Earlier this week, I went out to ride my bike after work, at the new-ish spot I’ve been riding at since arriving in California last month. It’s a train station next to the 405 — nothing glamorous, with the constant roar of passing cars on the freeway giving the area a feel of constant unrest. Its most memorable function so far has been as the opening scene of the movie “Heat” in 1995. After 7 p.m. most days, the cars empty out of the parking lot and the lights remain on, so I’ve naturally gravitated towards it during that time. 99% of my short time there so far has been uninterrupted with the exception of a man attempting to fix a ’70s era Winnebago (he ended up clapping at my efforts and asked how high I could bunnyhop.)

And then a car approached me quickly the other night, a blinding light on the side of flashing directly into my eyes — the police. Immediately, I was told to raise my hands as they exited their car and put my hands behind my back, patting me down for weapons. I was then forced to drop my bike and shoved in the back of the police cruiser as they searched my backpack, which contained a bike lock, a DK Random wrench multi-tool, tire levers and a Klean Kanteen.

As the story of a 37-year-old riding a BMX bike at 8 p.m. during the middle of the week seemed too unusual, they saw the existence of tools in my bag as proof that I was breaking into area cars and using this idea of “extreme athlete” to cover my tracks. Still sitting in the back of the cruiser with my hands on the grill that separated the front and rears of the car, they continued rifling through my backpack, pulled the multi-tool apart and started trying out the wrench sizes in the wheels of the existing cars still in the parking lot.

Unsatisfied that neither a 15mm or 17mm socket extension works on the lug nut of a Chevy minivan, the officer came back to the car, demanded to know what my deal was, and added that me being “white” and “out at night” didn’t add up. I answered all of his questions.

“Yes, I have run from the police. Once, when I was 16 and the police broke up a snowball fight in the parking lot of Strathmore Cinema in Matawan, I ran.”

“No, I am not here to break into cars. I do manuals on the sidewalk, then turn around and do rolling tricks down the slanted area.”

“The Random Wrench is made by a BMX company called DK. It holds all of the tools you need to work on your bike.”

“No, I’m not intentionally coming here from New Jersey to make your life more difficult sir.”

After an ID check was cleared, I was allowed to step out of the car and retrieve my belongings. No apology was given. Instead, the officer told me that he had been to New Jersey once and that it sucked and that he hoped I would enjoy the more moderate winter in Redondo Beach.

I’ve been though the same motions with police more than a few times now (because of riding), and that inherent feeling of violation that used to bother me has given way to a new sense of ridiculousness as the events unfold. In the end, the police had stumbled onto a 37-year-old white male riding his bike by himself in a train station parking lot, prepared for any bicycle malfunctions he might encounter along the way. And this time, while sitting in the back of the car with my hands raised, I looked straight into the dashboard camera and told them just that.

Sidenote — BMX companies that make multi-tools should print the word “BMX” or “Bicycles” on the outside of the tool. This is the second time I’ve been detained because of the enigmatic appearance of multi-tools.

I bought the magazine, read it from cover to cover, and by the end of the week, had dropped my plans to skate in favor of getting a freestyle BMX bike. The bike came a few months later, but in the meantime, I continued to purchase this magazine, Freestylin’, monthly, alongside its sister publication, BMX Action. The walls of my bedroom quickly turned into the pages of both magazines, and for lack of a better term, I think I became hooked on BMX.

I was 12.

Over the following two years, my addiction to BMX was fueled by both magazines, which were born out of a small office space in Torrance, Calif., by editors that rode bikes, skated and helped to cultivate a thriving BMX scene not only in their microcosm of a scene, but throughout the world. Any trend that unfolded on those pages became the exact thing I was doing, from wearing goofy Vision Street Wear outfits to following the flatland trick trend into the realm of rolling. I had become, by all accounts, not only addicted to riding BMX, but to the magazine that directly inspired me to do so.

In the summer of 1988, the Haro BMX team traveled to the nearby town of Middletown, N.J. to do a demo, and I did everything in my power to get there. The show featured Mat Hoffman, Joe Gruttola and Rick Moliterno, and it amazed me from start to finish. Not only the three pro team riders riding, but the enormous amount of local riders that had turned up to ride and meet the Haro team. I went home, beaming, and penned the following letter to Freestylin’ Magazine.

Freestylin’,
Today I saw a Haro show with Mat Hoffman, Joe Gruttola and Rick Moliterno. It was great. Rick just came back from an injury and was riding great. Same with Joe, who was pulling backwards decades. But the most insane ramp rider, Matt Hoffman, was raging. He told me he blacked out in the middle of an air and crashed. He said he thought he had heat stroke, but he still pulled all of his rad tricks except the lookdown that he blacked out on. Thanks Matt, Joe, Rick and The Rhino (announcer). It must be hard doing shows in 95 degree weather.
Brian Tunney, Aberdeen, New Jersey

I wrote the letter on the desk in our living room, asked my mom for stamp, and sent it to their address:

Freestylin’
3162 Kashiwa St.
Torrance, CA 90505

A few months later, the December 1988 issue arrived in the mail, and somehow, my letter had been printed in the letters section. It was my first time reaching out to a strange entity across the country, and not only had they acknowledged my letter, they printed it in the magazine. There is no way to equate the meaning of this in current terms, but to a 14-year-old kid hooked on BMX in New Jersey, it meant the world. Freestylin’ was already my bible by then, and now it was a friend.

Less than a year later, things changed fast. BMX freestyle was beginning to enter into an age that transcended commercialism. It was becoming more movement, less marketing strategy, and BMX brands quickly tightened their reigns in opposition to the organic growth. Although this was necessary for everything to fall in place as it has, it was not without casualties. Freestylin’ and BMX Action were among those brands that fell, merging into the slimmed down Go: The Rider’s Manual.

For me, Go was inspirational, groundbreaking and fleeting. At the time, I was only 15, but I could see the changes in BMX — less brands, smaller magazines, fewer people riding in my neighborhood, the Wheeler Dealer selling mountain bikes. I knew things were heading in a more underground direction, but it wasn’t cemented until my senior year of high school. My Go subscription stopped showing up, and my letters to the editors of Go, asking what was up, went unanswered. Now you need to remember the time frame — I couldn’t email a circulation dept., and I couldn’t go onto a website to discover that the magazine had gone out of business. For weeks, maybe months, I wondered what had happened, until I finally found out from someone at the mail-order I ordered from at the time (Trend Bike Source), that the publisher had gone out of business.

I’ve written about this before, and there’s no two ways around it — I felt betrayed. This magazine had started me down a path I didn’t know, and I was still depending on the magazine to guide me. Then suddenly, it was gone. I wasn’t yet in the good sense of mind to realize that making a magazine meant paying a lot of bills, I was more pissed that I was suddenly alone, on a rigged Haro Master with no inclination of what to do next.

Fast forward twenty years.

I’ve been visiting Southern California for years, still pursuing the BMX thing in one form or another, and often thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be cool to go visit the Freestylin’ building, just to say I’ve been to the place that started me on this ridiculous journey in the first place?” This past December, still chasing the BMX dragon, we moved to Redondo Beach, Calif., a bike ride away from the physical location of the magazine that had touched me way back in 1986. I told myself that I would visit that place and finally get it out of my system.

A few weeks ago, in Torrance and still remembering the physical address from the days when I read each issue of Freestylin’ cover to cover and back again, I looked up the address and rode my bike to the original Wizard Publications office, home of Freestylin’ and BMX Action. In a set of industrial buildings located off the beaten path, on a Sunday afternoon, I pedaled to the home of Freestylin’, to the building that had set me on my life’s path some 26 years earlier.

And when I arrived, it was anti-climactic. The building was now the home of Barnes Systems, a made in the USA oil pump brand for cars, and it was quiet, with no superficial reminders of the revolution that it had helped create. So I did what I had to do — I stared at the empty building in the desolate industrial park, pondering its meaning to me twenty years after it had been vacated by the magazines that got me here in the first place.

I rode at the building, pulled up my front wheel and did a few flatground wallrides on the side of the building, my tire marks arcing up, then down. 24 years ago, I had reached out to the people within this building, and they had reached back, ushering me on a journey that I continue to discover daily. The wallrides were clumsy, but it was my way of saying thanks.

2011 was not a good year. For most of the summer, I think I listened to the Young Widows album ‘In and Out of Youth and Lightness‘ because I could blast it in the car and kinda turn off my brain for at least twenty minutes a day. Said album saved me from internal combustion probably more than a few times, but when life mellowed out and I took a look back, I couldn’t decide if I really liked the music or just liked that it was loud and numbing.

Even now, more than a few months out, I’m still wondering what that record meant to me.

By November, new challenges had arisen, and I had even purchased a few records between the summer and that time. Via Dischord came a new record from the mind of J. Robbins and company, in a new band known as Office of Future Plans. Once upon a time, J. Robbins was the songwriter in bands such as Jawbox and Burning Airlines — both bands that enamored me at different points in my life.

Five years ago, Robbins released a few massively underrated records with Janet Morgan and Darren Zentek under the name Channels. Once, before the Music Hall of Williamsburg became the Music Hall of Williamsburg, I got to see Channels live at North Six. I think I sat on some bleachers and watched them solo, then pedaled my bike back over the bridge, through Manhattan and took the train back to Newark.

I remember thinking to myself that they were good and that it wasn’t as good as Burning Airlines. And then their first EP came out and floored me and forced me to realize that I was using past experiences to judge the present. The EP was followed by an album on Dischord called “Waiting for the next end of the world,” which I still really love it to this day, despite its ‘Dick Cheney is watching you’ feel. (Now that I think about it, I think Dick Cheney may have inadvertently inspired more than a few albums I liked in the ’02-’07 era.)

Following the release of that album, Robbins and wife Morgan (also of Channels) gave birth to a son, who was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy. The band quietly disappeared as their efforts focused elsewhere.

But somewhere in that new life that none of them expected, J. Robbins returned to playing music under a new governmentally-paranoid inspired name, The Office of Future Plans. According to a recent bio, “The songs began as cathartic exercises, cooked up in the singer/guitarist’s spare time, with no agenda other than to stay sane.” That line really resonated with me. Robbins’ life had been summarily turned upside down by his experiences as a parent, and his escape from the demands of life became a new record that excised hospital visits, occupational therapy and every hurdle he was jumping through to understand his son’s disease.

I bought the record back in November and listened to it for what it is — not a natural progression of Channels, but an attempt to keep one’s sanity in a world of uncertainty. I’ll never understand what Robbins and his family has been through, but I think I finally do understand the benefit in taking things for what they mean in the current time and place and not judging them against what’s already happened.

Office of Future Plans is J. Robbins in the present tense. Listen here.

Growing up and deciding to focus primarily on the flatland aspect of BMX in the Northeast in the mid ’80s wasn’t exactly uncommon. At the time, there seemed to be a good number of BMXers that did the same thing within mere miles of myself. But because the sport had begun on the West Coast, and because the media of the time focused on the West Coast professionals, a kid in Central New Jersey wanting to learn how to ride flatland had no local heroes to look up to.

There were a few N.J. riders that eventually did make an impact on the BMX scene in the late ’80s (riders such as Roger Sullivan, Jay Jones and anyone from the General Bicycles heyday), but around 1986, if you wanted to ride flatland and needed a hint that you weren’t completely off your rocker trying to do so in a town 25 miles outside of Manhattan, you didn’t have too many options.

So I went with Chris Lashua, a pro for Mongoose that hailed from Massachusetts and generally didn’t “fit in” in the scheme of flatland at the time. He was 3000 miles away from the media, he wore a weird ventilated helmet in competitions, and he rode for Mongoose right at the time when they were trying to push more scooters than BMX bikes.

Still, for some reason, Lashua was featured heavily in the magazines of the time. The purist in me likes to believe it was because he could ride a bike with style and looked good in photos, but the salty bastard in me tends to think that Mongoose had ad dollars to spend and putting a Mongoose rider in the magazines was good business for all parties involved.

Once upon a time, I was not that person, and that is why I’m here now. Lashua wasn’t from New Jersey, he was from Massachusetts. And even at age 13, I knew that Mass had way worse winters than we had in N.J. The fact that he had overcome the weather versus BMX in a tougher climate than myself automatically made me a fan.

Not only that, at a young age, I could easily see that he made riding flatland look stylish. He had the right hunch, the bent knees, the ability to work with the bike and not against it — all that I easily took from still photos portrayed within the page of Freestylin’.

But the real reason I remain to this day a devout fan of Chris Lashua goes back to one day in Point Pleasant, N.J. in the summer of 1988. Lashua and the Mongoose team were doing demos for Mongoose at the beach, and before the ramps were set up, before the crowd had assembled, and before anyone was paying attention, Chris Lashua was riding like it was his last day on Earth.

Halfway through the session, someone local brought the go-to ramp of the time (a launch ramp) and Lashua rode at the back of it, hopped over it on his Decade Pro and landed in the small transition of the take off. He then circled around and glided into a fast (even by today’s standard) steamroller glide around the circumference of the parking lot. Afterwards, he did the then unthinkable. He hopped at the back of the launch ramp, landing on his sprocket in the disaster position, then pushed forward into the transition as smooth as Mike Brennan did in the Ride BMX video “Insight.”

I was awestruck already, and then I met him. He was grounded, encouraging and really didn’t think he was anything special in the scheme of BMX. I went home that night, grabbed some Lashua pictures out of the magazines, taped them to my walls and remained a fan until BMX died a half-hearted death and Chris Lashua disappeared.

Years later, I would come to find out that Chris Lashua made the switch to performance art, joining Cirque Du Soleil and pioneering some kinda wonder wheel thing like Richard Pryor rode in “The Toy.” He remains evasive about his influence on BMX in modern interviews, but I don’t wanna sell the dude short here.

Chris Lashua didn’t invent a whole lot of tricks, and he didn’t remain on the scene to become a savior of sorts for the Northeast, but he brought an important aspect to the rolling aspect of flatland that I often find overlooked in modern times –style. To this day, 25 years after he first did them, Chris Lashua’s steamrollers remain one of the best steamrollers in BMX. And that is why I will never say anything bad about him for doing a Mongoose ad where he’s posing in an endo on a scooter next to a stretch limo in Vegas.

I’m glad flatland has progressed to the point it has, but I miss the days when style was just as important as the progression of the sport.

This video is partially responsible for me being a weirdo in my adult life.

Considering it’s been a while, I’m not really sure where to begin. I guess there is the obvious — moving from Jersey City, N.J. to Redondo Beach, Calif.

And then there is the mundane, like waiting around for over two weeks while our belongings were shipped to us, sitting in lawn chairs and watching “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” DVDs on a computer propped up atop a washer and dryer in the kitchen.

And, of course, the flat out absurd, like the time I walked into the restroom in the new building I work at and had to pee next to a guy attending to a conference call on his speakerphone.

Now that our things are here and I’m not washing disposable plastic ware, it’s beginning to calm down a bit. I even had somewhat of a typical day today, aside from riding to the Pacific Ocean in the morning, along the water to Palos Verdes, and back up past famed BMX spots that were immortalized on the pages of Freestylin’ Magazine in my childhood. I guess, for all intents and purposes, I’m going to either assume that the surrealism I’m experiencing daily is normal, or that I’ve kinda lost sight of what I once thought was normal.

Either way, everything at the moment feels kinda crazy, and I never ever thought I would find myself here. I guess I was more comfortable knowing I was a walk away from filming locations for “The Sopranos” than “Pacific Blue.”

But before I go any further into that, I should mention the above video. Many years ago, when my younger brother lived in Jersey City and I was still in Piscataway, my father and I drove up to North Jersey to visit him at work. After stopping into the bar he was working at, my father suggested we check out the old railway terminal at Liberty State Park. A hundred years ago, it the was the point of entry in the U.S. for European immigrants that had cleared Ellis Island, and the tracks led West to new lives throughout America for the English, Irish, Scottish, French, German, Russians, Poles, etc, etc.

I don’t remember much of what transpired between us on that February day, but I remember the enormity of the parking lot for buses next to the railway terminal, and I made a mental note that if the chance ever arose, it would be a good place to ride bikes.

Sometime in late August 2007, I revisited the park. The parking lot was still empty and the lights were on all along the water. Pretty soon afterwards, I started testing the waters, expecting to get kicked out by the park police. But that never happened. Instead, each officer I spoke to in the parking lot over the past four years was over the top friendly and curious about my riding, my bike and everything that had brought me to the park in the first place.

Quickly, it became the one spot I gravitated towards throughout my tenure in Jersey City. And when that city would push me towards insanity, I would retreat to that one place I knew to be quiet and peaceful, hinting at an ocean breeze from the nearby brackish Hudson River.

I knew everything about that place — each crack in the pavement, each half-cocked local, each groundskeeper, each light bulb that needed to be replaced. And when we found out we were moving earlier this summer, I knew that I wouldn’t necessarily miss our apartment, our street or the surrounding environment. But I knew that I would miss the one place I had to come to call my own in that desolate parking lot overlooking lower Manhattan.

I didn’t make any rushed plans to document my last months there or anything. I had gone back and forth with Dane Beardsley sometime before, about him coming to visit. I initially thought he was coming to visit New York City, and then, on a Saturday night in early November, he said he was down the street in a bar drinking by himself. So I rode down and met up with him. Over the next few days, we filmed the above clips with no real plans for them. They were just some random things I had been working on and Dane wanted me to have them filmed before I moved away.

On the night of Friday, November 25, I had my last session at the park. I didn’t say goodbye, I just rode for two hours and left with the intention of coming back the next day. Then packing turned into more packing, and before I knew it, our moving day (Nov. 28) had arrived. Now I’m 2800 miles away, looking for new places to ride and glad that Dane encouraged me to film the above video.

Whenever the situation arises and a decision is made to go to the beach, Heather shows patience with me and allows me to avoid the most direct routes in favor of local roads down into Central Jersey for our excursion. Along the way, I tend to repeat not-easily-forgotten proponents of my upbringing, which was, by and large, Monmouth and Middlesex County, N.J.

Some of those snippets include:

“That’s the gas station where I bought my first car from a man named Scamp. The ‘82 Datsun.” (Route 35, Middletown)

“There used to be a shortcut to that 7-11 from our house.” (Lloyd Road, Matawan)

“That orchard is renowned throughout New Jersey.” (Route 34, Colts Neck)

“One time, we stole pumpkins from that pumpkin patch and collected them on the side of the road, but when I went to get the car and retrieve them, someone else had stolen them.” (Route 34, Holmdel)

“That used to a Boston Market. I don’t know what ‘Kicky’s Restaurant‘ is though.” (Route 34, Matawan)

“That clown scared me to death as a child.” (Evil Clown, Route 35, Middletown)

Most of the time, it’s really just small talk, reminisces of a yesteryear when the terrains remained the same, but the signs and shapes of my daily surroundings were different (with exception to the clown, which remains). I realize that it’s the experiences of my past, and that by crossing back over the land in which these experiences happened, that my mind will dig up these past memories and apply my current morality to my past exploits. (IE – Don’t steal and never buy a used car from a guy named Scamp.) But it’s also a way for me to dig up some nostalgia and remember what is was like to be a kid growing up in central New Jersey in the late ’70s, throughout the ’80s and mid ’90s.

Today, on our way back from Spring Lake, N.J., I took Route 35. Along the way, we stopped in Bradley Beach for coffee (former teenage hangout), then in Eatontown at the DMV to get the car inspected (the same place where I successfully passed my driver’s test as a 17-year-old), and then in Middletown at a Whole Foods.

The last destination shouldn’t have meant much, but more than a few times, as young kid, I remember my mother and grandmother, in the same parking lot, counting coupons for Shop Rite’s annual “Can Can celebration.” It was nothing more than a sales event for Shop Rite’s own brand of canned goods, but it was on land that I once traversed as a child, with a family I no longer knew in the same way. (My grandmother passed away in 1994, the rest of us have moved on away from Monmouth County.)

For a moment, I felt sad at the loss of what once during that memory. It wasn’t just the mourning of my past life as a child; it was more just the realization that these very real trigger objects to my earlier life still exist throughout so much of New Jersey, and that soon, I would be too far away to visit them in just an hour’s drive down Route 35.

But then, just as quickly, we turned the car on, exited onto Route 35, and headed North for the lives we currently occupied.

Every Tuesday morning, around 5 a.m., ominous curbside noises emanating from a Jersey City garbage removal truck remind me of my intended plans to write a novel about the life of a North Jersey garbageman, as his life unfolds on the streets of an under-funded Northeast city.

It would begin: “Joe lived in Kearny. In the early ’90s, he lived in his parent’s backyard in a one of those pop-up VW vans called a Westfalia. The van served more as a bedroom than transportation, and in his spare time, he played the bass guitar in a local college band that mixed hardcore and funk in the vein of 24-7 Spyz. The band lasted two years — the Westfalia van, seven.”

And then I usually fall back asleep, as the noise of the visiting garbage truck decreases into the early morning remainder of Second, and then Third, streets.

Upon waking, I typically rehash the idea over repeats of The Sopranos on A&E, thinking to myself that waste management couldn’t possibly have been (or remains) a typically cut-and-dry “do the job no matter what it takes” type of operation; that there just has to be some element of wise ass employees and nonsensicality attached to the idea of picking up and disposing of another person’s trash, far beyond the little respite offered by Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen in the 1993 film “Men at Work.”

The novel continues: “Joe has never found any dead bodies in oil drums on his route, or been forced to ride with managers that refuse to share french fries and hate rent-a-cops. He just does the job to pay his rent and hopes one day to move from the back of the truck to the driver’s cab, listening to Howard Stern on Sirius, drinking hot coffee from the imitation 7-Eleven on Newark Ave.”

And then I just think that a guy wanting to move from the back of a garbage truck to the front in North Jersey is probably best left for those intermediately dazed thoughts upon waking and drifting back into sleep. He can keep the van, and his dreams of playing bass in a college rock band alive, but his imagined dream of advancement at work will forever die with me around 5:20 a.m. every Tuesday morning.

“Junk mail,” I thought to myself, as I passingly clung to the thought of a new car, with little money down, for the price of my storage space each month. I kept the piece of mail, which contained a personal bargain code specific to my name, and continued pondering the possibility of a new Ford Fiesta. A new car that was good for the environment and wouldn’t destroy my bank account or force me (back) into a ramen noodle/potato a night budget.

Meanwhile, our 2000 Ford Focus with 135,000 miles sat in front of the house, waiting in earnest to be moved to the other side of the street. Because it was Saturday, I let the car be, and left the piece of mail on the kitchen table, returning to it a few times an hour, staring at the lime green Ford Fiesta and wondering if a new car was actually a possibility to me.

Monday came, and so did two appointments: one with the dentist and one with the sales service at Jersey City Ford. I needed a filling topped off, and as a result, the right side of my mouth was numb with novocaine, leaving me with what felt like a Savannah drawl and a sloppy drinking tendency.

The dentist was methodical and precise, doing everything in his power to limit my discomfort. I left his office with a numb face, but confident that he had done the unfortunate job that needed to be done on the tooth in my mouth.

Being numb, having needles stuck in my gums all morning, it felt like the perfect time to deal with people that wanted to get me into a new car for cheap. Our salesman collected the buyback piece of mail, inquired about the 2000 Ford Focus, and took down our credit information before asking us about a test drive.

And the test drive went great. The 2012 Ford Fiesta was definitely a fiesta to drive when compared with the dulled focus of a 12-year-old Focus. And somehow, inside, I knew that the pleasant encounter with our local Ford dealer was about to come to an end.

“We can do this price for you — $299 a month,” he said, way above the price listed on the piece of mail I had initially called “junk mail.”

I said it that was way too much money, and that I was really hoping to pay $78 a month for a new car, as indicated by the mail we had received.

The sales person brought his manager over. He looked like the actor Luis Guzman, and stated that we could’ve just called and asked about the price instead of wasting their time.

We left soon after, uncomforted by their aggressiveness to get us to spend money with them, the junk mail to lure us in with, and the ability to switch to rude once the idea of spending money was off the table. I’m still trying to shake it off, which brings me back to the dentist.

Here is a doctor, who is knowingly employed by putting people into uncomfortable situations, for the health and benefit of their teeth, gums and mouth.

And in the other corner is the auto sales person, who is knowingly employed by also putting people into uncomfortable situations, for the sake of a new car.

I guess I really should’ve known better than to try to knock out both encounters in the same day. But I really would’ve appreciated that dentist at the entrance of the auto dealer, saying, “Don’t worry, this will dull the pain and get you out of here that much quicker. And it’s pina colada flavored!”

And I realize this whole entry sucks, but I sorta put off the whole free writing thing all summer long and this was my first meager attempt back at it after a long, long summer.