Loose trucks -n- loose women.

I STARTED THINKING ABOUT WHAT TO WRITE for this tour article this morning after a large cup of coffee. I wanted to write about all the times we were forced to leave our hotels by the police. Or the time we took a girl with us from a Kansas City demo and put her in the van until New York. Maybe I could write about some of the sick spots we skated all across America, like skating LOVE park for two hours with Ricky Oyola without getting busted--and the fountain was even empty. Or the crazy park we skated in Trinidad County. What about El Vortex, the Mexican wrestle-a-gram that the guys at Meta hired for the new guy on tour? Or the time--no. See, I don't want to write about that stuff. It seems to be standard tour article material. So instead I'll write about my crazy neighbors who had four fires in the four crazy months they lived next to me.

The house next door to me has a high turnover rate of occupancy, about three tenants a year. Most people have the same neighbors growing up as a kid. Maybe they change every few years. Three times a year is a lot. This means every three or four months some new sketchy people move into the sketchiest house on the block, barely six-feet from my house. Perfect. The family moving in this time consisted of a mom and dad with one child, who was a crazy girl about 12 years old. The mom and daughter were the only ones who had jobs. They both worked together in some weird mother-daughter prostitution tag team It was odd to see them getting dropped off at the house by some old dude driving a Rolls. And they would be geared up in some crazy stripper clothes and tall boots. This was quite a site nearly every morning.

I can't remember how long it was before the first fire, but it couldn't have been more than two weeks. Luckily I live across the street from a tire station. They could literally walk across the street with their hoses and put out any fire. While cooking some bacon, the Queen of the sketchy family caused a skillet grease tire in the kitchen. Not knowing what to do, she threw water on the skillet inferno. This caused the flaming grease to fly in an uproar out of the skillet and onto the test of the kitchen. I must say, it was great to see a frantic hessian lady running across the street yelling, "FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!" wearing an apron and waving a spatula around. She looked like some crazed tweaker chef from a Black Sabbath cooking show, if there was such a thing. The fire department came over with extinguishers and put out the grease tire in about 14 seconds. It wasn't too big of a deal to them, but to Queen Hesh it was gnarly.

The next fire was maybe one week later in the front yard of the hessian's house. This is where--in true hesh fashion--they parked their cars. They had two VW bugs on blocks, one VW van chat ran, and an old Chevy pickup truck all in the front yard.

One day the hesh dad was out working on the Chevy with a friend. They must have been doing something to the carb. Or the fuel line. Anyway, a cig fell out of the hesh dad's mouth and caught the engine on fire. Now two, wild, shirtless hessians are running around the truck freaking out. One sprouts half a brain for a second and grabs a blanket from the back of the truck and smothers the fire. They both look at each other and give a sigh of relief followed by some uncomfortable laughter. They removed the blanket only to see chat the fire was not "out," but was in fact out of control. They backed up and the fire fighters rushed over to put the fire out before it set the whole house ablaze. The burnt-out truck fit perfect with the look of the front yard.

Things went smooth next door for a good month or so. Well, as good as it could go for a mom-and-daughter prostitute team with a jobless, drug-addict father figure. Then at around midnight sometime in the middle of the summer I heard the neighbor lady yelling, "FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!" I couldn't believe it. Again? You have to be kidding. I look out front and sure enough smoke was pouring out of the front door of her house and she was only in a towel. The fire fighters came over again and round a box in the middle of the living room in flames. It turns out the box was full of porn mags and had mysteriously been placed on the floor furnace. The furnace was on high, for whatever reason, even though it, vas probably 90 degrees outside. Some hessians do things a little differently than the average human, I guess.

My neighbors used drugs a lot Sometimes the drugs ran out so they had to resort to alternative methods of getting high. In this case the dad chose to huff gasoline in the basement. After a good amount of huffing, what better to do than light a smoke? You can see where this is going. Needless to say, with the amount of gasoline, vapors in the air, lighting a match was the worse thing he could probably do. He struck the match and a large explosion occurred directly afterwards. This lit the hessian up like a human torch. He then ran up the stairs and into the rest of the house, totally engulfed in flames. The more he ran the more oxygen he gave the fire, which caused the fire to burn more and at a higher temperature.

His lady was in the kitchen with a friend making cocktails when he ran by. Her friend tried to get him to stop, drop, and roll, while the Queen tried to cut his burning clothes off with a butcher knife. Since he was moving around kind of crazy--being on fire and all--the knife didn't cut his clothes but instead it cut him. In a feeble attempt to help her man, Queen Hesh ended up stabbing him. So now he's on fire and bleeding from a friendly stabbing ... hessians are great!

The fire department was called once again and were able to get the bloody flaming man put out. I went over to see how he was as they were prepping him for the hospital and I noticed a piece of charred Levis on the floor. This isn't something you see everyday. They still had the leather belt on and it was melted to the jeans. Fucking fantastic.

The ambulance rushed him to the hospital and a couple of weeks later he returned with white mitten-like bandages on his hands. They soon afterwards moved out and I never saw them again. You can only imagine the antics to follow them; I'm sure they are very memorable. You've got to love the wild hessian lifestyle.