Ghost Rider

His state ID says he’s 65, but David Lloyd, aka Ghost Rider, says he feels like he’s 21. The quiet, tall, high school athlete was born in Iceland. His mother died in childbirth. At the age of 5 his father moved them to New York City. Lloyd said his father remarried, and joined the US Navy Seals, though I have not independently verified his father’s military history. Lloyd’s father died from exposure to Agent Orange while he was in Vietnam, where he also spent six months as a POW. His father went on to fight in Korea. “He went from 250 pounds to 60 pounds because of Agent Orange,” Lloyd said. His father passed away in 1985.

Lloyd always liked, and was good at, baseball. He was a switch hitter. He was also into BMX bikes and rode them across city rooftops. He loved the feeling of being in the air. Local police regularly called his father about his rooftop antics. Lloyd quit high school a month before graduation. He got caught selling marijuana. He got his GED while in jail, at age 18.

His father moved around with the military, largely stationed in San Diego and Hawaii. As an avowed miscreant, Lloyd “did a lot of bad stuff on the base but never got caught.” He tried to enlist but was told by a recruiter “the military wasn’t taking the last son,” since his brothers had all joined up. “I took a test to join the Air Force and only missed one question,” he said “I wanted to be a pilot. I would have been the only one in the family to fight from the air.”

He loved being in Hawaii nevertheless. He remembers going into a volcano once to collect some special blue flowers to prove his love for a certain girl. At age 21 he proposed to his girlfriend by asking a friend to sky write “Will you marry me?” above them while they were on a date. When their daughter Rebecca was two years old, his wife was killed by a drunk driver. He moved back home to get help raising her. Rebecca is a “computer whiz,” Lloyd said, with a “120 IQ working at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.”

Lloyd’s stepmother was a “tough Irish woman born in Dublin and raised in Belfast,” he said. He had a hard time accepting her as a replacement for the mother he never knew. “It took me ten years to call my step-mom my ‘mom’” Lloyd said. When that happened he cried, and she cried. When he left home for good he was 35. He didn’t have a job or home lined up, so he started flashing signs at intersections saying he would work for food. He began mowing lawns and doing landscaping. He began roaming, landing in Florida for a few years, then Canada. He stayed on an Indian Reservation for while with a girlfriend of Apache heritage. He learned to use medicinal herbs and live off the land. When they broke up he roamed a more urban landscape, hustling at pool tables and card games. He tried to commit suicide twice - once playing Russian roulette with a pistol, and once he jumped off a ferry near the Statue of Liberty into freezing water. A priest threw him a life preserver from the ferry and he took it.

He was in New York working as a bike messenger on 9/11. Someone from the Port Authority pulled him out of the dust, and he remembers the two of them giving someone else CPR. In New York he fell in with a woman named Red Feather and stuck with her through her detox. She died in 2006 of cirrhosis of the liver after five years without a drink. They had been living on the street next to “one of the baddest police departments in the city.” But Red Feather had charmed the police officers there with her recovery efforts. They were sad about her passing and put a plaque with her name in the sidewalk, Lloyd said.

Eventually he got tired of the city. He left a good apartment he’d secured with a Section 8 housing voucher, and headed back to San Diego in 2015. He tried surfing at Sunset Cliffs but got discouraged the first time he crashed and got scraped up on barnacles when he crawled back up on the rocks. Currently he spends most of his time in Balboa Park carving and painting walking sticks. He said a policewoman once bought one from him for $100 as a gift for her mother. He said he doesn’t understand why people won’t get serious about global warming. “This heat is the beginning of Armageddon,” he said. “It’s gong to be nasty. Most people don’t know how to survive” without all the modern appliances and comforts. “I want there to be a Noah’s Ark with every race onboard” when the planet is threatened with destruction due to climate change.