I CAN’T REMEMBER WHERE I SAW IT, OR WHO OWNED THE CHUNKY VHS tape, but at some point in my adolescence I sat down and watched The Search for Animal Chin, a ridiculous and fantastic DIY skateboarding video starring the Bones Brigade, a group of skaters—some of them barely older than me at the time—such as Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, and Steve Caballero.
Chin is a gonzo movie. Check it out. It’s weird and never takes itself seriously, but highlights the sort of rebellious attitude that skateboarding has both embraced and rejected, commodified and sold over decades. It was a bunch of kids skating where they shouldn’t, breaking rules, and thrashing the cityscape. I loved it.
So I, too, began skateboarding, despite the fact that in Vermont concrete was hard to come by. I begged my parents to buy me a skateboard, which they did, and my father and I constructed a ramp. I knew nothing about actual ramp building, and neither did my father. The frame was made of old cedar fence posts, the bark still on them. The deck of the ramp, which was not concave as most ramps are but flat and angled precipitously upward, was a large eight-by-four-foot piece of particle board. The thing probably weighed about a ton. It was gnarled and seemed like the sort of ramp australopithecines would’ve used.
I set it up on the old cracked and lumpy driveway of an orchard next door to the house I grew up in. This wasn’t the urban skate scene I think most of us imagine when we think of skateboarding: graffiti-covered alleyways and concrete jungle-type cityscapes. This was rural Vermont, next door to the eighteenth-century converted sheep barn that was my house, next to an orchard and horse pasture. Tony Hawk I wasn’t, but I wasn’t about to give up trying. The ramp sat at the bottom of a steep and gravelly drive.
When skateboards reach a certain velocity, they begin to wobble back and forth. It’s a terrifying sort of erosion of control, as the board begins a hyper-intense weaving back and forth as you try to keep your balance atop the plank of wood you’ve decided to balance on while rocketing down the hill. This is what happened, with my dubious father watching, when I chose to begin at the top of the steep hill on my first attempt at launching off our Pleistocene ramp.
That first attempt was an inglorious lesson in physics. I hit the base of the steep ramp, which at its zenith was probably a good four feet off the ground. The front wheels of my skateboard crunched easily into the particle board, bringing my board to an abrupt halt and flinging my body with a resounding slap against the ramp. Shaken but undeterred, my father and I covered the bottom part of the ramp with a sheet of aluminum that made the egress to the near-vertical height of the ramp a bit more manageable for the wheels of the board.
The next attempt was successful, depending on how you look at it. Skateboards then, some twenty-five years ago, still were miraculous in their construction. Swiss-engineered ball bearings were housed in dense, frictionless polymer wheels that spun with an incredible velocity and lack of drag. The speed I was going as I successfully hit the ramp was not recorded with any kind of technical equipment, so I have to rely on anecdotal reportage from my father, who was the only witness, and my own memory, which, due to the concussive result of said launch, is understandably a bit gauzy. I’m not saying there was an audible “pop” as a gawky adolescent broke the sound barrier at Dunham Orchards that day, but I’m not saying there wasn’t.
I never got very good, but I loved the idea of it, and the way it seemed to make adults shake their heads in dismay and conjecture about the way in which today’s youth were wasting their time At that time, in the late 1980s, carrying your Santa Cruz or Powell and Peralta deck around was the closest you could get to flipping everyone the bird as you walked around town. To a disaffected teenager, it was manna from heaven.
I had to give it up as my work with kids moved into the wilderness. But for a few years in Los Angeles, I worked at a small elementary and middle school, and saw the opportunity to revisit my love of skinned knees and sprained wrists with my students.
I began a club, scheduled for Fridays after school, called Skate Club. It had, as its central focus, street skating, which is different from what we see nowadays in the Olympics. True street skating is exactly what it sounds like: taking to the streets and finding curbs and loading docks and parking lots to launch and grind and carve on. The kids and I would ride our boards around Pasadena, hitting up rails and curbs and hills and concrete riverbeds and anywhere we could find that presented an interesting place to ride. The kids named their Skate Club team “Team Freedom,” which I thought fit nicely with the anarchistic underpinnings of skating. We’d carry chunks of wax in our cargo pants pockets to slick down curbs for grinding, buy elote from little carts pushed by Mexican vendors, and sometimes take the train into downtown Los Angeles and skate around Skid Row and Union Station.
Driving through any city now, I can still dial into the skater’s perspective and see rails, curbs, stairs, and grinds. It’s a secret topography, where the urban landscape is radically altered and becomes a playground, antithetical to its actual purpose, which is to grease the wheels of commerce. Skating is a very ironic enterprise in this way; urban cityscapes are designed with big business and adult concerns in mind. Grand edifices, concrete and steel and glass walls and walkways and plazas, all built with the thought that they will be used as physical accessories to the adult world of banking, commercialism, and bureaucracy. Skaters love these places: polished marble and grand, concrete staircases. They’re perfect for skateboarding, which is, to borrow a term from the world of the gainfully employed, a net-loss enterprise.
We skated wherever it looked fun to skateboard, and were often shooed away by security guards. Skateboarding often incensed people who worked and used these places, and they’d come barreling out of revolving glass doors, spitting furious epithets, the razor burn over their Brooks Brothers collars turning scarlet with rage. I could never quite figure out what it was that made them so mad, but honestly, I think it might have been resentment over the freedom the kids exhibited. I think these bastions of commerce, these foot soldiers of the urban business world, hated the kids because they themselves were so far removed from what it meant to be a kid, to be careless and carefree, obnoxious and oblivious. We got chased away, and would always go, politely; that was the rule. Ask forgiveness not permission was our credo, and whenever we got yelled at we always left whatever spot we were skating, offering sincere apologies. The kids didn’t sweat it. There was the entire city to skate.
But things didn’t always go that smoothly.
It was a typical Friday, and we headed out after school to skate. We had decided to stay local. We rolled down the sidewalk, talking, laughing, and enjoying a typical Southern California afternoon. We headed into a neighborhood that abutted the street our school was on. It was a neighborhood that CalTrans had purchased with the hope of building a freeway; the freeway had never been built, so all these beautiful old homes were rentals, thus lowering the normally mortgage-based security-mindedness we found in more established neighborhoods. In other words, security was low and there were lots of places to skate.
We located a “gap,” which is skater parlance for any space between two objects. The idea is to “ollie” the gap. Pop your board up and jump over the space. This one happened to be from one wide concrete wall to another.
We started taking turns trying to ollie the gap. Skateboarding is an exercise in failure. In order to do a trick successfully, skateboarders first must practice the trick, again and again and again, hundreds if not thousands of times. It is remarkable to see them trying to land some trick; they will literally attempt the same thing dozens of times, each time failing. But for some reason, unknown to me, there isn’t the same level of frustration that you’d find in more traditional sports. The level of failure is an accepted piece of the culture; nailing a trick is great, but there is an equal amount of attention paid to eating it and getting shredded in epic bails.
Right before we finished skating the gap and headed off down the sidewalk, two things happened. First, I saw the silhouette of a woman in the home nearest to us. I had knocked on the door earlier, out of what I felt was an example of common courtesy I hoped to demonstrate to my young charges, and had not received a response from within. Whenever possible, I would try to ask permission of people to skate near, or on, their property. This set me apart from a lot of skaters, I knew, but I felt it was my job to bridge the gap between a criminal enterprise and urban education. Skateboarders are often seen as a public nuisance and riffraff; most major municipalities across the United States have invested thousands of dollars in “no skateboarding” signage, and many commercial entities have put “skate-stoppers” on particularly attractive ledges and rails to keep kids from grinding and boardsliding on their properties. I felt like I was a diplomat from the other side, a teacher, no less, reaching out to dispel the negative myth that surrounds skate rats.
A few minutes after I saw this silhouette of the woman, who appeared to be looking at us through a gauzy cotton curtain and talking on the phone, the second thing occurred—two police cars zoomed past us on the street. We were in a small parking lot abutting an apartment building. I quickly put two and two together.
“Let’s go, guys,” I said.
The boys had seen the police as well, and since we were, at this stage, familiar with what most authorities felt about our after-school activities, we quickly got on our boards and began moving back down the street. We were headed toward where my car was parked, near the school a block or so away, when a cop car, lights flashing and siren blaring, roared up beside us and screeched to a halt on the curb. The cop leapt from the car yelling.
“Off the board, now!” he said. We all slowed and stopped. A second car came careening around the corner, the lights on top flashing red and blue, and siren howling. It pulled in at the curb just like in the movies, with a sort of shuddering halt that left it nosed in at the curb right at us, as though the Chevy Caprice was hungry and if it wasn’t for the curb would’ve jumped straight at our throats.
“Whoa, hey, guys, settle. It’s alright, s’okay. I’m a teacher,” I said, walking toward the closest cop, a blocky guy with a brutal crew cut, dark shades, and bowlegs. I held my hands out in a gentle gesture of slow down, back off. The cop snatched my wrist and whipped me around, jerking my arm behind my back.
“Hey!?” I was in shock. The kids were gape-mouthed and staring. The recently arrived cop car was now ejecting police like a clown car, and they were bearing down on my scraggly looking students, who stood like deer in the headlights.
“On the curb! Now!” the officer yelled. He zip-tied my wrists. He manhandled me to the curb and yanked me down onto my knees. This all happened in seconds.
“Officer, you have the wrong people here. I’m a teacher. These are my students. We’re an after-school club. Take it easy!” My voice sounded unnaturally shrill and high. I felt electrified with fear, and was shaking in terror.
I was trying to talk over my shoulder as I kneeled awkwardly by the curb. I could see one of the students, Jake, being cuffed as well, his face pale. He looked ready to vomit. The other kids were still just standing around, frozen. Another siren blared; this time it was a police motorcycle. It was like we were on an episode of Cops
The officer behind me moved away, and another (the third) cop car pulled up. This was getting ridiculous. I stood up, with no small amount of difficulty, and turned to address the nearest police officer, a severe-looking woman who stood behind me in a short-sleeved police uniform, her hair pulled back tightly in a glossy bun.
“Officer, these are my students. I’m a teacher. I can take you to our school its right down the street.”
I felt, somehow, in the dim, distant part of my brain not taken over by panic and fear, that if I could get the cops to take us to the school, maybe show them the classroom, that sort of thing, I could convince them that we were not, contrary to appearances, a group of derelict drug-addict skateboarders. We were a class out for an after-school club, for god’s sake, which must be at least one level above crack dealers.
The woman wheeled, nostrils flaring.
“Down! On the curb!” she yelled, and her hand went to the butt of the gun holstered at her waist. I kid you not.
“Okay, whoa!” I said. I backed away and returned to the curb. By now all the kids were cuffed and seated twenty feet away on the curb, an officer taking down their names. They were on the edge of tears; some were already crying. The short, crew-cut officer came back over to me.
“ID?” he said. I didn’t have any, and told him so. I didn’t bring my wallet with me skating; it was bulky, and I was always afraid I’d lose it. This did not make him happy. He had patted me down when he sat me on the curb. He had taken my car keys.
“Which car is yours?” he asked. I nodded up the street to where the old girl sat. My stepmother had generously donated a mid-1980s Ford Crown Victoria to the Erik transportation initiative years before. It was dented and missing hubcaps and pretty dusty. If I was working on a Hollywood set and needed a car as a prop to build a scene involving down-and-out criminals, my Crown Vic would’ve been on a short list of choices.
Despite my love of the outdoors, of camping and rock climbing, and even though I tended toward activities like skateboarding and trespassing, I was also teaching students in the classroom at the time. In fact, I was working on a language arts project with some of the girls in middle school. One of them had expressed an interest in Hamlet, so we were filming little sections of the play as a movie. We’d pick locations throughout Pasadena, and film at night, with the kids doing scenes. I’d film with an old VHS camcorder, and we hoped that we’d be able to string together an hour of the play at some point.
The point of all this is that in the back of my car, the officers found a camera and various stage clothes including bodices for Ophelia, big, frilly Victorian dresses, and tights for Hamlet.
The cop with the crew cut surveyed the contents of my trunk, and looked back up at me. He’d taken off his wraparound shades at this point and stared daggers at me, no doubt thinking that he’d just nabbed a child pornographer.
There we were, me with no ID, with a pack of dirty, homeless-looking kids in tow, with a car full of fetish clothes and a video camera. They were not pleased with me, and shot me the kind of looks I imagine inmates did to Jeffrey Dahmer right before they stove his head in with a detached toilet lid in prison.
They loaded us in the cars. The backs of cop cars have plastic seats, and they don’t give you seatbelts. It’s basically a little bench. Our hands were tied behind our backs, making sitting in the car difficult. I was in a car with a student named Daniel, who seemed the least perturbed out of all of us.
“There goes Jake!” Daniel said as one of the other police cars passed us, and we saw the pale, terror-stricken face of Jake in the window. “Dude, let’s wave!” Daniel said. He looked down at his arms, which, like mine, were still tied behind his back. “Oh, I forgot. I can’t,” he said, bemused.
We got to the police station and the cops unloaded Daniel from my car. They took him in a separate door. I complained, saying I needed to stay with my students, they were my responsibility. As one of the cops pulled Daniel from the car, I tried, even though I was scared shitless at this point—scared we were going to jail, that I’d lose my job, that the kids’ parents would kill me, that I was going to have to learn to handle love “prison style”—to assuage what I assumed must be fears on Daniel’s part.
“Daniel, it’ll be okay. I’ll get ahold of your parents. I’ll come get you guys.”
Daniel looked back at me, hands locked behind his back as the policeman maneuvered him out of the car toward a side door in the towering police station.
“Dude, we’ll be alright,” he said. He was smiling, and I realized in a groundswell of amazement that Daniel was having a good time. He was enjoying himself, the spectacle, the rush of danger. Teenagers. Gotta love’em.
I, on the other hand, was not enjoying myself. I felt terribly guilty for creating this situation. The cop drove me down into the sally port where they disembarked dangerous criminals, like middle school teachers who skateboard with their students. The female officer led me through horribly windowless and bright corridors to a little room, where I was seated on a hard bench bolted to the wall. There was a small table on the other side, with a wheeled stool. The short male cop came in and switched with the lady. He brought with him a series of papers and forms, all on a big clipboard. He made a move to sit down on the stool, but due to his enormous gun belt and jack boots, and the smallness and close proximity of the room, he kicked the stool a bit with his heel and came down with just part of one ass-cheek on the edge of the black vinyl stool. It wasn’t enough to hold him, and the stool simultaneously slipped and wheeled out from under him, and he fell awkwardly down on his ass. The clipboard clattered to the floor and papers flew. I rose out of instinct to help, the way, I think, anyone does when someone near them tumbles. It was just a little half rise off the bench, and I had to incline my upper body to propel myself up, as I was still cuffed and couldn’t lift myself with my arms. I guess I moved too quickly, or maybe my bent-forward posture suggested I was going to try to launch a flying head-butt. The policeman, on his ass with legs sprawled on the floor, held one hand out at me to defend himself and the other grabbed at the butt of his pistol.
“No!” he shouted. I froze, and then quickly lowered myself back down. He scrambled up, cursing, gathering papers. His face was flushed crimson, and he wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
“You okay, sir?” I asked. He didn’t answer.
It was sort of awkward after that. I was fingerprinted, and they took mugshots. I was asked my name and other information a couple of times. I tried, several times, to re-explain the situation, but I got the poker face every time.
The cop led me up some stairs to the holding cells. The cells were all situated around a central station where the jailors sat. The jailors on this Friday afternoon were two guys who were watching an NBA playoff game on TV. The Lakers were winning. This was during the heady Shaq-and-Kobe dominance days. I was led, unceremoniously, to a little holding cell that was not meant for anything other than detoxification. It had a hard, narrow, concrete bench jutting out from the cinderblock walls and a lidless, stainless steel toilet. They took my belt and shoelaces from me before putting me in the cell, leaving me with big, floppy-tongue skate shoes and sagging pants that I had to hold up by clutching a section of bunched-up waistband in my fist.
I sat there in the cell, numb and stupefied. Had this actually happened? Had I just gotten my students and myself arrested for trespassing? What was happening to them? Were they okay? The only other inmate was a skeletal man in one of the other cells who was curled in the fetal position on the floor, head unhygienically close to the toilet, in my opinion. He looked to be in some stage of withdrawal, curling in on his need in an effort to extinguish the spark of it. His skin was ashen. I could smell him from where I sat.
The guards were talking with someone else in the station over a radio. I could hear snippets of the conversation.
“. you got him in there yet?”
“Yeah, we got him. He’s in cell six.”
“. a teacher. We got his kids down in juvenile holding.”
“No shit!”
“For real.”
“Aw, man, he’s a teacher? What you guys doin’ with the kids? They scared?”
“. called their parents skateboarding on private property.”
“No way, man! Oh shit!”
The two jailors—both of whom were African American—were laughing, and I could hear the voices on the other end laughing too. Apparently everyone thought it was a regular riot that I had been arrested with my students skateboarding on private property.
As I stood holding up my pants with my flopping shoe tongues dangling askew, I felt pretty pathetic and not very amused at all. I felt like I was about to lose my job.
The younger of the two jailors turned to me, eyes flashing with laughter.
“You got arrested on a field trip, man?” and he burst into more laughter.
I smiled. What else could I do? I sat down on the little bench bolted to the wall. It was so narrow you had to sit straight up, and I rested my head against the wall. Then I started thinking about vomiting crack addicts, and bloody criminals, and angry inmates peeing all over the place. I hastily stood up again.
The guards went back to watching the game. Minutes passed, then an hour. The guy in the next-door cell didn’t stir, but new odors were highly suggestive of a functioning, if ill-timed, digestive system.
Finally, in the face of imminent termination, possible lawsuits, and incarceration, something happened. I grew bored. You can only be angry or stressed or scared for so long. Those are evolutionary emotions, designed to sustain a chase by a lion for as long as it takes us to get away. They’re not designed to carry us through the ordeal of the modern criminal justice system.
“Can you guys turn the TV a bit so I can watch the game?” It was maddening listening to the commentators describe Kobe and Shaq and the rest of the team as they battled for West Coast dominance in the playoffs and not be able to watch. The guard smiled, and turned the TV. I situated myself in a way where I could stare sidelong through the yellow bars and see the screen, and the guards and I watched most of the second half together.
Looking back on the experience now, I realize that much of what happened to me was mitigated by the fact I was white. While my students were a regular Benetton ad—Korean and Black and Southeast Asian—I was white, and therefore was treated as a white person. If I was Black things would’ve been much different. Maybe fatal. That’s just the reality; my skin was a ticket to treatment a Black guy never would’ve received.
As the game came to a close, the radio crackled again, and instructions were given. The guards came over to my cell. One of them had keys. I figured I was either headed to the big house in downtown Los Angeles, the city jail, where I’d likely pledge my undying love to some huge dude named “Bubba” and be rubbing his shoulders with Tiger Balm and giving him the choicest portions of my sloppy joe by morning, or I was going to be let go. I saw the second jailor had my shoelaces and belt. I felt tears well up in gratitude.
They let me go. The way they let you out of jail, when you haven’t been officially booked, or cited, for anything, is pretty anticlimactic. They showed me to this door that opened up on a side street behind the station. It was dusk, when the smog of Los Angeles turns the sky a violent, bloody red. They shut the metal door behind me, and I heard the lock clunk home. There I was, in my floppy shoes, belt and laces in hand.
I took my shoes off and ran around to the front of the building. I didn’t bother taking the time to re-lace my shoes or put on my belt; I just shuffled along as fast as possible. I knew I had to get to the front of the building and check on the kids. Where were they?
As I rounded the corner, I was met by all the boys from Skate Club. They’d been released and were standing there with their parents. I can’t imagine what they thought when they saw me, shoeless, holding my pants up, covered in street grime from skateboarding. The look on my face must have been one of abject terror, because a few of them actually looked sorry for me. Most looked disappointed, and a few displayed expressions notably more stony and cold.
I stuttered apologies, swinging madly from abject, pathetic begging to desperate attempts at joking. It didn’t go well. The parents started fading back, holding their boys protectively around the shoulders. The boys looked chagrined, and none of them really looked at me. I saw a few smirks, but mostly they looked pained at the ordeal they understood I was going through. I think a few of them were rightly concerned for their own hides, as well. I imagine some of them were very validly concerned their parents were going to sue me. Or have me shot.
Leon was being led out by his parents. Leon was Korean, and his parents had been generous to a fault. Korean culture holds teachers in high regard, and they had invited me over to dinner countless times, even taken me out to their favorite restaurants in Korea Town. Doubtless this recent escapade made them question my integrity, if not my sanity. Leon inclined his head toward me as he was drawn away by the gravitational pull of his parents’ disappointment and anger.
“Dude, I know we’re all going to be in trouble. But seriously, that was the best field trip ever.”