on lap wise and on the back side of the circuit that you can't see. Besides I taped all the races on a VCR so I could watch them when I got home. Usually I watched the replay in a motel on ESPN the next night. Michael Andretti pretty much dominated the race, and then... well read this clip;

 

Posted: 17 Dec 2007

This 1986 March 86C CART Indy Car is considered to be one of the most historic and recognizable Indy cars of the first decade of CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) racing. This car was delivered new to Kraco Racing in May of 1986 to be prepared for its first event in Milwaukee. Michael Andretti won the Milwaukee 200 in the car's inaugural outing and one week later was involved in one of the most memorable road races in CART history on Father's Day at Portland. Having led 87 of the 104 laps, Michael Andretti came out of the last corner on the final lap only to run out of fuel! He was able to coast across the finish line, but not before his father, Mario Andretti had caught and passed him for a victory margin of 0.07 seconds. Happy Father's Day Dad!!! Later that year, Michael drove this car to victory at Phoenix International Raceway in one of the most dominating performances in Indy Car Racing history, taking the lead on lap 30 and leading 166 of the final 170 laps and lapping the entire field except second place finisher Danny Sullivan who finished a distant 20 seconds behind Andretti. In all, Michael Andretti won two races, one pole position, led 6 races and 418 laps in this car in 1986. The car was later sold and entered in two Indianapolis 500s before being retired. At the conclusion of its racing career it was restored by Blackburn-Daly Ltd of Indianapolis to it's original as raced trim. It has been displayed as a show car at special events since that time. We are selling the car without engine as a roller. It would make a fantastic addition to any serious racing collection.

 

Ratmsg1014.jpg

 

I was standing right behind Michael's pit and it was hard to see all the way down to the corner but Mario had been catching Mike up and was all over him. His car experienced fuel pick up problems and stumbled. Then the turbo lit out onto the drag strip, the engine misfired badly, and all of a sudden they were side by side at the Checkered flag. Almost nobody knew who won or what happened.

 

Ratmsg1004.jpg

 

I knew from the previous year when Mario had won the race, how they worked the Victory Podium celebration, and how Security kept the fans out of the area in front, where only individuals with credentials from teams, the media or organizers could get. I worked my way back up the paddock away from all the crowds trying to get onto the track being fought off by security.

 

March-Indy-86C-Michael-Andretti-1986-07LGE183724539Bjpegpagespeedcebq6nsun4b1.jpgMarch-Indy-86C-Michael-Andretti-1986-07LGE183724539GjpegpagespeedcefYH_rYD1PA.jpgMarch-Indy-86C-Michael-Andretti-1986-07LGE183724539Djpegpagespeedce-s2jV2Icf1.jpgMarch-Indy-86C-Michael-Andretti-1986-07LGE183724539EjpegpagespeedceUyIgjvoALe.jpg

 

I went up to where some crews guy were stacking used race tires, put my head down looked at the ground and walked right through the hot pit lane with all the crews, and now a steady stream of press photographers. They drove a flat-bed truck out into the middle of the track in front of the main grandstands wich had a backdrop with the race sponsor's logos, in order to award trophies and spray champagne for the TV audience and motorsports journalists.

 

I just tagged along behind a three hundred pound photographer who was toting ten thousand dollars worth of lenses past security, and ended up at the back of the pack in the middle of the track, with thousands of fans looking on from the stands.

Who ever was the third place car drove up, then Mario who would be the first place car drove up, then their teams helped them get out.

 

I turn around and here comes Michael Andretti going the wrong way, coasting dead stick towards the crowd in front of the flatbed stage. He rolls to a stop about twenty feet from me and I start to casually walk over to him and get my camera out.

Everybody is so intent on juggling for position in front of the stage and to see the TV interviews with Mario, that nobody sees that Michael is struggling to get his seat belts off, the steering wheel off. Mike comes flying out of the cockpit, tossing the steering wheel into the air, until the pigtail wire for the radio button that tethers, crashes it into the side pod.

 

Michael wriggles out, strips his helmet and balaclava off in a spray of sweat. His face is all creased and wrinkled and boy is he pissed! He looks right at me and I have no idea what to say... the poor guy just got robbed, if what they are saying on the track PA is right. I go, "What happened? in an exasperated tone? Michael growls something, at me and I jumped out of his way.

 

Just then his team and the TV people hear all the fans in the stands yelling at him, and he is mobbed. On the Victory stand he was trying to be cool for TV, but you could tell he was so bummed out, thinking what could I have done better, I drove the shit outta the car and dominated. In the interview he said, if he had to loose it to anybody that way, at least it was to his Dad and a teammate. You could tell he wasn't convinced however.

 

Here is Mario telling him Thanks for the points and purse money kid!

 

 

Ratmsg1010.jpg

 

Mike is trying to muster up a grin... hey that's your green flag racin'.

 

Ratmsg1011.jpg

 

That race went down in history as the Father's Day gift. So that was me too, my Dad told me the first time my birthday was on Father's Day that I was his gift.

 

My Dad passed away right this time of year when I turned 25. He was sixty-three. I'm sixty? What do yo think I should do for the next three years?

  • Like 1
Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.