There’s a little window of time in the Phoenix year that is primo for riding pools. It starts around mid-May when it starts getting hot, and goes until the monsoon clouds that have been threatening from the east finally sack up and bomb rain on us. Riding pools in the winter is nice and cool, but many times you end up bailing out water. Once the heat hits, pretty much all the leftover water in the pools dries up and you don’t have to bail shit, you just roll up and drop in.
During this year’s particular window, Josh Small put me up on a few pools. He put me up on some general locations of pool possibilities as well. The first one I rode was in an apartment complex that was being renovated. It was a badass square, with a deep end that dropped off so steep that you could ride it like a u-ramp. I’d go down the wedge, go over the light, then back up the wedge, turn at the top, rinse and repeat. I called Jerry Davis to come ride it with me, but he’s an air conditioning guy and was on call so he didn’t make it. I called Josh, too, but he pussed out. I got some good over the light airs but never aired out, and I was pretty happy I got a pocket to pocket (also known as the double trouble, as named by Josh), as I hadn’t done that in a while. God, I love square pools. I only got to ride it once, though. Here are some pics of it:
Sick, huh? Turns out the complex was getting demo’d instead of renovated. Pool riding tradition states that the one who finds the pool gets to name it. Seeing as Josh never named this one, I’m gonna call it Flat Top. Ah well, that’s pool riding, and there’s always more pools in the PHX.
Like this one. I cruised up and down the street in my truck in a certain area Josh suspected there were empty pools; parked, rolled up to the first house with a construction fence around it, and here was this honey of a pebble-tec pool! Luckily there was a plastic cup left over by some dirty construction worker, so I used it to drain the little puddle of water out of the deep. I rode it myself the first time, then came back with a crew one day, and with Steven Mueller a few weeks later.
Like I said, it was all pebbly and such, so I named it Fruity Pebbles.
After getting down with the get-down in Fruity Pebs, I cruised around the neighborhood to see if I couldn’t find some more pools. I found one more (with a construction fence around it again,) but the house next door had an asshole of a dog that would run off at the yapper when I got up to the fence. I decided to wait it out. I told Josh about the pool, and he messaged me a couple weeks later that the dog and his people had moved out of the house next door. Yessss! I got all up in that sweet square mama girl, and had a fairly good time. It was steep and slippery as a mahfucker, and it was blue. For the life of me, I couldn’t get over the light, but I did develop a way to ride it. It was way too tight of a tranny to ride straight back in after going up the wall, so I’d get up there and turn my front tyre. I’d slide my back tyre down the wall kinda in a reverse table and enter the tranny sideways so it would catch me at the bottom. It was different, but it felt really cool. I had ridden a pool with Will Bissell in Buckeye that he named the Slippery Blue Tyrant a couple years ago, but it was put out of commission when some people moved into the house and filled it with water. Therefore I christened this pool its Slippery Blue Successor.
The next time I visited the Slippery Blue Successor, we had just had some serious rain. I knew I didn’t want to bail it out, but I did want to get a pic for this article. When I poked my head through the backyard gate, though, some weird dude was right by the back door under the porch. He said “What’s up?”, and I said, “Hey, what’s up?” back. I backed right out with no delay and got the F outta there. Best case scenario was that he was a city worker there legitimately (the house was being demo’d by the city and trespassing was prohibited), and therefore he’d probably call the cops on me. Worst case scenario was that he was sucking the glass dick or snorting some crystal up on that porch, and I didn’t need to be snapping pics with some cracked-out cracky cracko creepin’ around. He also could have been raiding the house of its copper tubing, in which case he wouldn’t much have liked witnesses around, either. Either way, I’m sure I made a good choice by bouncing up out of those nuts. I came back a couple hours later and got my pics, and Methy McCrackerson was nowhere to be found.
I came up on this last pool pretty much out of nowhere. I was on a shoot in the beginning of July, and it turns out that one of the locations we were shooting at had been a drop house for illegal immigrants just a couple months prior. It also turns out the house had a sick little square in the backyard. I was just about to ride it, too, when the storms hit, leaving a scummy little garbage swamp in the bottom. I was really looking forward to this one, because the back wall was way mellower than most Phoenix pools, making airs and lip tricks much easier. Considering all these little idiosyncrasies, it made perfect sense to name it…………………….Ryan Fudger’s Vagina.
So, to sum it up, you should find some pools, blah, blah, blah, ride them with your friends, blah, blah, blah, dip out from cracky crackos and copper pillagers, blah, blah, blah, fun, blah, good times, blah, blah. Yeah…I actually could give a shit what you do, cause Old School’s got to get his pools just like he’s got to get his pussy, and if you want to ride some gems with me, give me a call, and if you don’t like pools, you can go straight to hell.
