Now, the interaction that follows her introduction could’ve been ripped right out of some Italian movie. Or it’s more like a hipster reenactment of a scene from an Italian movie, with all of us vying for her attention while trying desperately not to appear to be vying for her attention. Our excitement is muted, our flirtatious gestures made as though underwater. There’s some restrained hot-dogging around the pool table. Sparrow, still wearing his sunglasses, peacocks a little by putting on some sensitive-sounding club music that he calls his “new jam,” the vocals of which are so heavily mixed they sound like they’ve been crooned by animatronic parakeets. Facundo plays possum, looking up only now and then from his computer, a display of confidence that’s as intimidating as it is charming.
When Mo gets up and grabs her gear, knowing I’ve taken the last open bedroom, I offer to move so that she might have her own space, one unsullied by a Y chromosome. This confuses her. She says not to worry about it, assures me it’s cool, encourages me to stay. She smiles in a way that both confuses and intrigues me. Oodles of fetchingly crude scenarios irrupt in my mind before I insist on moving into the Yellow Room, where Pat has posted up.
For a good while there I hoped marriage would issue in a new order, one in which I’d be able to kick my reflexive habit, when I meet a woman, of conjuring extravagant libidinal tableaux vivants, these set pieces of bucknasty congress, full of Cirque du Soleil acrobatics and heroic feats of strength and stamina. I’d grown tired of them, of always rooting around these routine social situations for some scant trace of sexual tension. I thought that under the sway of a deeper love I’d be able to slough them off, trade them in for more productive fantasies, maybe ones that involved me changing my car’s oil or learning to use a saber saw. And as I continue to wait for that change, just as a certain breed of religious folk continues to refine the date of the apocalypse, I’ve been forced to content myself with altered expectations. So instead I brim with chipper husbandly pride as I carry my clothes from one closet to the other, feeling like I’ve passed a test in resisting Mo’s offer. Maybe on some level this is what marriage is about, this reification of our superegos. Are not spouses there to help us realize our best selves, after all? Or is this another damning manifestation of my self-centeredness? Has the nostalgia made me even more self-involved than I already was? Absurd as it is, I wish Alexis could’ve been there to witness my minor victory, to congratulate me, though of course I know her presence would’ve asterisked the win in a Heisenbergian way. Worse, I know that had she been present she wouldn’t have seen the temptation resisted, as I did, but only the temptation itself, and that seems an unhusbandly emotional car wash to run her through.
Mo and I return to the lounge area where the other guys look at me like I’ve just handed away a winning lottery ticket.
En masse we make for B.O.B. Upon arrival, James plugs in his phone and as we spread out around the hangar, tunes of a distinct Jack Johnson mold pour out of speakers mounted high up on the walls. I run a few steps, dragging the tail of my board on the ground a little before jumping on, and cruise to the far end of the space, past manual pads and flat rails that sit on the ground like metal lizards, estivating under the industrial fluorescence. I ride up the six-foot quarter pipe and turn lazily at the top and head back toward where I came from.
Growing up, whenever I got to a spot, I’d first ride around like this, taking a lay of the land before starting to skate in earnest. This would open a part of the world to me. There’d be this phenomenological shift whereby everything at the spot became the pieces of a puzzle. A ledge, a curb, a sidewalk, a set of stairs, a handrail. What could I do with each one? How did they all fit together? Could I stitch them up with a run, a line? I know this might sound new-agey, like some strange urban pantheism, but to skate a spot is to commune with it in a way that your normal city dweller does not. It is to respond to and unlock that place, to be surrounded by potential. Possibilities. And often, the tricks I’d end up choosing to do at a spot weren’t the product of my will alone. They seemed to emerge out of the terrain. In some mystical sense, some very peculiar form of entelechy, when you do a trick it’s almost like you’re giving the trick back to the spot, literally expressing it. I think this is more or less what people mean when you hear them talking about a skater’s vision. The best skaters show us this hidden potential of the world around us. And this is a revelatory and poetic and radical action.
As I now stand on the large platform by the entrance, though, I feel as impaired as a man with cataracts. I hear Alexis’s voice in my head and decide to take it easy tonight, not go for too much, nothing crazy, and head over to spend some time in the miniramps with Pat. He’s doing proficient blunt stalls over the center spine and small frontside disasters and long fifty-fifties across the coping, but everything looks labored and is a little hard to watch. For me, skating is nothing without style, which is to say, in most cases, an air of effortlessness. Grace. It’s been a part of skating’s code since its inception: that you can do a trick has never mattered quite as much as how you look doing it. This is one of the first lessons about art I ever internalized, long before I knew I’d apply it to pursuits other than skateboarding: style is inextricable from content. One skater can be less technically accomplished than another and still be more interesting to watch.
I turn away from Pat and look up to find Facundo on one of the rectangular trampolines on the platform above me. He’s jumping so high he can touch the ceiling, maybe nine or ten feet above. The springs sigh metallically each time he lands. Once he’s reached peak height he launches away from the pad and does some crazy combination of spins and flips and lands in the pit of foam blocks. On the other trampoline Mitch is practicing his backflips, confirming the absurdity of his ambition—picture a lawn chaise being upended by a stiff wind and you will hold in your mind an image of his form. Mo has joined them. She hops on where Facundo has left off and simply jumps.
I watch. There’s something mesmerizing about the way her long hair, cinched into a loose ponytail, hangs momentarily above her head as she comes down. It’s like a charmed snake. At one point she drifts away from the trampoline’s center square and lands awkwardly on the padded plywood that covers the springs. She swallows a small cry that maybe only I hear and steps off the trampoline and slides down to sit against the wall. Facundo takes her place on the trampoline and pumps himself higher and higher, loading up for another aerial whathaveyou. When Mo tries to get up, she cannot bear her weight and stumbles and catches herself against the wall. I hop up on the platform and help her down the steps.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she says.
James decides she should go to Urgent Care and skates off to get one of the camp’s large vans. He leaves his phone behind, so the music continues to play loudly over the speakers. I help Mo hobble to a bench outside of B.O.B., where she lies back and props the ankle up on her knee and sobs. The sky is so full of stars it looks like freshly laid asphalt, and there’s a Twin Peaks eeriness to the brooding outline of the woods on the edge of campus, where the dry slopes radiate a ghostly glow.
“It’s broken. I know it’s broken,” she says. “I heard a pop.”
Below the hem of her jeans, which have been rolled to her calf, is a globular mass, the size of something citrusy. Even if the ankle’s not broken, her time here at skateboard camp is up, of that much I’m sure. In an effort to get her mind off the situation, I ask what else she has planned for the summer. She tells me that she recently broke up with her longtime boyfriend. She clarifies “longtime” by saying they’d been dating for thirteen years. I do the math: they’ve been together since seventh grade, when they were twelve. The list of life events they’ve been through together likely includes puberty. Other than my family, there’s not one person still in my life that I’ve known that long.
“I was just really looking forward to spending some time away from him, from home,” she says, and chokes back something different now, something more profound
and nuanced than bodily pain or the simple fear that accompanies it. She breathes deep breaths that carry her off somewhere inside herself. A silence gathers between us like a long yawn. Whatever Mo’s thinking about, I understand, involves an adjustment of her expectations, a reorientation of her relationship to her future. I feel close to her somehow, and try to imagine what this future of hers might entail, the particulars of her ex-boyfriend and their impossibly long relationship in Kalispell, Montana, with its enchanting, fairy-tale name, surrounded by a mountainous landscape like a castle’s battlements. But I come up short. Her life there eludes me. Already I can feel this moment receding from us, bound for the back of both of our minds, taking with it the peculiar intimacy that has arisen here between us. And as we wait for James to arrive and as our eyes allow us to see more of the dark, I wonder whether she, too, can hear the muffled chill beach music from inside B.O.B., whether she, too, will remember it sounding like it was coming from someplace far away.
VII.
After breakfast the next morning the skaters are milling about outside the Hesh, waiting for the coach-counselors to bring the vans around. I’m not fully awake yet and go back for another cup of coffee. The kitchen and its crew operate under the watchful eye of Tom Inouye, a bona fide OG from the Dogtown days, who collective consciousness has it invented the wall-ride and was among the first people to skate a drained pool. Like, ever. He’s in his midfifties now and still skates and his left arm is bent crooked, akimbo even at rest, from an injury I’m too bashful to ask about. I know it’s ridiculous but in my mind I equate asking him about his arm to asking Jesus what up with his palms. Everyone here calls him “Wally” with the same jovial tone that the cast of Cheers said “Norm!” and he always has a smile on his face and his attitude is infectiously good and so I feel rather dickish when he walks by me with a tub of dirty plates and I start wondering about the retirement plans available to the pioneers of this sport. Wally and the other crew members are cleaning to Sublime’s self-titled album and though I haven’t heard it in years, I’m surprised to find I know almost all the words to the song that’s on.
Back outside I stand near a huddle of the cooler-seeming teenagers but not so close that I’ll appear too eager to stand with them. They have names like Boston and Scotland and I can’t tell whether those are nicknames or what. Their hoodies are pulled up over their heads and their postures are almost competitively slouched.
As we load into the vans, I tell Jamie what’s happened to Mo.
“Bummer,” he says, and shakes his head. He holds eye contact to show he really means it and then makes a mark on his roster. “That’s a bummer.”
“I know, right?” I say, slipping back into speech patterns that had been freeze-dried inside me. “Bummer.”
When we get back this afternoon, Mo will be gone. On my way out of the Adult House that morning, after all the other guys had loaded into the van and made for the mountain, she was sitting alone in the lounge area, her crutches leaning against the pool table. Her ex-boyfriend was coming to get her—her car’s a stick and she needed someone to drive her home. In my bunk last night, as I stared at the slats above me, one of which bore a sticker that said I TRAMPS, I could hear her across the hall, making these plans, her voice a steady, smoky whisper. Pat was playing a first-person shooter on his computer and the tinny sound of small-arms fire chirruped from his headphones and his face was lit by the chaos on his screen and I know it wasn’t me ripping the SBDs and I wondered how things would be playing out now had I taken Mo up on her offer to stay. No grand visions of funny business this time, but the mild intimacy of a late-night heart-to-heart, that weird honesty that can arise between relative strangers. The ex-boyfriend was on a flight that left before six this morning and was taking a cab from the airport. I have not and likely won’t ever meet this guy, yet I feel like he’s managed to teach me something about commitment by example. Because if that’s not one husband-ass move he’s pulling for her, I don’t know what is.
“Well, have a safe trip home,” I said, and waved a wave I immediately regretted. I held my hand out straight and made a so-so motion and waggled my fingers as though I were playing air piano. It was Dad’s wave, emerged from somewhere inside me.
“Yeah, thanks. Have a fun week, I guess,” she said. “A nice life.” And her flippancy sent a shiver of sadness and loneliness through me. I understood in that moment that I would, in fact, be the only adult at skateboard camp this week. Only the sadness and loneliness were too rich to be explained away by that alone.
The day’s park is about an hour away. When we arrive, we pour out of the vans and make for a large concrete area sitting like a mirage in the middle of a field. When I was growing up, I rarely ever went to parks. There weren’t many around, first off, and those we had certainly weren’t as well appointed as the area I’m standing on the edge of. The terrain here is expansive and impressively variegated, a muckle of possibilities. There’s a large wall of a quarter-pipe at one end and at the other are the bowls, one of which even has some vert. In the space between them are wax-darkened ledges of the sort my friends and I used to search Richmond high and wide for. Step-ups and boxes and little hips. Sets of stairs to nowhere and their concomitant handrails, which are perfect, low and mellow and smooth. It’s a dream of a place and my cohort is eager to explore it. As they push off, a few of them emit little squeals of delight. I try to recall the last time I squealed likewise but draw a blank.
I wait a moment and watch the others. There’s an unspoken hypothesis among skaters, at least there was when I was younger, that you can gauge how good a person is by how he pushes, how he simply rides. This most rudimentary action says something about one’s general comportment to the craft and can reveal talent of a deeper sort. If this hypothesis holds, I’m happy to discover that the situation isn’t as bad as I’d feared: I will not be the worst skater at Session 2. A few guys use their front foot to push, which is called mongo footing and is amateurish and clumsy and looks like a move from the hokey pokey. Many of the younger kids hunch over their boards and employ a frenetic stomping motion, as though the ground were on fire or covered in bugs. Then there are the counselors and the cooler-seeming teenagers, whose feet barely seem to touch the ground, whose long, pendular strides suggest gravity’s gone slack. Their motions are so fluid that the board more or less disappears underneath them as they cruise through the different areas of the park.
I drop my backpack at a picnic table on the concrete’s edge and join them.
VIII.
And it’s here that I start to fear a breakdown in communication. I’d like to write what I’m up to out there but know that doing so would obscure more than it would explain. Because in order to talk about skateboarding in any meaningful way one has to use its language, and if you don’t know this language, then encountering it here will be like eavesdropping on a conversation between lovers in a foreign country. This is the maddening and deeply alienating experience I have when I watch, say, ice-skating on TV. I’ll sit and listen as the announcers say the names of different jumps, but the jumps themselves look exactly the same. Without the language to appreciate it, I watch ice-skating as though through a veil, in a state of mildly awed boredom, shamefully hoping the skaters will fall, because, ironically, it’s only when they fall that I can appreciate how hard the jump is. I’m sure this is what happens when non-skateboarders flip on the X Games or Street League series and see a cluster of bros waiting to take their turn leaping down a set of stairs to nowhere or flinging themselves skyward from a huge wooden U. And I think this points to the magical poetic naming power all languages share: to learn to say something is to learn to see it.
To wit: skateboarding’s language is a concrete poetry of action, in which all the nouns are also verbs. There’s no distance between the thing said and the thing intended, no connotative flimflam. You do a kickflip, you kickflip, and vice versa. Its grammar is radically aware of one’s orientation, both with respect to the board, on
which your stance can be regular, switch, nollie, or fakie, and to the world, in that tricks and obstacles are either frontside or backside. And while some tricks have special names, most are formed from simpler component tricks. After the ollie, you have the 180s and shove-its and kickflips and heelflips. You stack these together like atoms to create a new trick. So a backside 180 kickflip is a backside 180 and a kickflip, a varial heelflip is a frontside shove-it with a heelflip. Because the tricks can quickly grow cumbersome to say, you get the slangy shorthand that non-skaters often make fun of with a stonery drawl. Backside flip, varial heel, tre-flip, front heel, etcetera, etc., &c. As a general rule, the more tricks you stack together, the more “technical” they are, the more difficult they are to pull off. And when you start adding manuals and grinds to the mix, you can end up with a concatenation of words worthy of the German Idealists: hardflip-to-backside-nosegrind-to-nose-manual-to-nollie-backside-180-flip-out.
Half the fun of watching skateboard videos growing up was naming the tricks the pros had done, letting the language catch up to what we’d just seen, or, as was the case when you watched a true genius like Rodney Mullen, the quasi-mystical experience of not yet having the words to name what’d played on-screen. Skateboarders are hyperaware of this language, too, because while simple and strictly denotative, the language has some wrinkles that novitiates don’t want to get wrong. E.g., there’s no such thing as switch nollie or an inward kickflip and while a nollie halfcab would convey the trick you’ve done, saying it that way will get you laughed at—skateboarders have no truck, as it were, with descriptivism. This language barrier, a shibboleth of sorts, is one of the prevailing reasons why the sport or art or lifestyle or whatever you want to call it (a spart?) has been able to retain its aura of edginess while having been so widely accepted as a part of the culture at large.
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