Thrashed

"I wasn't exactly a star quarterback, but somehow cheerleaders still wanted to date me," he adds. "Life was golden. It's amazing how things change."

Then came the 1983 accident. Robbie was on crutches while his knee healed. Then his parents divorced. There were no fireworks, but it took a toll on the family. Robbie's connection to the big-time — Powell-Peralta and Walker — evaporated. And then, just before Christmas, Scott came within a hair of doing jail time. He was zipping through the neighborhood in his El Camino when one of his friends, riding in the pickup bed, threw something at a car full of young Hispanic men, Robbie explains. "The guys followed Scott, and he was terrified," he adds. "They followed him home, and he thought they were going to beat the shit out of him, so he went inside the house and got his shotgun. He fired over their heads to scare them." Scott was arrested and charged with two counts of felony aggravated assault. Prosecutors later dropped the charges.

"It was a weird period of time," Robbie says. "I really didn't know what the hell to do with myself." His dad helped him get a job at the airport, cleaning planes for Eastern Airlines.

Emotionally it all hit home two years after graduation. Robbie's knee had healed, and he'd begun to skate a little. But he was floundering. (The lone bright spot for Robbie was Scott's health. Despite poor prognoses from doctors since birth, Scott seemed as strong as ever.)

"I guess I probably had an attitude back then," Robbie says. "I just thought that if you worked hard at something, you became good at it. And if you became really good at something, good things would happen to you. I didn't understand why the good things had stopped happening."

In 1985 Robbie left Eastern and found a job driving a UPS van. "I got a delivery in the suburbs somewhere, and I get to the house, and it was a skateboard I had to deliver to some kid," he says. "I had a, almost a flashback, and all I could think about was how I used to wait for the UPS truck to bring my boards, especially after I got on the Walker team. They'd be bringing me stuff all day. It had only been five years before, but it felt like forever. I really almost broke down."

It took Robbie fifteen years to find success again.

"Here's the thing about Robbie," his dad says. "I don't think he's some kid who was good at skateboarding and got lucky with other things. I think he's a kid who works so hard he would have found success at anything. But he did go through tough times trying to figure out what exactly to do for a living."

As the Eighties ebbed, Robbie slowly built a life for himself. He'd skate the occasional exhibition to make a few bucks and promote a ramp-building business that he'd launched in his dad's back yard.

He found occasional stunt work in commercials, TV shows, and movies (Bad Boys, Deadwood). And he discovered an entrepreneurial bent he never suspected in himself. "I was doing an exhibition in Lauderdale and I brought one of my ramps up there," he says. "There was a woman there who started asking me about if I built the ramps and how I hauled them around and the kind of work I'd done," he says. "I had no idea what she wanted. But then her husband called and offered me a job."

Soon Robbie was ferrying around beautiful women in tony RVs for the ACT Modeling Agency. Using his ramp-building expertise, he also began building portable sets, a useful commodity in South Florida, where unpredictable weather can often ruin plans for a shoot. "It was great," Robbie says. "I started making a little money, and I got to hang around all these models."

In 1990, after he'd been working in the modeling world for two years, Robbie met South Beach fashion photographer Willie Miller. "I thought he was the rudest guy I'd ever met," Robbie says.

Miller, Robbie's elder by twenty years, acts and dresses like a perpetual adolescent. The two have become close friends. "Robbie's the shy one, and I'm the one who's not afraid to talk to women I don't know," says Miller (whose preferred pickup method seems to be yelling, "Nice shoes!" at women on Lincoln Road). "Not that Robbie isn't happy to just stand around looking young and healthy and wind up getting the women that I put in the work for."