It felt necessary to go outside and skate after Thrasher Magazine’s Jake Phelps’s death was announced in March 2019. Not that he would’ve given a damn what I’d done, the now departed enfant terrible of skateboarding, whose knowledge of the culture’s history was only outmatched by his ability to piss people off.
I decided that morning to skate an older cruiser board across town, something that by name and definition should be a mellow ride. The board was a Krooked Zip Zagger with a zoomed in photo of a slice of supreme pizza for a bottom graphic. It had a shaped, pointed nose and a flat, shovel of a tail, and soft orange Spitfire cruiser wheels with a faded mock Zig-Zag rolling papers graphic. The board was maybe seven years old at that point, changing out the bearings every so often, using the board mainly as transportation from BART to my apartment in Adams Point. When I moved in with my girlfriend in Rockridge, I skated to BART but far from regularly now.
It had been months since my last proper session. It’s hard as a skater to find one’s place within its culture at any point and time, let alone times when work, commutes, and other creative outlets occupy more of the front of mind. Days and weeks turned into months of not skateboarding. Doubt crept in. Then fear. Then malaise.
Still, I left the house and went skating—already a win. Off I went down Broadway and toward the bike lanes connecting Rockridge with neighboring Temescal, from 51st to 40th streets, skating the cross-neighborhood distance of two BART stops. It was a trip feeling the sensory overload again, of responding to every crack, car, stop sign, smell, and sound around me.
A month into unemployment post-tech layoff, a beer felt in order. The corner bar was open and ready for my stupidity. George Kaye’s has been around since just after prohibition and it is probably the cleanest of the older bars in Oakland. The neon lights read Geo Kaye’s outside, but the original owner was indeed George. Not the kind of place to know or care what a Yelp was. Local ball game on the tube TV aloft in a corner kind of bar, where the finest technology is a CD jukebox and maybe a digital antenna forced upon them during the broadband switch decades ago.
I sat on the short side of the L-shaped bar facing the Giants spring training game. I started a tab. One beer turned to two Red Stripes. I thought about Phelps, how I’d miss stories he shared with the public, and how the magazine would be assuredly fine. Within the High Speed Productions portfolio, Thrasher is its vanguard—and the vanguard for print and digital skateboard media, worldwide. I recalled to myself the tales of Phelps—getting hit by an SF MUNI bus and surviving; his well-informed foul mouth; his banning of pro skaters from Thrasher; his almost dying in a van full of skaters in South Africa after the van’s brakes gave out; the time actual gunshots entered a van full of skaters in the mid-’90s, striking Real Skateboards rider Coco Santiago, and injuring him permanently.
And then I realized I didn’t have a wallet. That I’d put my license and credit card between my phone and its protective case, not planning to be here, an infamously cash-only bar. The ATM across the street surprisingly wouldn’t accept my credit card. I was stuck. The bartender was an older gentleman with combed back hair and demeanor that said “veteran of foreign service.” I feared he thought I was going to offer my board as collateral as probably other skaters and punks before me had tried before but who am I kidding. He could tell I was good for it. I called my girlfriend and asked her to drive down with cash and spot her jobless walletless guy some bread amid my tight squeeze, or whatever imagined and smooth Great Gatsby cutting room floor line I didn’t use on my girlfriend nor the bartender. I tipped well and left. Not only was I rusty on a board but on a barstool as well, apparently. She asked if I needed a ride back to our apartment, knowing something I didn’t, and I said no, skating off to the nearby high school and skate spot, Oak Tech.
Oakland Technical High School’s exterior is all regal columns and half circle stair stages, a giant palace of an exterior before a traditional high school hides inside, including its football field.
It’s a spot with historic street skating significance after being featured in 1988’s Sick Boys. Produced and filmed by Mack Dawg, the VHS was limited to only one thousand copies worldwide, but became an underground classic showcasing the future legends of San Francisco street skateboarding. Notably Mickey Reyes, Jim Thiebaud, Tommy Guerrero, and Oakland’s Ron Allen. Many of the skaters featured in the video became the owners of companies within the skate industry that are still relevant today, including Deluxe Distribution, part of a new guard breaking from the big brands of the ’80s into the early 1990s.
Rereleased on DVD in 2008, Mack Dawg Productions described Sick Boys as “free from outside control or industry support.” Shot entirely on Super 8 film, Ron Allen described filming with Dawg as “having a camera on a broomstick. He’d always tell us to go as fast as we wanted because he was confident that he could keep up with us. You’d be skating and look down and here’s this little camera floating around.” Scenes of Reyes going up the concrete bank and popping an ollie over trash cans at Oak Tech were ingrained in my mind after catching up to Sick Boys as a skater in the late ’90s.
At the spot, all I can think is go fast, push into the smaller side of the bank and try to get enough speed to hit the larger part of the concrete bank where Reyes skated years prior. I run and jump on my board, still getting used to the feel of this beat up cruiser. Overcompensating my speed pushing slightly uphill, I approach the bank and suddenly change my mind. I can’t decide whether to ollie into the bank or kick out and bail, but I was going too fast to do anything logical, so I tried both—impossible—leading to a chaotic tumble onto chewed up asphalt. My wheels, already a softer urethane, were more worn than I had thought. My board flew one way and my body another. Landing I planted my left leg down like a mast raising a white sail of defeat and I heard a click more so than a pop come screaming from my left knee. All this, before my body hit the ground and rolled a couple times into some knee and arm scrapes, before my body came to a stop, shook.
I remember accidentally staring at the sun and exacerbating my absolute confusion at what had just happened. Most of my life has been spent mumbling across dinner tables and other unamplified interactions. But I yelled that day. A new voice unheard to my ears and lungs before. I’m an idiot, a fool, a dummy, arrogant for not respecting the discipline required to skate…anything. What did Phelps say? Something about skateboarding owing you nothing but wheel bite in the rain?
I get up quick, flexing and bending my knee to confirm it’s not broken. Every terrible thought is running through my mind. It’s my left knee, the already bad knee, the one I didn’t stretch much today nor the dormant weeks preceding this session. I walk around deliriously, rest my hand against the concrete pillars encircling the solar car shelters above, all of which didn’t exist at the time of Sick Boys filming. I tried to keep moving, but the rising tides of swelling crept in, announcing how fucked I’d be for weeks? Months?
You okay?
I looked over toward a two-seater pickup truck and saw a dude looking at me, appropriately, like I was an idiot. I don’t know, I replied, honestly. We did the diagnostic talk about whether or not I heard a pop, if I could bend it, if I needed a ride somewhere. I took him up on that offer using my board as a cane to walk in his direction.
He introduced himself, explained he was there because he ran the school’s theater department, the truck hauling the latest production’s strike of set props and odd ends. I told him about participating in such choral theatrical activities most of my life, an hour a day from fifth grade through high school graduation, how it even got me out of state sometimes, and I wondered if he could smell the beers on my breath or the tree rings in my gray hairs, insecurities all the same. Appreciate this solid and figure it out, I thought. The pain made me delirious enough to pour out my familiarity with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s oeuvre as he made a left from the school up Broadway, my knee spasming its way to the top of my mind.
I texted my girlfriend, again, and told her to meet me, again. This time at the 76 station on the way to the bar, the one on Broadway by the California College of the Arts. Ice was needed and they had it. They were my local gasoline-selling bodega with a mechanic shop for international cars ONLY next door. I told my chariot to head that way and he assured me I could get a ride all the way home but I assured him that ice was the priority. Not that I knew shit about this situation. I was holding everything together in this stack of cards I was folding on top of myself—my ability to skate, drink, see skate spots, enjoy theatrical interactions with dudes literally producing theater, my potential marriage—and hoping things got better.
Hobbled into the store for ice sweating, paid, and quickly sat on a curb between the gas pumps and the store. I propped my foot on my board, sitting sideways on its axles and elevated just enough, with ice bags surrounding the interior of my left kneecap. It wouldn’t stop stinging, throbbing, waves of pain. I bent it every so often knowing I was setting myself up to go stiff but nothing mattered then. I just felt terrible and probably looked ridiculous when my girlfriend pulled up again, not needing to ask What Happened?
Did I mention I had just been laid off and lost health insurance? All the potential costs were adding up let alone the realization of what I’d put my girlfriend through this lovely afternoon. Swallowed Advil upon arrival at the apartment, debating if my neighbors downstairs could hear how hurt I was by the sound of my lumbered pace. I could barely bend my leg. My knee was stiffening too quickly. I asked my friend, a doctor, to come over and check out the knee and they didn’t notice any structural damage. Bone bruise was the diagnosis. I sat in my kitchen nook for weeks until a month arrived, staring out the kitchen window from Rockridge toward the city and the Bay Bridge.
I spent weeks apologizing to my girlfriend, myself, my age, my doctor friend. I look back at photos from those weeks and see nothing but a giant blue ice pack and my cat sharing space on my leg. Lots of photos taken from a chair, inside. It was all a reminder of how skateboarding is a discipline, a practice, a ritual. Though some can step off a board and jump back without interruption, creating magic upon rearrival, for most it’s scratching off rust, humbling what our minds see versus what our bodies tell us to feel when we step outside on our boards, let alone stepping outside our comfort zones. I knew before I left the door there was no reason to skate other than the act itself, yet I tried to force honor out of a day that should’ve been about getting comfortable on my board again, not trying to punch above my weight toward some projected enlightenment. It’s the reason I gasp at new scooter owners going twenty-five miles per hour down congested streets at the squeeze of a handlebar, without knowing what a fall and failure feels like. They might as well drive those things blindfolded, and me skating the Oak Tech banks with a stiff, buzzed body felt similarly foolish. I jogged for the first time a month later, the trails at Mount Davidson in San Francisco, cresting to the massive cross acquired by a local group to commemorate victims of the Armenian genocide. I managed to walk around enough to meet my parents in town for a trip to the Monet exhibit at the de Young. I even got enough mobility to have dinner with my girlfriend in downtown Oakland before going on a walk and proposing to her on the east side of Lake Merritt. I can still feel how much that knee hurt as we turned and took selfies, smiles from ear to ear.
And I wonder still if that dude’s play went well at Oak Tech and if the kids received a standing ovation.•
Excerpted from Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens, by José Vadi. Published with permission of Soft Skull Press. Copyright © 2024 by José Vadi.
José Vadi is the author of Inter State: Essays from California and Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press. He lives and writes in California.
