Where "The White Bear" nickname came from

It has nothing to do with race, it's just a nickname from my BMX days

In the spring of 1988, my first serious girlfriend in Southern California dumped me. She was a singer in a local band, and the whole time we went out, I was trying to write lyrics, to pen a hit song for her to sing. I filled up seven full legal pads (stolen from work) of really bad song lyrics. I was an overly uptight dork that, and totally in love then, the day she dumped me. So I went home, listened to Don McClean’s “American Pie” over and over and over on my tiny ghetto blaster, and wrote a “song” called “The Journey of the White Bear.”

Now one thing about writing seven notebooks full of bad song lyrics, my writing had improved somewhat. “Journey of The White Bear” turned out to be the best set of “lyrics” I had written. In the poem, I was the white bear, a dorky, naive kid from Idaho. Three different previous girlfriends had told me that I reminded them of a bear, something about the shape of my nose. One even bought me a Teddy bear that she said looked like me. So that’s where the bear part came from.

The white part was a metaphor for being really naive, untarnished by the realities of the world, like new snowfall, that’s what was in my head. That’s how I seemed to myself, when I moved down to Southern California. I was uptight, dorky, didn’t do any drugs, and just completely inept in social situations. On the other hand, my girlfriend was about five years older than me, she’d been around the block, so to speak, plenty of times. She liked to party, and had a whole lot of experience that I didn’t have. In today’s world, we might call her a cougar, even thought she was only 25 then. But the term “cougar” wasn’t invented for about 15 more years. In the poem, I called her “the black leopard,” she definitely had that feline quality that modern, two-legged cougars are known for.

Like most of the 400 or 500 poems I’ve written since, “The Journey of the White Bear,” has been lost to time. I don’t have a copy of it anymore. But in the poem, me, as the dorky white bear, came to California, looking to become a star (BMX freestyle pro), and met the black leopard. She introduced me to a wilder side of life, and eventually tired of me, and dumped me.

The lines in the poem I remember are the refrain, “Nothing’s black or white, in this world today, nothing’s black or white, it’s all shades of gray.” When I came to SoCal, I saw things as very black or white, things were even either right or wrong. Dating her, I came to understand most things are shades of gray, there are many subtle nuances, very few things in life are absolutely right or absolutely wrong.

In any case, since we worked together when we broke up, I showed her the “lyrics,” and even she liked it. The “song” was good for a little post-breakup sex, and then we went our separate ways. She found a new job not long after.

Around that time, I looked at the “songs” I had written for her, even though I didn’t have a band, and had no intentions of starting one. I was a writer, not a musician. I came to the realization that I was a poet. Being a poet was definitely not cool in 1988, and I was already not cool enough. Not long after, the growth of rap music and slam poetry made “writing rhymes” cool. But it wasn’t cool in my world in 1988.

But I had grown to like writing “lyrics,” or poems. So I got a new spiral pad, wrote “Just some stuff I wrote” on the front of it, and started writing my poetry in there. I hid that notebook in a box in the back of my closet, so no one would find it. When I filled the whole notebook up, I got a new one, “Just some stuff I wrote #2.”

I figured out that writing poetry is the cheapest form of therapy, and at the time I had more issues than the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble, and more hang-ups than Kim Kardashian’s closet (or Cindy Crawford’s closet back then). I kept writing poems and told no one. I became a pretty good poet.

Ideas began to pop into my head at weird times, totally randomly. If I didn’t write them down immediately, I’d forget them. Since late 1988, I’ve been carrying a standard, black, Bic pen, to “catch” these ideas when they popped in my head, or to write down entire poems when they came to me. I threw out those first seven yellow paper legal pads full of poems. But I began to fill up more notebooks with my poems as the years went on. I’ve written around 400 or 500 poems altogether, after the legal pad garbage.

Fast forward to 1992, when I was living in a tiny apartment in Huntington Beach with a well known BMX racer/jumper/entrepreneur, and another BMX industry guy. One morning my roommate came out with a book of poetry by Henry Rollins called Black Coffee Blues. He really liked a couple of the poems. I checked out the book, and it was pretty cool. More than anything, I thought, “I could do this.” Then I thought of my notebooks full of poems that no one knew about. I thought, “Wait, “I already have done this.” I was scared to death of sharing all the personal thoughts in my poems. But I decided to do it anyhow.

I started going through my notebooks, and wound up making a zine of poetry, about 70 pages, with close to 100 poems, I think. I typed the whole thing out, over a month or two, on a cheap electric typewriter, with tons of White-Out. Finally, I finished the huge poetry zine. It was so thick, I couldn’t staple the zine to hold it together, I used duct tape to bind this huge zine. The zine book of poems was called "We’re on the Same Mental Plane… and it’s Crashing. “Journey of the White Bear” was the first poem in the zine.

I gave my roommate one of the first copies, figuring he would tear me to shreds the next day, because of all the sappy, but honest, poems. Much to my surprise, he said it was pretty cool, and pretty courageous to put out something so brutally honest. That was part of what he had liked about the Henry Rollins book. It was about a day later when he started giving me some crap, as we drank our nightly beers, “I am The White Bear, you are the Tigress,” he yelled. I said, “No, she was the Black Leopard.” But he continued. It started with crazy drunken talk, and the other roommate thought it was funny. The first roommate kept calling me The White Bear, and soon his girlfriend was, too. It was never just “White Bear,” it was always “The White Bear.” His girlfriend would leave the apartment, saying “Bye The White Bear” on the way out. Within a week, I ceased being Steve in the apartment, and I became The White Bear. Of all the nicknames I’d had, which is quite a few, that was the coolest one. So I rolled with it.

So The White Bear became my name to most of the 90’s BMX guys I hung around with, the exception being when I lived in the P.O.W. House (the Pro’s Of Westminster), they called me Sluggo behind my back, and later to my face. But to all the Sheep Hills locals, and all the foreign BMX travelers who slept on our couches and floor, I was The White Bear. Ask Beltbuckle Barry Nelson, or Porta John, when Chris Moeller gives you a nickname, it usually sticks.

Several years later, in 1996 and 1997, I put out two more zines of poetry, and I used The White Bear as my pen name. There are still a bunch of people from the BMX world who call me The White Bear. In 2017, starting a new blog, I called it Steve Emig: The White Bear, and that’s been my main personal blog since. It now has over 170,000 page views and over 930 posts. So when I found Substack, that was what I put down for the URL, just to check out this platform, and then later, for the title. So that’s the story of my nickname: The White Bear.

It has nothing to do with race, I’m totally against all that white nationalist bullshit. Cool people and lame people exist in every ethnic group, religion, nationality, and any other category.

So now you know.