The idea was born where countless other important ideas has been born before it.

Mark Maynard, the prestigious co-editor of the excellent magazine Crimewave U.S.A., and I, the editor and author of one of the most criminally overlooked zines in history, The West Virginia Surf Report, were seated on the patio outside the Warner Bros. Studios commissary.  Eating lunch amongst besuited power players, up and coming stars, and rugged-smelling grips and best boys, we came up with the idea for this project -- in the same location where studio execs had undoubtedly hashed out the details of Casablanca and Goodfellas in days gone by. 

But this one was big.

To be fair, most of the credit goes to Mark.  OK, all of it.  He wanted a tour of L.A.  He wanted to see the famous death spots he had read about back home in Michigan, the nation's heartland.  Of course he didn't want to just tour it in the usual sense, he wanted to get a magazine article or two out of it.  So he presented me with his plan, over our ten dollar grilled cheese sandwiches, and we agonized about the details with animated hand gestures and impressive-looking pencils behind our ears.  When we walked out of those hallowed gates, we knew we were on to something special.

The Crime/Surf Cooperative Race for the Gore would take place in a mere three days.  We would ask fellow underground writers and editors to pledge an amount of money for each death site visited, as you would with an AIDS walk or a cancer dance.  And, in turn, we would present the proceeds to a worthy charity.  We decided that the beneficiary of our selfless work would be Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, a folk art garden located in Simi Valley, California.

And so, it was time to get to work, and Mark turned to his vast network of "friends" around the country for morbid addresses.  By the time Saturday rolled around, we had actually patched together a half-assed plan of sorts.

I picked him up at 6:30 a.m., about ten minutes later than we had hoped.  Mark had wanted to be seated in the "Beatles booth" at the oldest surviving Big Boy restaurant at 6:30 sharp, but I was running late.  He was worried that fans(?!) might be there wanting to join us on our journey.

Surprisingly there was nobody to greet us, so we just went inside.  The hostess started to lead us to a table with no known history, but I spoke up and told her we wanted to "sit where the Beatles sat."  So she begrudgingly took us to an enormous banquet style table all the way in the back of the restaurant.  Above it, on the wall, was a plaque that said the band had sat there on their "Help!" tour in 1965.  For some reason, the sign didn't mention the Beatles, it only referred to them as John, Paul, George, and Ringo.  We felt kind of silly, two guys sitting at that big-ass shuffleboard-sized table way off to ourselves.

The waiter eventually made the long trek back to take our order.  Of course, Mark had stuffed both menus in his backpack as soon as we sat down, so we were trying to play it cool and order from memory.  I said, "I'll have what John had."  The waiter just stared at me like I was wearing a suit of turds.  So I took a fumbling stab in the dark, "Uh, OK, I'll have the farmer's breakfast."  Every restaurant has a farmer's breakfast, I guessed.  "How do you want your eggs?" he asked.  And we were off.

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