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Photos and Words by Allen Ying
February 17th, 2009
Zach Wagner brought filmer Tyler me to a mini drainage ditch with a tree wallie-up in some fancy, expensive neighborhood outside LA. We somehow got into a gnarly altercation with a methed-out psychopath construction worker, who pulled up in a pickup truck claiming to own the unfinished million-dollar home across the street from the ditch. Straight off the bat he was flipping out with the craziest look in his eyes—just for blocking his driveway with our car, and then for being across the street shooting in the drainage ditch..
The situation quickly escalated from an attempted humane conversation to him grabbing a board and throwing it over the construction fence. Useless arguments, push to shove to chase to board swinging, and finally an attempted flash stealing. We were both calling the cops on each other, but I had no clue where we were. It was a fucking nightmare, honestly. We were so shocked that we had no idea how to react. Do we want to gang up on this guy? Potential Kids re-enactment? He could’ve had methamphetamine invincibility going on. At one point I nearly stole his keys off the ground to chuck ’em into the woods, but who knows how he would’ve reacted to that. With all of our camera gear still out, we really just wanted to pack up and get the fuck out of there. Regardless of who’s in the right or wrong, police situations always end up in us losing the rest of our day.
We all had heavy adrenalin rushes going by the time we got out of there. The best part was when he mocked us for thinking we skateboard and shoot photos for a living, without us even bringing it up! Even better was when he was trying to take a cell phone photo of Tyler’s car registration, and Tyler shoulder-checked him into the car with VX in hand.
After recovering from the adrenalin rush crash, that nearly put us out for the day, Zach managed to switch heelflip this street gap in a much friendlier LA neighborhood. The pedestrians were actually psyched to see what we were doing.
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