Skate club

Thrasher Magazine, May, 2004 by Reed Kellman

Later that evening I'm watching Video Days when the front door's bell rings. Gavin is in the basement sawing away at his two-by-fours and a load of stolen plywood, so I answer it. Outside is a kid of about 15 holding a board under his arm, the latest Puff Boy model. "Can I skate the ramp?" he asks.

"I think you're at the wrong place," I say.

"If he can kickflip but can't ollie, tell him he can't skate until he can ollie," Gavin is whispering in my ear. "If he pushes mongo tell him he can't because he pushes mongo."

"What?"

"Don't let him skate the ramp."

"You can't skate the ramp," I tell the kid. "You can't ollie."

"Good," says Gavin. "Now do that for all of them that come."

I shut the door and turn to Gavin. "What is going on?"

"We're going to change the world," he says. "We're building a park."

Commute. Work. Commute. Sleep ...

Two weeks later and our house is completely swarming with skaterats. They're everywhere. I come home from work and they're learning to crooked grind. I come back from the grocery store and they're doing airs over the hip. I walk in and they're asking me if I'm pro. "No," I say. "I'm just old."

HOW HIGH CAN YOU OLLIE?" THEY RESPOND.

At night they gather in front of the television. A major network has picked up a contest circuit called Velocity X. Our underground family is out in the open now. There is a contest each night. The skaterats sit there with notebooks and scribble down what tricks they need to learn; imagine the lines needed to win.

I see less and less of Gavin. I don't know where he has gone. I'm still going to my job but it's becoming harder and harder to make it through the day. Mr Jackson's son skates now. I see him at the public park on Sunday mornings, sitting over to the side with the rest of the weekend fathers, reading his paper as his son rolls back and forth in the bowl--endlessly I think he likes me even less now. Before, I was just an idiot. Now I'm an idiot playing the same game as eight-year-olds.

I can't escape as easily. The daydreams are replaced with a queasy stomach. I worry about filming. I even worry that my style is outdated. I can't do hardflips. I can't do frontside flips. I worry that I'm getting old and regressing, my skating becomes less and less consistent. I've found a new ditch to skate, a half-mile run with hips and wallrides. Gavin isn't there to skate it; I struggle to find the motivation.

Back at the compound, as I've come to call it, all the kids are getting on flow. Boxes of boards in oversized UPS packages crowd the porch. They're coming for me, I can tell. I am broken. One night I come back to a pantry full of onion rings--boxes and boxes of onion rings courtesy of the kid's sponsor, Mel Brothers Onion Rings.

Gavin is back. I hear rumors that be is setting up similar compounds around the country, preparing. What he is preparing for I'm unsure--some sort of mass-participation in skateboarding. He pulls up in a 12-passenger van; he is taking us all on a street mission. I try to tell him about the ditch. "Later," he tells me: "This new rail just popped up. We need to get it filmed before it's played out."