Continued from: The Epic Tale of my 1963 Econoline, AKA: The Van Story- Part 1 & The Van Story- Part 2, Past the Edge of Oblivion We pulled into the U-Haul on the edge of Las Vegas and spat out our thinly rehearsed lie to the kid at the counter, and at first it seemed to stick. He ran the info through his computer, but eventually we hit the same dead end. Unsafe, they couldn’t get a truck, they couldn’t rent a trailer, we were fucked. Again. Outside the sun was slowly falling and the darkness began to come creep over the desert. I could feel the world pulling us in, trying as best as it could to hold us in this god-forsaken Valley of Fire. The kid behind the counter had a devilish smirk on his face, and you could tell that he was the type of guy that gets off on the tiny sliver of authority they grant him there. Josie and I stepped away from the counter, defeated and tired. Josie, unable and unwilling to succumb to defeat, suddenly saw something that made her jump. ”What about that? That could work!” she yelled. I turned my exhausted and sun burnt face to see the object of her attention: a bumper-mounted tow bar. When I saw the tow-bar she was pointing at, our eyes met, we both nodded at each other, and we made a silent pact there on…
July 2011
The Dragoons- Nite of The Hot Rods, 7/16/11 Antioch, CA If I were older, I’d probably be sitting here rattling on about how nice it is that the younger generation is carrying on the tradition, blah blah blah, but I’ll leave that to someone else. As someone in the same relative age bracket as most of the Dragoons, I’m really happy to see my contemporaries doing cool shit and making this great show happen in Antioch, of all places. This show is always impressively packed with killer cars that always makes you take pause by the end of the night and wonder how, exactly, these punk kids (and punk-kid-minded adults) manage to drag such top quality cars out to a parking lot next to a public fishing pier by the railroad tracks. The secret? Honestly, if you met these guys you’d do anything you could to make what they’ve got going on out here a success. I was booth-bound for most of the show, but thankfully MLV held down the fort for a few minutes while I ran frantically to take a few pictures of the beautiful show. Custom cars, punk rock, and great people, if that’s not enough to get you out to a show I don’t know what is. Enjoy: Mrs. Gambino’s new Cadillac: Check out this cool in-progress custom: Thanks for reading! The Dragoons Nite of The Hot Rods- 7/16/11 Antioch, CA was last modified: October 30th,…
Part II- Past the Edge of Oblivion Continued from: The Epic Tale of my 1963 Econoline, AKA: The Van Story- Part 1 When we got out of the truck, a old man wearing aviator shades was walking out to greet us. He introduced himself as Walt, and we got to talking. The more Walt, Josie and I talked, the clearer my understanding of this place became; this wasn’t a place that people came to by choice, but rather a place of last resort for people who had expended all of their other options. Walt had been married once before in Utah; his wrinkled forearm still bared her name on a tattered banner over a shaky rose. He was living here, not sure for how long, seeing how things went with a much younger girlfriend out here in the trailer park. Everyone here, it seemed, had some story about how they were just passing through. Nothing about this town had any sense permanence about it; it was as if the whole goddamn place could just pack up and leave in the middle of the night without a trace. Walt told me he had a couple of vans back in his heydays, and how he had picked this one up as a project a few years back to relive some of those wild times. The 300 six-cylinder in it that his daughter had insisted over the phone was rebuilt and running seemed to…
It’s not my intention for this blog to become a deeply personal account of my travels, but this weekend my personal life and my show-going life are inseparable and indistinguishable. My wife has been having a really tough time getting around lately. She’s had a hard time walking, and hasn’t been able to stand for long periods of time on her own for a while now. We recently started seeing a neurologist about it, and she’s been going through pretty intense treatment for what we learned was an inflammation of her spinal cord because of lesions on her brain. Its scary stuff, and not something to be taken lightly. She’s been knocked down for a few weeks, and really hasn’t left the house, aside from coming to the shop, for about a month. I stepped up and with the help of a few friends we’ve been running the shop in her absence. The past week was particularly tough, because not only did she have to deal with the side effects of some pretty harsh medicine, but also because we’ve been waiting for a blood test to reveal what life-long condition we’ll be up against. Well, Friday’s doctor appointment revealed that she has MS, a yet uncureable auto-immune disorder that’s going to require long term treatment, but the fact that we now know what we’re dealing with has been surprisingly comforting. Also, the harsh medicine seems to have worked, because after…
1. An EXCELLENT article and great photos on Coby of Church Magazine’s amazing Econoline, Van Go. 2. Wonderful coverage of the Sacramento Autorama by BOMB CITY, AKA my wife and I! It’s a tremendous honor to have our work in such a huge publication. A huge thanks to Zombie and the crew at TRK. Check it out, it’s a damn good issue. Like it? Let them know! – Posted from the road
I decided I should post up the long and strange journey that is my van build-thread from the LBCC board. I’ll post it up in a few installments. Enjoy: Part I- In the beginning: Josie and I left for the desert at about seven o’clock at night. Still being at the height of summer, the sun hadn’t fully set, but it was steadily on it’s way there. I hadn’t even unpacked from Paso; my duffel bag sat in the back seat of my dad’s crew cab half full of yesterday’s dirty laundry as we climbed the Altamont. My heart pounded as I held the wheel of the truck, swerving around potholes with one hand, pounding an energy drink with the other while my brain went over all of the important details of our trip: We were heading for Nevada, and tomorrow I would be pulling home my Econoline. We left so quick I didn’t even bother to get directions; I knew we were staying the night in Vegas, a drive I’ve made a handful of times, and finding a room should be easy. We would call Walt in the morning to go see the van, thus far I had only spoken to his daughter who had posted the van to the Las Vegas craigslist for her computer-illiterate father. This whole ordeal started from that ad and a picture she emailed me before Paso: She had said that there was a…