I spotted Tony Hawk sitting at a Lower East Side café, walked up, and introduced myself.
For years, I’d been trying to reach him, hoping that an interview with the world’s most famous skater might reveal some insider information about who my boys were, and where they were headed. I told Hawk about my kids and the book I was trying to write, and he agreed to an interview. Weeks later, when we talked by phone, I asked him to help me understand the stage my wife and I found ourselves in, with two pathologically rebellious teen skaters on our hands, a stage that seemed to go on and on.
“Why are they drawn to the fringe?” I asked, knowing that he had skate sons of his own. “Why the distrust of authority, the outsider attitude?”
What I really wondered: What are we doing wrong, and how can we fix it?
Hawk told me some kids—kids like him—craved an identity that differed from their peers, and skating gave it to them. I totally got that part. I’d been that kid. I just wondered when they might transition from skate life to life life. He agreed that skaters all faced that moment when they “take responsibility for yourself and become a member of society.”
Some of them abide; some don’t. “But your kids can always hold on to that sense of individuality,” he said. “They need to just figure out a way to make that uniqueness work in their favor.”
Their uniqueness. That’s what I’d always cherished. For nearly a decade, skating had been something my kids did, alone or with friends, day and night, indoors and out, for two or four or six hours straight. Who does anything for six hours, except sleep and work?
Still, at times while writing this book, dragging myself and my family back to our roughest patches, I’d sometimes wonder (as would they), Why? Why dwell on my kids’ noncompliant past? But the truth is: I loved those days. I’ve loved all of our days. I’d reached a point where I needed to relive those moments, to celebrate them, the good and the bad.
Though my wife worried that writing about our kids would “memorialize our incompetence,” I lobbied that it would “celebrate our persistence.” Probably a little of both.
Writing this book was as much an exercise in therapy as it was reportage and storytelling. And as I plunged deeper and began slowly admitting aloud that I was actually writing a skate dad memoir, I was frequently shocked at how many parents had stories to share. They had skate kids, or they’d been skaters, or they had a defiant, pot-smoking teen somewhere in the family.
We were hardly alone, I learned. That’s what convinced me that our story, and theirs, was worth sharing. Despite all the risks.
I knew I was exposing my kids and my wife. After many uneasy discussions along the way, they agreed to come along for the ride, a profound act of generosity that humbled me. They read, they edited, they corrected me, scolded me, and did what they could to fix what needed fixing. For that, I’m eternally grateful and proud. But I should be clear: any fuckups are mine alone.
Like any memoir delving into the minefields of family history, this story required a delicate balance of revelation and obfuscation, involving a handful of bent rules, the kind I wasn’t used to bending. As a journalist—and an ex-Catholic—I’m professionally, physically incapable of bullshitting. Yet for the sake of narrative flow, in a few instances similar scenes were merged, and the timing of a few scenes was tweaked. And since this story contains teen drug use, for the sake of college admissions—and any future political aspirations—I changed a couple names.
Beyond that, everything happened as described. At least as I remembered it.