The View From The Mezzanine

 I've got a lot of thoughts. 

Too many, actually. I am frequently irritated how difficult it is for me to calm my mind when I get excited about a project. Its consuming, but its also the only way anything has ever gotten done for me. Obsessive, passionate, clever, maybe even a little bit shrewd when it calls for it.

My life is probably fairly atypical comparative to most folks, and I really think for my own sanity and hopefully someone else's enjoyment...I should be sharing these adventures, misfortunes, triumphs. 

It means a lot to me that all of you are here to keep up with what's going on, things have changed a lot in the last 5 years and life is only going to get more insane. 

So fuck it.

Lets start from the top and be honest with each other, then from here we can just get straight to the point...right? I feel its important for everyone to have a good feel for me before going on this road trip together.

I'm Coyote Black.

No that's not entirely my birth given name, but once you get to know me...it'll all make sense.

I'm a weird dude, I've done a lot of weird, awesome, difficult things in my life. I think that very few people in this world actually see the full picture of who I am, mostly because my friend groups are all from totally different backgrounds and run in different circles that don't often overlap. This first post is going to make a lot of things really clear for everyone, and be a good foundation for the posts to come here. The process of starting this blog and really starting to document my life, and motorsports journey therein is massive therapy for me. I'm opening up a lot here, so I thank everyone again for going on this ride.


I knew I had depression when I was a kid, for sure. I have massive issues with irrational guilt/ anxiety/ depression still to this day...but it really sucked when you're like...10 years old the first time you realize it. I remember having to sleep on the floor directly next to a fan just to get racing thoughts out of my head and because I was just too depressed to get into bed. 

My parents were cool, good people that were good to me as well. I had a good life as a kid, but those brain chemicals just don't mix right sometimes.

That said, I already felt like I needed to get the fuck out of everywhere, adventure, be seen, make something of myself somehow. I remember watching Insomniac with Dave Attell as a kid. I would have been around 10-11 and probably absolutely should not have been watching that shit on summer nights around 1AM. That show though, man it seemed like the world was so wild, there was so much out there and I just wanted to get away and experience it all. I had some sort of absolute pure wanderlust as a kid that would serve me well into adulthood. 

That though, made me an indescribably difficult teenager.

Around 13-14 I started getting into skateboarding heavy, the punk rock scene, the metal scene, getting into bands...getting into trouble. I was already getting hammered off Zima with my buddies at band parties living the life...by about 16 we were already the known fun dudes to hang out with around the scene. These were some of the best, probably stupidest times of my young life. Needless to say, wasn't easy on my poor Mother, but she made it through...somehow.  I was bouncing between both of my divorced parents houses, totally unhappy with life begging for the day I was 18 to just get the fuck out into the world finally. I was fighting the world and everyone in it. I became a good student of anarchism, but that also lead me into getting into even more trouble

This is also around the time I found BMEzine,

For a kid who already had a taste for the extreme...BME was just perfect. I was kind of always looking for the most intense stuff I could find, and this body modification website was totally the thing I was looking for. Later in life, it would turn out, BME would play not only a huge role in my career but also my racing. More on that later. 

When I finally turned 18, I left home the same week. I met a girl online who lived in Minneapolis and left Pittsburgh to go adventure. The first time she came to see me here in town, she drove all the way here in her Porsche 911 (996) in bright yellow. That was the first time I think I really noticed cars, those cars. It was the primary car we drove too, even in the winters sometimes up there...so early seeds were planted.

 I was into hockey big time around this time, it was one of the few things that would keep my mind off my anxiety and depression. I had a really shitty drug trip on mushrooms that fucked me up really bad. Like, I spent a few months essentially alone in a room afraid of everything. Hockey was something new and exciting that didn't remind me of anything else. Of course moving to Minnesota, that's pretty much the main export...life was finally good.

I landed my apprenticeship not long after.

Which finally got me in the door to the industry in 2008. Piercing was so different even back then vs now...but I was fortunate enough to be in the right circles on BME so that I "came up" the right way in the industry. I also tattooed nearly my entire face, at 18 years old. What a time.

Piercing would end up being my life long 9-5 career to this day. I own the piercing side of a shop outside of Pittsburgh, PA called Mantis Tattoo and Piercing. The industry has been good to me to this day. I am very fortunate to be able to say that I work for myself, and do something that I enjoy every day. I was very fortunate to serve on the membership committee for the Association of Professional Piercers and gain a fair amount of recognition from peers in the industry in my time on this earth. I don't take a second of it for granted, even after 15 years.

What wasn't so fortunate was that one relationship with the girl in Minneapolis...when we split I was around 19 and I still didn't want to go home. What was the next best option?

New York City.

I came to NYC with almost nothing. I was living in my shitty Buick Century, or crashing with random friends from BME. I met some really great people, did some really cool stuff. I wasn't working, didn't really have any money. I'll be honest I have no idea how I stayed alive the first year. It was almost 100% from support of friends/ romantic partners. Not a great way to be, but I was 19 and having the time of my life. For awhile I worked in Hoboken piercing, skateboarding from Jersey City every day in any weather. Once I remember catching a weird piece of pavement jutting out of the side walk and eating shit, massively. I remember laying there freezing cold, not having eaten for probably two days just hating my life. It's weird how certain moments just stand out in your mind for the rest of your life. That was one of them.

I ended up driving back to Minnesota to pick up all my shit, and I got stuck there. Zero money. I had purposefully cut ties with everyone in my family so I was free to roam without them worrying all the time. Nobody really knew where I was or what I was up to and I wanted it that way. I ended up finding some cool folks from a couch surfing website that let me crash for a little while. 

I would play music on the streets on a borrowed acoustic guitar in front of St. Anthony's near the Mississippi. I'd play for probably 10 hours a day and if I made 5 bucks it was a phenomenal day. This is where I really started to understand what it was like to suffer a little bit...like for real. I would ask restaurants what they were throwing away so I could eat. Or dumpster dive, or whatever. It was pretty goddamn miserable honestly. I will say this is probably one of the most important times of my life though. A lot of folks who are in situations where they don't have money or means, or grow up without money or means seem to get this mentality where they decide they will never go back to living that way. Those people in my experience work themselves to death, and seldom take the time to enjoy their money or discover who they really are. It becomes a point of obsession just to constantly be earning, but never really living. This was the direct opposite for me, I found this liberating because I knew that no matter what risk I took...I knew how to survive with absolutely nothing. It gave me the permission to go for broke, all of the time.

Eventually a friend back in NYC wired some money so I could drive back to the city and stay with them. Once I landed back there I ended up getting a good job with a good dude at the mall at one of the early Zumiez stores. I was making enough money to get an apartment, got my shit together a little, and found a band to be in again. I wasn't drinking at this point in my life, I was around 20 about to turn 21 and I was still really weirded out from my bad trip about any kind of recreational drugs at all. The band I was in ended up doing some pretty cool stuff for a bit, I had plans to move to France with the bass player and do the metal thing full time. I was just going to overstay my visa and figure it out like usual. Personal differences, and my then girlfriend put the lid on that idea then. I found myself wanting to return back to Pittsburgh and have a better cost of living. 

My time in New York City was rough, It still feels like a weird dream because I have never been back since. I had a lot of hardship there that I'm not going into massive detail over but it was a really transformative time for me. I'm glad I did it. 

Pittsburgh called me home though.

I found myself back at my parents place briefly, the girl I moved home with and I split like two weeks after the move, what a mess. I found some bandmates on craigslist and ended up moving in together. That was the beginning of the wildest times of my entire life.

 Devil's Cut

Yeah. That was me about 10 years ago. All the band guys were living together out in Crafton going on 3 day drinking binges, playing shows, having gratuitous amounts of sexual debaucheries . We were basically living like we were Motley Crue, just without much money, thank god, because it probably would have killed us if we had the money. I was 21, and I was literally unstoppable at this time. We were having all the fun in the world but I was also slowly but surely working my way into being an alcoholic. It got to the point where I was drinking from the second I woke up until the second I went to bed. Old Crow was 8 bucks a bottle and I'd slip it in my leather jacket and just drink literally everywhere. I'd kill a bottle a day most days. Most of the other guys were pretty close to the same boat. It would not be out of the ordinary for me to sleep with 2-3 different women in the same day. I was most certainly not a role model.

We were going harder and faster month by month too...the parties were getting bigger, the shows were getting bigger. We found ourselves opening for some of the biggest bands in the 80's , and some of the shows I was too fucked up to even stand. 

We were good though, and god dammit we were fun. Below is a video of us opening for L.A. Guns. The song "Sleaze Rocket" was written about me. Oh if you were wondering also, this is when I changed my name to Coyote. I always related to the coyotes here in Pennsylvania. They're loud, up all night making noise, ripping shit up and causing trouble, most people think they're a nuisance and its actually legal to shoot them on sight here.  It just worked. My last name was already Black, so the rock star name just fit. It stayed too...

Spoiler, fun like that doesn't last forever.

I hit my breaking point after going to the hospital two times in two weeks for alcohol related issues. Both times I was too drunk to even see, and both times I was drinking in the hospital even.

I was living this fantasy too hard, and it was going to kill me, or someone else by accident driving home hammered from Club Erotica at 5am. I had decided it was just my time to go, and I was fine with it. My depression, guilt and anxiety was at an all time high. I wasn't a very good person around this time either. When you're that low, you just don't care about anything or anyone really. It was just a fast track to dying young and I was ready to just get on with it.

One night at the band house party, I met a smokin' gal. So I married her a week later. I was living that fast and loose. When I told our singer what went down his answer was "The girl from the other night? Nice, I would have too.". We were all out of our fucking minds.

I also became a step-dad overnight. 

My new wife had a son who was about 1.5 years old, whos biological father was not in the equation at all. I moved in with her, naturally, and life changed dramatically. Things just didn't feel the same. I was still drinking too much but I wasn't living at the band house (Sleaze House) anymore. Slowly but surely I came to the understanding that I can't be that guy anymore, and if I couldn't be that guy the entire dynamic of the band didn't make sense. It wouldn't be genuine to just act the part, so I hung it up. I haven't played music since. I had to let all of it or none of it go, so I did. For my own sake, and my family's sake. 

I found a really good reputable tattoo shop nearby that didn't offer piercing, they gave my Vince Neil looking ass a shot. It worked out too, that's still the shop I'm at to this very day. I've got two piercing children also, Nova and Kate. From this shop and the industry is how I met my now fiancé Hale as well. I'll always be grateful to the folks here for giving me that chance, I have no idea where my life would be if they hadn't. 

Life settled down, I was making more money, we moved into a nice house, and I cut my hair. I was living "normal" life to its fullest at this point. 

Which makes you itch.

Its hard to go from 100-0 like that. I was happy with my life, but I needed something to keep my mind moving forward. I went back to skateboarding, hockey, fitness, and then finally I was able to start getting into cars, as every suburban married male does. 

Automobiles were interesting to me the same way hockey was originally, I didn't know anything about them. It was a totally new thing and it was fun. It was also fun in such a way that kept me from partying, drinking, or wanting to go out and go wild. 

I ended up with a few cool street cars and that's when racing came in. I tried drag racing, and I was always interested in doing "Forza style racing" but really had zero idea where to start. I went to a local SCCA meeting once but nothing came of it, ironically now current day I actually serve on the board of directors for the region. 

 Eventually I ended up wanting to go fast on the street instead, so I bought a boosted Honda Civic that probably made 250hp and I swear to you that car was the fastest thing probably ever. 

Many blown up things later, I decided to revisit and really see what it took to go wheel to wheel racing. It seemed like the ultimate automotive sport to me and likely the hardest to get into. Just perfect for my sensibilities, you know, that it'll all just work out by the seat of my pants? Those ones.

Now, I can nearly write an entire book on what it took to get into road racing in the first place, but I did a video summary of that in 2019 that will sum it up nicely, and I'll give you the cliff notes below. 

In the shortest summary possible, I built a car in three months to go to road racing school. Bought a truck, trailer, and had a separate business making business cards (Spectre Cards, hence the team name) to pay for the bulk of it and still maintain some sense of normal life. 

It was probably one of the hardest things physically and mentally I had ever had to do, and I was all on my own with zero experience at the time. Eventually I made the connections to the team I have today (Joe, Mike, Ravi, many more) and things got slightly easier. However, just after the video above was filmed my wife at the time and I got divorced. Things just weren't working out, we were amicable and we're still on good terms to this day. I still see my son every week and I think we both just needed to move on. I was 28 or so when we ended up splitting up, so after 7 years in your 20's you just...change. It made sense and I think ultimately it was very much for the best for both of us.

This though left me at a point in my life where I was making the most money I ever had, I was winning races, I had notoriety in the piercing community, and I was single.

Back down the rabbit hole.

I lost my fucking mind, again. I grew my hair back out, I had come to terms with the fact I never wanted to be in a monogamous relationship again, and I was going to live on my own terms forever. I have a very strong sense of who I am, and what I want typically...so I was going to chase after it. 

My primary goals were to become a national champion in SCCA road racing and then go to professional racing. Also to drink, party and have as much sex as humanly possible in my off time. Which as you would expect, lead me directly back down the path of my old band days. I was a total mess. I had some really amazing romantic relationships that I really wanted to last but polyamory is not for everyone. Its a tough life too, most folks don't even realize that I have more than one partner so its not something I get to even talk about too much. I have lost more relationships than I've gained living this way, but it is absolutely who I am, I know that. My partners Hale and Nikki now are the most understanding, forgiving, and kind people in my life. I am so lucky to be loved the way I am. 

Anyway, I was a fucking mess coming into the pandemic. I was very close to suicide a number of times. I felt very alone, and I was. I was single the whole time and spent all the time totally by myself, alone in a room, just like when I was younger. Without racing or anything to keep me sane I really deteriorated fast, likely one of the darkest times of my life mentally. This is when my now Fiancé Hale decided to take a chance on me and fly out from Portland, Oregon. The rest, as they say, is history. 

Racing came back in 2021 and we were back to work. Mechanical hardships, money, and aggravation with classing and bad luck had me leave SCCA after the 2021 Runoffs at Indianapolis. A pro series from the west coast was just starting out this year (22) called USTCC. It was a much easier classed series that was entry level pro racing. Perfect. I'm in. 

This brings us to modern day, after skimming a great deal.

Today I have found a balance between the absolutely wild side of myself, and the logical side. I am grounded by the people around me and I have a much healthier relationship with my vices. I have decided that instead of spinning my wheels with Honda, that if I'm going to be disappointed or deal with mechanical hardships at least I'm going to do it in a Porsche. Which is the newest chapter in the hardest shit I've ever done, but hey...It'll probably be fine, right?

We had landed an unbelievable, once in a lifetime sponsorship with Savage Garage earlier this year thanks to my dear friend Rachel Larratt. Somehow, the cosmos decided to rip not only her but also Randy Savage away from the world too soon about three months after we signed the contract. So not only did I lose one of my closest friends, we're also starting from zero again, when less than a year ago we likely would not have had to ever think about money for racing again. 

Life is weird, racing is hard, but it still beats asking for expired beans in Minneapolis.

So we keep going.

This blog is about motorsports, my journey, or team's journey, and my life at the time. 

Even if nothing else, it will be here to document my ride, If new friends or interest comes from it that's even better. I get nostalgic, so I do love to look back on things. I hope this serves as a good conduit for that. I cant promise I wont get off the topic sometimes, but this is ultimately an extension of myself, however irreverent, irrational, or ludicrous it may be sometimes. I hope anyone who read through this has a better handle on who I am, as a person, before we get into all the ridiculous choices I'll be making shortly building this car.

I have sold, as of October, all of my race cars, street cars, and toys to be able to buy either a 911 or Cayman full prep car. Why? because it seems impossible, and I like that. I plan on renaming the team Mezzanine Motorsports. Firstly, because Mezzanine is one of my favorite albums from Massive Attack, secondly I like to think I have reached a point in my life where I can look over all that I've done, learn from it, and keep moving. The view from the mezzanine is different. Perspective is a hell of a thing. 

Like Paul Newman before me, who had great successes and other loves in other facets of his life, was a racing driver first. 

Being a racing driver is who I am, and what I need to do to be fulfilled as a human being. Which is why this fire burns so brightly, and why I put myself through so much heartache and bullshit to get to these races. Its a metaphor for everything I have ever done. 

I'm glad I have you all with me. Get in nerds, we're going Porscheing. 


Live fast, Eat ass