Initially I think all parents are like mine. When I visit most other kids’ houses, however, I see that it isn’t so. Most kids have to hide when they get high. They live in massive houses crawling with brothers and sisters. Nobody plays or even talks together, and they all seem to hate each other. The kids hang out quietly in their separate rooms, probably smoking weed, while their parents politely talk about things not worth the words.
When I’m with my mom or my dad, they don’t hide a thing from me, and they let me and my friends in on the discussion if we’re interested. They tell me that if I want to be like Jimmy Page or Bruce Lee, all it takes is practice. Not like, “Get real, kid—nobody will ever achieve that, much less you.” As a little kid you immediately think either I can or I can’t. All I ever hear is “You can.” Maybe it would be good to hear what I can’t or shouldn’t do once in a while, but that never happens in our family.
Aaron and I jump around the house until we’re too tired to stay awake, playing like most other eight-year-olds, except that we’re stoned out of our minds on the best weed a person can get. Being high makes it easy to imagine that we’re Bruce Lee, throwing around nunchakus, acting it all out, jumping from one table to another, daring each other to jump further, saying, “Okay, I’ll bet you can’t do that.” Once we both land a jump, we pull the tables wider and wider apart, leaping further and further. When we finally miss a jump, we know just how far we can or can’t go. (It’s like Clint Eastwood says: “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”) We’re totally free to push the limits of possibility as we become crazy acrobatic daredevils, something that will soon translate into our skateboarding.
There are times we’re maybe thirty feet up in some tree, saying, “I’m gonna jump from here and land on that bush.” When we suddenly realize how high up we are, occasionally we’re like, “All right, I can’t do that after all,” but usually we don’t back down. In the martial arts movies people say things like, “Your tiger claw is no match for my praying mantis.” Once skateboarding gets us in its grip, that becomes, “My ollie is higher than your ollie.” We want to do things our own way, be the best, jump the furthest, and reign supreme as king of the mountain.
DEEPER AND HIGHER
Nobody stays together forever in L.A., and my parents are no exception. They split up around the time I’m eight years old. When I get older, Pops eventually tells me that my mom once threw all his possessions out the window, onto the street. He doesn’t mention what led up to that, but knowing him, I suspect it was at least partially his fault. It always takes two, right?
MY FATHER. THE ARTIST EVERYBODY CALLED POPS. HOSOI FAMILY COLLECTION.
He tries to shield me from things like that, and I guess it works, because I don’t remember things being too bad. There’s a lot of arguing at home, but nothing crazy or violent or anything—just the day-to-day disagreements that for some people lead to court proceedings and for others, like my parents, separation. They never seem mad at each other after their separation; they simply quit living together. As far as I can tell they’re close friends and everybody’s happy. They never do get divorced except as a formality, years later, so my mom can remarry. Together or apart, they are always there for me.
You might think I got into drugs as a result of my upbringing or my parents’ breakup, but that’s not true. As a child I never had that deep longing for my parents to get back together that you sometimes hear about, and I never felt that something was broken or missing in my life. I’m the type that would have found drugs whether my parents were together or not, even if they didn’t smoke weed, which is hard to imagine. When you feel entitled, as I did, you’re never satisfied. You want more. In my case, that meant running deeper and getting higher.
THICKER THAN WATER
My father’s full name is Ivan Toyo Hosoi. He’s full-blooded Japanese. He was born on Oahu on September 26, 1942. As a child he stole the family car and drove it through Honolulu, getting out and peering into various bars in search of his dad. Even after being punished, he continued taking the car to town now and then.
Eventually he was shipped off to the “Big Island” of Hawaii to work on the Parker Ranch as a cowboy. Because of being sent away, he thought for a long time that he had been adopted. That hurt, but being Japanese in the 1940s, Pops also suffered racism, and one of his uncles was actually sent to an internment camp in California.
My mom, who passed away last year, was part Hawaiian; she was born on Maui. Before she married my father, her name was Bonnie Puamana Cummings.
I was born Christian Rosha Hosoi in Good Shepherd Hospital in Los Angeles on October 5, 1967. Pops once told a friend that my name represented three religions: Christian for Christianity, Rosha for Judaism, and Hosoi for Buddhism. I don’t know, but it sounds good.
In 1974, when I’m six years old, the family is still together, and we move to Oahu. Pops has been a surfer since the 1950s, so we go to the beach every day, all day, whenever I’m not in school. I mess around, riding some little waves, but I never really hook up with surfing the way he does.
After a year on Oahu we move back to L.A. because the teaching job he was promised at the University of Hawaii doesn’t pan out. The other reason we move is that I have a bad kidney infection, made worse by all the mosquitoes that forever buzz the Hawaiian Islands. The first house we rent in California is in Beachwood Canyon, Hollywood. Later we rent a big studio on Washington Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, in L.A.’s Koreatown.
My parents first moved from Hawaii to L.A. before I was born so that Pops could refine his art skills at Chouinard. My mom helped put him through school and he ended up transferring to and graduating from U.C. Berkeley, where he received a master’s degree in fine art.
Picture us in Berkeley in the late ’60s: I’m being pushed in a stroller when the Berkeley riots go down. How crazy is that? I’m already a rebel at two years old!
Besides being birthed into rebellion, I’m born into music and art. Pops often has his paintings displayed in a gallery where he also plays music. When I get sleepy, he simply lays me down in the soft velvet of his guitar case, behind the amps, with nothing but my legs sticking out. When he isn’t working on his own projects, he assists famed artists Sam Francis and Ron Davis. Whatever those guys want he builds for them. At other times he does his immaculate custom woodwork on people’s mansions.
From a young age Pops whispers in my ear that surfing and skateboarding are art forms, and I learn to see all creative expression from an artistic point of view. I want to express my art through skateboarding and do things no skateboarder has ever done before. I want to fly higher than anyone ever has and put on a show while doing it.
While Pops is a free spirit, my mother is a lot more regimented, and I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone like her. She has a strong family foundation, embodied in the aloha spirit of Hawaii, and is just over the top with things like family reunions and sending out cards for everyone’s birthday. She dresses right for every occasion and is well spoken, business-minded, and organized. Even as rambunctious and rebellious as I am, when she says, “Christian, you gotta keep your head on straight,” I respond right away.
When we move back to L.A. from Hawaii, my mom works as a secretary for a big company in Beverly Hills. She tells me to do my homework, and she’s probably the only person in the world who could get me to do it. But she isn’t all business; she’s also a ’60s girl, into art, wine, and weed. A friend of mine remembers sleeping over once when we were young teenagers. He says that I was yelling at my mom to find my roaches and she told me where they were. He claims he saw her take a hit from a joint before walking out the door to go to work. Like most kids of the time, he’d never seen adults be so casual about weed.
Like Pops, my mom really doesn’t care so much what I do. Unlike Pops, she insists that I keep things together when I do them. I learn about business and working with people who are different from me, from her.
My parents teach me a lot about life, but
in skateboarding I’m on my own, at least for the time being. There are no videos to rewind again and again; all we have are the skaters we see on the streets and the still photos we cut from the mags. We memorize those stills and have to imagine what happened before and after the shots were taken. We study each shot so carefully that we can tell you what boards and wheels everyone rides. We know who took the shot, where it was taken, and more often than not who’s standing in the background. Having only magazines for reference stimulates the imagination far more than any video ever could.
In 1978 I’m eleven years old and Pops and I build a ramp in our backyard. Aaron also builds a ramp in his father’s warehouse, and together they move that to my backyard. Now we have a bank ramp and a quarter-pipe right there at home, any time we want. I make it sound like we build them, but of course our dads are the ones who do all the work. We act like we’re helping, which really amounts to nothing more than telling them to hurry up.
LOOKING INTO MY FUTURE. HOSOI FAMILY COLLECTION.
© GLEN E. FRIEDMAN
GENESIS OF A REBEL SKATER
The only thing Aaron and I think about is that the Marina Del Rey Skatepark will soon open. For months we have eyed the construction crews laying down iron bars and digging deep holes. Soon the cement trucks will pour out a concrete paradise. The place is nearly done one day when Pops drives us there to check it out. Skaters are hanging out in the parking lot, just waiting, though opening day is still a couple weeks away.
At first Aaron and I wait with everybody else, but being fidgety, we soon begin exploring. We sneak in past the NO TRESPASSING signs until we see a gate cracked open a little. When we hear the sounds of skateboards, we inch forward and peek in to see Tony Alva and Jay Adams skating right in front of us. Wow! The whole Z-Flex team is there with them: guys like Shogo Kubo, George Wilson, Dennis “Polar Bear” Agnew, and Marty Grimes are all taking their turns, ripping hard. But we recognize only Tony and Jay, because they’re prominently featured in every skate magazine. We’ve never seen famous skateboarders up close before, and there they are, the most famous skaters in the world, close enough to touch. We didn’t know it at the time, but the bowl they’re riding is called the Dog Bowl, and it’s soon to become the gold standard of the skate world.
All of the bowls at Marina are trimmed with perfect coping and clean, light-blue tiles, with one white tile placed every ten feet or so. That’s how we recognize the park in the photos. But we’ve never seen skaters blast with such speed and power before. I can still see and hear Tony Alva—TA, as he’s often called—carving a frontside air and planting a perfect tail tap. Next up, Jay Adams drops in and snaps back off the lip, hands behind his back, before moving into a long and loud frontside grind. TA’s long frizzy hair is sticking out beneath his helmet and flowing as he rides. Jay has a black-and-gray beanie pulled on over the top of his helmet—something I will soon come to realize is typical of his unorthodox way of approaching everything.
They’re moving higher and faster now, doing tricks we’ve never seen, not even in magazines. To be there and to see it with our own eyes, to grow up during that time of skateboarding, to experience that moment in history—this lights a fire in my heart that has never burned out. At that moment Aaron and I commit ourselves to skating every day for the rest of our lives and to becoming professional skateboarders.
Soon it’s opening day at Marina! We arrive before the skatepark opens. Pops pays, and Aaron and I run in to be among the first ones ever to ride the smaller bowls. This place is a dream—perfect for learning all the basic tricks. We skate for hours, attempting all the tricks the big guys do. Within weeks Marina becomes a second home to us. Pops is stoked for us, but he’s like, “Oh boy, this is getting expensive.” We run wild at Marina, smoking weed and skating day and night. Inside, they have some of the first video games, like Space Invaders and Asteroids, along with a Playboy pinball machine and other cool old-school games. But we never pay to play; we learn to cheat the machines. I pluck out one of my long hairs and attach a quarter to it with a small piece of tape from a sticker. Holding on to the hair, I drop the quarter into the slot and bounce it up and down, the continuous dinging sound announcing that we have tons of free games coming. Aaron stands guard to make sure nobody busts us. Finally I pull the quarter out, pocket it, and we play as many games as we want.
Pops is dedicated to his art, but even more dedicated to his son. He puts his art career on hold and takes over as the manager of Marina. This is a huge step in supporting me as a skater. Now I’m there all day—at least whenever I’m not in school—and long into the night. I even have a little job. Each morning I sweep out the pools before anyone gets to the park. I ride through the bowls on roller skates, making sure everything is free from litter and whatever might have blown in overnight. One time I fall really hard on my butt: that’s the last time I’ll ever wear a pair of roller skates in my life.
Just as in surfing, if you’re at a spot often enough you’re a local. I’m a Marina Del Rey Skatepark local, one of the originals. I’m still just a kid, though, and I never venture beyond the little bowls—what they call the brown bowls or the rust bowls. Aaron is a surfer at heart and is soon spending more time surfing than skating. That leaves me on this mission alone. My goal is simply to blow away anyone who rides the little bowls. Mission number one is accomplished before age eleven.
People come from everywhere in L.A. County and beyond to skate Marina. It attracts kids like Aaron and me who have grown up skating, listening to Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones, and smoking weed. Most of these guys are from broken homes, and skateboarding and rebellion are what binds us all together. While everyone is from different backgrounds, you never see anybody’s parents, except sometimes when they pick their kids up or drop them off. From hundreds of kids who skate Marina regularly, only Pops and Mike Smith’s dad are there with their kids on a consistent basis.
After skating the park all day, some friends and I skate over to the supermarket and steal the plastic guards off the handlebars of shopping carts. We cut them up at home and snap them onto our skateboard trucks, using them for copers. (Copers are plastic half-tubing that protect the axles of a skateboard’s trucks, allowing the rider to grind long distances.) Our copers might not be as good as store-bought ones, but it’s more fun swiping them than buying them. With all the skateboarders in the area, a lot of shopping carts in our neighborhood are missing plastic guards!
Skateboarder magazine is like our Bible, and we live on every word, every photo, and every ad. Marina hasn’t even been open a year when someone shows me the new issue of Skateboarder. For the first time, I see a full-page color photo of me in a magazine. It says it was taken by Skateboarder staff photographer Ted Terrebonne. Wow! That’s me, doing a frontside ollie in a rust bowl. Seeing myself in Skateboarder at age ten sets me on a course that directs the rest of my life.
That’s my first big exposure, and because of my long hair a lot of people think I’m a girl. Tony Hawk, the guy who will become my biggest competitive rival, tells it this way: “Because of that first photo in Skateboarder magazine I thought Christian was a girl for two years. The long hair threw me off, but at the same time, I thought, This girl rips! Seeing a photo of someone so young blasting airs is what made me want to fly.”
I don’t care what people think, and I won’t cut my hair for them or anyone else, no matter what they say. They’ll find out soon enough that I’m a boy, when I smoke them all in the contests.
I think my friend Eric Dressen is one of the only skaters to be featured in Skateboarder at a younger age than me. Eric’s half a year older than I am, and a phenomenal skater for his age, or for any age. In 1979, at the age of eleven or twelve, he beats guys twice his age in the Gyro Dog Bowl Pro contest at Marina, which inspires the rest of us kids greatly.
In the late ’70s skateboarding is basically surfing done on land, and some people still call it sidewalk surfing. We rip down sidewalks and imitate getting barreled on waves,
ducking beneath overhanging bushes that line the streets as they curl over us. We spray dirt when we slide out, the way a surfer throws spray while cutting back. Jay, TA, Shogo, and Polar Bear are all excellent surfers and the top pool skaters in our area (and therefore probably in the world). As surfers they want to throw cutbacks and hit the lip, not spin 360s in endless circles, like the top freestyle skaters do in the contests. When a surfer skates, he wants to slam the top and grind the coping as hard and as loud as possible. That aggressive style is in our blood, growing up as we do in or near a surf town like Venice Beach.
There are very few skate movies, so we do the next best thing by attending every surf movie that premieres at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. I’m usually there with Jay Adams and my original skate hero, Shogo Kubo. We openly fire up joints in the front row of the theater and watch Hawaiian surfer Larry Bertlemann on the screen, breaking all the rules with a rad new style. Bertlemann is the biggest thing in surfing at the time, and his skate influence runs deep also. He forms a strong link between Hawaii and California. When he visits Southern California, he surfs and skates with TA and Jay. His impact on Jay runs so deep that Jay alters his entire method of skating and begins skating like Bertlemann surfs and skates, in that cool, low rotational style he becomes known for. Bertlemann is the fastest thing on water and the first guy we see blast an aerial on a wave. People have been catching air on skateboards for a while, but when we see Larry flying on waves we’re honored. Surfing may have spawned skateboarding, but skateboarding is now paying back its debt to its big brother by teaching it some new tricks.
The skate contests aren’t geared toward the surf style of skating, though. They’re all freestyle events with everyone high-jumping over limbo bars and doing pirouettes, 360s, tick-tacks, and walk-the-dogs, all on flat surfaces. Stacy Peralta is a Dogtown skater—Dogtown is one of the hilly L.A. neighborhoods where surf-style skateboarding got its start—and his movie, Dogtown and Z-Boys, reveals how he, Jay, TA, and some of their crew break down the status quo. It’s a good thing they do, because freestyle has gotten to the point where you barely need a skateboard to perform your tricks. We think it’s lame for guys to be frozen in one position, balancing their boards on two wheels. Most of us from Venice or Dogtown relate to what the late Dogtown legend Bob Biniak said: “We were like a hockey team showing up for a figure skating competition.” I can’t sum it up any better than that. And while it’s all about winning for us, it’s not just winning for ourselves, but for Venice and Dogtown. These are more than names on some tourist map; they’re revolutions of culture and attitude.
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