Hosoi

by Christian Hosoi

  WE STROLL IN. THEY KNOW WHO WE ARE, AND OUR REPUTATION AS POOL PLAYERS, SO THEY ASK US IF WE WANT TO PLAY FOR MONEY. WE DECIDE TO START WITH TWENTY BUCKS A GAME. BAIO BREAKS AND SINKS A FEW BALLS. IT’S CHRISTIAN’S TURN NEXT, AND HE RUNS THE TABLE. BY THE TIME CHRISTIAN FINISHES CLEARING THE TABLE, BAIO’S SO PISSED THAT HE SAYS, “I’M NOT GONNA PAY YOU.” I STEP IN AND REPLY, “FINE, HOW ’BOUT I WRAP MY POOL CUE AROUND YOUR HEAD INSTEAD?” IT WASN’T THE MONEY—NONE OF US AT THAT TABLE WOULD HAVE MISSED TWENTY BUCKS—BUT HE WAS BEING SUCH A JERK. FINALLY WE AGREE ON DOUBLE OR NOTHING.

  THEY RACK, AND CHRISTIAN BREAKS AND RUNS THE TABLE AGAIN. HE’S DOING THESE ICONIC BANK SHOTS, LOOKING STRAIGHT INTO JUSTIN’S EYES WHILE CALLING THE POCKET BEFORE SINKING IT. NOW I’M FEELING LIKE PAUL NEWMAN IN THE COLOR OF MONEY, AND I’M SAYING, “OKAY, PAY UP, BRO.” IN THE END SCOTT AND JUSTIN PAY US AND ARE COOL ABOUT IT. FINALLY SCOTT COMES UP, SHAKES HANDS, AND SAYS, “THAT WAS A GOOD GAME.” LATER JUSTIN AND I BECOME GOOD FRIENDS.

  ANOTHER TIME WE’RE PLAYING AND IN WALK L.A. LAKERS OWNER JERRY BUSS AND THE LEGENDARY NBA STAR WILT CHAMBERLAIN. CHAMBERLAIN SAYS, “WE’LL PLAY YOU GUYS.” WELL, WE SMOKE ’EM, WIN EVERY GAME.

  NOW WE’RE BACK AT THE HOUSE AT THE POOL TABLE, AND CHRISTIAN LOOKS AT ME AND SAYS, “RACK ’EM.” I’M LIKE, “I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER ASK.” HE’S SMOKIN’ A FATTY WITH ONE HAND, SLAPPIN’ THE CUE, AND SUCKIN’ HIS TEETH THE WAY HE SOMETIMES DOES WHEN HE’S CONCENTRATING. HE’S WAITING FOR ME TO GET THIS TIGHT RACK. I TAKE THE RACK OFF AND I’M LIKE, “BREAK ’EM UP, PUNK.” ALL OF A SUDDEN IT’S LIKE, C-R-RACK! I WOULDN’T HAVE BELIEVED IT IF I HADN’T SEEN IT WITH MY OWN EYES: HE BREAKS ONE-HANDED—THE FATTY IS STILL IN THE OTHER—AND SINKS THE EIGHT BALL, MEANING HE WINS THE GAME OFF THE BREAK! HE JUST LOOKS UP AND IS LIKE, “RACK ’EM AGAIN.” SO I RACK ’EM AGAIN AND WHACK! AGAIN HE SINKS THE EIGHT BALL WITH ONE HAND. I WAS SO DEVASTATED I THREW A BALL ONTO THE FLOOR AND WALKED OFF TO BED.

  My memory is that I sank the eight ball using two hands the first time, and with one hand on the second game. I like Rusler’s version of the story better, though.

  DOWNSIZING AND DOWNSLIDING

  True to my long-standing practice of spending all my money as I earn it, I haven’t saved a cent. With little or no income remaining, I’m forced to vacate the awesome Fields house and move back in with my mom around 1991. I can’t move my ramp, so I leave it there, hoping beyond hope that the next tenant will skate it, even though I know there’s no way any other skateboarder but me could afford to move in. What breaks my heart most is leaving my nine cats behind. I can’t abandon them to the shelter, where their number might come up before adoption; they’ll have better survival chances right on the grounds. The property is big and wild, and I figure they’ll be better off finding their own dinners of squirrels and mice.

  My mom lives only a few blocks away from the place I’m leaving. I drive there with some boxes of stuff, but the rest will have to go in storage. I’m broke, but my exodus is in style, in my McLaren sports car. That car was like $40,000 back in the late ’80s, and I bought it with $12,000 down. After the move I gave it to my mom. I have to part with my classic ’62 Harley-Davidson motorcycle too. Man, I’ve acquired a lot of stuff in a few years. I’ve got enough clothing to open a department store—including probably fifty leather jackets and hundreds of shoes—along with jewelry, artwork, furniture, all kinds of trophies and awards, stacks of skateboards, and various other fruits of the good life.

  With hundreds of storage companies to choose from, I pick a unit owned by the exact wrong one. I have no idea, of course, that everything I store is going to be demolished by something I can’t see coming, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which we live near the epicenter of. The violent shaking seems to last forever at Mom’s place. I later hear that some motorists have been buried beneath tons of concrete and steel when a portion of the Santa Monica Freeway collapsed on them, and I also learn that a chunk of I-10 landed right on my storage unit. While my loss is nothing compared to that of those who died, the earthquake has cost me most of my possessions and many of my mementos. Eventually everything gets dug out and moved to another storage area.

  I don’t even recognize my belongings when I see them again. All my trophies—everything I stored there—are smashed beyond repair, and I feel detached from my legacy. As much as I pretend otherwise, my life has taken an abrupt turn and is now far from perfect. I’ve pushed the envelope in every area, risked it all, and for the first time I haven’t come out a winner. Something beyond my control seems to be taking over.

  (LEFT TO RIGHT) SCOTT OSTER, JAY ADAMS, AND ME IN THE SHALLOW END OF THE PINK MOTEL POOL. © GRANT BRITTAIN.

  A calculated risk is different than a crapshoot, where you throw the dice with no idea of what number they’re gonna land on. I’m a risk taker, but a calculated risk taker. In skating I won’t do things unless I’m pretty confident they’ll work. That’s why I never really get hurt on the ramp. I won’t just go for broke without knowing the outcome; that’s do or die. I’m not a do-or-die type, although most people watching me probably figure that’s how I operate. I rehearse the motions mentally before I attempt a trick, and consequently I’ve only broken one bone and never had any concussions. If I had gotten hurt, I would have been really badly hurt. I usually skate without a helmet or elbow pads, not even a shirt on. I should be all scraped up, but I rarely have cuts or bruises on my body.

  The closest I ever get to disaster on a skateboard is when I’m doing a demo as a kid in St Louis, Missouri, at a Six Flags amusement park. The ramp there has a weird transition to it, and I pump at the wrong time and am soon flying through space. When you’re upside down, flying twenty feet above the earth, lots can go wrong. When things spin out of control in vert skating, you slam back down to the bottom of the ramp, hard. I’m nearly at full height when I launch my board, and I land on the ramp before it does.

  I hit hard, but I know how to fall and so I land without injury. Still, in the split second that I lie there, I hear the crowd sucking their breath in and realize that my board is following me back down. In fact, out of the corner of my eye I see it rocketing right at me. Before I can move aside it hits my helmet so hard I nearly pass out. There’s ringing in my ears, and a little blood trickling from my head and down my neck. I pull off my helmet carefully and check myself out further: it turns out to be nothing more than a scratch on my ear. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, I could have been killed. Instead, I brush myself off and wave to my fans to let them know I’m okay.

  Others haven’t gotten away so cleanly. I’ve seen injured legs, arms, teeth, chin, eyes, ankles, wrists—you name it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched skateboarders carted off in ambulances. The way I’ve lived, I should have a history of broken bones and stitches all over my body. Actually, I should be dead.

  I’m never one to give up, and I figure I’ll bounce back even if the rest of the skateboarding industry doesn’t. I’m still at the top of what’s left of the skateboarding world, winning contests, making appearances, signing autographs, and living a pretty good life, all things considered. Even though I’m making a fraction of the money I used to and I’ve had to move back home, the radical downslide doesn’t begin until 1989, when I’m twenty-two.

  The trouble starts on a typical night at a typical club, where not much is happening. Someone asks if I want to do some speed, something I haven’t done since I was seventeen, back when I was snorting coke. I’m bored, so I’m like, “Yeah, whatever; let’s do it.” We snort it right there at the table and it burns like—well, I can’t believe how badly it burns. Following the burn, though, I’m pumped with energy and feel really good and alert. That fix turns out to be meth, and I like it.

  Meth doesn’t make me feel anything other than up and ready to take on the world. I never experience any of the negative side effects my friends do: uncontrollable twitching, an inability to eat or sleep. They don’t want anything but more and more meth, and they don’t take very
good care of themselves. They look sucked up and bugged out. I eat, sleep, and keep myself clean, cuz I still want to get with chicks.

  Since I’ve smoked an ounce of weed a week since the age of fifteen, I understand how to do drugs and maintain my life. As I mentioned before, compared to most of my friends I’m basically a nondrinker, so I usually drive when we go out. That helps me think of myself as a responsible user, whatever that is. So now I snort meth from time to time, but it doesn’t have its hooks in me. Not yet.

  NO TURNING BACK. HOSOI FAMILY COLLECTION.

  POINT OF NO RETURN. © CESARIO “BLOCK” MONTANO.

  “As the skateboard recession drills deeper, everybody in the industry is either crashing and burning or scrambling to stay afloat. One of my top team riders, Sergie Ventura, works as a waiter, and Duncan has returned to carpentry, making ramps for all the companies and events that require them. I hear that Hawk’s company, Birdhouse, is teetering on bankruptcy. Here he is, the most famous skater of all time, and he doesn’t even have his own skateboard model any longer. Like me, he’s fallen from being a highly paid pro to scraping to get by. Neither of us has ever really worked before, unless you count skateboarding as work, and we aren’t about to start now.”

  We’re scrambling to get other things going, but his temporary solution to the downturn is to perform skate demos at Six Flags, Dallas. He performs three demos a day for a total of a hundred bucks a day. Two years earlier we would have earned thousands for that sort of gig. But Tony and I love skating more than anything, and we’re convinced it will soon make a comeback. We continue sharpening our skills for the next time we meet in competition. We’re still skating hard, improving, and setting the pace for the sport.

  While we concentrate on skateboarding, the rest of the country has more significant matters on its mind. There’s an undercurrent of violence in the United States that could erupt at any time.

  FATAL ATTRACTIONS

  In 1992 I’m still living in L.A. when the city boils over into what’s euphemistically called civil unrest or the Rodney King uprising. Call it what you want; this is a full-blown riot. As soon as the verdict is announced and King’s arresting officers are proclaimed innocent, people take to the streets—some to protest, some to loot, some to unload years of pent-up frustration on the people and structures around them.

  While people flee the city in droves, I head the other way, toward the heart of the action. A friend of mine who owns a bookstore on Beverly, right near Melrose, has asked if I can watch his store for him so he can get home. I’ve never experienced a major riot before, so I snap at the opportunity. The city is blanketed in smoke and violence, and I’m casually cruising toward this war zone in my Mustang with Pops, trying to avoid all the military-type stops.

  Martial law has been declared. Cops are out on patrol, and you can be arrested just for being out after 6:00 P.M. Still, I’m a master at deceiving the law, and I’m sure the cops will believe me if I say it’s an emergency and I need to get somewhere. Maybe I’ll tell them I’m rushing Pops to the hospital. But the cops more than have their hands full that night, and nobody ever stops us. We arrive at my friend’s store near dark to see walls of flames devouring shops up and down the street.

  To one side is a camera store with its doors blasted open, fully on fire. The neighboring shop is smoldering after being burned to the ground. Windows and doors are smashed in stores as far as we can see, and there’s nobody around to stop the anarchy. For looters, this is the ultimate shopping spree. Everything is up for grabs: people race up and down the streets carrying purloined TVs, furniture, cases of liquor, stereos, and other big-ticket items. The entire world looks like some Jim Morrison nightmare—and I love it!

  My friend sees us coming and rushes toward us. “Hey Christian, thanks for agreeing to hang around and make sure nobody breaks in,” he says, grabbing a few things to take with him. “I’m glad to help keep your place safe,” I say, relishing the thought of blasting off a few rounds with my nine-millimeter gun if some fool walks through that door with bad intentions. Then the owner races away from the riot zone. While that’s the smart thing to do and most people wouldn’t blame him, I’m perfectly happy to stay put, thinking about all the fun Pops and I are gonna have.

  We hang out at the store all night, cuz once people are in the area, the cops won’t let them leave. The streets are haunted by the distant sounds of people shouting, the sirens of cop cars and fire trucks, and occasional gunshots. We just kick back, smoking joints all night, and I stay armed and ready. We have front row seats for the best show ever and are disappointed that nobody tries entering the shop.

  Looking back on that night now, I see my reaction as bizarre. While I didn’t enjoy the prospect of other people being hurt and harmed, I did enjoy the scent of danger. I got the same sort of rush from tempting fate that I get from skating big ramps.

  BRAIN-FRYERS, BELL-RINGERS, AND OTHER DELIGHTS

  I’m regularly buying quarter-pounds of weed now, not to make money but so I can get my stash for free. My friends want to get high nearly as much as I do, so when I sell them a little something, they often break me off an eighth of an ounce. Now and then I score a bunch of mescaline pills and move them for twenty bucks each. The pills are so tiny that some skeptics comment, “That little thing won’t get me high.” Then they take it and get obliterated and run back to me for more. Sometimes we burn weed soaked in PCP. That’s a brain-fryer. Once in a while we’ll freebase cocaine or take big crack hits, which people call bell-ringers cuz you get a ringing in your head. But that buzz comes in and goes out quickly; it’s a short, intense high. That’s why crackheads keep hitting the pipe again and again.

  By the mid-’90s I’m still okay, but anyone who looks closely can see that my life is beginning to fray around the edges. It doesn’t help that Pops moves to Hawaii to take care of his father, who’s dying of cancer. Shortly after that, my mom tells me she’s moving to the East Coast to get remarried. I ask her, “Does he love you?” When she replies yes, I give the marriage my blessing, which is kind of strange since I’m the child and she’s the parent. My mother’s marriage to her husband, Mitch Mitchell, turns out to be an excellent decision. And I’m left with a great stepfather. I call him Pop. There have never been many restrictions forced on me, but having my parents around has been at least somewhat stabilizing. If I needed to borrow twenty bucks, get encouragement, or sit down to a homemade meal, I could always drop by my mom’s house, and she took me back in when I lost my place in Echo Park. If I needed sage philosophical advice on life, I could drop by to visit my dad. That’s no longer the case. One chapter in my life is ending and another is about to begin.

  Suddenly, none of the anchors in my life is in place. Because I’m using more and more meth, I don’t like being around my friends and family that much anymore. Nobody I grew up with is using drugs as heavily as I am, so I avoid the very people who could help me. Pops is probably the least strict dad in history, but even he’s concerned, asking what I’m up to. When I answer that I’m raging, he says, “Okay, just be careful while you’re raging.” But even he will give in to the power of meth when I visit him years later on Oahu. In the mid-’90s, though, when I offer him meth for the first time, it’s no big deal. After all, we’ve done acid and coke together since I was fifteen and once smoked heroin together when I was seventeen. He doesn’t get strung out; he just does a little bit once in a while.

  As for me, I’m well past that point. Drugs are no longer just part of life; they are life itself. My friends and I have all tried everything there is to try, and one by one we’ve settled on our drug of choice. For some it’s coke; for others heroin; for me it’s crystal methamphetamine. You know, meth, speed, tweak, ice—whatever you want to call it. I can handle it, I tell myself; but not everyone else can. Like Rusler, for example. I’m not exactly sure what drugs he’s using, but whatever they are, he’s not handling them well at all. He’s no longer a fun, outgoing guy, and we don’t see him arou
nd much. When we do he looks terrible. Turns out he came to think pretty much the same thing about me. His recollection of those days:

  I WAS GETTING HEAVILY INTO THE DARK DAYS OF ADDICTION, AND I STARTED ISOLATING. CHRISTIAN AND MY BROTHER GARY CAME BY AND TALKED TO ME. I REMEMBER CHRISTIAN SAYING THAT HE LOVED ME, THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE CARED ABOUT ME, AND THAT I STILL HAD A LOT LEFT TO DO. I’LL NEVER FORGET THAT. HE BROUGHT TRUTH TO ME, AND HE STAYED WITH ME DURING ONE VERY DARK NIGHT. OF COURSE HE WAS PARTYING THAT WHOLE TIME. THAT MADE ME KIND OF JEALOUS THAT I COULDN’T HANDLE IT, WHILE HE AND MY BROTHER COULD. CHRISTIAN TOLD ME THAT I NEEDED TO BALANCE THINGS BY QUITTING HARD DRUGS, JUST SMOKING WEED AND TAKING CARE OF MY RESPONSIBILITIES. HE SAID THAT IF I DID THAT, I’D BE FINE. THAT WAS ALL COOL, BUT IT WOULDN’T WORK FOR ME. WHAT STUCK WITH ME WAS CHRISTIAN TELLING ME THAT HE LOVED ME.

  NOT LONG AFTER THAT TALK I WENT TO REHAB AND GOT CLEAN. CHRISTIAN HAD MOVED OUT OF TOWN BY THEN, AND I STARTED HEARING HORROR STORIES ABOUT HIM. BUT I WAS THINKING, THERE’S NO WAY HE CAN’T BEAT WHATEVER CHALLENGE LIFE THROWS AT HIM. I NEARLY WENT TO AN INTERVENTION WHERE EVERYONE WAS TRYING TO GET HIM TO QUIT. BLOCK WANTED TO KIDNAP HIM AND BRING HIM BACK HERE TO L.A. I WAS WORKING THE TWELVE-STEP PROGRAM BY THEN AND KNEW THAT I WAS POWERLESS TO HELP HIM IF HE DIDN’T WANT TO QUIT. I WENT TO VISIT HIS MOTHER AND SHE TOO WAS WORRIED ABOUT HIM. PEOPLE WERE SAYING BAD THINGS ABOUT CHRISTIAN, AND I WOULD TELL THEM, “SHUT UP; YOU DON’T KNOW HIM.”

  NAVIGATING THE NO ZONE

  It’s late in 1993, and I’m in what I call the “no zone.” With no direction home, I’m drifting through a sea of drugs and empty promises. Micke Alba rescues me for a time by inviting me to check out a new skate scene, especially this one pool he’s skating in Huntington Beach. Sounds intriguing, so I agree to go. Together with Micke and Eddie, I speed down to Orange County. The pool is everything Micke claimed it would be, and we skate it for hours on end, not just that one day but often. In Huntington Beach I meet some friends for life, including the guy who owns the pool, Barrett “Chicken” Deck. Chicken and I share the same birthdate and have lots of other things in common.