Skate and Destroy

Ninja Death: The Jak’s Team made the skating life of drinking and having fun seem like the thing to do, but they never allowed girls to skate on their team. So Spike started her own skate team called Deadly Sparks.

Kriss X: God, I hated that name. I only skated with Deadly Sparks for a minute. But I hung with Spike and Dagger a lot.

Marc Dagger: We started the Jerk’s Team because nobody in Jak’s would let us in ‘cause we couldn’t skate worth a shit. We were just a bunch of ragtag little skaters.

James Angus Black: Our Prez was a great, great skater but he was such a freak, they wouldn’t let him into Jak’s Team so he started Jerk’s Team just to piss them off. We existed for one purpose only and that was to annoy the fucking shit out of the Jak’s Team. Not just the Bay Area Jak’s. Portland, Seattle, D.C., San Diego, L.A., you name it. We would write on them when they passed out. We would steal their girlfriends, their skateboards, anything from them that we could get. The Jaks were all drunks and the Jerks were all tweaks, so when they would pass out, we were still wide awake and ready to go.

Tammy Lundy: There was a homeless guy named Wild Bill who was a medic in Vietnam. He always patched up our road rash and put the butterfly closures on our cuts.

Ninja Death: Spike enlisted me, Carole Lennon, Lizza, and the S.F. Hags for Deadly Sparks. We always skated from Fogtown — Ron MDC’s skate shop in the Haight — to the beach every Sunday. All we had to do is get drunk at the end of our journey.

Tammy Lundy: Ron owned Fogtown and I helped with the advertising and stuff. The only other place in town that sold boards was Skates on Haight. We just completely obliterated them in about six months because Skates on Haight was not cool.

X-Con Ron: Early employees were Jayfish, Pat Black, Tammy Lundy, Jake Phelps and Tommy Guerrero. We decided to start up Fogtown Skateboards, producing our own boards and creating a team with sponsors. My partner Carlos didn’t come up with his share of the money and I continued without him.

Tammy Lundy: He sued and made us change the name, so it became Concrete Jungle. A lot of kids who went on to become really famous skaters bought their first deck from us when they were eight years old.

X-Con Ron: The team was composed of various notables such as Danny Sergeant, Noah Salasnek, Mike Archimedes, Steve Roetter, Jake Phelps, Phil Chen, Mickey Reyes.

B.A. Lush: Skate teams were big back then. Team Lush was a drinking team. That was more my speed. My friend Jenny Lush stole the name. We would let anyone join who wanted to buy us beer. Then they could be called So-and-So Lush. There was a spot in Golden Gate Park, north of the main entrance near Stanyan, that we named Lush Gardens. We used to drink there all the time and crash in the bushes, between squats. There ended up being offshoots of Team Lush in L.A.

Kriss X: I hooked up with the Y.A.A. Girlz skate team and rocked with them for several years.

Ninja Death: The Y.A.A. Girlz included the Fuckettes, Kriss X, Chi-Chi, and Michele Rebel. Y.A.A. stands for “Young Alluring Alcoholics” — poignant considering it was the toughest girl skate team in S.F. California Living did a huge story on the Deadly Sparks and Y.A.A. Girlz in 1984.

Kriss X: I was staying at some girl’s house that I was fucking at the time, selling and doing major amounts of speed, hanging out at the Compound, riding my skateboard, wearing all leather with long, black, spiky hair and way too much make-up. Norms were horrified. I was very confrontational. People would stop dead in their tracks and stare at me. I would get pissed off and scream at them, “What the fuck are you looking at?!” Now, I look back and just have to laugh at my own stupidity.

Tammy Lundy: Kriss X came out at a time when it was not really cool to be a lesbian on the scene. That more than anything else freed her to be who she was. Everything she did after that was so much more authentic. You’d go to a party at her house and she’d be showing off her brand new bondage swing and her brand new girlfriend. She was wonderful.

Dean Washington: She was pretty much King Kong. She was a major, major threat to everyone’s well-being. If you didn’t bow in submission in passing, you just might get slapped to the ground.

James Angus Black: The baddest dude in the whole punk rock scene was not a dude at all, it was her. She was so fast and so brutal, and always wearing hardware — that crazy-assed gauntlet with the big ‘ole carpenter’s nails sticking out of it.

Gary Floyd: The first time I saw Kriss X, she was beating the hell out of Denz Havoc. She had him in a headlock and was punching him in the face. Our manager, Debbie Gordon said, “Hey, Kriss,” and she said, “Hey, what’s going on?” while she was still punching him.

Kriss X: I was a little monster. I took absolutely no shit from anyone. Sometimes it was unwarranted and I kicked someone’s ass because they said something about me stealing their girlfriend or some shit. I was completely out of control with the speed and alcohol, as a lot of us were. I compare the violence back then to living in the Old West.

Dean Washington: You really didn’t want any of your girlfriends to get near her, because that might be trouble.

Kriss X: I fucked every hot girl in town whether she was taken or not. They never said no. It was amazing.

James Angus Black: There was some idiot from the East Bay with long hair and a scraggly beard, at the Mab with his girlfriend. Kriss looked at the girl, offered her arm, and the girl just walked right over. Kriss gave her a big kiss and they walked off. This stupid guy said something like, “Hey bitch, where are you going with my girlfriend?” Kriss walked back over and BOOM! She hit him and tore a perfect triangle of flesh right out of the side of his face. You could see his teeth and the inside of his jaw. And the girl and Kriss just walked away.

Kriss X: I did everything to excess. I did my first shot of speed with a particularly well-known junkie band person who is now dead, when I was 12. I will never forget that first rush. I felt like I was king of the world.

Gary Floyd: One beautiful cool San Francisco afternoon, I had all my windows open because I was living on the second floor. All at once something whizzed through the window, bounced across the floor, and landed in the middle of the living room. It was a nine or ten inch dildo. Weird-looking, like not brand new. My visitors looked at me as if they thought it might happen all the time in my house. A few days later, Kriss X said, “Did you get my present, Gary?”

Dean Washington: So you had different factions. In San Francisco, you had Kriss X and the Fuckettes. My group was the East Bay Underground. That’s Oakland hardcore. Don’t play in Berkeley, don’t play in Oakland and you get along with everybody. We were skating hardcore daily. We were constantly searching for empty pools or ramps to skate and destroy.

Jim Lyon: East Bay Underground was made up of people who skated and hung out at Blondie’s Pizza. Dean Washington is the founder. Dean was our social calendar.

Glen Moore: I couldn’t skate worth shit. But I wore a jacket with EBU painted in Old English on the sleeve. I had it on all my decks. But styles varied. We were punk rockers, man. No one looked the same back then.

Jim Lyon: Like the Teenage Warning song says, “It’s not the clothes you wear / It’s not the color of your hair / It’s not the beer you drink / It’s just the way you think.”

Dean Washington: I was a little skinny beanpole guy back then. Little afro. Runnin’ around with holey jeans and cut-off-sleeve T-shirts or, if I was in Circle Jerk mode, I’d have my cowboy boots on with the chains goin’ down around the ankles, with bandannas on the boots.

Noah Landis: I saw Dean at a show once. Some little scrub from the suburbs, who showed up with a mohawk he’d made that day, was stomping around, getting’ in people’s faces. Dean just had enough, like, “Who the fuck are you, shoving people around, thinking you’re a punk rocker? You don’t know anybody here.” And Dean just flattened his nose. I had never seen that happen right up close, blood gushing. If you didn’t know how to navigate yourself through these people, that’s what happened to you. You had to be careful.

Dean Washington: I was young and it was the punk rock way. There was definitely a gauntlet and there was definitely a price to pay if you really wanted to fit in.

Ray Vegas: East Bay Underground were just a bunch of drunk skater dudes. Attitude Adjustment was involved with that.

Dean Washington: EBU booked shows, too. We had a great place in West Oakland on 7th Street.

Jim Lyon: We were punks that were tough and ready to fight. We had a skate glove that had pyramid studs on the top, so when you made a fist your punch would be all studs. It was great for busting out windows. We were proud punks that were tired of being laughed at and called Devo.

Dean Washington: Then you had BTU. Now, the BTU guys and my EBU guys didn’t always agree on things. There’d be times when there were physical acts of violence. Not always, but on a few occasions.

Patrick Tidd: BTU stands for Berkeley Trailers Union.

Toni DMR: Talk about gnarly, hardcore guys. We were linked to BTU vicariously, through Rachel.

Sammytown: They were like the local biker gang. But they rode mountain bikes.

Patrick Tidd: We started hanging out together when we were 12 or. Our common thing was riding BMX and trail bikes in the Berkeley hills. We were already accomplished shoplifters, burglars, car thieves, and had a penchant for vandalism.

Kate Knox: They were kind of the counterparts to DMR. Total drinker, fuck-up, get-crazy kinda guys.

Patrick Tidd: By the time we were in our late teens and early 20s, our drug addictions had gotten worse and we had become more violent. Our activities included home-invasion style takeovers of frat parties and fights with frat boys. “Orinda/Lafayette fags,” we used to call them. If we showed up at a party that was put on by someone we didn’t know, it usually ended with us pulling the phones out of the wall so they couldn’t call the police, emptying the kitchen and taking anything valuable in the house. And, as a grand finale, taking the keg and fighting our way out of the house.

Dean Washington: I think I express myself on my skateboard.

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