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Renewed Interest in Skateboarding: True story It probably all started when I was 8 or 9 and some poor soul left his plastic Flexdex skateboard with red wheels on the porch of my house, the casualty of an unforeseen war with which I was totally unfamiliar at the time. Kids used to race those things in front of my house, down the hill of a street that ended in a dangerous four-way intersection. It was a bad place for speed wobble and time delayed logic to combine in an accident, making for multiple instances of thrills and carnage during summer months. This was a fact that I’d learn later on in life. But for then, I considered those boys and their pastime to be careless indulgences. Eventually, I used that blue, plastic deck to familiarize myself with the intricacies involved in skateboard movement. At the time, though, it was merely a symbol of what was to come. My next experience involved being older, maybe twelve, and visiting some family friends in Marin County, California. A whooshing sound would overwhelm the relative seclusion of suburban wilderness frequently in the late evenings. It was the time of night when I would become trapped in waking silence because of an inability to adjust to pacific zoning and fall asleep before 3 am, a disorder with which I am still plagued. When we were up late together one night, the lady of the house attributed the noises I heard to skateboarders taking to the hills in the dark and riding them at high speeds, through sharp curves and during hours when they were least likely to run into cars. This was in the days before street luge at the x-games or even the x-games at all, and although I was twelve not too long ago, it was a totally different era in terms of extreme activity. Bombing huge hills was a reality that was unprecedented and epic, especially in the mind of an urban pre-teen from the east coast. Every sound I heard at night in California, resembling wind, speed, the wooshing of anything in motion became daring figures on skateboards. It was a magical and exciting fantasy for me to ponder as I lay in an unfamiliar bed, buried my head in pillows, listened to Face to Face and thought about the downhillers. Those are the times to which I am referring. Eventually, I bought my own skateboard and attempted an awkward, introductory shuffle-with-wheels on the rough asphalt of my driveway. Talents did not progress much beyond that point for a while. I lacked true diligence and motivation. I arrived at high school, a misanthropic teen in the throes of rebellion and the beginnings of anti-conformist thinking, having to join a class of 400 kids, most of who had been together since the seventh grade. The best part of that school was the diversity it exposed me to. I stayed for four years and inevitably made good friends. **** The day that stands out in my mind was sunny, June and near the end of the interminable stretch of combined warm weather and shuffling papers that, no matter what the incentives are, never mix appropriately. We cut school and went to Cambridge, rode the green line and held our skateboards. E was on the soccer team, lived in Dorchester and was raised in a traditional Irish household, a good Bostonian athlete with a wild streak. In those days, she experimented with same-sex relationships and dyed her hair. She was into skateboarding, and so we hung out. We skated in front of our friend’s house in an otherwise quiet West Roxbury neighborhood, the sounds of trucks on curbs disrupting the calm, us out of breath, while our buddies inside drank cheap beer and made out with each other. B was a reformed goth, a kid who once wore stockings on his hands, black lipstick, mascara and white facepaint, who had somehow morphed into a male-chauvinist prick with a good heart when nobody was paying attention. He used to skate and had red Sal23’s. They circulated amongst our friends, somehow, in the way that trading shoes is a phenomenon that can only survive within the ridiculous conventions of high school. B was over it and then, that day, in his manly leather dress shoes, suddenly back into it for about three hours. R was Filipino and into hip hop, so he came at it from that angle. Having grown up in San Jose, he had a board under him before he could think about its significance, gave it up not so long after, moved to Boston and found himself with a renewed interest in the dangerous hobby of his younger years. He was in my tenth grade math class, and he came along. We escaped school, rolled around the brick sidewalks of Cambridgeside, ollied onto stairs and off of them, took badly timed pictures of ourselves and sucked, overall. Somehow, there were connections to the thriving pro skate scene in Boston, so new decks would appear within the crowd intermittently, and we experimented with them when something broke or wore out. But we really had no idea what we were doing, and that is the beauty of those days and why I look back upon them with such fondness. Nothing ever progressed beyond the point of low ollies, an occasional landed shove-it that would take us by surprise, 50-50 stalls and weak acid drops. We got tired after that summer, stopped hanging out and put down the boards. Perhaps the most startling event to happen during what I can now refer to as “those glory days” was the near death experience of a kid we all looked to as a sort of mysterious skate guru. Blonde-haired, lanky framed and quiet, he would do crazy things in the back of school and we’d just stare and watch, sometimes ask “what was that?” He’d reply “shove-it double kickflip,” nonchalantly, never lose his rhythm and keep on rolling down the street. He was the kind of person you could tell to ollie twelve stairs to torn up concrete, and he’d do it immediately, without hesitation. He’d land, roll away and then say something really abstract about fusion, electricity or drugs. The thing that happened and made us think was that he OD’d on acid, almost died, caused us all to reconsider our priorities and then made a recovery, although never fully. He was just that type of guy. A certain era ended some time around his accident, when we all became serious for about a minute and grew up, temporarily. *** I made new friends in eleventh grade who would sit by the Copley fountain and spoon out food to hungry and curious passersby. We would go to sweaty basement shows together, see people scream and love with all our hearts the reek and intensity of those small spaces, full of pounding noise, dirty punks, wild bodies and crazy antics. I started skating again on a journey from a basement show into Roxbury to buy a dinner of hummus and pita. We got on thrashed decks that came out of someone’s trunk and moved through the colorful streets at dusk. It was a rough and flawless transition. Later that summer, we went to Plymouth (MA) one night, kind of late and so the skatepark was closed, but the fence was still climbable. Kids who reminded me of myself three years before sat atop a pyramid in the corner, drinking vodka, making fun of the girls and guys they had their eyes on and, overall, trying to appear a whole lot cooler than they actually were. We pumped transitions sloppily. I can remember boardsliding to jumping out of this one long rail that was basically lying on the ground. All the obstacles were too high, and I didn’t know what I should do with them. Later we kicked down the sandy but well paved streets, went new places and met up with the local contingent of young hellions. We spit on “the rock” while proselytizing about the Native American experience in the early days of Puritan invasion. Later, we skated to the pier, took off our shoes and thought about the significance of all the small fish swimming and our legs swinging over the ocean at the edge of a continent. The best part of that night and the whole summer in general was the wonderful experience of recklessness and passion it fully took advantage of. I’ve since lost those days, but I treasure them like tangible antiques made out of delicate ceramic or glass. Other than that, I’d ride down to a flat street alone, ollie on to and off of the curb for a while, lock into 50-50s, move no further and disturb the relative serenity of the neighborhood. All of this was to the dismay of people who would actually come out of their houses and yell at me. September, I moved to Colorado and left my skateboard behind. When I came back, two years later, via Vermont, my best friend, through an overall interest in self destructiveness, bought himself a board and said “let’s skate.” I willingly fell back into it, into rolling through bank parking lots, train stations and strip malls late at night, cutting into the terrain and leaving suddenly. I had lost all the pop I once had and was sloppy with my feet and unfamiliar with the board underneath me, and as such I remained. There wasn’t enough time to regain skills I had mastered in the past. When is there? In terms of now, my dance major friend and I took out our skateboards on a fateful night in November, but that was all. In total, it was an unsuccessful and frustrating endeavor that I almost wish had never happened; I realized I lost almost everything I once knew. ***** About a year ago, a guy I used to hang out with talked a lot about skating and told me that some kids built a mini ramp in their basement and that we should go skate it, but he moved away before we could try it out. Today is different than anything before. I don’t know if it’s the well-crafted shoes on my feet, a readily approaching summer, seeing other people gracefully flip boards underfoot, or whether it’s because I have this history, but I want in again. For days in the past, in the present and the future let me skate. |
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