Any Deck, Any Truck, Any Wheel Part 1: Freestyle Foolishness, Dungeons, Dragons, Dorks and Desires.

1988 was the year I made the transition from being a kid with a skateboard to being a “skateboarder”. The distinction between the two things may seem like a fine hair to split, but as a 14 year old who had never had a girlfriend, never made it onto any sports team and had a big brother who did his best to make sure I didn’t have the confidence to ever dream of doing either, it was like throwing down the fucking gauntlet.

Outsiders can scoff. It’s easy to think that all I was doing was falling into a fad, but if skateboarding was a fad it was the hardest fad in the history pop culture to actually participate in. Fads are supposed to be easy. Sometimes all you have to do to be in the thick of one is buy some doohickey or scrap of clothing, but with skateboarding, it was a major commitment of time and discipline just to buy your way in. By ’87 Skateboarding was rapidly gaining popularity, sure, but the return wasn’t so much a subcultural rags-to-riches story as it was a rags-to-new-outfit-from-the-goodwill story. Even in throes of Bones Brigade mania, in the midwest becoming a skater was not something that happened unless you really wanted it to. It took a daunting amount of work just to be a poseur. That’s why, even for the trendies who only skitched their way on the thrash bandwagon for a few months, the decision to dabble in skating was a lot more involved than going to the five and dime to buy a hula hoop or a pogo stick, and the effects of that decision had broader impacts. Skaters wax poetic about their first real board. It’s seen as a rite of passage. To an outsider, that’s a corny sentiment at best and a sad overidentification with crass consumerism at worst, but in a time when skateboard shops, sometimes even skateboard magazines, only existed in the major metropolitan areas in the midwest, the simple act of getting your hands on a board was more than an act of consumption, it was a true initiation: a baptism of plywood, urethane and cast aluminum. Here’s your Hosoi hammerhead, welcome to the cult.

Skatesploitation Part 2: SO YOU WANNA GO THRASHIN'! THRASHIN'!

When it comes to skatesploitation, the 1986 film epic Thrashin’ is the proverbial Vallely elephant popping bonelesses in the middle of the room. It’s the titan, the heavyweight, the millstone hanging from the subcultural neck. Both reviled for its hollywood cluelessness and beloved for being a much needed primer on contemporary skateboarding for anyone cut off from the subculture’s epicenters in the 80’s, Thrashin crystallizes everything sickening and crucial about the mainstream’s commodification of skateboarding in the awkward middle years of the 1980‘s. Thrashin’ is a terrible movie, but it’s OUR terrible movie. Thrashin is woven deep into the fabric of a whole generation of skate culture. People still parody it in videos, and quoting any of a handful of “classic” lines from the film at a session is sure to get you a few chuckles or callbacks form anyone over 30. As a sign of its time, a time when the mainstream was trying to make a few quick bucks off skating, and kids on the fringes were salivating for  any skate knowledge they could retrofit from the mainstream, Thrashin’ is a potent but ridiculously embarrassing landmark, a snapshot of the barney culture’s commodofication machine trying its hardest and failing to box skateboarding into a lowest-common-denominator-soluble package.

Skatesploitation or Die (Part 1of 2) "REACH FOR THE TOP!"

Learning about skating via the pre-digested, commodified versions of it we saw in pop culture was not ideal, but skateboarding’s flirtations with the mainstream in ’86-’87 turned out to be vital for me and my valterrorizing friends anyway. By ’86 I had been cruising my department store Variflex for two years and me and the pre-pubescent driveway gangs haunting the subdivisions had pretty much reached the limits of what we thought carving, kickturns and coffins could do for us. We knew there was another level of skating somewhere, but we had no idea what it looked like or how to take the first step to get to it. We didn’t even have directions to the stairwell. We were desperate for any bit of information we could digest.

Skateboarding's Critical Mass: The masonite/Boneite Revolution

For me 1986 and 1987 were the years of a sort subliminal indoctrination into skateboarding. By the end of ’87 I had reached the turning point where I realized skateboarding was not going to be just a diversion for me, but a passion. These were the years when my friends and I slowly and painfully began to realize that those Nashes and Valterras we were riding weren’t going to be enough.

These were the years before Thrasher showed up in the bookstores but Thrashin' and Police Academy 4 were on movie screens. 720 appeared in the mall arcade promising answers to the tao of skating that, alas, remained elusive no matter how many quarters we pumped into it. At home, my friend Monty and I were ignoring the hackey sack and volleyball stages of California Games on the commodore 64 so we could go straight to shredding the 8-bit half pipe in the skateboarding stage. Skate Or Die came later, and we would find ourselves taking pixelized advice on equipment and skate spots from a double-chinned, purple mohawked skateshop owner named Rodney Recloose in the hopes of taking down aggro eddie. Of course when the screen went blank, no matter how well we scored head to head against Bionic Lester, we had to go back out to our driveways with our Valterras and Nashes and be Poseur Pete.

 In the living rooms of our suburban ranch houses there were sporadic commercials with tiny snippets of skating flash cut in between pitches for cola or hair gel. Each split second of shredding between money shots of Swatch watches or perspiring cans of Mountain Dew would have me putting my face right up to the screen, searching for information. In the mid 80’s, if skateboarding was the bright center of the universe, I was on the planet farthest from, but like a radio telescope operator with an open line to alien world, I was poring through the pop culture static and aggregating a transmission of skateboarding whose signal to noise ratio was slowly getting better.

Skateboarding: The Loser's Choice.

By fall of ’87 the only thing in worse shape than my cut-rate variflex board was my cut-rate team Murray BMX bike. This was a problem because, by 1987, the brief flare -up of budget board skating that got turbocharged by Back To The Future in ’85 was beginning to fade away in favor of a return to BMX. The little bubble of interest in skateboards seemed destined to be nothing more than a breather that barely interrupted the BMX mania that had been ongoing in the rural midwest since the beginning of the decade.

I had never had a good BMX bike and skateboarding had temporarily created a level of equality between me and my peers. All our boards were more or less equal in their second rate status. (not that we really knew that). But now BMX was re-asserting it dominance. On top of that there was a new type of BMX bike every kid had to have. It was called a freestyle bike, and with their rotors, pegs and neon colors, freestyle bikes were even further removed from my rusting, wobbly-rimmed department store Team Murray. To add insult to injury, my main partner in valterrorism, Monty, dropped his valterra for a hot pink GT freestyle bike in ’87.  This was a harsh blow. I was bummed not just because I was unsure who I would have to skate with while Monty was over-flipping endos on his bike, but also because his subdivision had the best driveways. The vicarious arms race that would later have every parent in his hood scrabbling to buy their little darlings the hottest car was supplying all those cut-rate carvers I had once skated with with tricked out, eye-watering fluorescent Dynos, Haros and, GTs.

Part 1: Stone-Age Throwbacks (Ca. 1984)

Courtesyhttp://vintageskateboardmagazines.com

 
The thing I remember most clearly about getting my first skateboard was that I didn’t want it.  It was a Christmas gift from my uncle Harry; a light blue plastic banana board with open bearings and wide, translucent red wheels. The trucks were so narrow the inside edges of the wheels nearly scraped the kingpin housing and bushings. If you stood in the middle of it with both feet together the bottom of the flexible plastic deck would almost scrape the ground. This was either 1983. I was about ten years old.