It turns out that Brooks and Gerchario aren't aimless adolescents with a death wish but, rather, highly trained professionals who actually have been instructed on the finer points of setting oneself on fire. That's right, they are trained stuntmen who honed their skills on the set stages at Six Flags Elburg in Holland (just outside of Amsterdam, a city known, we might point out, for sparking stuff up). The gig first came their way via Brooks's cousin, Kenneth Rhodes, a stunt performer himself who worked his way up until he was producing shows and hiring talent for Six Flags Elburg. Rhodes was assembling new talent for Six Flags' Batman stage show and offered Brooks a job. Brooks, like any good buddy, asked his friend of almost two decades, Gerchario, to come along to Holland with him.
Rhodes first said that the pair would be learning basic stunt skills and training to serve as stand-ins for the real stunt guys. But when the two got to Holland, Rhodes surprised them by fully training both men; he already had two professional stuntmen participating in the show and figured that having an additional two fully trained stuntmen at his disposal would allow the experienced pair a day off once in a while.
Before they knew it, Brooks and Gerchario found themselves living in Holland, building the sets for the stunt shows each day and learning the tricks of their new trade from the highly experienced French, Russian and English pros on the crew. A few weeks later, when the two experienced stuntmen up and quit, Brooks and Gerchario suddenly found themselves running the show. Just two months after touching down in Holland, the two kids from Texas were the star performers in Six Flags Elburg's Batman and Spy Catcher thrill shows, busting their asses in three 20-minute shows per day, in which they each played three roles.
Brooks and Gerchario loved what they were doing, though the rest of the crew probably didn't love them back with nearly as much enthusiasm. Brooks is a world-class practical joker who became known for setting trip wires back stage and pitching water balloons over the stage doors, so other cast members would occasionally be acting out their piece in front of the crowd while soaking wet or suffering a bloody nose, courtesy of the "stunt guy."
Last year, the park's stunt shows were cancelled, and Brooks and Gerchario abandoned Amsterdam's many distractions and returned back to their Texas homes. It was then that they discovered sportbike stunting. When they left the Lone Star State years back, everything was dirt bikes, but now all their two-wheeled acquaintances were into streetbike stunting-an activity that seemed second-nature to these two. Brooks and Gerchario began hanging out at a stunt practice spot at a Fort Worth-area abandoned airport, which is where they first met Patrick Stephens. Talk eventually turned to what Brooks and Gerchario did in their "real lives," and Stephens invited them to put their two skills together for a debut at his recent Make Them Hate It video release party, and the Pyro Punks were born.