C.C. Rider

In Shaking the Cage, the documentary about the making of film Easy Rider, director Dennis Hopper said: "An easy rider is a person that is not a pimp, but he lives off a woman; he lives off a whore. He's her easy rider.”

During the Great Depression an easy rider referred to a slow-moving train and eventually the men that would hop on for free as it passed by, and those who even after the Great Depression, continued to live and travel along the rails that way. A “hobo,” if you will.

Chris Cook lives with and is financially supported by a prostitute, and has been leading a criminal life for so long he is almost totally comfortable with it. Drug induced counter-culture activities have become the norm and even though he wants to achieve more, he has adapted to life on the streets and incarceration. He says he's pretty much an easy rider.

Cook has a whole lot of charisma. "I'm stuck in the now," Cook says, which is good because that's all I got right now.

One night in Folsom Prison, Cook had "Carpe Diem" tattooed onto his chest in huge block letters. He says that he wanted something to balance out all the full sleeves of prison ink on his arms, and the other seemingly random tatts on his legs and back. Since then, he's gotten his gut covered, and his shoulders too, and now tattoos are starting to sprawl up onto his neck.

He almost always tucks in his t-shirt, and he wears baggy thrift store jeans that he holds up with a canvas belt. Right now he’s got on a pair of cheap sunglasses and somebody else's hat. He gets his clothes where he can. He doesn't usually wash them either. He just replaces them.

Inside his messenger bag, Cook has got a stack of intricate tattoo-like drawings (very good ones), a bunch of markers and pens, an array of multi-purpose doo-dads and gadgets that rarely get any use, and a beanie to keep his shaved head warm at night. His bag is always packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

After a quick rifle, Cook pulls a homemade tattoo gun out of his sack and says: “Check that out!” It’s made of a sawed-off pen top, a walkman motor and wires, and some electrical tape.” He makes needles for his contraption out of pieces of guitar string which are then stuck into bits of eraser inside and placed inside the motor so they spin. Smiling, Cook says, “I just did a whole leg piece last night.”

Cook’s baby face is starting to look a bit raggedy. The methamphetamine binges and the cold nights waiting outside of his prostitute-girlfriend’s hotel room have got him looking kind of tired. But, as Cook said himself, “She’s gotta pay the bills, y’know…When old-girl has got somebody coming over, I just go wait outside. If she don’t make money, I don’t get money.”

Today, Cook calls himself a “top-notch urban safariast” who can “speak everybody’s language,” if need be. “I am that guy,” Cook says seriously as he lights-up a cigarette, slouching forward a little bit just to hide the flame.

“He just doesn’t get it,” says close friend Dan Renal. “I love Chris like a brother, but he’s the perfect criminal. He has been in the system for too long and when he gets out he does exactly what the system wants him to do in order to get back in. Once they got you, they got you!”

On the eve of Christmas in 1976, Christian Bronson Cook was born at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, CA. He moved to Bullhead, AZ with his mother and step-father when he was 6-years-old. His half-brother was born a year later. Cook never met his biological father.

Because he was told to always set a good example for his younger brother, and because that didn’t always happen, Cook says that he was liberally beaten and verbally abused by his step-father. He would introduce Cook’s half-brother as his “real son.” Cook looks away and says: “I pity him for what karma is gonna do to him some day.”

Cook remembers clearly the time that he was caught bringing home a pellet gun without permission. His step-father took him out into the back yard and made him stand inside a huge cardboard box. Cook says that he covered his crying eyes with his trembling hands as his step-father fired-off the entire clip of pellets into the box, pelting his adolescent body with almost every shot, just to teach him a lesson.

“When I was 14 years-old, my mom got into a car crash but she was going to be okay. I talked to her and everything.” Cook says. “I wasn’t really living at home at the time. I was staying over at my cousin’s house. A few days after it happened, I was on my way out the door to go and visit her when my cousin was like: ‘Wait…don’t you know? Aunt Terri is dead!’” Cook’s mother died in the hospital with a severe case of cirrhosis of the liver. She never told him she was sick.

Shortly after the passing of his mother, Cook just wanted to get away from it all. He ended up at a payphone in Lake Elsinor CA, calling 911 for himself. For three days, he had been lost, scared and hallucinating on a lot of methamphetamine. Cook says the police found him with a stolen truck and a pocket full of drugs, hundreds of miles away from home. He was arrested and spent the following 3 years in the Arizona Juvenile Detention System.

Upon his 18^th birthday, Cook was released from The Arizona Boys Ranch and went straight to his grandfather’s house in Redwood City, CA. He has lived there, on and off, ever since, but he mostly lives the life of a vagrant, on the streets or in and out of the state prison system for various reasons including minor parole violations, drug use and possession and burglary.

According to Cooks grandfather, Chris had "a hell of a life."

“He didn’t have nobody who cared about him, well, except me,” his grandfather says. “I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to him about that crew he runs around with. Then he comes around here half-drunk and says fuck you and everything to me.”

In 2001, Cook was sentenced to 3-years in the state prison for robbing a Subway sandwich shop at knife point. He stole the cashier’s wallet and all of the money in the cash register. He remembers getting only a few blocks away before Redwood City Police rolled-up and arrested him at gun point. “There was no feeling or emotion in any of that,” says Cook. “I was just drunk as hell.”

“I’ve only been to prison once for committing a real crime. Now I just get busted by parole for weak shit like missing meetings and testing positive for dope,” says Cook.

He forgot to mention hit-and-run, causing bodily-injury, with a D.U.I and without a license or insurance, for which he was busted for in 2004.

“Idle hands are the devil’s playground, Cook says. “I’m mother fuckin idle hands!”