I first met Tall Paul as he was walking out of the Oakland Home Depot toting a giraffe of a bike. It was orange with gold accents — pedals, spokes, and pinwheel-shaped mags — and its body was made of interlocking triangles stacked so tall the handlebars stood at roughly my height. I was impressed and asked if I could take a closer look. “Of course,” he said, and began showing it off.
Tall Paul is tall — over six feet — with soft, dark curls he usually hides under a baseball cap. He’s cordial, but when he starts talking bikes, a kind of electric and childlike wonder steals over him. You can’t help but feel enthusiastic too. When I asked how he mounts such an ungainly ride, he demonstrated by giving it a shove as he jogged a few steps beside it, then he clambered up the triangles of the frame like they were a ladder. “Where did you get it?” I asked him. “I made it,” he said.
Patting his bike, he explained: “Last fall, I was out with one of the double-stackers when I saw a couple of kids cutting school. They were about 10 years old; I saw them cutting class all of the time. And when I saw the kids, I saw they were excited about the bike. They were like, ‘Wow!’ And I thought, ‘Hey, that might be something I can do to get them back in class.’”
Paul made the two boys an offer: if they went back to school and got three A’s on their next report cards, he’d give each of them a bike. “And it worked,” he said, laughing. “They turned out to be really smart kids. They just got caught up messing around in the streets and cutting school and stuff. They’d been doing it for a while.”
Now Paul has a standing offer to reward any kid who makes three A’s on his or her report card. While Paul doesn’t have the resources to give everyone a bike, if an A student brings him a frame to work with — even if it’s so rusted it no longer runs — he restores and customizes it.
He invited me to come by and watch him work on his bikes sometime. He lives near the Home Depot in a mobile home “parked illegally,” which, I later learned, means he stays put for street sweeping because he’s cultivated relationships with city employees, who sometimes chip in a few dollars for the bikes he’s fixing up for students. That he’s able to stay in one location is part of what’s made him a neighborhood fixture — even beyond Oakland, parents from San Jose and Hayward know to bring their kids’ report cards to him.
On the day I visited, his place was instantly recognizable by the bikes stacked on the roof. When Paul saw me, he greeted me with a hug and began hauling bikes out of his home and propping them on the sidewalk. One after another, there they were: double-stacks, choppers, and, finally, the little black-and-gold frame of a child’s bike with its wheels in disrepair.
This bike, painted in Paul’s signature colors, is to be the prototype that introduces his bike program to schools in the area, starting with Prescott Elementary in Oakland. Paul’s idea is to donate a tricked-out ride every report card season, which the school would prominently display. Every A on a student’s report card would be an entry into a raffle to win the bike. If schools take to it, his goal is to work with as many as he can.
Tall Paul started tinkering with bikes when he was just a child himself — as he remembers it, he was five years old. His mother had saved up to buy him and his six brothers and five sisters bikes for Christmas. While everyone else was out riding theirs, Paul took his down to the basement and dismantled it. “I wanted to see what made it work,” he said.
The passion for taking bikes apart and putting them back together hasn’t left him. “I like everything about it,” he said. “It’s an art.” One of his passions is sanding down the metal of a rusty bike and erasing the ravages of time until the frame gleams. “You see, when you sand it, you take your hand, and you feel the bike. You don’t want to feel a scratch; you don’t want to feel a nick; you don’t want to feel nothing. Like a baby’s butt — smooth.” When he’s finished, he puts it all back together and makes sure it runs well, then carefully paints each piece down to the spokes in the white-walled wheels, then buffs everything to a lustrous shine. For his own bikes, his finishing touch is a rhinestone “TP” (for “Tall Paul”) affixed between the handlebars. He also plans to add gears to his double-stacks.
A few pigeons milled about on the sidewalk where Paul was working. He said the birds know him, just like the rest of the neighborhood does. “They recognize me,” he said. “I could ride my bike right to the corner and stop, and birds will fly down from everywhere and come to it.” He took a break to coax them near. That day there were maybe a dozen, but he explained that on Sunday there’s inevitably a flock around him.
Crouching among the birds, he told me he also dreams of opening a shop so that he can scale his operation. Although the bikes he hasn’t started restoring yet can rest atop his mobile home, he has to take all of his finished and in-progress bikes inside when he’s not working on them. Plus, he has several bikes of his own. This means he usually accepts only two bikes at a time from children and tells others to come back in two days. With a shop, he’d have space to store bikes and tools, as well as a location for business. “I’d love to get this program into every school in the world for all the kids,” he said, referring to his bike raffle. But he’s taking it one step at a time.
For now, he’s on the lookout for any bike that people have given up on and are selling for scrap metal, which he can buy for a few dollars. “I get whole bicycles that probably come off a bush or somewhere. They have all these leaves in them and chains so rusted, you can’t even turn them. But I bring them back to life.”
