The Ride of My Life (11 page)

This was the magic question for McCoy. He’d perk up and begin to expertly provoke the situation until it had evolved into a chase. It was after midnight and we’d gone to the corner convenience store to hook up with some sodas. We were chilling on the curb when the attendant came out and made a stink about the “No Loitering” sign posted to the wall. A few yards away at the gas pumps, a drunk was filling up with petrol and overheard the attendant. He took this as his cue to chime in. “Yeah, son, you need to get home,” he slurred aloud to our group. Dennis stepped to the guy—he approached him and piped up, “Okay, Dad, I’ll get right home. But first I got to ask a big favor. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I was wondering if I could
borrow
those really tight corduroy pants that you’re wearing, just one night. I’d be a hit with the girls …”

The drunk wasn’t quite aware of how he’d been burned, but we were all laughing at that point, so he grunted and lurched over to challenge McCoy to a fight with his fists raised and thumbs pointed straight up in the air. Dennis loped around him, mocking his unorthodox boxing stance, prancing and dancing like a dork. Dennis maneuvered his opponent into position while Thorne had crept up from behind, down on his hands and knees. Dennis shoved the drunk backward over Rick and he hit the ground. We mounted up on our bikes and could barely ride straight; we were laughing so hard. The drunk hopped in his car, a thrashed old Cutlass, and chirped his tires after our crew. We crossed the street into a huge parking lot, where we clustered in the lot of an empty business park. The guy charged across the lot and spent a few minutes trying to mow down targets with his Cutlass. Finally he got frustrated enough to stop with a screech and hopped out of his car to continue the chase on foot. Bikers were shooting around him, just out of his reach, and he’d run a few steps at one target before somebody would attract his attention by throwing pebbles or making noise. It was like being trapped in a pen with a mad bull. While this was going on, Rick snuck over, leaned in through the guy’s open door, and shifted the idling car into drive. The car slowly began rolling forward, and we started cracking up again. The drunk abandoned chasing us and had to chase down his runaway car. Then he got inside and revved the engine. We scattered, Dennis leading the way. He used a tried-and-true BMX Brigade emergency exit, which they’d been using for years to elude pursuers. All you had to do was bunny-hop over a planter box, and drop down off a three-foot-high wall into the parking lot below. Anybody following in a car would have to stop. However, the emergency exit had never been tested with a determined drunk guy in a jacked-up Cutlass.

We were already in the parking lot below and taunting the drunk. He stuck his head out the window and hollered at us. Then he floored it, slammed over the curb, and jumped his car down the drop-off—sparks flew and the guy momentarily lost control. So did we. We had tears in our eyes by the time we realized the drunk had recovered from his gravity slam and was steering his wrecked, barely functioning car at us. I was the last guy in the pack, and the drunk chose to take out his frustration on me. I had to ride as fast as I could and barely got out of his way. I ended up losing him by throwing my bike over a fence and cutting through a backyard. After the BMX Brigade met back up at Dennis’s house, we had a good laugh and stayed high on adrenaline for the rest of the night.

The outcome of any chase depended on a lot of factors—what city you were in; how many people you had with you; how well they could ride; and what the ramifications were if you got caught. Cities began putting police on mountain bikes. They were new at it and didn’t really have the skills built up yet to ride down stairs or bunny hop up tall ledges. But the cops would see a “little kid” on a BMX bike jump down a six-foot drop-off and assume there was nothing to it. We evaded some big tickets before the cops learned the art of urban riding.

Just in case I forgot, the rest of the Haro wrote: “By Mat Hoffman” on the smashed bumper. Summer 1988.

Steve Swope and I at the Haro show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1988.

Sometimes citizens tried to take the law into their own hands and clean up the streets. For Dennis’s bachelor party a group of us all dressed up wearing impromptu thrift store costumes and went on an all-night street ride. Dennis, a true pioneer of street riding, was dressed as an old woman wearing a gray wig. He freaked out a ton of people that night on the Kansas City cruising strips. Bystanders would see an old lady blur by on a bike, crank off a 360 down a huge flight of stairs, then drop into a nose wheelie hauling ass down a hill, followed by a pack of badly dressed bike-mounted mutants. The night ended with some vigilante chasing us into a gas station parking lot and trying to fight us because we were disturbing his peace. He pulled a crowbar out of his trunk and figured he had us “cornered.” Dennis rounded up the only weapons available—squeegees. Our costumed gang of freaks started swinging squeegees and screaming like howler monkeys at Mr. Crowbar, who found us confusing and threatening when he realized he was outnumbered and totally out of his element.

Of the countless Kansas City chases, there was only one that had a bad outcome. I’d just smashed two eggs on a bearded hotel manager’s face [he accosted me for cutting across a lawn), thinking the eggs would completely discombobulate him and allow me time to escape. But the egg raid seemed to sharpen his focus and fury. He grabbed my coat and tried to get a grip on me long enough to land a punch. In the struggle I slipped out of the sleeves and left him standing there, holding my coat with egg on his face as I fled. More chasing followed, culminating with a Three-Stooges-style standoff involving Rick Thorne, the angry egged man, and a large pole. The guy attempted to tackle Rick, who was darting around a concrete parking garage pillar like a leprechaun, taunting him with a steady stream of gibberish, saying “Gary Gnu, you got to catch me.” They must have circled the pole for five minutes, the whole time Rick providing “Gary” with a running commentary on his poor strategic thinking, lack of speed, and excessive facial hair. Eventually we all got away. As the rush wore off, I realized I’d just sacrificed my brand-new Life’s A Beach coat. Better to wind up with a lost jacket than a jacked loser.

Rick Thorne arriving an AFA contest, welts on his head and all. He got beat down by some marines who didn’t get his humor. (Photograph courtesy of Spike Jonze)

Haro was a team with a reputation that preceded them wherever they went. They were the hard-living, high-flying, free-spirited, rental-car-wasting, nightclub-scouring commandos of the freestyle world. I looked forward to my first summer tour as a Haro-sponsored rider. Two Haro teams were going out on the road in the summer of 1988: the seasoned squad of Ron Wilkerson/Brian Blyther/Dave Nourie, with an Australian named Nick announcing. Then there was us: Rhino on the mic, and Rick Moliterno, Joe Gruttola, and me handling the riding. Joe was a new-breed East Coast flatland wiz. Rick was from Moline, Illinois, and was good on ground and quarterpipes. He was a former BMX racing pro who’d turned to tricks.

We worked really hard at making our show a state-of-the-art display of everything that was great about bikes—and what was possible if you applied yourself. The demos were like a rolling classroom for kids who didn’t get to see riding of that caliber, and those who came to see us ride witnessed a jam-packed hour of the newest stunts and a handful of oldies thrown in to show we had soul.

I was at the helm of the Haro van (license still suspended, by the way], plowing through Utah. As traffic slowed, I looked for a Beastie Boys tape. I heard my name called from the back of the van, but I ignored it. I knew it would only take me a second to find that tape. They said my name again, with more urgency.
Where did that tape go?
Then I heard “
MAT
!” a third time, with a tinge of terror behind it. I looked up just in time to see an Oldsmobile stopped dead in front of me. The vehicle received an enema with the full force of the Haro van, trailer, and quarterpipe. There was screeching and swerving behind me, and a split second later the Dyno freestyle team’s tour rig flashed by, threading the needle between our wreck and a roadside telephone pole. Dyno’s driver, Hadji, pulled off an incredible feat of surgical control, saving us all a lot of extra grief There was a fierce corporate rivalry between Haro and Dyno, and we weren’t supposed to be seen near them. But out on the road, away from the bosses, the riders were friends and when our paths crossed in the Midwest we paired up for about two weeks.

Everybody jumped out of the vans to check out the damage, while I bolted into the backseats and began chanting, “I’m an idiot! I’m an idiot!” I was beyond bummed. The old lady we’d hit saw the large logos on the rig and immediately began complaining of neck and back pains. Later, her $300,000 lawsuit against Haro and me was dropped because I was only sixteen at the time of the incident. In fact, despite not having a license, I avoided all legal repercussions. For the rest of the tour, I was banned from the driver’s seat, and my teammates gave me hell for my sloppy steering skills.

Touring is a life of extended stretches of boredom between show dates. We made the best of the situation by keeping ourselves entertained, or distracted. We had a van policy to pull over and session wherever we found a good bank, ditch, or transition. Ditto for fireworks stands, which are found dotted throughout the southern half of the United States. And, there were a lot of girl-related delays. Some of the guys on tour would spend hours on the phone with their homesick chicks, and others on the tour… well, there was a stack of Polaroid photos on the dashboard of topless “friends” we met on the road. And somewhere in the van was a box of underpants that had been donated by other “friends.” You’d be surprised, and perhaps disturbed, to know how many girls out there were willing to climb into the back of a musty old trailer full of greasy bicycles and donate their undergarments after hearing the sales pitch as to why a vanload of expert bike riders needed their thongs.

In the city of Rockville, Maryland, there was a freestyle mecca, a store called Rockville BMX. They put on shows that regularly drew two to three thousand kids. One year, disaster was narrowly averted when my mom and dad showed up in the crowd to see their son shine. Before the show my dad and Rhino were chatting in the front seats of the van, and Rhino was telling him what a great kid I was and how smooth the tour had been so far. My dad noticed a stack of Polaroids on the console—THE pictures—and idly picked them up. There were a few riding shots and goofy mug shots on the top of the stack, but somewhere in the middle the content shifted from rated PG to rated R. Rhino diverted Dad’s attention and hustled him out of the van without Dad seeing our extracurricular snapshots. How Rhino managed that, I don’t know.