The sound of skate wheels on rough pavement—a rattle-chatter like rocks and billiard balls tumbling inside a bingo cage—always triggered my sprint to the window.
After moving into our new house, my boys developed an infuriating habit of skating down the driveway into the street. With a cursory car check, they’d turn right, then left, propelling themselves with their push-off foot down 65th Street. My ears became attuned to that sound, like a dog waiting to bark at the mailman. I’d rush to the nearest window and watch them surfing east toward the bus stop, bound for a friend or a skate park or a party. I once saw Leo texting as cars whizzed past; I once watched Sean fire up a cigarette. I’d beg them to skate on the sidewalk or at least do a better job looking for traffic. They’d insist that their finely tuned spatial awareness told them when cars were near.
A decade after Sean’s accident, I could still hear the screech of those Toyota tires, that driver’s screams, and always would. So anytime I heard the sound of boys skating into the street, I’d brace myself for screeching and screaming. It finally happened one day when I heard Leo skate the driveway then heard squealing tires and ran to the window. Instead of an accident scene I saw Leo’s little blond head in the backseat of an electric-blue muscle car, the driver burning rubber as he fled.
Great. We’d entered the phase where my kids’ friends were driving, which meant my kids were passengers. One more thing to fret.
When our friend Lorraine was in high school, she and four classmates left a house party, but the driver was so drunk Lorraine refused to get into the car. She tried to convince the others to walk with her, but they just razzed her and drove off. On the walk home, she heard the impact and soon reached the wrecked car, wrapped around a tree. “I should have stayed with you,” one friend whispered just before she died beside the road.
That story haunted me. It occupied head space beside two drunk-driving deaths during my high school years, another during college, plus my brother’s multiple nonfatal hospitalizations. I would remind Sean and Leo about Lorraine’s friends and Jeff’s incidents as we entered the “oh shit” stage of parenthood, during which sixteen-year-old kids started getting permits and licenses and driving muscle cars.
I reminded them again after one of their friends drove drunk into the ass of a parked car, and another stole his parents’ car and flipped it. Those accidents—fortunately with no injuries—launched a series of scary near misses as we descended into the murkier mucks of high school.
Like the time Willem got hit by a garbage truck.
He was skating down a sidewalk, wearing earbuds and a smile, on his way to meet Max for a ride to school. Sitting in his dad’s car, Max had a perfectly terrifying view as Willem ollied off the curb and into the street, made a smooth left-hand turn with his back to oncoming traffic. Whatever music Willem was listening to drowned out the sound of the truck’s blasting horn and screeching brakes. The truck’s front grille punched Willem in the backpack, like a bully’s shove, and sent him flattened onto the pavement, facedown, centered between the truck’s tires, which squealed to a stop on either side of him. The terrified driver pulled Willem out, shaken, bruised, scraped, but okay.
Weeks later, Sean called me in an agitated state, talking fast and frantic.
“Dad, don’t worry, we’re safe, it’s okay, the police are here,” he said. “But I almost just got killed.”
Sean and a friend had been out skating and were sitting at a bus stop when a car veered off the road and straight at them. They had no time to move. At the last possible second the car twitched right and hit a tree—a small one, which bent over their heads but didn’t break. The car stopped just ten feet from where the two boys sat, staring right at the drunken old man behind the wheel. I left work to pick them up and was floored at their good luck. Sean was right: if not for the skinny tree, they might’ve died.
Suddenly it seemed to me, mischief and danger lurked everywhere. Cars, trucks, graffiti, cops, booze, drugs. I once read author Dennis Lehane’s take on fatherhood fears, which reflected my own: “I don’t see electrical cords anymore; I see electrocution.” Back in North Carolina, sledding with the boys in a park, Mary and I had watched helplessly as Leo and his saucer sled veered off the main sledding path and crashed into a tree trunk. That’s how things felt now: instead of a safe path forward, I saw tree trunks.
A sport and a lifestyle and a group of comrades that I’d mostly supported now seemed like a dangerously volatile mix. Innocent fears about my kids not wearing helmets or not crossing at a crosswalk were replaced by terrors that clenched in my chest and haunted my daily thoughts. Fear enshrouded me. I put it on each morning like bad cologne.
More than anything I dreaded that middle-of-the-night phone call, that knock on the door. “Mr. Thompson, there’s been an accident . . .”
One night Leo was at a friend’s house for a sleepover and Sean was skating at Inner Space as word began trickling across cell phones and social media that they’d lost one of their own. At first, no one believed it, assuming it had to be some mean-spirited Internet rumor. Then came the confirmation: Michael was dead.
One of Sean and Leo’s first Seattle skate pals, Michael reminded me of my friend Don, transformed atop a skateboard into a different version of himself, a fearless and flowing dancer. He was an A student, a chubster amid the gang of spindly middle schoolers who’d come by our house after school to skate the backyard and alley. By high school he was smoking pot all the time, skating less, spraying graffiti, hanging with an older crowd. He dropped out and began experimenting with faddish drug cocktails, mixing prescription pills with the purple codeine-and-Promethazine syrup known among skaters and rappers as drank or lean—it makes you sway, slur, lean.
Michael’s grandmother found him one morning in his bed, an open laptop by his side, with Law & Order queued up on Netflix. He was two weeks shy of sixteen.
Michael’s overdose rattled the boys, and us, and echoed through the skate community. Mary and I worried Sean and Leo might use his death as an excuse to do something reckless, reactionary. Instead, the boys and their friends helped plan Michael’s memorial service, a Spirit Keeper ceremony at a Native American cultural center beside a park called Discovery. Sean and Leo sat in the “inner circle” and toked on a peace pipe as a shaman smudged them all with sage smoke. The boys came home perfumed by sage and told us about the three-hour ceremony, how something spiritual happened to them all. They seemed so raw and vulnerable as they kept talking about their lost friend.
“He was such a pudgeball,” Sean said.
“Yeah,” Leo said. “But then he got so skinny, y’know? His whole face sunk in.”
They both fell quiet, trying not to make each other cry. Then, as they had when Sean’s classmate Joey died, and when their grandfather died, and during other times of sadness or strife, they went to meet up with friends at a skate park. I pictured them sitting at the rim of a ledge or bowl, skinny legs dangling against concrete, sharing more Michael stories and hiding their faces in their hands, and it just made me so sad and scared. He was only fifteen years old. Same as Sean.
Nate and others soon posted “RIP Michael” videos, compilations of Michael ripping tricks at Woodland and Inner Space, slo-mo shots of him laughing, high-fiving, flipping the bird. Then, in keeping with a skateboarding tradition I hadn’t been exposed to, Sean and Leo etched “RIP MAC” onto their boards. Their friends all did the same. From that day onward, whenever my boys got a new deck, the first thing they’d do, almost ceremoniously, was scratch, carve, Sharpie, or graffiti RIP MAC.
We tacked Michael’s obit and memorial card on the corkboard beside our fridge: “He was artistic and highly creative, loved the outdoors, music, jumping on his trampoline and skateboarding, a sport in which he excelled . . . Michael had friends from all walks of life and believed that we are all connected as people and one with the universe.”
Seeing my boys and their friends once again mourn collectively, seeing them prop each other up during a painful time, affirmed my still-strong belief that their clutch of loyal (if sometimes troubled and troublemaking) friends were part of a community that embraced them and gave them an identity.
Or was I grasping for rationalization and hope, giving the skate life more credit than it deserved? On the surface: they were outdoors, exercising and practicing, not glued to a TV screen, living in a world that they’d created tucked inside one they didn’t (or wouldn’t) accept. One level deeper: they all coaxed each other to be more defiant, less compliant, to take more risks, to collectively step closer to the edge. They’d convinced each other that that’s where they belonged—at the edge.
Michael’s grandmother later told me that during his spiral downward into drugs, she felt he was “looking for something that just is not here.”
It’s not like we were pushovers. But after Michael’s death, Mary and I began wondering: Were we doing enough?
Over the years, we’d tried every form of discipline. We grounded them. We banned TV and computer screens. We loaded them up with chores. We separated them from their friends. We confiscated their cell phones. We empowered teachers and counselors to keep them after school. And we frequently confiscated their boards.
We also talked to them (Mary), sometimes screamed at them (me), and they’d scream back (both). We encouraged, prodded, and just listened to them.
They didn’t fear us. And I don’t think we feared them, though we did tire of the constant conflict. We wanted peace. We were running out of ammo.
At dinner, we’d be like two pairs of soldiers sharing a battlefield smoke during a holiday break in the action.
One thing we’d learned was that zero tolerance just didn’t work in our family. The no, no, no stance usually backfired. Not only did it fail to achieve the desired results—they’d find pot if they wanted pot, for example, no matter the punishment—but it cleaved an unhealthy chasm between us and them. Not that we strived to be the kind of parents who were best friends with their kids. Mainly we just wanted to keep the lines of communication open.
So Mary and I developed a shifting, adaptive style of parenting and began experimenting with hands-off-the-wheel tolerance. We’d set boundaries, then back off and let them be free until they crossed the line, then we’d reset the boundaries, then retreat again.
That was more or less the tack we took on a spring break RV trip through Northern California and up the Oregon coast. When we dropped them at a skate park, or watched them walk into a forest of California redwoods, or onto sculpted Oregon dunes, we’d pretend we hadn’t smelled that familiar scent coming from their backpacks, pretend we didn’t know what they were up to. At a Mendocino campground I watched them climb high into a pine tree at sunset and thought, Well, why wouldn’t they want to be a little buzzed? I still didn’t understand their style of buzz, even as I exercised my own style, sipping bourbon and tending a campfire. But as long as it was just pot . . . maybe it was okay?
Mary had been reading a book I’d snagged from work, Humboldt: Life on America’s Marijuana Frontier, thinking it might divulge some secrets of pot culture. As we drove through the infamous pot capital of Humboldt County itself, Mary kept reading passages aloud: “Pot farming was not only a way of life in the region, it was the foundation of the entire economy.” During lunch at a steak house off Eureka’s downtown square, two burly cowpokes walked in, all tawny skin, rough hands, ruddy cheeks. They passed our table on their way to the bar and left a pungent trail of dope in their wake. The four of us exchanged “did you smell that” looks, and laughed.
Driving toward home through Oregon, Sean got a call, and a job offer. We’d been encouraging the boys to find jobs, and Sean had applied for a position as a clerk at a local market. The manager wanted him to stop by the following week for an interview and to fill out some paperwork.
“Um, yeah, sure,” Sean said. “That’d be fine.”
Sean walked to the market after school, nailed the interview, and came home glowing and proud. But when the manager called the next day, she told Sean they’d decided to give the job to someone older, more experienced. They’d keep his name on file.
Weeks later, Sean called me at work. I was busy interviewing an author and couldn’t pick up, so he kept calling, over and over. As usual, he didn’t leave a message. The kid had an aversion to voice mail, ours and his, never leaving or listening to messages. I excused myself to call him back, worried that something was wrong.
“Dad?” he said. “I got it—I got the job!”
I had nudged Sean to go back and tell the store manager he was still interested, which he did, albeit reluctantly. The manager was impressed by his persistence and later told me: “That says a lot. Not many teenage kids would do that.”
“Congrats, buddy,” I told him. “I’m proud of you.”
“I know, me, too. I’m psyched.”
I returned to the author, who asked if everything was okay, and I was suddenly confessing parts of our story: the pot, the bad grades, the parental guilt, and now Sean’s job, which was such a relief that I, as usual, could barely stop myself from tearing up. She was patient and generous. Most authors—like most skaters—knew something about failure and persistence. “Maybe it’s best he got rejected,” she said. “Things don’t always work out the first time.”
Helping Sean land a job—followed weeks later by Leo scoring a golf caddying gig—reminded me how vital work had been for me during high school. My parents always pushed Jeff and me to rake leaves, shovel snow, mow lawns, lifeguard, or babysit. I delivered newspapers at dawn at age twelve and one summer worked for an insurance agent at his home office, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps as the lonely old guy made me delicious toasted cheese sandwiches.
But the best jobs, maybe of my entire life, involved bricks and burgers.
Bricks: With my best friend (and skiing partner) Blaise, I lugged stacks of brick and block to the masons working for Blaise’s dad. On weekends and during summers, high school through college, Blaise and I rose early, drank black coffee, two bony teens mixing batches of gray-sludge cement, pushing dozens of wheelbarrows of the stuff, getting sunburned and wiry-strong. We bummed cigarettes, learned to tell dirty jokes, took shit from foul-mouthed masons. We always had beer money.
Burgers: Shorter and kinder than Tony Soprano, my boss Vinnie ran his North Jersey greasy spoon, the Gibson Girl, the way Tony would later run his Bada Bing! strip club. Vinnie hired me as a dishwasher, then bumped me to prep cook, then to burger-flipping night cook, and finally took me under his wing to train me in the fast-paced art of slinging breakfast. Among the highest honors of my otherwise unimpressive high school years was getting tapped by Vinnie to sub for him on Sunday mornings.
In Jersey mobster parlance: I fuckin’ loved that guy. Blaise’s dad, too.
So when my own sons started earning their own cash, I finally felt that we and they were doing something right. I also hoped that some tough-love boss might knock some sense into them. Because, for the most part, they weren’t responding to the proffered life lessons of teachers or parents.
An example of which: I’ll spend the rest of my days flinching at phone calls arriving between 5:55 and 6:00 P.M. That’s when we’d receive the near-daily automated calls from school. I’d see the number on caller ID and groan. When prompted, I’d reluctantly press “1” and listen to the recorded voice scolding me: “Your child [Sean or Leo] was marked [tardy or absent] from the following periods: [insert number(s)] . . . Please inform your child to get to class on time.”
Most of these calls came at 5:57, and I’d bark “what!” and wait for the snippy, judgmental robot lady. I’d sigh with relief if it was just a tardy or two, but I’d growl at the words “marked absent,” especially if that was followed (usually on sunny skate days) by “periods four, five, and six.” That’s when my shouting began, especially if it was both boys.
Remarkably, despite their spotty rates of appearance, many of my kids’ teachers seemed to actually like them. Report card summaries read like “I hate to deliver bad news” equivocations—Sean was “a pleasure to have in class,” but “frequently tardy”; Leo “shows creativity and originality,” but “is missing a few assignments.” Both boys would infrequently get the grades they (and we, and their teachers) knew they were capable of in class, then score in the upper tiers on state tests and proficiency exams. We had the same conversations so many times, to the point of parody: your job is to go to class, get there on time, respect your teachers.
The problem wasn’t just the tardies, absences, and mediocre grades that littered their report cards like turds. It was the antiauthority attitude behind it all. Buried deep inside Sean’s backpack—“a black hole,” Mary called it—we’d find worksheets and essays that he’d completed but didn’t feel compelled to turn in. Leo, if cornered after an egregious episode of absenteeism, would argue that people learned by doing things, not by listening to teachers read from textbooks or show movies.
“I’m not learning anything in that class anyway,” he’d say.
“Well, no shit! You’re never there!”
At their age, I can’t say I loved high school, either. But I didn’t despise the place, so I had no reference for my kids’ avoidance and didn’t entirely understand the depths of their disdain. Leo once texted me a complaint about a teacher with whom he’d developed a testy relationship: “I understand ‘he’s the teacher’ ‘he’s in charge’ ‘blah blah blah’ I understand all of that but you need to understand he has never once showed any respect to me. He’s a bad person and an even worse teacher.”
Mary and I would ask each other the same questions: Who’s fault is this? Who should we be mad at? Our defiant kids? Their underfunded public school? Ourselves? Is it the pot smoking? Mary at one point started researching military schools and wilderness boot camps. “Why aren’t you trying harder?” she’d angrily plead with her sons.
In weaker, boozier moments, I’d flog myself for not having the cash for private school or the guts for military school. One night after a shame-inducing robo-call, Mary and I went for a long walk and I told her I felt like a bad cowboy, the one who couldn’t break his spirited horses, whose fences needed repair, the one the other cowboys snickered at.
As a former horseback rider, Mary tried to accept my cowboy analogy but refused to join in my misery. Sometimes she schooled me with her hopeful outlook, her resilience. As she often did anytime we paused on a run or a walk—or while brushing her teeth, or in line at the grocery store, or while cooking in the kitchen—my wife stretched and twisted and squatted, squeezing something productive from each in-between moment. “There’s something in there, inside them,” she said. “And we need to just wait for it to come out.”
It’d take a few years for her to admit how worried she was at times, how she was not just waiting for her sons to blossom, but for her husband to stop acting so mad.
There were signs of her optimistic view right there in front of me. Sean’s biology teacher once told me, with a hint of admiration, “Sean has his own interpretations of assignments. He negotiates. He reads what he wants to read, only pays attention to the things that interest him.”
Just like the middle school vice principal who appreciated Sean’s willingness to ask “why,” the biology teacher found Sean’s intractability both maddening and compelling. “He’s a happy kid,” another teacher said. “Very independent and bright. But he doesn’t want to play the game. His attitude is: I know what I know, why do I have to prove it to you?”
It’s not as if my boys weren’t self-aware. In an essay on “values” (which he did turn in), Sean described the value that mattered most: freedom.
“Freedom is one thing I can’t live without,” wrote my son, who only wrote when he felt like writing. “It’s one of the most important things in my life . . .
“At school, for me it is a constant fight for freedom. I’m always getting in trouble for pushing the limits of my freedom. Freedom is a value that can easily be taken away from you if you make the wrong decisions. Freedom is a great value but it has to be earned.”