As we trudged up the rocky path toward the volcanic cone of Diamond Head, only two in our sweaty pack of sun-pinked tourists lugged the unnecessary baggage of a skateboard.
Sean and Leo had insisted on bringing their boards on the climb, through tunnels and up ladders, in hopes of finding a secret off-limits skate spot they’d seen in videos. Based on our years of failing to get the boys to hike with us, the boards were an acceptable compromise. We didn’t find their spot, but on the descent they managed to skate the final stretch of paved pathway, slaloming through startled tourists as I obnoxiously snapped photos.
The next day, as most Honolulu visitors sunned themselves on Waikiki Beach or snorkeled or surfed, we were driving the back roads of Diamond Head, looking for that skate spot. Sean saw a weed-choked lot and a crime-scene set of concrete steps that he recognized . . .
“Stop here, I think we’re close,” he said.
So many family trips ended up like this, venturing way off beaten paths, down alleys and into creepy city armpits, looking for renegade parks or off-limits skate spots, with little to guide us but my kids’ memory of YouTube scenes and some cues from Google Maps. They were like backcountry skiers—the real fun happened out of bounds. So we parked the rental car and hiked up the inland ass-crack of Diamond Head, not another soul in sight, along a hint of a pathway, littered and glittery with busted bottles, past the chains and NO TRESPASSING signs, Sean and Leo insisting we were getting close.
We emerged onto an expanse of jagged, multitiered, graffiti-covered concrete, and the boys were instantly Disney-like euphoric. Far from home, impelled by instinct and parental dereliction, they’d found their spot, the foundation of a demolished school now decorated by orphaned couches, heaps of trash, a burned-out motorcycle frame. It was absurd, but I was excited, too. Mary left the three of us and went for a long run as I pulled out our gear—cameras, tripod, homemade video stabilizer, etc.—and we got to work.
For two hours, the boys skated themselves sweaty, ollie-ing the wrecked motorcycle, 360-ing over chunks of concrete, kickflipping off ledges and over scrap lumber as I took photos and shot video. The sun began to slump and Mary did postrun squats and stretches and I took final portraits of the boys posing beside a piss-stained couch, Leo in his yellow Hawaiian shirt and Sean in his stretched-out STILL LIVIN T-shirt, downtown Honolulu shimmering beneath them. I realized, once again, that we were a weird-ass family.
Leo had partly inspired the trip, with his call for more family unity and—in a rebuttal against Sean’s ghetto fixation, and against rainy Seattle—his hopeful visions of tropical paradise. I had encouraged Hawaii as a destination because it’d allow me to indulge my growing curiosity about the origins of the board that had come to dominate our days.
Close to finishing my latest book (a biography of the eccentric, world-traveling cartoonist, Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley), I’d started researching the history of surfing, the sport that sired skating. Surfboard, skateboard, snowboard, they all seemed to lure boys like mine into a certain lifestyle—or maybe they were totems of a lifestyle such boys already craved. But what was it about the board itself, I wondered, that plank? Was it a primal reminder of some ancient weapon? Undeniably dick-shaped, was there something sexual about surfing, snowboarding, and skating? Was the board an extra phallus? Were the boys all overcompensating?
I couldn’t exactly ask my kids and their friends my dumb questions, so I sought clues elsewhere.
I took surf lessons on Waikiki from a tubby instructor named Pat, who danced across his board like Fred Astaire. I checked out the beautifully carved, sensually shaped, century-old wooden boards at the Bishop Museum, and learned how Christian missionaries’ disapproval of Hawaiian surfing had pushed it to the brink of extinction. I read about Jack London’s 1907 visit, and his still-apt description of a young surfer dude: “upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” I bought books about the godfather of modern surfing, Duke Kahanamoku, of whom a fellow surfer said: “He had an inner tranquility. It was as if he knew something we didn’t know.” And I reread Tom Wolfe’s The Pump House Gang, which captured the darker side of board riding—the drinking and drugs, the self-destructive ennui of the California surf lifestyle that begat skating.
Revisiting Wolfe’s classic made me realize that bored Seattle boys on boards were, in spirit and in action, the same kids Wolfe had described a half century earlier, teens on the fringe of society, burdened by the “hassle of the adolescent, the feeling that he is being prodded into adulthood on somebody else’s terms.”
I’d also started reading books by and about Tony Hawk, Laird Hamilton, and other skaters and surfers. I learned that Hawk’s parents had given him tons of freedom as a kid and “never yanked the normal parent leash,” as he put it. He didn’t like team sports, or school, and he quit violin lessons at an early age. His father was his “personal chauffeur” who “logged hundreds of miles every weekend driving me from park to park.” Skate parks became his “family room,” his “clubhouse”—“the Elks Club for kids with scabs.” Like Leo, he was often the smallest kid and often felt like an outsider, a distracted doodler, “detached from the normal crowd.”
I recognized my kids and their friends in the words of Hawk and other skate pioneers. Christian Hosoi: “I always loved doing whatever I wanted.” Tony Alva: “Our attitude was like, ‘We skate—fuck you!’” Rodney Mullen: “What skater doesn’t feel like an outsider? It’s a collection of people who don’t belong in collections.”
My reading and research taught me this much: riding a board had historically been something to be ashamed of and/or defensive about. For centuries people had been telling board riders to knock it off and get a job. The missionaries scolded Hawaiian surfers to cut up their boards and make desks. And I loved the story of the teacher who told Hawk that by “defying authority” and following a “path of disobedience” his future looked bleak. Instead, the millionaire skate entrepreneur wrote: “Skateboarding saved me.”
Then again, the ties between surfing and skating meant little to my kids. Nursing bad memories of a family attempt at surfing in Oregon, they’d declined to join me for my Waikiki surf lessons. Afterward, as I lay baking beside Mary on a towel, we watched the boys walking toward us, two pale and sweaty Seattle kids trudging across this famous beach—a beach that could be called the womb of skate culture. Instead of barefoot and shirtless, they toted their boards as their skate shoes kicked up puffs of white sand.
“Coming to join us?” I asked. “Go for a swim?”
“Nah,” Leo said, grabbing a water bottle and downing half of it in three chugs.
They’d been doing tricks off curbs and sewer pipes in a nearby parking lot and were on their way to another spot.
“Going skatin’,” Sean said.
Surfers are beautiful boys with buff torsos. They’re tanned and slick with seawater, pure and wise and zen, even when they’re badass, like Patrick Swayze’s “Bodhi” in Point Break (one of our family faves). And snowboarders? They’re high-flying daredevils, medal-winning Olympians, as are their two-boarded skier brethren.
But skaters? They’re street rats. My kids took pride in doing the less obvious, like spending a sunny day in the frying pan of a parking lot while others lounged at the beach.
On their boards, I realized, my kids felt whole and in control. Among like-minded skaters, they felt protected and accepted. They’d found something on a skateboard and among skaters that just made sense. As Hawk put it, they’d found “a secret club the rest of the world didn’t know about.”
What nagged at me was this: What if their secret club pulled them too far afield? What about their relationship with the rest of the world?
In the spring of 2010, three young men, recent grads of our local high school, were killed in an early-morning car wreck. They’d been speeding in the rain when the driver lost control and slammed into a signpost outside the Taco Time.
Two months later, a lightbulb in an apartment closet torched a foam mattress and fire raced through the home of Sean’s classmate Joey, a sweet, skinny thirteen-year-old whose family had immigrated from Ethiopia. Joey, two sisters, a cousin, and an aunt all died. It was the deadliest Seattle fire in decades, and the tragedy devastated Whitman Middle School. Instead of giddiness to start the summer, the school hallways hosted tearful scenes of wracked and wounded friends and cries of “Joey!”
Days later, teachers led students onto the soccer field for a memorial service, arranging them in a big circle. Once everyone had joined hands, boys and girls started praying, then weeping, then wailing. Sean called me in tears. “It’s horrible, Dad. Guys I’d never imagined crying were bawling their eyes out. Girls were screaming. Just horrible.”
Sean and Leo left school and hopped a city bus, along with Willem and Nate. I asked Sean to put Leo on, who said, “I just can’t be alone right now. I just want to be with my friends, so we can all stay close and just be together.” I knew what bus they were on, and I knew where they were headed: Inner Space. The number 28 bus rolled right past Joey’s home, where classmates and neighbors gathered beside flowers and handwritten signs—JOEY, WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU—that had bloomed outside the charred apartment building.
I thought back to the tragedies of my youth: classmates and friends killed in car wrecks, felled by cancer or suicide. None of that, not even my mother’s or sister’s deaths, prepared me for helping my kids confront such inexplicable loss as Joey and his family and those three young men. I felt so ill-equipped. This was the boys’ first up-close exposure to death, and I worried I was blowing a chance to impart some parental wisdom. I wanted to help, but there was nothing I could say. All I could do was hug them, which was really more for me.
For real comfort, the boys turned to skating, and mourned with their friends. Skating was their vigil, and the skate park a place of commiseration. Inside subterranean Inner Space, amid rap music and clackety skate sounds, they were in a safe zone. The skate park had become “more than just a place to skate,” as Hawk once said.
Leo created an “R.I.P. Joseph” video, a montage of skate tricks in tribute to their lost friend. In his YouTube description he wrote: “no one deserves to die at 13. we all love you and miss you. . . . . . . . . . . . .good bye Joseph.” For the music Leo chose an appropriately sober rap song by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, which captured his state of mind . . .
You know, don’t nothing come easy
You gotta try real real hard
I’ve tried hard, but I guess I gotta try harder.
Weeks later, death came to our family, three years minus a day past my mom’s death. Mary’s dad had been sick for months, but he’d downplayed the seriousness of the condition that was constricting his weakened heart. He died calmly in an easy chair, late one night at home in North Carolina, with Mary, her mom, and her sister by his side.
At Bill’s funeral, after his sister gave the eulogy, she asked if anyone else wanted to say a few words, and Sean jumped out of his seat and strode to the front of the church. He seemed tense, agitated, and Mary and I exchanged “uh-oh” looks. But then . . .
“I just can’t believe he’s gone,” Sean began, his anger melting. “He was so . . . so fit. So active. So alive. He has this . . . essence.”
Sean talked about how Grandpa Bill always kept busy, how he and Grandma Pauline always had fun, gardened and fished and hiked and threw parties, cooked great food and traveled the world and really, really lived. They had shown him what it meant to be alive, he said.
“Why did he have to die?” Sean asked us all. “Why?”
He sat down beside Leo, who stared at him for a moment, then leaned his head on Sean’s shoulder.
Once again, my kids found some refuge on the board. The day after the funeral, we took the boys to a skate park south of Asheville, and in the dimming summer dusk, beneath banks of spotlights, we watched with clenched jaws as Leo made numerous attempts at ollie-ing down an eight-stair set. Without a helmet.
Surfers often refer to wave height in relation to their body: chest high, overhead, double-overhead. Though some classmates were already man-size, twelve-year-old Leo was still stretching toward five feet, with a blond-topped baby face that could pass for nine. So the height of this eight-stair was decidedly overhead. From the platform above the stairs, Leo propelled himself to full speed, crouched down low, then popped off the top step and into the air. He soared out over the concrete descent, the board glued improbably to his feet, a bold rejection of physics—and of safety. Instead of landing gracefully he crashed violently, tumbling and rolling like in those old Road Runner cartoons.
The boys had skated there the previous day and made a few quick friends, who nicknamed Leo “Seattle.” A few of them now gathered, a mix of white, black, and Hispanic, to watch Leo fling himself off the ledge. They began chanting, “Seattle! Seattle!” but Leo kept missing his landing, scratching and bruising himself, then stalking angrily back to the lineup. We’d lunched at a Mexican restaurant, and I could feel the pollo asado churning in my gut. I felt torn between intervening and letting it play out.
So many times, at so many parks and skate spots, I’d watched them attempt the same trick ten, twenty, fifty times. They’d developed their own version of Samuel Beckett’s oft-quoted advice: “try again, fail again, fail better.” My kids’ take: fall, fall again, fall better.
By now, I’d grown to admire skating’s try-harder credo, its cozy relationship with failure, the embrace of which was built into the whole system. The only way a skater improved was by courting bodily harm, living in his danger zone, pushing to the edge of his abilities, failing, then doing it again. (Search YouTube for “skate fails” and you can easily waste an hour in a state of perma-cringe.) As someone who’d become more risk-averse with age, I often witnessed my kids’ exploration of their mortal limits in a clutch of fear and awe.
Mary’s sister looked on wide-eyed—“I can’t believe you’re letting him do this without a helmet!”
It was hard to explain to others that it was out of our hands, as was the cursing . . . “Sonofa-bitch!” Leo yelled.
We’d seen this side of Leo before—determined, angry, focused. Like the day he taught himself to ride a bike, on his sixth birthday, rolling and falling and screaming down the sloped, snow-splotched backyard of our North Carolina house for what seemed hours until he could finally pedal around proudly.
Thankfully, it took Leo only a few more tumbles before he nailed his big eight-stair ollie. With his arms up and out like wings, his hands turned down like a gymnast’s, he looked like an airborne version of the Karate Kid in that crane-kick pose. For what seemed like half a minute, my son was flying.
Leo’s grit earned respectful board slaps and high fives from the other kids, which he accepted with a taut smile. He also earned a few battle scars, his knees, wrists, and elbows road-rashed from the concrete. Leo later explained how and why, despite his many flights over surfaces that could tear his skin and break his bones, he’d never gotten seriously hurt, at least thus far.
In short, he said: “You learn how to fall.”
I thought about that sentiment as I watched Mary struggle to accept the loss of her father, watched the boys mourn the loss of a man with whom they’d spent the first half of their lives. I later found a school essay Leo wrote, describing Bill as “one of the most important people in my life. He was a leader, a role model, MY role model.” Leo wrote about the day he and Sean had been skating in the backyard when I got the call from Mary, how I’d called them inside to tell them their grandfather was dead.
“That’s when I started to cry,” Leo wrote. “I cupped my hands over my face and let them fill up. How could he be gone? I wish I could have seen him one more time to say good-bye and tell him how much I loved him and that I would never EVER forget him.”