It was 2006 in Orlando—a sweltering, airless sinkhole of strip malls and paranoia—and Bad Shit was taking the stage like a runaway locomotive loaded with high explosives. The moment those first jagged, apocalyptic chords tore through the humid air of the bar, the room dissolved into pure, unfiltered madness. Ed Selego stood near the edge of the pit, slammed the rest of his beer like a man facing execution, smashed the pint glass onto the concrete, grabbed Angel Ramirez by the throat, and dragged him headfirst into the screaming vortex of the crowd. It was beautiful, terrifying, and completely out of control.
When the sonic carnage finally sputtered out, the band started hauling their battered gear toward the exit, pushing through the sweating mass of humanity. I tried to play the Good Samaritan, stepping up to clear a path through the crowd for them—a fatal mistake of ego. Mick E Reyes didn’t need my help; in fact, he viewed my mere presence in his radius as a personal insult. He hit me like a runaway freight train, violently shoving me completely out of his path. Incensed, buzzing on cheap beer and suicidal courage, I followed him out into the humid Florida night, screaming filthy, reckless slurs at his back, trying to goad him into a bloody parking-lot brawl. He didn’t even bother to swing. He just laughed a dark, maniacal laugh, grabbed me by the collar, and threw my raving ass into the back of a waiting taxi.
The next morning at the trade show, under the blinding, clinical fluorescent lights of the convention center, reality came crashing back in. The boss from Skatepark of Tampa caught me by the arm, his eyes wide with genuine panic, and spat out a dire warning: *”You better watch your back, kid. Mick is looking for you. Whatever you do, let it go. That guy is an absolute gorilla—he will literally rip your head off.”*
Before I could process the terror, Mick E appeared out of the crowd, all smiles and ominous bad intent. He cornered me, jabbed a heavy, finger directly into my chest, and leaned in, asking with a wicked grin if I remembered all that wild shit I was screaming last night and if I felt like repeating it to his face. Right in the middle of this impending execution, Jake Phelps spotted the commotion from across the aisle and came charging over like a rabid bloodhound. Mick laid out the previous night’s treason. Phelps stopped, squinted at me with those manic, hawk-like eyes, looked back at Mick, and let out a cackle: *”Man, this kid’s got some serious nuts on him talking to you like that!”*
Cornered by two legends of subcultural violence, I did the only logical thing left: I yanked off my glasses, handed them over, and said, *”If you guys are gonna beat the hell out of me, just don’t break my glasses.”*
They both exploded into wild, howling laughter. The tension snapped like a dry twig. *”Alright, kid,”* they bellowed, *”you’re with us now.”* Phelps immediately threw me into a suffocating, beer-scented half-hug, half-headlock, hauling me through the convention floor toward the mini-ramp, where TNT was already in the middle of obliterating the mini ramp coping into absolute splinters. I was just a kid in the background, swept up in the weird, violent magic of the Antihero carnival, lucky enough to keep my glasses—and my head—intact.
A few years later i moved to San Francisco. I would run into Mick E and Jake all the time and Mick would always buy me a beer and tell me some skateboarding secrets. Jake would give me rides in his car piggy, and encourage me to hurt myself on my skateboard. I may never have been in the crew, but the boys didnt lie i was with them now. And they are in my heart forever.
Mick-E Reyes was a human battering ram operating at the exact, volatile nexus where American machismo, asphalt kineticism, and absolute street-level carnage collide. Long before the corporate sheen washed over the counterculture, Reyes was the undisputed enforcer of the San Francisco street-skating universe—an OG “Sick Boy” whose entire presence radiated the terrifying, righteous authority of a man who lived on the lethal edge of a wooden plank and four urethane wheels. As the legendary team manager for Deluxe Distribution—the iron-fisted operational heart behind Anti-Hero, Real, and Spitfire—he didn’t just manage a roster of wild, feral skateboarders; he policed them, protected them, and loved them with the suffocating, tribal intensity of a wartime drill sergeant. He was a terrifying, beautiful monster of pure instinct, a guy who would throw hands in a dark alley to defend his team one minute and play the fiercely protective, surrogate father figure the next, driven by a deep, existential code of honor that only the true street-level lunatics could ever fully understand.
Then came the cosmic irony, the ultimate plot twist in the great American existential psycho-drama: Reyes put on a badge and became a San Francisco police officer. It was a hallucinatory, almost mythic inversion of power—the ultimate outlaw stepping behind the blue line—spawning surreal urban legends of Officer Reyes cruising the city fog in his patrol vehicle with professional skaters riding shotgun, bridging the impossible chasm between authority and total anarchy. When the dust finally settled and the high-octane frenzy of his youth began to turn to ash and memory, Reyes retreated north to Portland, Oregon, morphing into the quintessential patron saint of late-night dives as the proprietor of the Cat’s Paw Saloon and the Thunderbird. Surrounded by skull art, worn leather, and Spitfire coasters, he cultivated a sanctuary for the broken, the bruised, and the night-crawlers of the Pacific Northwest service industry. With his passing in September 2026, the world lost an irreplaceable, unfiltered force of nature—a man who carved his name directly into the concrete bedrock of American subculture with pure, unadulterated grit and an unyielding, bloody-knuckled heart.
Chainsaw Magazine 