Who the heck is Steve Emig

This is footage I shot of a 2-Hip King of Dirt comp at Mission Trails near San Diego, in the spring of 1991, that wound up in the first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.

At the moment (spring 2016), I'm a middle aged guy who somehow wound up in Kernersville, North Carolina.  My "eclectic" work history makes me a bad match for the job market here, so I'm creating my own job (aka small business) doing artwork, writing projects, and whatever else that leads to.  I'm putting a lot of links in this post.  If you see parentheses with a number inside, like this (13:43), that's a point in the video either I'm in, or I'm the cameraman, producer, or editor. 

I've lived a weird life, and been involved in a lot of creative endeavors over the last few decades.  Here's a look at how I got here.  I was born in a small town in Ohio, and we moved around Ohio during my childhood. My dad was a draftsman/design engineer.  I grew up looking at his huge sheets of drafting paper and designs for things my dad drew.  He taught me how to draw Army Jeeps, the old Willys kind, when I was eight.  That turned me into one of the best artists in my class that year.  I've been drawing ever since, though not always on a regular basis.

In 1976, as a nine-year-old in Willard, Ohio, a friend showed me a skateboard.  It was just over a foot long, made out of pressed aluminum, had steel wheels, and no grip tape.  I rolled about a foot on it, hit a pebble, fell, scraped my knee, and said, "Skateboards are dumb!"  In the following months, another friend got a plastic skateboard with urethane wheels, and I started learning to ride it.  I saved up my allowance (minus candy money) for nine months to buy my own board, a lime green plastic Scamp.  I've goofed around on skateboards ever since.

My family moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico for my ninth grade year, and that year sucked, though I did fall in love with the desert.  I bought an old BMX bike off my friend Mike for $5, a few days before we moved again, that time to Boise, Idaho.  I lived there through high school.  In a trailer park outside of Boise, I got into BMX bike riding in 1982.  There wasn't much else to do out there.  I built my $5 Sentinal Exploder GX into a better bike, part by part, and started racing BMX in October of that year.  I raced locally at the Fort Boise track, all through 1983, and won a contest to help re-design the track, and help design and build a new track in Boise.  Then, I started getting into trick riding, which was just turning into a sport in 1984.  Much to everyone's dismay, I spent my high school graduation money on a brand new Skyway T/A bike.  I joined the only trick team in Idaho, with rider Jay Bickel.  We did shows and rode in parades all that year.  I also traveled with Jay's family to my first big BMX freestyle contests, one in Whistler, British Columbia, and one in Venice Beach, California in 1985.

I didn't have enough money to go to college, so I followed my family to a new city, San Jose, California, in August of 1985.  Like all freestylers then, I lived for the moment that FREESTYLIN' magazine would show up in the mail every month.  I literally read every word of that mag, even the ads, trying to soak up every drop of knowledge about the obscure world of BMX freestyle.  As luck would have it, one of the best freestyle scenes in the world then was in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I'd met Robert Peterson, Eddie Fiola, and a few others at my first AFA contest in SoCal.  But I didn't know them well.

I'd read about zines, (pronounced zeens) in FREESTYLIN'.  Those were small, self-published booklets about some topic.  In those pre-internet days, that's what self-publishers did.  I bought an old manual (as in NON-ELECTRIC) typewriter at the swap meet for $15, and used my Kodak 110 camera (remember those?) to take photos, and I started my zine.  I had never seen an actual zine in my life, just a magazine article about them.  So I had no idea what I was doing.  My goal was just to meet the riders of the Bay Area.  Much to my surprise, it worked.  Before long, I was going to the monthly Beach Park Ramp Jams, put on by Skyway pro Robert Peterson.  Soon after I went to Golden Gate Park (5:07) on the weekends for the sessions there.  I met all the local pros and interviewed them, Bert, Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Hugo Gonzales, Oleg Konings, and Rick Allsion. I also met a big crew of amazing amateurs.  Future BMX Plus! editor Karl Rothe was in that crew, as was future skateboard deck design legend Mark McKee.  The Golden Gate Park scene was the most cohesive freestyle scene anywhere, and I became a part of it, though my riding lagged behind the other ams.

The something amazing happened.  I got a call out of the blue from Andy Jenkins, editor of FREESTYLIN'.  He said the guys liked my zines I sent them, and asked if I wanted to write a story about the next AFA contest.  I flew myself to Tulsa, Oklahoma, hung out with the Haro team all weekend, and had the time of my life.  I met some up-and-coming ramp riders like Joe Johnson, Josh White, and a local Oklahoma kid named Mat Hoffman, who was 14 then.  My first article, and a review of my zine, which they thought was the best in the country then, appeared in the July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'.  I was beyond stoked.  Then I got another call from Andy J., one of the writers was leaving the magazine, and they wanted me to fly down and interview for the job.  That weekend was amazing.  Even better, I got the job as editorial assistant at two national magazines, BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', at age 20.  I had no college degree.  I'd never even taken a single college course.  I had no background in creative writing, other than high school work and my zine.  They just liked my zine and knew I was a hardcore (if not overly talented) BMX freestyler.  I left San Jose with a bike, a suitcase, and $80, and moved to Southern California.

Suddenly, I was a part of the BMX and freestyle industry.  I met all the riders, company heads, and behind the scenes industry guys.  I was living the BMX freestyle life.  But, I didn't totally click with Andy, Lew, and Gork at the magazines.  I just wasn't punk rock enough for them.  I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  And I was really uptight back then.  I got laid off after only five months there.  One cool thing was that Lew introduced me to a freestyle skater who practiced right by The Spot in Redondo Beach, where we rode flatland every night.  That skater was a 19-year-old Rodney Mullen.  He was the first pro skater I really got to know, and the first person who was super serious about practicing with an intensity few others had.  I learned a lot from Rodney, and did a mini-interview with him that wound up in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'.  My time at Wizard Pubs was over on New Year's Eve 1986.  They permanently replaced me with some BMXer/skater kid from the East Coast.  A kid named Spike Jonze.

I quickly found a job at the American Freestyle Association, editing their newsletter.  There I worked for early freestyler and serial entrepreneur Bob Morales.  He's the guy that turned BMX freestyle into a sport.  He promoted the first skatepark contests, then later the flatland and ramp contests.  I did a little bit of everything there, from writing, shooting photos, and laying out the newsletter, to running errands, putting logos on T-shirts, and driving the AFA van and 30 foot long trailer.  There was something new nearly every day at the AFA.  The pay sucked, but it was interesting.  One day, before a big contest in Austin, Texas, Bob walked in and asked me if I wanted to make a TV commercial.  He found out that he could get ads on MTV in the Austin area for $25 each.  So I headed off to Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company that shot footage of all our contests.  They guided me through the process of producing a TV commercial.  It wasn't great, but it did bring some spectators to the contest.  After that contest, Bob talked to me.  "You know," he said, "I advertised some contest videos in the newsletter a while back and never actually got around to making those videos.  Do you want to produce them?"  Again, I said, "Sure."  I went back to Unreel, and my video career started by producing six AFA videos (2:18) in 1987.   Very few people saw those early videos, but two or three clips from those videos wound up in Mark Eaton's BMX documentary, Joe Kid on a Stingray.  I spent so much time at Unreel that year, that they offered me a job in December of 1987.

Outside of work hours, I rode my bike every night, and spent my weekends at the Huntington Beach Pier, freestyling in front of crowds with Mike Sarrail and other BMX guys, along with freestyle skaters Pierre Andre, Don Brown, and Hans Lingren. The H.B. Pier was a known spot, and anyone could show up on a weekend.  Mark Gonzales rolled by often, Ed Templeton was a young local, Bob Schmelzer was there a lot.  On the bike front, Woody Itson and Martin Aparijo showed up on a regular basis, along with many others.  I figured out once that I probably rode in front of over 140,000 people at the Pier.  But they were in crowds of 50 to 500 people at a time, over several years. 

When I started at the video company, Unreel Productions was then housed in a really nice office in Costa Mesa, CA, and we could see the Pacific from the upstairs windows.  That's not a good thing when we had an office full of surfers.  They would disappear when the waves were good.  But it was another job I was completely unqualified for, but ended up excelling at. My main job was making dubs, copies of tapes needed by someone in the Vision family of companies.  At that time, Vision owned Vision, Schmitt Stix, and Sims skateboards.  It also owned Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing.  So I suddenly left the BMX world, and became a part of the skateboard industry.  On one hand, it was a really cool job.  I made VHS copies of all the raw footage our cameramen shot.  So I saw all the footage of the BMXers, skaters, snowboarders, and fashion photo shoots.  On the other hand, one of my jobs was to label and organize all the video tapes in the tape library.  The boxes were labeled with tags like, "savannah skate."  No date.  No year.  No idea who was on which tape.  I literally went through every single tape, found out when and where it was shot, and labeled each one of the 3,000 or so tapes and organized them.  When I was bored, I'd put on a tape I liked and just watch it, until more work came my way.

During the course of my 2 1/2+ years at Unreel, I worked on Psycho Skate, Vision Skate Escape, Red Hot Skate Rock, Mondo Vision, Freestylin' Fanatics, Snow Shredders, Snow Daze, Barge at Will (14:53, 19:02, 45:18) many fashion videos, and other random stuff.  I was basically a production assistant, so I didn't have much say in the videos.  The one exception was for the BMX videos, they'd always ask for my input on those. In addition to those home videos, Unreel produced the first ever action sports syndicated TV series, called Sports on the Edge.  That was six years before the X-Games came along.  When Unreel tried to sell the series to ESPN, the suits there replied, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV... and what the hell is snowboarding?"  It took a few years, but ESPN finally saw the light when it came to action sports.  During that time, I also edited the 1988 contest season video (3:07) for Ron Wilkerson at 2-Hip.

By 1989, I became the staff cameraman at Unreel, so I shot a bunch of footage which was nearly always fun.   I was on the deck of the halfpipe shooting video when this happened.  I went to the '89 2-Hip Meet the Street at the Brooklyn Banks in New York City.  Racer/street rider Rich Bartlett and I shared a hotel room, and Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Steve Swope, Rick Thorne, and a couple other guys slept on the floor of our room to save money.  That was the best weekend of my BMX life.  I also met a ton of talented people working at Unreel/Vision.  Don Hoffman, Dave Alvarez, Paul Schmitt, Marty Jiminez, Mike Miranda, John B. (the B is for Badass) Hogan, Miki Keller, Scott Clum, and many, many more.  In 1989, though, the wave of skateboard and clothing business began to fade, and Vision was to big for its own good.  Unreel was dissolved, and I was moved to an office in the main Vision building.  The last project I worked on there was a promo for Tuff Skates, a short lived skate company that combined Christian Hosoi and Vision.  I got to hang with Christian and his guys for three days shooting video, which was a crazy experience. There's nothing like hauling a $50,000 video camera to a sketchy area of Van Nuys, to shoot footage of Christian Hosoi skating a pool behind a crack house. 

I finally bailed from Vision in the summer of 1990.  On my last day there, one of the women in the promotions department asked me what I had planned after I quit.  I told her I didn't have any plans.  So they asked me if I  wanted to go on a short tour with some skaters.  I spent the next three weeks on the road with Mark Oblow, Buck Smith, and two 15-year-old vert skaters named MikeCrum and Chris Gentry.  As tours go, it wasn't that crazy.  But I did see the most disgusting thing ever on that tour.  Ask me about it some time.

I had already started shooting footage on the weekends for my own, self-produced video.  I got a part time job at NSI Video, a small distributor of surf and skate videos.  In October of 1990, I released The Ultimate Weekend, (27:33, 28:30) my first completely self-produced bike video.  I tried to show what riding was really like, and to not be as hokey as the Vision BMX videos I'd worked on. Jess Dyrenforth was supposed to be the star of the video, but he kept flaking out on me.  A recent New Jersey transplant to H.B., Keith Treanor, was always raring to go ride.  The video had about 35 great riders in it, but Keith became the star.  Unfortunately, that year the BMX freestyle industry was collapsing as the bike world switched their focus to the growing new genre of mountain bikes.

A woman I had worked with at Unreel called me one day and asked if I'd like to work a day or two on "real" TV shows.  I showed up at the office, just over the hill from Hollywood, and logged footage all day for monster truck shows.  The asked me back the next day... and the next.  I wound up working a few months on those shows, that year's monster truck and supercross series.  One of the highlights of working there was meeting Johnny Airtime, the super technical motorcycle jumper whose career spanned the years between Evel Knievel and Seth Enslow.  One day, I sent him a copy of the footage in the clip at the top of this post.  He called me up and said he was blown away by how crazy BMXers were.  We brainstormed some ideas for the Stuntmaster's TV series, which was produced by the same company.  That led to this stunt.  I was gone by the time they taped the show, but that Stuntmasters episode had far reaching effects.  It was Johnny Airtime who told Mat Hoffman that to do bigger airs, he needed a bigger ramp.  So without the BMX world knowing, it led to Mat and Steve Swope doing this.  It's funny how things happen sometimes.

I went back to doing odd jobs in Orange County, but the next year I finagled a job on the stage crew of the hit TV show American Gladiators.  That's where I met the best athlete I've ever seen, Wesley "2 Scoops" Barry.  I worked four seasons on that crew, along with working on similar shows Knights and Warriors and Blade Warriors.  If Lady Battleaxe on Knights and Warriors looks familiar, that's because Dot Jones went on to play Coach Bieste in Glee a few years ago.  When I met Dot on the show, she was taking time off her job as a prison guard, and was the nine time women's world arm wrestling champ.  It may seem hard to believe, but she is the funniest woman I've ever met.

During that same period of time, the early 90's, I got a call from Chris Moeller, owner of the fledgling BMX company, S&M Bikes.  He asked me to produce a video for them.  I was stoked, hoping to pocket $2,000 or $3,000 for making the video.  As it turned out, Chris was a serious tightwad in those days, and we made the entire video for less than $750, including beer money.  That video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, became a cult classic in the BMX world.  It a crazy turn of events, I also wound up sleeping on the floor of Chris' tiny apartment, and helping sell bikes and ship orders for S&M in those early days.  Chris and I were roommates nearly constantly until 1995, and we spent many hilarious nights drinking cheap beer and brainstorming ideas for the company.  In the skateboard world, maverick entrepreneur Steve Rocco had the super intelligent Rodney Mullen as a sidekick.  Chris Moeller, the maverick entrepreneur of the BMX world, had me.  It was a crazy time.  In 1993, with a slightly bigger budget, I produced and edited the second S&M Bikes video, 44 Something.  That low budget video sold somewhere around 8,000 copies and was later called one of the ten best videos of the 90's by BMX Plus! magazine.

In 1992, I became the first freestyler to become an official resident of the P.O.W. BMX House.  Roommates in that era included Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Todd Lyons, Alan Foster, Chris Sales, Jai Lonegran, Lawan Cunningham, Mike Griffin, Brian Foster, Brooks and Suzy, a couple of dogs, and many others.  If you've ever jumped your bike, raise a Mickey's Big Mouth (or an O'Douls if you're on the wagon now) to the P.O.W.'s and to Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean, who built Sheep Hills during that era.  Remember kids, never drink St.Ides (it's EVIL!), ramen is your friend in times of need, and "You are rotten."  Subliminal old school message, if you're too big for an S&M these days, get an SE Fat Ripper. 

Another thing that happened in the early 90's was that I got a part time job in 1993 for the first Cirque du Soleil tour to come to Orange County, CA.  The show was Saltimbanco, and I was blown away by that weird new Circus.  At the time, no one knew what Cirque was, so I had to explain it to people on the phone as I sold tickets.  "Andrew Lloyd Webber meets The Fall Guy," was the line I used.  In later years, I also worked in the Orange County box office at the Cirque tours of Alegria, Quidam, Dralion, and Varekai.  Cirque du Soleil is the best run company I've ever seen, which surprises people.  There's a reason it started as a group of French Canadian street performers and now has about a dozen shows worldwide.  If you've never seen Cirque du Soleil, go see it when it comes to your area, or when you're in Las Vegas.  I learned a ton of stuff working with circus people, one of the hardest working groups there is.

Yet another thing that happened in the early 90's was that I decided to work through my personal issues, like being super shy and not making a lot of money.  I started reading books about real estate and business.  That led to reading self-help books, and later books on religion and philosphy.  In 1993, I bought a speed reading course and started plowing through books of all kinds.  I read several hundred books, mostly non-fiction, in the 90's, and listened to hundreds more on tape.

By 1995, I was burning out.  I was tired of working on dumb TV shows, and the BMX world was still pretty dead.  I became a full time furniture mover.  That sucked.  In two years, I moved about 900 households.  I still rode my bike nearly every day, but just did it for fun.  After a couple years of pushing cat-piss-stained couches up stairs, I decided that the TV industry really wasn't so bad.  I started calling my contacts, and got a job at a lighting company.  In Hollywood terms, that means I was in a warehouse, testing, prepping, and packing up studio lights that then went to TV shows, movie premieres, and corporate parties.  It was a long commute, but the work was pretty fun and it paid well.  I even got to got out and worked on location once in a while.  I worked at the 50th Emmy Awards after party, at a premiere for the second Harry Potter movie, and spent one day on the set of Viva Rock Vegas, the second Fred Flintstone movie.  I was finally making good money, and was generally pretty stoked on life.

Then I injured myself.  It seemed to be a hernia.  When you lift things that weigh 100 pounds or more several times a day, that's a real bummer.  I saved up money, took the summer of '99 off, and planned on getting the necessary surgery so I could get back in action.  But there was a problem with my insurance.  I got the run-around for three months, never did get to see a doctor, and burned through my saved up money.  I needed a job that didn't require heavy lifting.  Somehow, I decided to try taxi driving.  Within two months, I could no longer afford my apartment (three blocks from the beach), and I put my stuff in storage and lived in my cab for six months.  Taxi driving is a crazy job, and back then it was a really hard way to make a living.  But I figured it out, and was able to have three exceptional weeks that got me a place to stay, and allowed me to only work weekends.  That was in the spring of 2000.

That was my good year in taxi driving.  I worked three long days a week, made $300 to $350 a week usually, and had four days off.  Having four days off is a really cool thing since I lived in a beach city.  Then, right before Christmas, there was a mix up at the DMV, and my driver's license got revoked for failure to pay a fine that I had actually paid.  Things went downhill fast.  I worked a telemarketing job for a while, but eventually wound up homeless.  I worked at a restaurant and lived in the bushes for nine months.

That turned into a decade of struggling in and out of homelessness.  I eventually got my license restored and got a taxi permit.  But the taxi industry was changing due to computer dispatching, and I wound up living in my taxi again, working 7 long days a week.  Every day was a struggle to earn enough money to pay for the cab, pay for gas, and buy food.  From 2003 to 2005, I struggled in the cab, often working 90 to 100 hours a week, and just scraped by.

The thing about taxi driving, is that you never know who is going to get in the

back of your cab.  I gave rides to homeless people.  I gave a ride to billionaire Larry Ellison once.  Other people in my taxi included BMXers Barspinner Ryan Brennan, Cory Nastazio, Shaun Butler, Ryan "Biz" Jordan, and Chase Hawk.  One night in HB, I picked up skaters Arto Saari and Stefan Janoski, and drove them to Geoff Rowley's house.  I gave rides to surfers Christian Fletcher, Samba Mann, and Karina Petroni.  I picked up early UFC fighters Tank Abbot and Ken Shamrock.  I used to work Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra's beach house late at night after the clubs closed.  I got a lot of great rides out of their place.  Taxi driving was really fun at times.  I even gave a ride to the Black Eyed Peas' tour bus driver one night, that guy was hilarious.  I gained a lot of weight working those crazy hours in the taxi, going from 200 pounds to 374.   I started having serious health problems.  It got harder and harder to make money, because all the taxi companies were putting more and more cabs on the road.

Then, in 2005, I got an unusual offer.  A taxi driver named Richard that I knew also ran an indy art gallery called AAA Electra 99.  He offered to let me live in the art gallery, and drive his cab on the weekends.  It was awesome to have some time off, though at first I just slept all the time.  I'd completely given up on doing anything creative while driving a taxi.  Living in a small industrial unit full of art by young, unknown artists, I got the bug again.  I drew a little picture the second night.  My creativity started bubbling up again.  A couple years before, I tried to do a mural with markers.  One day at the gallery, I layered a bunch of marker scribbles over each other while drawing a tree.  It looked pretty cool.  My scribble style was born.  I did that for seven months, working the weekends with hardly any sleep, then drawing in the gallery where I had a mama cat and six kittens for roommates.  But I didn't make enough to save any money.

So I went back to full time driving and living in a cab in mid-2006.  Again, I struggled to make enough to pay for my taxi lease, gas, and food.  In November of 2007, I could no longer make enough money to pay for the cab.  With $15 in my pocket, I walked out onto the streets of Orange County, California.  I weighed about 365 pounds, and my feet were cracked and bleeding from severe athlete's foot.  I could just barely walk, I hobbled really slow like an old man.  I expected to die within a few weeks.  My mantra was "Moment to moment, day by day."  I lost all hope for any kind of future.

But I didn't die.  I lived on the streets, panhandling to survive, for nearly a full year.  The streets are no joke.  A lot of bad stuff happens out there that normal people never see or hear about.  Surviving that year was the biggest accomplishment of my life, but I'm the only one who knows that.  Everyone else just thinks I'm a complete loser for getting into that situation.  Just for the record, I don't drink or do drugs.  I just couldn't make enough money to get my life back on track.  I finally called my family, who had moved to the Triad area of North Carolina.  They gathered money and flew me to NC.  I arrived in my parents' small apartment in Kernersville in November of 2008.  Remember that time?  The start of the Great Recession?  It was a bad time to try and find a job.  As I began to decompress from my year on the streets, I just wanted to get a job, lose weight, and forget all about homelessness.  But I couldn't even get a restaurant job.  All my old friends and contacts in California meant nothing.  I started blogging about my early days in BMX.  I had no idea that anyone would actually read it.  After about a month, my blog went viral in the old school BMX freestyle community online.  I didn't even know there was an old school BMX community online.  I've been blogging ever since.

I drove a taxi in nearby Winston-Salem for a while.  Again, I had to live in the cab and gained by most of the 130 pounds I'd lost.  In 2012, my dad had a massive stroke, and eventually wound up in a nursing home.  It was obvious he wasn't going to be around very long.  I quit taxi driving, and literally built a hut in the woods to live in for a couple months.  I would panhandle money for a couple of days, then take the regional bus to Highpoint, where my dad was, and stay for a couple of days.  My mom and I weren't getting along well at the time.  On the day my dad died in August 2012, my mom asked me to stay at her apartment.  I've been living with her ever since, working odd jobs when I could find them, and selling artwork now and then.

After dealing with some serious health issues over the last four years, and finally starting to get that worked out last year, I realized that I was never going to find a high paying job here in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina.  But I think like a Californian from the action sports and TV world.  I decided to step up my game with my "scribble style" artwork I do with Sharpie markers.  I decided to create my own job.  That's where we're at now.  My Sharpie art looks nothing like that of Jessie Armand, his stuff is amazing.  But, I'm hitting up my social web as well as local people to draw whatever I can.  My forte' is sports pictures with lots of shadows.  I have drawn quite a bit of other stuff as well.  As I write this, I'm all caught up on the drawings I'm doing for other people, and I'm drawing my first surfing picture in my new style.

So that's my story in a nutshell.  Most people around here see me as a complete loser.  Maybe they're right.  Or maybe I'm just regrouping for another go at it.  I know this is a really long blog post, but I only scratched the surface.  If you meet me in person and want to be moderately entertained for a while, ask me about some of my taxi or homeless stories.  I have lots of them.  Or you can get me to draw a picture for you.  That sounds good, too.

If you're only going to watch one clip linked in this post, make it the Brian Foster clip.  Stay Strong like Stephen Murray and chill like Boozer Mike.  Ridaz Gotta Ride.  Now go do something cool.

Check out my new blog on building creative scenes:
How to make your lame city better