José Vadi began writing poems around the same time he started skateboarding. He was 13, shocked by the bolts of energy he experienced while riding and eager to articulate what this “toy” or “endorphin tool” meant to him. In Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens, Vadi triumphantly realizes this early aspiration. If his debut essay collection, Inter State, offered a series of love letters to California, Chipped is an extended mash note to the rich subculture of the board.
Characterized by a friend as a “skate rat,” Vadi hails from Pomona, in eastern Los Angeles County. He grew up in the 1990s, an era characterized by Rodney King and O.J Simpson, as well as Governor Pete Wilson’s three-strikes policies and Proposition 187, which, Vadi explains, “attempted to create a state-administered citizenship system that denied immigrants basic social services” such as healthcare and education.
“As predominantly Black and Brown skaters pushed street skateboarding forward at San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza and the schoolyards of Los Angeles,” he writes, “they were progressing the form under a heightened state of police brutality and incarceration of Black and Brown men throughout California.”
Vadi’s mother and father were concerned that skateboarding would lead him into dangerous territory, toward forces they couldn’t control. “My parents,” he elaborates, “knew the stats and the streets, growing up in Mexico by way of La Puente and Santurce, Puerto Rico by way of East Harlem—two hoods on either side of the states, knowing the threat of first impressions with kids like me and law enforcement, lead to a mix of model minority expectations and sheer overly hammered common sense, to be sure I knew, even before skateboarding, that my privileges were different.”
To appease his parents, Vadi struck a deal. “I had to get straight As—or damn near—to skate,” he says, during a recent conversation via Zoom. Though his high marks in school didn’t stop police from targeting him over his white friends when rousting skate spots, they did lead to his admittance to UC Berkeley.
“There are a lot of examples of skateboarders, in a nontraditional sense, being proper academics,” Vadi observes when I ask about the stereotype of the troubled skateboarder. Tony Hawk’s IQ, for instance, has been widely reported as near 150.
While an undergraduate, Vadi discovered poetry slams from flyers plastered around the campus. This led him to learn “spoken word poetry like a skater,” by watching mixtapes—including Russell Simmons’s series Def Poetry—before braving an open mic himself. Eventually, he got involved with Youth Speaks, a San Francisco nonprofit offering literary programs in and after school throughout the Bay Area. He performed with the group on BART cars, at MUNI stations, and at bus shelters, as well as in school auditoriums, not to mention the Herbst Theater and the War Memorial Opera House.
The seamless throughline Vadi develops between skateboarding and poetry suggests that skaters and poets are cut from the same cloth; both are inherently improvisational, and rebellious, social activists who thrive as members of creative communities. “Open mic culture, poetry slams, the performance nature of showing up to a venue and delivering,” he says, “is very much akin to showing up to a [skate] spot and doing your best trick. Even if it’s not in a competitive format. You’re showing up, you’re present, and you’re contributing to what other people are doing in that space.”
Throughout Chipped, Vadi pays homage to the skaters, musicians, and poets who inspired his deep appreciation of the culture. “You can’t accurately talk about skateboarding,” he says, “without talking about music and art.”
One such inspiration is Frank O’Hara, whose book Lunch Poems was written as he observed the midday bustle of midtown Manhattan. Much like a skateboarder, Vadi notes, O’Hara kept to a pedestrian’s perspective and a ground-level connection with space. When it came to his poems, he wasn’t precious, often shoving them, crumpled, into a pocket. “His carelessness for his own physical writing,” Vadi writes, “reminds me of those obsessed, talented, but myopic pro skaters who didn’t care to redo a trick if it was filmed poorly or not filmed at all, the day’s vibes and the knowledge that they did it—and didn’t need to publish it—is such an unassuming braggadocio as to infuriate the hardest working skaters of the world.”
Although Vadi spent nearly two decades in the East Bay, becoming intimately acquainted with the area as he rode its streets and grinded its curbs, he now lives in Sacramento, where he works as a writer and marketing specialist at UC Davis. Almost 40, he still skates, knee injuries from failed ollies and falls on busted asphalt be damned. In Chipped, he writes not just about continuing to skate, but also growing “alongside the toy.” This, he suggests, “doesn’t stunt him in childhood, but keeps him in communication with its root definitions of joy.”
“Skateboarding is a tool for inquiry and discovery,” Vadi points out as we are talking, adding that these days, he spends less time hanging around skate parks, dodging security guards who might spot his graying hair, gravitating instead toward city street curbs, the “initial gateway drug to skateboarding.”
As for the question of how to keep things playful in adulthood, even as one’s life becomes more standardized and rigid, it’s a matter of not taking yourself too seriously. “If you’re just doing the thing and pushing around and enjoying yourself at whatever age,” Vadi insists, “you’re winning.”•
Emily St. Martin has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Vice, Los Angeles magazine, and the Southern California News Group.
