Local Legends

Peter Steele died the other day. Most people, including me, aren't too familiar with his work. If you haven't heard his band Type O Negative before, just imagine taking a heavy metal song and playing it on a record player at half speed. His voice is that deep, and the songs are pretty slow. Probably the best example is at the beginning of the movie "I Know What you Did Last Summer" when their version of Summer Breeze (yes, that Summer Breeze -- I've always found it odd) plays. You can hear part of it here. Honestly, I wouldn't even know of Peter Steele or Type O Negative if it weren't for a story I heard in 8th grade that I might not even remember accurately.

There was a guy in Craig who was a kind of mythical badass. He was my friend's older brother named Jeremy, and everyone knew who he and was intimidated by him.He was basically known among us as the toughest dude that ever strolled down Yampa Avenue. He was probably 19 or 20 at the time this story supposedly went down. The story goes that he was at a Danzig concert, and hit on some chick. Well, it turns out this wasn't just some chick. She was the girlfriend of one of the guys from the opening band. The opening band? Type O Negative. Violence ensued between Jeremy and his brother and the entire band. As I was hearing this story, my ingrained belief in the Jeremy's badassity lead me to automatically assume he was the victor. To my naive shock, he actually lost quite handily. This was before I knew that Peter Steele was a well-built 6'7" angry metal guy.

I consider myself a reasonably skeptical person, and the thought that some guy from Craig would get in a fight with an entire band for hitting on some random girl at a concert sounds pretty far fetched. But his losing the fight and thus shattering the notion of his invincibility made me buy the whole story.

I talked to Jeremy a few times several years later when he was running the first of several incarnations of a now defunct local record store. Turns out, he's really just a stonerish-type guy that likes heavy metal and could never seem to fill my order for Black Flag's Damaged. I never asked him if the incident really happened as I had heard it. By that point, unbeknownst to him I'm sure, his fabricated legend based on hearsay among younger boys had faded away completely. Peter Steele destroyed it.

While Jeremy's folk-hero status as the baddest mofo in town was thwarted by Type O Negative, Craig and every other town still have their own locally well known people, but not in a famous kind of way. More in the "I can't believe this person exists" or "what the nuts is wrong with that person?" kind of way. And to me, these people are way more interesting. I like to pick these people out wherever I live, even if I'm the only witness to their awesomeness.

Everyone in Craig has had an experience with Crazy Dennis. His unverified story is that he was a bright teenager 30 or 40 years ago, but then he fried his brain with homemade LSD. Now he argues with imaginary friends while walking around town. Someone once told me they saw him get in a fistfight with one of these figments while sitting in the old Little Caesar's restaurant inside Kmart. There's a guy in Mesa called Dizzy who is similar to Crazy Dennis, only friendlier. Everybody that grew up here knows him, or at least knows of him and has seen him in action.

There are two other people in Mesa that really stand out to me, and sadly I was alone when I saw them. The first was this woman that I saw walking around my old neighborhood a couple of times. I was driving on Broadway about to turn up the street to my apartment, and I noticed what I assumed to be a hooker heading the same direction on foot wearing a pink tube top, white miniskirt and clear plastic heels. Though hilarious, not out of the ordinary for my old neighborhood. Only as I got closer did I see the full amazing ridiculousness of this woman. It wasn't the heels, or the tube top, it was the masculine frame behind the tube top. A tranny hooker! By my apartment! And she was turning to walk up my street! I tried to discreetly snap a photo with my cell phone, but it was too dark. But the next afternoon as I was coming home from work I saw a pink tube top in the distance next to a guy by what I consider the world's busiest liquor store on Mesa Drive and Broadway. 'Twas her/him again in all its glory!

The other was a one time encounter that still boggles my mind. I was walking to my car after Church one day, and I saw perhaps the greatest thing witnessed by man. It was an old man, with a long flowing beard, wearing a yamaka, and riding a pink girl's banana seat bike with tassels on the handlebars and a basket. I stood breathless as he crossed my path. I can only compare the experience to my guide in the Costa Rican rain forest that was physically shaking because we saw a very rare bird. "You guys have no idea how lucky you are to have seen that," he said. Indeed. A once in a lifetime experience.

In larger cities, the more ghetto the neighborhood the more likely you are to witness one of these people. And the ghettoest neighborhoods I've ever been in are located in Stockton, California (read about this place, it's pretty rough). So it's no surprise that Stockton is a goldmine for what we used to call "creatures," or legendary figures on the strange side of town. I heard about a few of them before I even made it to the city. Probably my favorite is a woman they called the Hair Beast. I never actually saw her, but apparently she had the most freakishly large untamed afro known to man. From the tales I heard, you wouldn't be surprised to find an eagle's nest or a mummy wrapped up in there. There were others too, like the guy they called the Alien, and the Stockton Stomper. He was a Cambodian guy that would walk around all over the place and always stomped his feet when he walked. It was like he was once a soldier, and his commander shouted "march vigorously!" and then died, having never given this man another order. So from then on he had to take large angry steps everywhere he went. I tried to take a picture of him too, but I missed and shot this instead:

People like these are interesting and fun as part of a local culture, especially when myths prevail about their nature and origin. But just like the legend of Jeremy was sullied by Type O Negative, reality ruins the fun in a lot of these people as well.

Reality has a tendency to do that with a lot of things. Every kid that took Tae Kwon Do when I was growing up believed that their instructor could beat the crap out of anyone they faced. That's the myth of the martial arts world. There's some sort of mystical power in knowing how to kick and punch the air in a particular sequence that somehow translates into the ability take out anybody in a fight. It's the Mr. Miagi effect, and a concept upon which Jean Claude Van Damme's entire career was built.

But then along came Ultimate Fighting Championship and the MMA phenomenon that put some of the best fighters from all sorts of disciplines against each other. Reality, as it turns out, shows that the high school wrestling coach could have whooped on your 5th degree black belt. Suddenly the mystique of Tae Kwon Do felt by every 10 year old in 1990 as a means to win a fight has been replaced with it's actual nature: a boring, disciplined art form that may be good for self defense.

And it's worse for local legends and human creatures. The reality of their situations is often depressing, and makes you feel like a jerk for joking about them. Some speculative realities: Crazy Dennis's story may be true, but living with hallucinations is pretty frightening. The tranny hooker is most likely just an actual woman with an unfortunate body-type, a more unfortunate drug habit, and an extremely unfortunate means to supply said drug habit. But I'll always have my Hasidic Jewish bike rider and the Hair Beast. Because they chose to be legendary.