My love for skateboarding (or, to be precise, skaters) has burned long and bright for the better part of my life. It started a little with Avril Lavine and then in earnest with a middle school boyfriend. In September, he sat beside me on the bus and walked me home. After school, I watched his feet move in sync to the black grip tape like pure magic on the basketball court and considered making out with him under the bleachers. I cheered for his band at the talent show, held his hand, sat next to him every lunch, and then, after two short months, broke up with him unceremoniously over the phone. The details have been lost to time, but I remember deciding I didn’t want his tongue in my throat—I didn’t want him to kiss me at all—I only wanted to watch him skate.
Before adolescence, I saw Tony Hawk guest star on an episode of Suite Life of Zack and Cody and visualized myself as Alexa Vega in aughties gem Sleepover (remember when she rides the skateboard past her crush in the sparkly red dress? I fucking wish). In my mind, I was the skater’s girlfriend in baggy cargo pants, casually performing kickflips in the courtyard at lunch and skipping out on fifth period. The girl who runs from mall security and drives a hard-top Jeep, who glides on concrete to school like a ghost, the epitome of chill.
But I wasn’t Avril, I was the other, more embarrassingly basic girl from “Sk8r Boi:” I did ballet, I read, and I possessed neither the coordination nor spirit of rebellion of the song’s victorious girlfriend. Still, my fascination for skateboarding and its devotees persisted. I fantasized about the kinds of men who could perform gravity-defying tricks shirtless, Dickies held up just so with a white shoelace, skin glistening, their lank bodies skimming the concrete, jumping to and from obstacles, landing in magnificent arcs and, even when falling, doing so with grace and levity. A small part of me believed they could fly.
I’m not the first to fall for the mattress-on-the-floor, tiny-hat Modelo fuckers, nor will I be the last; the Instagram account “Tiny Hat Skate Life” has been a memeified safe space for commiserating sad souls destined to love Carhartt dudes who can’t be bothered to buy a belt, let alone turn into the brooding prince of our dreams. I’ve slept in my fair share of Lottie’s sweatshirts, waved to the Palace skaters from my rearview mirror as I backed up from my parking spot in front of Verve, donned my limited edition Nikes to the park just so some cute-but-skeletal guy will tell me he likes my kicks.
I like to think of this pattern as proof of my tenacity, but if I’m being perfectly honest, there have been times when my romantic type could be constituted as a legitimate disease. At nineteen, I hooked up with a twenty-six-year-old skate-brand videographer who liked to tell me long, semi-racist stories about his time in Japan I was supposed to find amusing before lighting a few candles and turning down the laptop volume. We fell asleep in his navy (why are they always navy?) bedcovers (they never possess a top sheet) and in the morning, I would kiss him goodbye and send an Uber to Glendale.
Years later, another boyfriend (whom I will call here “David”) actually taught how me to skate and initiated me into the “cool” and “uncool” binary of the culture—or at least his version of it—Rip n’ Dip: uncool, Adidas: Uncool, Nike: Cool, Illegal Civ: Uncool, Highland Park: cool, Venice: Uncool, Baseball caps: Cool, Snapbacks: Uncool, Jonah Hill: Uncool, Mikey Alfred: Cool (on and on it went). Skateline played continuously in the background, I saved Skatemoss posts for inspiration. The roles of the “fashion girlfriend” and “skater boyfriend” are quickly evolving as those same girlfriends are learning to skate. The sport has inched representation further in the past year alone when Supreme signed 26-year-old, Beatrice Domond and Vans released a collaboration with Lizzie Armanto in the first Vans skate shoe designed by a woman in over twenty years. And Betty, the HBO show depicting the very real all-girl pack, Skate Kitchen, solidified its subjects as legitimate stars. The division of recognition and sponsorship remains (only 23.9% of skateboarders are women and even fewer are considered in the “core” demographic), but numbers are projected to rise with the visibility of Women’s Skateboarding at the Tokyo Olympics and the rise of TikTok skater girls.
While the recent boom has done great things for diversity in the sport, its free-wheeling libertarian origins (just an empty pool and a handful of surfers on early longboards) have been muddled in the gold rush. Skateboarding has become an indelible part of our culture and, therefore, entwined more than ever with capitalism. Where skateboarding used to be punk, synonymous with outsiders, poor kids, and rebels, some have cashed in and sold out. Supreme’s seasonal drops, while already expensive, make a killing on the resale market; a camo hoodie with the classic “Supreme” box logo on the front is (as of now) going for $797 on the resale website, hbx.com. Said logo’s currency is ironic in and of itself, a well-known rip-off of Barbara Kruger’s anti-capitalist art. Illegal Civ, its partner brand, has a full-fledged movie studio, and Louis Vuitton makes a line of streetwear. Oh, how far we’ve come.
Even film has had its share of “skateboarding-focused” stories (see: North Hollywood, Mid 90s), the best of which being Bing Liu’s documentary Minding the Gap. Set in the desolate blue-collar city of Rockford, Illinois, Liu constructs an insightful film about generational trauma, friendship, and heartbreak through the lens of skateboarding. An archival clip of a young Kiere (one of the film’s primary subjects) exemplifies the rage and discontentment bubbling beneath the surface. After being bullied by a neighborhood kid, Kiere steals his board and stomps on it again and again as the board remains stubbornly intact, spiting his tiny, furious body until it, finally, as if relenting with a great, deep sigh, splits in two. Later in the film, an adult Kiere sobs through a graveyard, searching for his father’s headstone: whatever immediate pain skateboarding may have assuaged, the central heartbreak has not subsided.
In my early days of learning to skate, I mainly visited the parks early in the morning or late at night with a pack of beers (not particularly advisable). There were usually only one or two women at the park, but in general, the vibe was friendly, if a bit testosterone-charged. I remember one incident at the technically “closed” Echo Park Skate Park (people just climbed through a hole in the fence) when I fell attempting to drop down. A boy of about eleven kindly advised, “Keep your knees bent. It won’t hurt so bad when you fall.” I thanked him and got back up.
Falling is part of the deal. Even for the most experienced, it’s never a matter of if, but how hard. Such resiliency is admirable and instills a lack of self-consciousness. It seems to be a feature, not a bug, of skateboarding’s democratic origins. Unlike many sports, skateboarding does not require classes, expensive uniforms, or team dues. Aside from the upfront cost of a board, trucks, and wheels (somewhere between $30-$85), it’s free to play. It’s the perfect poor kids’ sport, which is perhaps why skateboarders developed a usually unearned reputation as delinquents. That, and skating obstacles on private property is a quick way to attract police (there is an entire genre of “Skaters Vs. Police” YouTube compilation videos).
One summer night last year, David and I hopped a fence into the high school on Grand in Downtown LA and skated around the courtyard. The concrete was smooth and slightly inclined. I practiced ollying (poorly) while he ably lept on and off lunch tables. A police helicopter circled around the city, its spotlight shining down on where we rode every five minutes. With my phone blasting music from my pockets, I felt a certain brand of delinquent high. I imagined this is what it must be like to be young and badly behaved. To be reckless. Not to date the bad boy from my dreams, but to actually become him, to taste his rebellion and let it clothe me like the Dime sweatshirt on my back.
Once, David stopped the car nearing midnight at a car wash in Hollywood. He pulled up a clip of Alex Midler riding down the side of the building. We compared the feat to the impressively large, vertical sight before us. A sympathetic thrill came over me. As I visualized the boy whom I once mistook for Brockhampton’s Matt Champion catapulting twenty feet below and landing on his feet—just as importantly, on his board—I saw another version of events, one with his brain smeared across the intersection, bloody and raw. And in Jim Greco’s “Jobs? Never!!” we see Greco ride atop a vintage baby blue sedan before spectacularly slamming onto the lip of a sidewalk. In slow-motion, we see his back contort, bending back from the force, and collapse sideways. Cut to long shots of 4th street downtown and a hospital waiting room. The camera lingers on a hypodermic needle entering the swollen muscle of his back. If you’re good, you make it look easy. It’s moments like these that remind you precisely what is at stake.
There are other sports in which, by their very nature, severe injury is to be expected. Football and Rugby, for instance, are known for long-term damage from repeated concussions; in Texas, where I grew up, it was not unusual for a Varsity Football player to be carried off in the middle of a game. While for the skateboarder there are technically pads and helmets, those safety precautions are far from the norm in street skateboarding (competition is another story). Apart from ruining the “devil-may-care” artifice, it seems to compromise the unspoken point of skateboarding: to risk something. Unlike those aforementioned team sports, there are no blows from competing players, no tackles from behind; only fear versus conviction, you versus you.
I remember back in my hometown midst-pandemic at House Park early in the morning skating alone up a half-pipe, doing tricks for my iPhone propped up against my water bottle. I was feeling good, finally comfortable at the park, when I slammed against the cold metal at the top of the pipe. I clutched my head and drove ten minutes home, collapsed on my mother’s couch, and cried like a baby. She called a doctor and I laid in bed for a week with a concussion, listening in fits and spurts to audiobooks and sleeping all day. When it was time to return to LA, my mother mailed back my board with the text, “Your murder board is on its way.”
I remember sweating my ass off that early June in David’s bedroom while I watched him put my board together. He got the board for free from his roommate who worked in media for the Berrics (an indoor skatepark in South LA with a robust YouTube channel) and used trucks and wheels from his friend we used to skate with. I watched him cut the edges of the blackest grip tape with an Exacto knife, demonstrate how to sand it down, and how to run your hand along the wheel to test their evenness. When all was said and done, he handed it to me. It had daisies on the bottom and smiley faces. It could have been anything, could have had no design at all and I still would have wept with joy at the sight of it. That night, I rode around the driveway in Boyle Heights, christening its sturdy wood and gliding metal, cold Modelo in hand; what I coveted became mine in the form of glue, wood, metal, and rubber—the boyfriend of my dreams.