Ritual warfare and entropy or Bob Loseedo wears a speedo

Thrasher Magazine, Jan, 2003 by Jocko Weyland

SOMETIMES YOU'VE GOT TO DESTROY WHAT YOU LOVE.

Kill it before somebody else does. Put down your faithful dog instead of letting it suffer a lingering death at the hands of others. Call in an air strike on your own position. Often taking measures that lead to an honorable end is the course of action which leaves the least amount of psychic scars. It beats letting a stranger decide the fate of something you cherish.

But that doesn't happen much with skateboarding terrain. Usually it's because somebody else--non-skaters, authorities, the enemies of fun--instigate the destruction of sacred grounds. We all have had to deal with this strange form of warfare and its ritual implications. Ramps burned, knobs on rails, parks and pools bulldozed. Skaters find, use and skate and then the belligerent aggressors come along and reduce it to rubble. Spots come and go, over and over, ad infinitum. To be a skater is to live through destruction and loss. Each spot rendered unskateable is a rehearsal for the inherent risks of file and gives skateboarding metaphorical implications far beyond what usually transpires under the aegis of "sport."

In the case of the Asbury Park pool it was a strange combination of havoc wrecked by the usual suspects, with a little bit of self-determination. One of the pool's most ardent riders got to help with the tearing down of that great place. On Monday, October 7th, 2002 Rick Charnoski wielded the tools of negation, driving the backhoe and operating the claw to annihilate a spot he deeply cared about. Thanks to a cool and understanding demolition specialist who handed over the controls of his machine, Rick got to perform the last rites for a place that deserved some compassion and respect. Later he said he felt a little bit like when the World Trade Center went down, although obviously on a much smaller and less horrific scale. But that's the thing with skate spots--and with life by extension--in this crazy, self-destructive world, we all exist with the prospect of absurd and inexplicable man-made destruction at any moment. Whether we like it or not, that carnage is an inherent fact of life we have to accept.

And that's what happened to the Asbury Park pool, another victim--or maybe a better word is participant--in the entropy that defines our time on this planet. And in a way it is fitting considering Asbury Parks mercurial fortunes over the years, from the vibrant boardwalk and rides and jazz bands of its heyday in the 1920s, to the fading glamour after the war, to the riots in 1967 that changed things forever. In the last 30 years it's been a desolate place where people hang out doing nothing, because there's nothing to do. Chronic unemployment and the ghost of Bruce Springsteen's beginnings made it a shadow of its former self, populated by crack addicts wandering the streets. The boardwalk is crumbling and plans for revitalization have fallen prey to years of political chicanery. The town has been left to fester and rot.

Back in the '50s when things were still going well the pool's first incarnation was as the jewel of the Deal Lake Motel. In its second awakening 40 years later you could almost hear the revelers clinking cocktails around the deck as their kids splashed in water. But the Deal Lake went out of business after the riots and the economic slide of the '70s, completely forgotten. Sometime in the '80s it was reanimated for the first time, but it wasn't until around 1998 that it blossomed and the exotically-shaped blue receptacle was brought back to life for a whole different kind of pleasure seeker.

I first went there in the winter with two friends on a stopover to then-thriving Casino skatepark a few blocks away. There was about two feet of ice in the deep end and it was a cold day, but we ended up skating the shallow with its quick transitions for an hour anyway. I tried dropping in and went sprawling and laughed as I slid on my down jacket toward the ice. After that I went back in the spring and for the next three consecutive summers made it a point to get there as often as possible. That's when the real sessions began with many New Yorkers, quite a few Pennsylvania heads and some local rippers in attendance. The thing about the pool was its weird shape that I was always trying to explain by drawing on whatever available piece of paper was lying around. An ostensible rectangle with six corners instead of four because of the strange pocket in the deep end and the protruding wall on the left side coming toward the shallow. The variety of lines available was mind boggling.

A lot of the enjoyment was the journey down there. Finding out there was a carload heading out, gathering at the appointed pick-up spot, driving through the Holland Tunnel into the Garden State, past Newark Airport and the surrounding industrial wastelands and then south for two hours, knowing you were getting close when you saw the exit sign for "Chessequake" on the Turnpike. Getting off in Asbury and moving toward the beach, stopping at the 7-11 for some victuals and liquids before cruising through the desolate streets lined by ramshackle houses and sketchy barely-hanging-on motels and the hulking carcasses of half-built apartment buildings. With the breeze coming off the ocean, the remains of the changing rooms where everybody relieved themselves never got too pungent. You stayed low so as not to be observed by passing cops while residents in the adjacent buildings looked out their windows to check the action.