How wanting to meet other BMX freestylers led me to writing

Buying a manual typewriter to make a zine in 1985 led to self-publishing over a 1 1/2 million words worth of writing in the 38 years since

In early September of 1985, I bought a 1930’s or 1940’s era Royal travel typewriter, much like the one in this photo, except it was built into a small case with a handle on it. It cost me $15 at the San Jose swap meet. I couldn’t afford an electric typewriter at the time. It was the 15 pound “laptop” of its day, the type of non-electric typewriter that traveling journalists once used, decades before I bought mine. (public domain image).

I grew up moving, nearly every year, as a kid. I didn’t have roots, my family was more dysfunctional than most, and less dysfunctional than some. I was a super shy, pretty neurotic, chubby kid, whose family moved to a new house almost every year, and a new town or area every two to three years. Like most fucked up, geeky kids, I spent a lot of time escaping. One form of escape was into books. Much of the time I read non-fiction. When I did read fiction, I read about heroes that seemed to be everything that I wasn’t. My other form of escape was to run off and wander the local woods, and later the desert area of Idaho. I loved exploring as a kid, and still do.

My parents, my little sister, and me, bounced around Ohio until I was in 8th grade, then to New Mexico for a year, which was a major culture shock for a Midwest gringo. But I did discover chicken fried steak, tamales, and guacamole, which helped ease the transition.

Then we moved to Boise, Idaho, once again led by my dad changing jobs. That was in 1981, as the collapse of U.S. factories and outsourcing of jobs was just beginning. None of us knew then that thousands of factories and millions of jobs would disappear. That’s why we left Ohio, because the company my dad worked at was for sale, and rumors were it may close. The same thing happened a year later, in New Mexico. We moved to Boise, Idaho, another big geographic move. I managed to stay at Boise High School all three years, but we lived in a rented house, then a double-wide mobile home in a trailer park outside of town, then my parents bought a house, during that time. That was pretty typical for us.

It was in the mobile home, in a trailer park we called Blue Valley, outside of town, that I got really into BMX riding, and then BMX racing. I was getting into BMX freestyle, trick riding on “little kids’ bikes”, in 1983, as we moved back into town. BMX freestyle itself, way out in California, was just turning into a sport, it was so new. The very first contests were just starting. I was one of the very first people in Idaho in this brand new sport. I started my senior year of high school running cross country. I was in the back of the pack, but I made it through the season, I even got a varsity letter. But BMX was growing much more important in my life.

Over the next two years, I got more and more involved in BMX riding. I raced once a week or so, riding inside a fairgrounds cow barn in nearby Caldwell in the winter, where we raced over wooden jumps. In the spring of 1984, I helped redesign and rebuild the Fort Boise BMX track, but got more into freestyle as the year went on. I bought my first high quality BMX bike with my high school graduation money, a Skyway T/A race bike. With axle pegs and front brakes, that became my freestyle bike. I went to a show by Jay Bickel and Wayne Moore, the only BMX freestyle team in Boise. I soon joined the team, and not long after, Wayne “retired.” So Jay and I renamed the team the Critical Condition Stunt Team. We did a handful of shows around Boise, and rode in several parades, all promoted by Jay’s mom, Cindy.

I didn’t have money to go to college, and like many 18-year-olds, I didn’t really have a strong draw towards any traditional career at the time. So I “took a year off” after graduating, living with my family, and worked in a small amusement park. It was called The Fun Spot, located in the large Julia Davis Park, on the Boise river. That was the summer of 1984. I worked nights in a Mexican restaurant through the winter, then at The Fun Spot again, as the manager, in the summer of 1985.

My dad got laid off, then found another job, this time in San Jose, California, in the spring of 1985. He moved to San Jose, and my mom and sister moved there in June. I rented a room at my best friend’s house that summer, where I lived with his mom and younger brother. I ran The Fun Spot, at 18-years-old, with 12 or 13 employees under me, day to day. Then I’d ride my bike for a couple of hours after work, learning new tricks, on the side street by the house. Then I’d hang out with my high school friends, none of which were into BMX, in the evenings.

When The Fun Spot closed in the middle of August in 1985, I packed up my gigantic, ugly, brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose, California, to live with my family again. I soon found a job working nights at a local Pizza Hut, and spent my days riding my bike, learning new tricks, alone. I knew there were a handful of pro BMX freestylers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a bunch of good amateurs, somewhere. But in those pre-internet days, in a metro area that big, I didn’t know how to find them.

I read about zines, small, self-published booklets, though I had never actually seen one, in an early issue of FREESTYLIN’ magazine. I didn’t think of myself as being a writer. I had no dream of being a writer. In the 1970’s, being a writer was never a cool thing that anyone I knew wanted to be. I enjoyed writing in school, generally, and did well when I had to write reports. But never even thought about it as a career, and definitely not as a passion. I started a zine, having never seen one, simply because I wanted to meet other freestylers in San Jose.

I’d thought about making a zine in Boise, I had even sketched out what it would look like. As a kid, I was always a huge daydreamer. I would dream of huge things, and then never take action. My zine, which I called San Jose Stylin’, was really the first time I had a creative idea, and then followed through. Instinctively, I took action, because BMX freestyle had become my life at that point. I wasn’t that great at it. I was pretty good in 1985, mostly because no one else around me was doing it. It was the first sport where I was ever any good at all.

So I took some of my Pizza Hut money, and bought an old Royal typewriter, much like the one in the photo above, it had the same kind of round keys as that one. The ribbon was made of silk, and I could never find a replacement ribbon. So when I got to the end of the ribbon, I would re-roll it by hand, and use it again. Somehow, I did 11 issues of my zine over a year, and the ancient ribbon never ran out of ink.

At first, I used photos I’d taken on a Kodak 110 camera, some taken in Boise, and some form a trip to the 1985 Venice Beach AFA Freestyle Masters contest with the Bickels. Since I had never seen a zine, I didn’t know they were usually standard sized sheets of paper, folded in half to make it like a little book. My first two or three zine issues were three sheets of typing paper, with writing and photos on both sides, stapled in the upper left hand corner, like a test in school. I took a few copies of my zine to four or five different bike shops in San Jose, all of which carried BMX bikes. My name and our home phone number were on each one.

About a week later, we were sitting down for supper at home, and the phone rang. That was a thing that happened back then, in 1985, families actually did sit down to eat dinner together, or supper, as we called it, being from Ohio. In addition, people would call on the home phone back then, a phone stuck to the wall, and we never knew who was calling. That night it was a freestyler named John Vasquez, who worked in a bike shop in downtown San Jose. He had read my zine. We talked freestyle for a few minutes, and I went to ride with him and his friends at their ramp, a couple of days later.

Within a month, beginning with John’s help, I met the Curb Dogs, the Skyway factory team riders, and a bunch of really good Bay Area amateur riders. As far as I was concerned, my zine was a success at that point, I met a whole bunch of really good riders, and was soon making trips to ride with them up at Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco, to ride with them on the weekends. But when I handed guys my zine, they’d check it out and go, “This is pretty cool, when’s the next one coming out? My response was, “Next one?”

So the next month, I made another issue. And another. I published 11 issues in all, sent them to the editorial guys at all the BMX magazines, and had a mailing list, a snail mail list, of 120 readers by the next summer. My parents bought me a 35 millimeter Pentax camera for Christmas that year, so my photos got a bit better. But I wound up doing all eleven zines with that $15 Royal typewriter, with the one silk ribbon.

Somehow, much to my surprise then, and even now, that zine landed me a job at Wizard Publications. A month after my 20th birthday, having never attended a single college class, I was working for BMX Action and FREESTYLIN’ magazines. I still didn’t think of myself as a writer, though I was writing some articles, in real magazines, soon after. I was also the proofreader of both magazines, with a week and a half of training by the guy I was replacing. It was another year later, at another job, that I first began to, kind of, think of myself as a writer.

In 1982, in a trailer park in Idaho, I got into a weird little sport that almost no one knew existed. Within a couple of years, I was dreaming of being a pro BMX freestyler, getting a factory sponsorship, and going on tour, and meeting lots of women. I wound up a mediocre, but innovative, rider in the national level amateur scene, in the 1980’s. Technically I had a factory sponsorship for a year, but with a second rate bike company in the BMX world. I did go on a three week skateboard tour as a manager in 1990. But the whole pro rider thing never happened, I just wasn’t that good of a rider.

The whole dream that I sought in those early years, didn’t happen. But it was that dream to be a pro BMX freestyler that drew me to writing, and helped me figure out that writing, and creative work, was something I not only liked doing, but was a path I needed to follow in life. Writing, and later producing videos and working on TV show crews, were things I never dreamed of as a kid. I grew up in a place and time where making a living as a writer, artist, or working on TV shows, was simply not even an option. In small town, rural Ohio, people worked in factories, the offices next to the factory, or on farms. Things like writing for magazines, or working on videos or TV shows, were simply not to be considered. “Get those crazy ideas out of your head, boy, you’re going to work in the factory.” That’s the kind of thing we heard as kids if we even dreamed of any kind of creative career.

Then the world began to change dramatically. Personal computers came out. Desktop publishing became a thing. A few years later the early internet began to emerge. Landline phones became cell phones which morphed into smartphones. The entire face of communication and media began to change.

In the 38 years since I published my first zine, I’ve published about 40 more zines, some with 48 pages or more. I was editor for a BMX freestyle print newsletter for close to a year. I contributed a few photos and articles to five other BMX magazines in the 1980’s, and was a staff writer for a short-lived BMX magazine in the late 1990’s. I’ve also written over 400 poems, most of which have been lost in my moves over the years. Three of my zines were collections of my poetry.

In 2007, while working as a taxi driver, I started my first blog. It totally sucked. But a year later, I was broke, living with my parents, and stuck on the eastern seaboard. I was unable to find a job, any job. I was the first time I had access to a computer and the internet. I started blogging about my days in the BMX industry, not thinking anyone would find my posts. I was just depressed and wanted to do something creative. About 20 posts in, one went viral, among people I didn’t know existed online.

Since then, I’ve written well over 2,500 blog posts, across something like 50 blog ideas I’ve tried. Crazy as it sounds, that makes me one of the most prolific bloggers worldwide. I’m still quite a ways behind Seth Godin, and his 8,000 blog posts, but I’m up there. My posts average around 600 words or more. That’s about 1.5 million words worth of blogging in 14 years, or the equivalent of about 20 standard novels worth of prose. Those posts have pulled in over 450,000 total page views. Considering I’ve been writing for small niches, that’s pretty good, overall. No, I haven’t written a bestselling novel or non-fiction book. I have no accolades. But when I stopped writing one of my blogs, in 2012, editors on two different websites, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, actually wrote eulogies for my BMX blog. That’s pretty crazy, when you think about it. I made an impact on my weird little niche, and have kept a small, but solid, readership since.

All of that happened, over a million words written and self-published, because I wanted to meet some BMX riders in 1985. And it all started with a $15, used, dinosaur of a typewriter. When you follow your draw to writing, or any creative endeavor, you never know where it may lead. The initial spark of an idea is the beginning. But then you have to buckle down and do the actual work, day after day. If you do that, creativity can lead you on a journey beyond anything you imagine now. That’s part of what I’ve learned in 38 years of writing and self-publishing.

With all that behind me, now I’m beginning a new journey here on Substack.