Locomotion and Other Obsessions

My skateboarding ambitions started modestly enough. Any wheeled thing represents the same opportunity to a teenage boy–locomotion. To see any of us, you’d have to catch us on the run, a collective frenzy of motion not heading anyplace necessarily. But constantly on the go.

Those days, a ten-speed bicycle was the coveted mode of transport (a Schwinn if your family had the scratch, mine didn’t), a high-end cruiser, the handlebars curled under to foster a racing pose. This was supplemented with a no-gear bike, built ourselves from spare parts bought and scavenged and traded from throughout the neighborhood. Mind you, this was a couple decades ahead of the internet age with the likes of eBay and letgo, OfferUp, placing at your fingertips a world of treasure that no longer serves the needs of someone else.

You knew someone who heard about someone who had the frame or rims or crank assembly you needed. A handful of shrewdly bartered exchanges, and your daily-rider came together, some with composite wheels and knobby tires suited for BMX (well before that was a thing). Others, like mine, had a banana seat with a modest sissy bar. We set out to perfect the art of wheelie riding, our aim to spend as much time on one wheel as two, the front tire dangling in the air ahead of us, our narrow frames providing needed counterbalance.

Originating among west coast surfing communities, skateboarding was slow to make its way to our sleepy little corner of Connecticut. It too requiring balance and grace mixed with a bit of daring, skateboarding offered its own special brand of exhilaration–ride an asphalt wave and be set free.

My first skateboard was a hard-plastic thing bought from the local sporting goods store, cheap imitation invariably the main path toward any new craze gaining widespread availability. The wheels were nearly as rigid as the deck, polyurethane infused with age-old concrete as far as I’m concerned. It was fine for tricks, wheelies and front-/back-side 360 spins (completing as many rotations as you could muster before setting the front wheels back on the asphalt). But downhill, it was a death trap.

Gary Cooper, Billy Fume and I set out one summer to shoot a skateboarding movie along the steep descent leading away from Grasso Tech in the direction of Sutton Park, each of us taking turns as cameraman screaming downhill alongside our cohorts. Had we only taken ourselves more seriously, we might have beaten Super 8 or Boyhood to the punch–to the screen as it were. (Had we only had better boards, more pliable wheels especially, we might have managed to string together downhill runs consistently enough to capture a couple of worthwhile scenes.)

This is where things get personal. I don’t write memoir. But my fiction is laced with tiny bits of who I am, how I got here, the factors that most influenced me along the way. For me, memoir constitutes little more than this. Only, confined to some fictional world, the story line provides a bit of distance from those aspects of the narrative that ring true, sparing me the task of fully assessing to what extent those things have yet to work themselves out.

 

KoPPM – Commissioned Skateboard, Board Life 12/15

The formative years are widely understood to span the first five or so years of a child’s life. It has been my experience that this period repeats itself every decade or so. The years between ten/eleven and thirteen or fourteen represented for me a period of significant change. I can trace three longstanding pursuits to that point in time, my passion for which has persisted to this day.

My parents divorced when I was ten. After a stint living on the other side of town, my father pulled some strings, called in a favor (or wore out his welcome, depending who you let tell it), and got stationed in Pearl Harbor. A career Navy man, it would take him full-circle, one last tour before retiring in the bosom of paradise. But it came at a cost.

Thirteen is the last year I played organized baseball. I was lanky even before I grew tall. Once I convinced the coach to let me catch, it was nearly impossible to get anything past me behind the plate. That gangly length didn’t spell much in the way of power hitting, but I was a consistent, Ichiro or Jeter-like contact hitter. Plus, I “had wheels”–Forrest Gump-type speed. Once on base, I tormented the pitcher, threatening to steal if not take the extra base in the first place. Traditionally a father-son pursuit, when my father left, there went baseball for me too.

My father’s departure also meant more frequent trips with my mother and sister to visit my mom’s mom in NYC, placing me at the cusp of a budding hip-hop generation. I’d sit pressed close to a speaker in my grandparents’ bedroom, the volume on the radio broadcast turned down low so as not to disrupt life in the rest of their apartment. Another several months would pass before someone showed up with a cassette recording of Rapper’s Delight–Sugarhill Gang, the whole lot of us huddled outside Fitch Senior High’s soon to be christened new basketball gymnasium, hungry for something to call our own. I have since become a bit of a connoisseur, hip-hop having matured to amass a catalogue of classics.

Somewhere along the way, my father caught wind of my interest in skateboarding. At this stage, he was already a couple of years into his new life in Hawaii, the undeniable epicenter of surfing culture (and by natural extension skateboarding culture). It is the one silver lining to my parents breaking up. He sent me a skateboard one year for Christmas or a birthday or some such occasion. It upped my game.

My sister and I visited Honolulu for the first time when I was thirteen. Forget the sights, the tropical scenery. I borrowed our father’s bike, an aging Schwinn ten-speed after all (evidently, at some point or another, our father had the scratch), and made the trek cross-island to a skateboard shop. I bought a set of Bones, off-white supple urethane wheels. On the ride back to his place, I got caught in one of Kaneohe’s daily sun showers. It was another couple of miles before I realized that one of the wheels had soaked through the paper sack I was carrying and disappeared. I eventually replenished the set, picked up a G&S (Gordon and Smith) curved wooden board and trucks, and pieced together another dream ride, much in the same manner as the no-gear bikes we had endeavored to build.

I still have that board to this day. I own three skateboards in total. Still find occasion to ride, onlookers gawking to see a person my age take a spill. What they can’t possibly know is that skateboarding is ingrained in me, a keen sense of balance sewn deeply into muscle memory. We pay in skin for our deepest passions. In time, those passions see fit to offer restitution for our years of ceaseless devotion. (In my best Jay-Z voice, ‘I paid the cost to be the boss to floss this hard.’) In other words, I don’t fall, the universe having already exacted more than its fair share of my hide.

Even baseball has come back in small ways. I’m an avid spectator at all levels, high school, college, MLB, depending on the match-up. I stay glued to the Little League World Series as an annual ritual. I played fast-pitch softball in a competitive corporate league after finishing college. (I attempted slow pitch for a bit. But without base stealing, leading off, it didn’t hold the same appeal.) These days, I can hardly keep baseball and skateboarding and hip-hop from creeping into nearly everything I write, small parts of me leaking out into the world.

Mystic Mythology: Skateboarding Part 2

“”What bothers me is the particular breed around here[…] M. Mehlman

Welcome to the second installment of Mystic Mythology: Skateboarding. During the late 1980s and early 90s, Mystic Connecticut, with its quaint and quiet streets and drawbridge that halted traffic 2,200 times per year, was the perfect place for a bunch of misfit kids to gather, ride skateboards, and have scorn heaped upon us by nearly ever merchant in town except Dan Curland at Mystic Disc. This was a time when lifelong relationships were formed and it is because of those relationships that I am able to cobble together the myriad memory fragments into something resembling a memoir. Welcome to part two: The Post High School Days.

As far as my crew and I are concerned, the skate scene in Mystic would have been very different if it wasn’t for “the booth.” The booth, located at 9 Water Street, was the place I worked managing the parking concession for The Landing Restaurant. It was there where I met the crew of dudes who I’ve now been friends with for over 30 years.

The booth very quickly became a refuge for the skateboarders of downtown Mystic. Back in 1987, we, the skateboarders of Mystic, were not exactly loved. As mentioned in part one, the merchants hated us, the jocks and jerks wanted to beat us down, and the cops did their best to arrest us. The booth was a place my friends could ditch their boards, huddle around the tiny heater in the middle of winter, or peruse the collection of off brand pornographic magazines that may or may not have been purchased by the oldest kid in the group.

The act of skateboarding, being both a creative and physical pursuit, seems to cement friendships quickly. The guys who hung around the booth started packing themselves into my 1978 Mercury Bobcat to go on skate adventures. It wasn’t long before we, with a nod to the world-famous Powell Peralta Bones Brigade, were known as the Bobcat Brigade.

These adventures took us all over Connecticut, into Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and as far north as Maine. While visiting these places, we inevitably met other skateboarders who would occasionally share skate spot information, or better yet, lead us to their favorite spots. These were the years when skateboarding felt like the only important thing in the world. All one had to do was be willing to try, sometimes despite better judgement and usually at the risk of physical injury and pain, and the respect of other skateboarders was earned.

Through the countless connections made by being as mobile as an old Mercury would allow, we discovered numerous hidden gems. When we weren’t skating Kaplan’s, the parking lot, 12 Water Street, or the Mystic Train Station, we could be found at places such as the Norwich Pool, Fish Ditch, Rat Hole, behind Benny’s, Case Ramp, Firehouse Curbs, about a million hill bombs, Mansion Ramp, Blues Ramp, College Hill, Turtles, the Sk8 Hut, Water Bros., Newport, and many, many more. The more adventure we sought, the more we found. We were becoming skate nomads without ever being aware of it. We were dedicated to skateboarding because it never let us down. We consumed it as it consumed us. We weren’t just kids with skateboards, we were skateboarders.

Mystic Mythology: Skateboarding Part 1.

Welcome to the first installment of Mystic Mythology: Skateboarding. During the late 1980s and early 90s, Mystic Connecticut was a bustling hub of skateboarding activity. The merchants hated us, the jocks and jerks wanted to beat us down, and the cops did their best to arrest us. It was kind of an ass-backwards paradise for us punk-rock misfits and I don’t think any of us would have had it any other way. *Please note: some of the details here have been blurred, not for the purposes of artistic license, whatever that means, but due to the fact that I wasn’t taking notes back then, my only access to photography was an OLD Kodak Instamatic, and, quite frankly, I’m getting old. Welcome to part one.

When I turned 12, way back in 1980, I got the one and only thing I wanted for my birthday; a plastic yellow skateboard. It had translucent yellow wheels, loose and loud ball bearings, a tiny kick-tail, and an even smaller pointy nose. I saw it in the Benny’s department store in downtown Groton near the bikes my parents couldn’t afford and I became obsessed with it, pestering them every time we stepped into that store.

After months of begging, cajoling, and promising that I would be careful to not hurt myself, my fantasy of becoming a skateboarder became a reality. On the last day of November, that little skateboard was mine. It did, however, come with a catch, I could only ride it if I promised to wear a helmet. I was crestfallen. If that wasn’t enough, my parents, without consulting me, had gone ahead and purchased a helmet for me and it was quite possibly the most hideous thing I’d ever seen. Instead of an actual Pro-Tec skateboard helmet, my parents purchased a Cooper SK 100 hockey helmet that looked like it was made out of plastic milk jugs. Imagine, if you will; an awkward husky kid from a trailer park, wearing off-brand shoes purchased from the Railroad Salvage store and thrift store ToughSkins showing up at the quarter pipe some older kids built while wearing a beacon of ignorant geekdom upon his head. Let’s just say I wasn’t welcomed with open arms.I was determined, though, and didn’t let those gawking teenage boys bother me. Growing up in a trailer park had prepared me for a life of derision. Instead of trying to overcome the perceived adversity, I would walk past, doing my best to ignore the taunts, and head up the hill behind my house to figure out how to ride that useless plastic toy.

On day one, despite countless promises to be careful and not hurt myself, I did exactly that. On day one I learned two very important lessons: what speed wobbles are and what road rash is. My mother was not impressed.

Covered in scabs, but undaunted, I persisted. On day two, the speed wobbles also persisted, but it was on that day that I learned the importance of “run-out.” This gently curving road had two distinct sides to it: the safe side, with sloping manicured lawns, and the suicide, filled with rocks, briars, and trees. On day two, I discovered that bailing at speed onto a nice, soft lawn required almost no first aid, only soap and water.

Bombing hills, surreptitious trips to the quarter pipe, and the occasional trip to a reservoir spillway that later became known as the Fish Ditch was my entire world for the first two years of being a skateboarder. I didn’t need anyone or anything else and that suited me just fine. At the time there was no way I could predict what skateboarding would come to mean to me, what doors it would open, or how it would be the common ground on which most of my adult relationships would be founded. That little, yellow skateboard, after all, was just a silly plastic toy purchased from a discount department store in the submarine capital of the world.