I am the proud new parent of a female long board. Her name is Scrap. My friend, Terry, my home bro, took me to buy her. The store was well-stocked with skateboards of all sizes, colors and shapes. Some brightly colored ones called out to me, those with yellow wheels and evocative graphics — like the shirtless goddess in bold orange, her long hair shrouding bare breasts. I enjoyed that one. But when I stood on it and rode it the length of the store, the connection wasn’t there. It felt ordinary at best, even a bit awkward.
I tried a few like that in succession, half-listening to the sales guy ramble on about how he’s from southern California and has been riding for years. I could read the expression on Terry’s face. It said: “Shut up, man. I’ve been riding skateboards since your parents were in diapers.” She’s always making herself out to be older than she is. I’ve learned to hear what she’s saying even when she doesn’t speak. I pay attention because she speaks her mind and her mind is genuinely her own. She is an artist so she’ full of that. She’s full of wit, too, which makes me laugh. She seems, also, one of the freest and consequently most powerful women I’ve ever met.
There was debate between bamboo and cedar. Bamboo was more expensive because it has more give, is a softer, more forgiving ride. Carbon fiber was the most expensive, but would be too much for a beginner like me. I tried the bamboo board and felt pretty good on it. Terry has one just like it as does one of our other friends, so that served as a minor deterrent, needing as I do to be original.
On several different boards, I flung myself with cautious speed across the store, hoping that one of them would engage me in some thrilling dalliance. Just as I was starting to feel frustrated, I spotted another rack of fresh boards I had yet to violate. One of them stood out in bright blue. When I approached, I saw that the graphic was a beach scene, the blue being an ocean wave. I wasn’t too turned on by the graphic, but something about the board appealed to me. I took it down from the wall. Terry hopped on it first, riding out of the store and back, announcing that she liked it. The sales guy said that its “kick fin” made for more fun, easier turning as well.
I rode it out of the store toward the hall. I felt in tune with it right away; I wanted to keep going down the hall and through the mall. When I stepped on he small lip at the end referred to as the kick fin, in an effort to swing around and head back into the store, the board lurched vertical, bucking me off its back and square on my sit bones. The board fled, fast and wild across the hall, into some people who hopped over it, and against the wall where it came to rest. Embarrassed, I stood and trotted after it, feeling the soreness in my ass where it put me with such stern and easy authority.
I had a flashback to a scene in Chicago. I was in my car on my way home from work, listening to a song by Bitch and Animal… “I stopped looking and then just crashed…” when I saw a kid on a skateboard crash into a stop sign, his board escaping into the street and getting run over by a car approaching in the opposite direction. The glint of silver from the metal truck inside the gashed wood was all I saw before driving past. “This is just scrap, this is just scrap, this is just scrap metal on the intersection making noise, this is just…”
I watched the kid in my rear view. His face was a broken heart. He was rubbing his ass. I was seized by a moment of judgment: That kid didn’t know how to ride that thing. Who was he trying to be? Who did he think he was fooling?
The moment held so much: The words in the song, the look on the kid’s face, the glint of metal and splintered wood — their mutual woundedness. The concrete, the wheels rolling over the escaped board. My car, the perspective of it all from inside looking out, from within my own baffling circumstances, having recently moved to Chicago, having left the woman that I married, having the private dishonesty with myself I so often enjoyed back then be rudely dispensed with by the mirror of judgment, by the world’s response contained in the whole of such a scene. I was stung. Perplexed. Whatever was it supposed to mean? I felt indicted, tried and convicted in less than one minute, mid-motion while rolling a stop sign. In what context had this verdict been formed? Apropos of what? I never learned. Not until that day in the mall that I found myself thrown to the floor by my new skateboard, my new Scrap. The slam of the soon-to-be-mine board into the wall and its disruption of the foot traffic it barged through exalted with the literal pain in my ass to reveal the full circle of my journey. The Universe, God, whatever you want to call it — that keen, discerning artist with its keen, discerning way had shown me, and not only shown me but seen fit to remark on it — my urgent search to identify who I am against the measure of how another sees me, how I am seen together with another, is self-injurious and typical of a girl poised between childhood and adulthood. My experimenting with haircuts, with intimacy and boundaries, the limits of fearlessness and despair. Doing none of it with malice, none of it to deceive. Only conducting deadly serious research into who this is sitting in these clothes, this skin, life. I was taking astounded stock of my own enormous range — on the lookout all the while for what rings true, for moments of recognition, for rare moments I would find myself feeling at home. My own failure to understand was nothing but proof of how little I knew myself truly, how pervasive the extent of my own duplicity.
I bought the skateboard. Terry and I rode it around the parking lot. She laughed when I told her the story of being thrown down by it and knowing only then that it was my board. She said I would know now to respect it. Therein lies the oblique yet unmistakable link to the moment seven or so years ago in Chicago serenaded by Bitch and Animal: “and everything shattered, including the light, much never mattered, nothing was right…”
At night, I surf the concrete waves of my neighborhood in the dark flickering real under street lamps. Scrap says to me, with a mind genuinely her own: “Grow up.”
And so I have to opportunity once again to settle, if more innocently, into being squarely myself.
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