I continued to believe skating was good for my kids, that it divulged secrets about an increasingly complex and volatile planet. Even with all the troubling flare-ups, I remained convinced that skating honed an awareness of real people and real places, of race, ethnicity, and even economics. Mary and I, consciously or not, sent our kids a message that figuring some of those things out mattered as much as calculus and the Constitution. My thinking went: by learning to navigate a city of strangers—by bus, foot, and board—they were learning about life on the streets, developing a sense of direction, learning conflict-resolution skills, sharpening their independence, and their courage.
One night, I ran my fingers across highlighted and underlined quotes in my battered copy of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” offering some needed but unsteady comfort. “Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?” . . . “imitation is suicide” . . . “trust thyself.” As someone who’d strived to embrace Emerson’s call to the genuine, misunderstood, unapologetic life, how could I not let my kids strive for the same? Uncle Ralph might’ve frowned upon certain aspects of the skate life, but still: “My life is not an apology . . . It is for itself and not for a spectacle.”
And yet, it also seemed too soon for us to have lost control. Every day brought a new conflict, a new ticked-off caller, and more noisy punishments. It was never their fault. The grown-ups never understood.
One night it was Mike from Inner Space, again. The boys had gotten shooed away from the “Adobe steps,” as they now called them, then snuck under the fence of a storage facility, whose security guard gave chase. That was followed by a round of ding-dong-ditch through the neighborhood, prompting calls to Inner Space from angry neighbors.
Mike said he and the other managers were starting to get pissed off at the escalating bullshit. The boys had been causing all kinds of ruckus. They’d been banned from Subway and other local stores, and Mike was tempted to start banning them from Inner Space.
“I’d been meaning to tell you, but I didn’t want to cause trouble,” he said. “I keep warning them not to be total assholes. It’s just not cool.”
I told Mike I was surprised that they’d turned their defiance on him, on their skate park, on their own kind. He just sighed.
“Man, when a gang of them gets together it just spins out of control. They just go crazy.”
As I drove toward Inner Space, Sean called me in tears. He was standing outside a ding-dong-ditch victim’s house. In the background I heard the guy yelling—he wanted Sean and Nate to come inside while he called the cops. “No!” I screamed. “Do NOT go inside! Run, Sean, run!” But he inexplicably handed his phone to the man, to whom I apologized profusely and told him, “I’m on my way to get the boys. I’ll take them far from your home, I swear.” I was becoming an expert apologist. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Having fully slammed into the reality of what it meant to really be a skater, crappy phone conversations began invading our nights, a fugly new phase, a family psychosis. It was as if a soccer mom discovered that having a talented soccer kid required an occasional carjacking. But we’d given our boys so much freedom it now seemed impossible to put the genie back. Our decision to not overparent was taunting us with the consequences of underparenting.
Even worse: we unintentionally rewarded bad behavior. For reasons I didn’t fully understand, our family kept returning to skate parks, lured by some voice that spoke to us all.
For Sean’s thirteenth birthday, we took Amtrak down to Portland. On the ride south, we let our boys and Nate explore the train as Mary and I sipped beers in the café car. Then a grouchy conductor announced, “Would the parents of three unattended juveniles please . . .” They’d snuck into a vacant sleeper car suite and helped themselves to showers.
In Portland, after checking into our hotel, we caught the light rail out to Ed Benedict Skatepark. Nate had previously injured his ankle skating and was wearing an orthopedic boot. He kept trying to skate with the boot but finally bailed and pulled out his video camera. The clips from that afternoon—Nate’s and mine—tell a story of boys losing themselves at a skate park, each skating a solo performance but connected to a bigger entity, a multitentacled organism.
The sun slowly sets. The park gets crowded. Overhead lights flicker on, off, on. Sean keeps trying the same series of tricks, again and again. Skaters call it a “line”—like a dancer working a routine. His intended line: drop down a ramp, ollie onto a mani-pad, then manual (i.e. wheelie) across the platform, then pop-shuvit, then kickflip off the ledge. After multiple, curse-filled attempts, Sean finally nails it, and Leo and Nate swoop in for congratulatory high fives, fist bumps, hang-loose surfer shaka waggles.
But the video segment that I’d later watch obsessively, sometimes tearfully—to remind myself there was a point to all of it—was a thirty-second slice of my YouTube clip of Leo trying to ollie down a tricky three-stair. First try: Leo accelerates toward the steps but pulls up shy, daunted. Second try: he clears the stairs—at least ten feet in length, and nearly a four-foot drop—but lands too hard. His board spins out, his butt and helmet smack concrete, he screams and rolls as skaters swerve around him. Third try: similar wipeout, feet and legs folding under his ass, more screams. Four and five: getting closer, but he scrapes his hands on number four and nearly gets smeared by a BMX biker on number five.
And then . . . Leo pushes off hard with his right foot, accelerates, crouches low, pops a huge ollie, soars through the air, arms out like wings, sticks the landing, and pumps his fists. He kick-turns back and Sean is waiting with giddy high fives, as if Leo had just homered in two runs. Nate, laughing, hands him a bottle of water and drapes him in a bro hug. On the light rail ride back downtown, I videotape the three of them, grinning and smirking, like they’ve just gotten away with something, like they’re sharing a secret.
The soundtrack I’d added to my video, from Spoon, meshed nicely: “It was the longest day that I’d ever known . . . Oh, life could be so fair. Let it go on and on.”
My sons were learning to fly. I understood that. And I wanted them to fly, though not too much. I also wanted them to comply. Why couldn’t they do both?
Though they’d become defiant and disdainful at school and at home, on the Internet—out in the world they’d created—they were downright joyful.
YouTube had become their canvas, their gallery of glee. Many of the skaters carried at least a Flip camera, and a few, like Nate, lugged backpacks full of digital or tape cameras, tripods, fish-eye lenses, and handheld stabilizer rigs. They were all proficient with video editing software—at least iMovie or, like Nate, the more advanced Final Cut.
My boys’ core crew through middle school remained Max and Nate, each with his own YouTube channel, and Willem, who was the leading man in many of the other boys’ videos. Sean and Leo each had a YouTube channel, and they usually shared filming and editing duties until Leo, over time, edged ahead to become the more devoted videographer. He made dozens of videos, especially after we superglued a fish-eye lens onto his Flip camcorder. He began proudly adding credits, “Filmed and Edited by Leo Thompson,” crafting birthday edits, basement edits, backyard edits. One video was titled “fun . . . fun . . . fun . . . fun . . . fun . . . fun.” Another: “Sunday Funday.”
My own videos, like “Daddy Day Camp”—scenes from a day with Leo, Sean, and Willem on Mercer Island—quickly grew outdated and blah, since I was no longer part of their adventurous, city-roving crew. I’d check their YouTube channels and snoop, watching them rolling and flying through our soggy city, skating at ATM plazas, fast-food joints, high schools, beneath the convention center, among the crowds at waterfront tourist spots. They’d tumble into bushes, sprawl onto sidewalks, take turns soaring off the backs of flatbed trucks. They’d chug grape sodas and scarf tacos or burgers. They’d confront hand-waving security guards.
I became a YouTube voyeur, watching their personalities and young manhoods take shape, watching the baby fat melt and sharpen. To this day, you can see them all start to mature in videos like “key bank parking garage,” “willem x construction site,” “leo is stupid,” “sean gets robbed,” “nate hurts ass,” “crazy old lady,” “20 bucks,” and one starring Max titled, accurately, “smashing my balls.” Subtitle: “a quick rail sesh ending in pain.” The entire dialogue: “Oh! Oh, fuck! Ow!”
The contrast between their expressive skating-on-YouTube life and their follow-the-rules school life was stark.
Sean, in particular, resisted academic expectations. Scolding e-mails from teachers became a constant reminder of our parental impotence. “Sean is missing a lot of our class daydreaming” . . . “Just an FYI, Sean got up and walked out of science today” . . . “refused to suit up for gym.”
Mary and I rarely worried about his intellect. He scored well on standardized tests and, if he chose to make an effort, impressed teachers, especially on writing assignments.
But we did worry about his commitment. One teacher found a cluster of completed worksheets crammed into his desk, as if turning them in would’ve been a surrender. We also worried about his happiness. Which led us to seek professional opinions.
A child psychologist gave Sean a battery of tests, none of them conclusive. In short: he’s a smart kid but inattentive and poorly organized, outwardly headstrong but lacking confidence. The psychologist dropped a few acronyms, suggested ADHD meds, but offered no real diagnosis except: “He should be doing better in school.” Which we already knew.
Still, we tried a few suggested treatments: talk therapy, acupuncture, squishy stress-reduction fidget toys. We researched attention-deficit drugs, and reluctantly agreed with a doctor’s suggestion to try Ritalin, then quickly regretted it.
One morning Sean sat at his desk, dreaming about kickflips. He later told us the half dose of Ritalin was making him jumpy and he got stuck in a loop and became obsessed with the question: Which pair of skate shoes was best for kickflips? He couldn’t stop himself, so after lunch he skipped out and came home to practice in our basement, trying on different shoes, measuring the scraped-rubber factor of each toe, watching YouTube videos for guidance.
“I was trying to get the flick just right,” he told me, as if it was a legit excuse for truancy. “I was trying to understand the physics of it.”
I forget whether we punished Sean by taking away his board or banning YouTube or both, but I do remember his rage. “Middle school isn’t learning,” he argued. “If I was learning something useful I wouldn’t mind, but they aren’t teaching me anything, so why should I spend my time on it?”
We quit the Ritalin and tried a new therapist, a gruff New Yorker who hit it off with Sean and told us he just needed to grow up. Which we already knew.
Sean came home one day with an A on a test, but he seemed embarrassed by my enthusiastic reaction, as if he’d been unfaithful to his defiant side. He skulked down the alley, took a bus to skate somewhere alone.
“I only want to be with my friends and have fun and skateboard,” Sean later said-slash-yelled. “That’s all I want to do, just skateboard. That’s it!”
A school counselor e-mailed a group of parents to report an “incident” in the appropriately named after-school “Wildcat Den.” She’d “witnessed” a few boys using some toy to pretend-smoke a bong. She said it was “clear to me that they had some experience with it.” Mary and I dutifully grounded our sons, made them come home after school for a week, surly and sour. But . . . were they really so naughty? Were the constant reminders from counselors and teachers—There’s something wrong with your kid!—really helping them?
Mary was getting impatient with the complaints and the blame-the-parent approach to difficult boys. We’d witnessed plenty of slogan-backed support for girls, empowerment programs for science, math, and coding. But for academically disengaged skate boys? The only slogan seemed to be “sit down and knock it off!”
“I just don’t understand it,” Mary said one night, after a scolding e-mail from a school security guard named Rose. “Why isn’t someone encouraging them? It pisses me off.”
Other times, we’d flog ourselves . . . “What are we doing wrong?” Mary asked, during a rare moment of pessimism. “Are we losing the battle?”
Mary was an efficient and decisive thinker—quick to judge, quick to conviction, quick to move on. I was more of an either-or guy, and an occasional handwringer. Like . . . On the one hand, I viewed the middle grades as a confusing twilight zone, just past the coddling of singsongy grade school yet just shy of the teenage freedoms of high school. That meant teachers were dealing with kids in flux, juiced by hormones. I wanted to believe the teachers were devoted to all students, not just the compliant and hardworking ones, not just the girls, who were clearly more sensible and obliging than their immature and annoying male peers. I wanted to trust the system.
On the other hand, Sean’s science teacher—who once told me she had to google some of the words she heard the boys using—relied on Hollywood for her lesson plans, showing disaster movies to discuss global warming, for example. The same teacher would quote from her union contract, telling students, “I’m not required to do that.”
Fake bongs were presumably on the not-required list. But I couldn’t quite muster Mary’s indignation. I felt blamed and ashamed, irrationally guilty for my kids’ behavior.
Meanwhile, Sean had devised his own personal lesson plan. Call it Ghetto 101.
He’d become obsessed with gritty, urban America, and could spend an hour or two researching slums and inner-city housing projects via Google Earth and Wikipedia. He’d watch YouTube videos of not only skaters but graffiti artists, rappers, and street-fight beat downs. He frequented sites like Vice and WorldStarHipHop, known as the “CNN of the ghetto.” In no time, Sean could list America’s most dangerous cities, the worst low-income projects, national crime stats, and the murder rates of Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and Miami.
Though Seattle was a blindingly white city, through skating my boys had made friends of color, and Sean had become especially attuned to any perceived race-based slights. When a teacher disciplined a Filipino friend, Sean muttered racist. When asked to repeat it, Sean looked the teacher in the eye and accused him of picking on darker-skinned students, earning a trip to the principal. When a Boys & Girls Club counselor punished another friend, Sean sniped, “Oh, because he’s black?” The counselor sent Sean to the director’s office, but Sean slipped out a side door and walked home in a huff. Sensitivity to injustice and inequity was seemingly stitched into his DNA. Back in North Carolina, on a road trip, he’d refused to join Mary and Leo for a walking tour of Duke University’s campus, claiming it was home to drunk lacrosse players, “racists and rapists.”
I appreciated this affinity for the underdog, which reminded me of the lessons my sister had taught me about acceptance and compassion. Many of the boys’ skate friends shared a sense of justice and righteousness, which I admired, but with trepidation. By skating the streets of Seattle, riding buses far and wide, they certainly witnessed more city grit than some kids their age, crossing paths with the homeless and the downtrodden, panhandlers and alley lurkers.
Mary and I tried to put a positive spin on some of it. Maybe they’ll study urban economics? Become social workers? I’d think back on Sean’s essay about skating as “nondiscriminatory,” open to everyone regardless of “race, age, gender, size, strength, social skills, background, education, sexual orientation,” as he’d put it. Then again, if inclusion was a core skater value, where was the empathy for hardworking teachers and counselors and cops? Sean sometimes seemed conflicted by his own inclinations.
“I only like to do things if they lead to something else,” he said one day after school. “But if I’m only going to work at McDonald’s the only thing I need is a clean criminal record.” This comment came before an epic night of homework battles. Sean had four worksheets to complete but first started watching a movie, then South Park, then skate videos. I kept shutting off his screens—“What’s the point?” he complained—and only after I threatened to take away his board did he finally sit down and finish his work. In ten minutes.
The next day I read an article about a father who was acquitted of assault after dragging his teen son by the hair for refusing to do homework. I actually felt bad for the guy.
Later that week, I found Sean sitting in a corner of the basement after school, staring into the waffle-pattern sole of a skate shoe, quietly despondent. He told me he was starting to worry about high school, and college, and a job . . . He was screwing up middle school, he said, as he started tapping his forehead with the shoe. He was worried he would screw up high school, too—tap, tap—and end up working at a gas station. He said he wanted to be homeschooled. He said he wanted to be in a spaceship.
“Sometimes I just wish I could be in outer space,” he said.
“You mean, like, an astronaut?” I asked.
“No, not a NASA spaceship. A UFO. I want to be on a different planet. A bigger planet. I want to be with aliens.”
He began hitting himself harder with the shoe, and I sat down beside him on the concrete floor, put my arm around him, gently taking the shoe away.
Finally, he said, “I just want to be your little Seany-shoo again. I want to be a little guy. I just want to live here with you and Mumslo.”
“Um, forever?” I asked.
“I dunno.”
“Well, you’ll probably change your mind about that.”
“Maybe.”
Meanwhile, as Sean wrestled with who he was and who he wanted to be—vagabond or alien, skater or little boy—Leo was going through his own weird boy shit.
Home life had devolved into a messy morass, and the strife was affecting Leo, who mostly wanted everyone to play their part and get along and be happy. The kid who once wished for the whole world to be Hawaii was now anxious and edgy. He’d developed a gag-like mouth twitch that looked like a mother bird choking up prechewed food for her chicks. He poked and picked at his mouth and nose, which led to an infection, and trips to a dermatologist. He started visiting a Chinese acupuncturist for his mouth twitch and stress.
To be clear, Leo could be a teacher-taunting smart aleck, too—and would catch up to Sean in that department—but he at least tried to play the role of middle schooler. He even had a girlfriend, and they’d walk the halls adorably holding hands, until the day he came home crying. I was in the kitchen and saw him coming up the alley, a stomp-walk that meant something was wrong. When he opened the back gate and I saw his face, I knew it was trouble. He broke down and told me how she’d dumped him—by text.
“I know it’s just, like, sixth grade, and it shouldn’t matter,” he said, in tears as we sat at the kitchen table. “But she was just, like, really cool and I just don’t get it.”
I tried to comfort him but realized Leo’s preteen boyhood had become a bummer: brother falling apart, parents always yelling at him, brother yelling back, parents sometimes yelling at each other . . . And why are they always talking about money and homework and chores and “life”? Why can’t we all just be frickin’ happy?
Truth is, some nights we could be a family freak show. I surely didn’t help by letting the stress of my freelance writing career, its sporadic income, and my ineffectual parenting all escalate into a noisy scrum. And I didn’t help anyone by self-medicating with bourbon.
I’d been working on a new book, but not fast enough, so I’d get testy when I wasn’t writing well, then pour an afternoon beer or whiskey to help squeeze out a few more words. I never got drunk-drunk, though one night I crossed the line and in a boozy snit shattered a cocktail glass that Mary had given me for my birthday. I didn’t actually mean to throw it at my wife, but I was flailing my arms, arguing some long-forgotten point, and the whiskey glass flew in her direction and smashed against the fridge. Mary gave me a cold, hard look that I’d never seen before. She was furious, and a little scared. I tried to explain that it was an accident, but she wouldn’t let me off so easy.
“You threw a glass at me,” she said.
Usually, the most stable one at dinner was Leo. No wonder he preferred hanging at Max’s house, where, he’d tell us, the parents read in the dining room while the kids played video games in the next room, a fat dog in the mix, “But they’re all together.” At Max’s, Leo and Max romped like boy-boys, silly and dorky, in no hurry to grow up. “They’re a real family,” he told Mary one night during one of their neighborhood walks. “We never do anything as a family.”
Lately, I’d watched Leo veer back and forth between skate friends and new friends his own age, including nonskaters. He also began testing some radical ideas, like studying and doing homework, and even trying new hobbies. After rejecting music lessons years earlier he decided to try guitar, then switched to drums. Then he joined a basketball league—bravely, I thought, since he was the shortest kid on his team.
One Friday night Leo went to a trampoline place with a new friend’s church group. Except for weddings and funerals, we hadn’t exposed the boys to much religion, so when the church van dropped him off at the end of the night, I was curious . . .
“Did you pray?” I asked Leo as we drove home.
“No,” he said. “We just bounced.”