In the Pink

He flits playfully through the crowd at Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, his unicycle zigzagging around light posts and barnstorming into stores. All the while, he’s shaking hands, singing songs, slapping high-fives and drawing dead-in-your-tracks stares in his hot-pink leotard, complete with pink cap and gloves.

He’s L.A.’s newest beach phenomenon, bopping across Santa Monica and Venice Beach, flapping his wings like some pink flamingo, doing graceful 360s on his cycle, an unconscious cross between Superman and Peewee Herman on wheels.

He is Pink Man.

In a city so weary of the weird it’s hard to get a second look, 36-year-old Michael Maxfield is drawing rave reviews with his feel-good, positive-pink street persona that has even the grouchiest Angelenos cracking a smile.

He’s neither panhandler nor money-chasing street performer, just an infectiously good-natured guy who prefers “pinking”--donning his blindingly pink uniform, hopping atop his unicycle and hitting the streets to shake people up.

He’s a divorced father of two who says he was once so depressed he contemplated suicide, a sometimes homeless East Coast transplant who twice a week steps into his cartoon-wacky routine, seeking nothing but a little self-affirmation from everyone he meets.

Both heckled and hailed, he swoops along beach-area streets, flapping the gray cape made by one of his fans, smilingly in your face, an antidote for an all-too-serious world.

And then he’s gone.

Maxfield’s creed? “I pink,” he says. “Therefore, I am.”

On Main Street in Santa Monica, a trendy stretch of shops and eateries that long ago lost its tolerance for token troubadours and scheming street performers, Maxfield has become a folk hero of sorts, invoking throaty cries of “Hey, Pink Man!” wherever he goes.

“I saw him a few weeks ago and I thought ‘What’s this guy’s game?’ ” says Tahna Cabanes, an employee at Wednesday’s House restaurant. “But he doesn’t have any game. He’s just Pink Man. That’s just what he is.”

Pink Man makes regular appearances along Main Street, cycling right inside shops, facing off with customers. But David Teck, owner of the World Cafe, doesn’t mind one bit.

“It’s all done very quickly,” he says. “He does a brief performance, like a flash in the pan. He doesn’t hang around until you’re bored. By the time you say, ‘What the heck is that?’ he’s already gone. [But] when you see him, no matter what mood you’re in, you instantly feel better.”

Maxfield migrated south to Los Angeles from Berkeley a few months ago in the hopes of turning his pink persona into a career.

He has been hired to hand out fliers and Robeks Juice semi-frozen drinks and has made quick “cycle through” appearances to jazz up the drinking scene at area bars. There’s even talk of a Venice artist creating a Pink Man computer screen-saver.

Fans tell him they’ve seen his picture on the “more-to-come” shots between commercials on the “Tonight Show.” Pink Man will also be featured as a loony blind date in the upcoming independent film “Three Girls South of Oxnard.”

The owner of a Venice animation design studio is developing an animated show featuring Pink Man as a character from another dimension who spreads good cheer on Earth. But animator Rob Kramer recognizes the fragility of Maxfield’s commercial appeal.

“People have already told him he’s a marketer’s dream,” Kramer says, “but in this country they burn out these phenomena as quickly as they make them. So Michael’s being careful.”

A native of Massachusetts, Maxfield picked up his first unicycle as a 13-year-old and a decade later was working as a cycling performer called Jester Max. But moving to Oregon, he soon tired of clowning and began looking for a new persona.

That’s when he saw a one-piece pink body suit in a dance-wear catalog and went wild with pink passion. He bought the brightest shade and planned to create a spaceman character. But first he took a test ride on the University of Oregon campus.

“People started yelling, ‘Pink Man!’ And I thought, ‘Hey, I am Pink Man!’ ”

That was 1995. Soon, Maxfield was doing a promotion for the local soccer team in Portland. Then he moved to Berkeley, doing selected pinkings around town, even performing in the off-the-wall How Berkeley Can You Be? parade.

Maxfield came to Los Angeles earlier this year on a trial run, pinking outside the Academy Awards and enjoying being taken for some kind of celebrity.

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But with pinking comes some predicaments.

Bottles and punches have been thrown at him from passing cars. Once in Berkeley, he was grabbed by someone in a car and dragged 50 feet. At Venice Beach, he’s almost been ticketed by the, ahem, Pinkertons.

Maxfield says he overcame thoughts of suicide several years ago after a talk with a hotline counselor. Now, zinging along the streets, his attitude is, “Who cares what they think! I didn’t kill myself. I’m still alive!”

Life’s still bumpy. Balancing the highs are the dark days when Maxfield doesn’t feel so pink and avoids going out, even without his suit. There are the crying jags over his children, who live in Oregon, and the fact that he has no home. Often short of cash, Maxfield says he has spent nights sleeping on the beach in Santa Monica.

Recently, he was taken in by two Pink Man fans in that city, one of whom loaned Maxfield her car so he could visit his children.

Meanwhile, the lithe, 150-pound Pink Man pedals on.

On the promenade, he cycles in circles, crowing like a skinny rooster, making goofy animal calls, chasing a flock of pigeons.

“I can’t help myself,” he says to a bystander. “It’s like I have to do it.”

And then he’s gone.