Kill City Choppers moved to Joshua Tree this week.

Steg J. von Heintz showed up maybe three years ago: fiftyish with a silver mohawk and black jeans over feminine, English-style hips, black shirts, thick New York accent. He rented a space that had been a recording studio – it sits next to a different recording outfit that operates fairly covertly as the owners probably don’t want to advertise the location of lots of expensive equipment. The bands more or less sneak in and out of the building. A friend who has been inside says he saw Sean Lennon there recently. But if you didn’t know better you might think the place was empty. There’s trash in the yard, and black plastic sheeting.

Similarly, Steg’s Kill City Choppers, vintage motorcycles, had a sign no bigger than your hand, and it was some months before I knew what the mohawk guy was doing inside of his studio. I assumed it was music, and I was partly right as it turns out Steg was guitarist in more than a few bands, one of them being School of Violence, a metal band, which I hear was pretty well-known for a while. Most of the time the roll-up gates were rolled up, but occasionally you’d see the smoked glass – classy looking paned doors – and the choppers inside. You’d see Steg riding around on what now looks like a tiny bike that made a big noise – too much noise for such a small machine. The horror of thinking of how much noise all of our auto machines are making underneath their mufflers. Beautiful young women went in and out of the shop, and there was a brindle-striped pit bull who never got walked and may have been the culprit when a friend of mine was nearly attacked by an escaped pit bull, my friend on his way to help fold-and-stamp the Echo Park Historical Society newsletter at my house. A cursory google search shows that in New York, Steg had a motorcycle shop called Psycho Cycles. His name sometimes is paired with a vintage motorcycles guy called Indian Larry.

At Chango coffee house on Echo Park Avenue, Steg was a large presence. For a while he seemed to live there, sipping coffee and hanging out with a coterie of musicians who resided there every day, all the time, it seemed. Some of them gorgeous, assured people, beautiful young women who were glamour stealers: no matter how good you thought you were looking that day they took away a little bit (or a lot) -- just by being in the room. That said, one of the regulars was a helpful guy who often brought with him one of the ugliest dogs I’ve ever seen: skinned tail that sticks straight out, rippled flesh, feet that would look fitting on an eagle, etc.

It took about two years but after all of that time of passing on the street and not speaking I said hello to Steg one day, and he seemed surprised and pleased and said hello back. Ever since we’ve always said hello to each other. That’s pretty much the extent of my one-on-one dealing with Steg.

Steg had a thick New York accent that I assumed for no good reason came from Brooklyn. I once lived in Brooklyn, but the accent is hard for me to pin down. Anyway, if this sounds like an obituary, it’s not an accident; though never fear, Steg lives, even if Kill City Choppers has moved. I heard it was moving at the beginning of the week, and it seemed incredible news. It had been no more than a couple of years, maybe three, but he had made himself an institution, in the best Echo Park sense of the word. He seemed out of sync with the higher-end changes in the neighborhood, more the kind of character who would have shown up here ten, twenty, thirty years ago. (His haircut would suggest twenty.) Even if he was more in tune with the current hipster scene than I could ever hope to be. But, yes, he came and went. A few weeks ago I started noticing that the usual crowd was not at Chango every day. (I’d see them occupying the outdoor café tables as I sailed past in my Jetta.) Then, as I said, I heard he was leaving. Friday I saw a moving truck in front of the “shop.” And yesterday I went to see the vacated space with a friend who plans to rent it.

It was the first time I had been inside. I carried my daughter because I didn’t want her walking on the cables and bits of hardware and who knew what kinds of chemicals. We met the landlord – whom I thought would be older. His name is Anthony. I believe he is Latino, and he owns a number of commercial properties in the neighborhood and – if my gossip serves me – some residential ones, too. He was raised here. We pinned down the exact location of my house, and he said, yes, he had been in it many years ago, when the legendary Gutierrez family lived here. (Before the Gutierrez family, the Nelson sisters lived in the house -- spending most of their lives in it, until one of the sisters married and moved two doors uphill.) He told me the side door had been the front door in those days – which I didn’t know.

I asked him where Steg was going, and he said “Yucca-something, or Twenty-Nine Palms.”

For some Yucca Valley is the royal court of the rock scene in Southern Cal, if not a high-desert graveyard.

I asked Anthony why Steg was going, and he became uncomfortable. I suppose asking a landlord WHY a tenant is leaving can be like asking your cat WHAT happened to the goldfinch you’d been feeding. Anthony said, “It’s not for me to say.” I said, “Of course,” He added. “I never speak ill of the dead.”

On the side of the studio was a big flame-decorated painted sign that read: “Psycho Cycles” and other valuable-looking stuff. Anthony said Steg's friends were coming for it.

Some time after ten the same night (last night) I made a run to the drug store for sundries. On my way back, Echo Park Avenue was quiet, still, as usual at this time of night. When I got to Kill City’s studio there was another moving van. Steg was there – in the driver’s seat -- with someone else. I drove past, then I backed up. Steg said he was moving his shop to Joshua Tree. I would have wanted to hear more, but another car approached from behind, and it was time to keep going.