Runway Imagination Soars With Flights of Fancy Trash

There is an ominous hum as the alien battle cruiser appears overhead, all sleek doom in a sky where clouds seem to cower from its presence. The craft’s futuristic lines are not of this age or world, and its surface bristles with unfathomable hi-tech devices. Slowly it pivots in the air above the city, its menacing continence turning to the humans clustered below.

On its snout-like prow obliteration beams are beginning to glow when, suddenly, a voice cries out in the crowd.

“Hey, isn’t that the portable carpet shampooer I threw out last month? And there’s a plastic Evian bottle, and those fuel cells, aren’t they. . . yes, they’re, specim e n cups! We’re being menaced by space trash!”

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Speculative fiction stories for years have suggested that Earth solve its landfill problem by blasting our trash into outer space. John Delacroix is way ahead of them, building fantastic spacecraft and other unseemly vehicles out of the junk of our modern life.

Most of the constructs in Delacroix’s Cypress apartment appear worthy of screen time in a George Lucas film, and it’s a bit of a shock when he takes a viewer on a tour of their parts.

Pointing to sections of a three-foot long spacecraft on his living room table, the 45-year-old said, “These are computer game joysticks, in halves. These are bits of a toy robot. These are electric typewriter carbon cartridges. These are toothbrush holders. This is a scented toilet paper holder. There’s an 8-millimeter film reel, and a fax machine paper track. This is the tank of a portable carpet cleaner.”

Components of other creations include a broken General Electric “curl tamer,” windshield wipers, toilet valves, bits of VCRs and computer boards, broken toys and the aforementioned urine sample specimen cups.

On average his pieces cost him $2 each to make, with parts coming from the Cypress College swap meet right behind his apartment complex. The vehicles aren’t time-intensive either, with most completed in less than four hours. His pieces are entirely black or primer gray, because they highlight the appearance and because he is colorblind. “I’m like Henry Ford with his Model T’s,” he said. “You can have it any color as long as it’s black, white or gray.”

He builds them in his cluttered garage, using only a propane torch, needle-nose pliers, screwdrivers, a hand drill and a hacksaw. He doesn’t use power tools because the electricity to the garages is on a timer that only goes on at night.

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Delacroix’s parents were French, and he was born in Venezuela after his parents honeymooned there and liked it so much they stayed. They moved to Southern California in 1956, in plenty of time for Delacroix to be entranced by the custom-car culture of the time. He started doing his own customizing on a small scale.

“I used to take models and enhance them. I’d boil water and take the front end of a model car and dip it in the water until the plastic got soft, and then start shaping and forming it the way I wanted,” he said. In the ‘60s he’d buy models of Ed (Big Daddy ) Roth’s twisted cars, “and I’d even find ways to enhance them.”

He’s spent his adult life in the grocery and dry-cleaning businesses and most recently worked for a swap-meet vendor who had him sorting out abandoned storage space lots she purchased. That was the source of some of the junk he uses for his creations. He’s recently unemployed and not looking forward to pounding the pavement again looking for work.

An intense, compact man, Delacroix said he took up model-making again eight months ago, “to relax me, to take my mind off the everyday struggle. Patience: I have none. But this takes a lot of patience, so I psych myself into it, into the details.”

He doesn’t read any modeling or science-fiction magazines and has only seen one “Star Wars” and a single “Mad Max” movie years ago. His inspiration and designs all come from his head. “I just throw whatever things I have on the table, look at it all and determine what it’s going to be.”

He cuts pieces to shape, then uses the propane torch to heat plastic parts and bend them to match his vision. A significant part of one predatory-looking spacecraft was made from a child’s tricycle seat he’d heated and held in a new shape for 20 minutes as it cooled. He doesn’t use glues, instead heating screws with the torch until they are red hot and driving them into the plastic.

One of the most inventive pieces hanging in his apartment is titled “The Last Dogfight” and shows a World War II-era fighter exploding into bits, with fake flames and smoky cotton wadding completing the scene.

“That was supposed to be a whole airplane,” Delacroix said. “But I went to sink a screw in after heating it. The sun was going down, the light got right in my eyes and I sank the red-hot thing in my finger. So I picked up the plane and threw it against the wall! And as I watched it hit, that’s how it looked. I picked up the pieces, added the cotton and there it is.”

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He also has made motorcycles, helicopters, “Mad Max”-inspired trucks, underwater exploration craft and a battered-looking space station made with discarded computer PC boards, a pool skimmer and the back of a television picture tube. Unlike his others, the piece took him two weeks to complete because he wired scores of tiny lights into it. “An electrician I am not,” he said, that statement underscored a few seconds later by the station’s lights blowing out.

He’s tried selling some of his items at the swap meet but finds customers in that market don’t want to part with the $75 to $100 he asks for his pieces. He’s given more away than he has sold to family members, friends and to people he knows with children. (Folks interested in buying Delacroix’s works can reach him at (714) 527-3606.)

He said he thinks he would fare better selling his pieces if he took them to toy shows or science-fiction meets.

“I’d do that, but I burnt my car up driving back and forth from Temecula visiting my mom before she passed away. So I’ve been without a car for four months, and you can’t do very much on your feet. It’s kind of hard to drag these around on the bus without looking too conspicuous,” he said.

Ideally, he would love to work for George Lucas’ Industrial Lights and Magic special-effects team, but he has no idea how to even contact such people. In the meantime, he’s content to realize local goals.

“One thing that really gets me going about doing this is there is an 11-year-old boy whose grandfather lives downstairs, and he comes by to watch me work. He does model kits now, and he’s totally excited about doing this now, and I told him I’d help him.

“I have a brother who has been suggesting I do something like that with this, saying I should display these in shows at schools. If doing that I could inspire one kid to pick up a blowtorch and create something instead of picking up a gun and destroying, I’ve really done something,” he said.