A Rainbow In A Snowstorm

In skateboarding, time slows down- literally. You’re weightless; pulled up momentarily by these little invisible strings whose power you’ve learned to tap into over years of painful trial and error. The board is just a whirl of brilliant color underneath your flimsy little Vans posed just like little ballerina slippers. You’re operating all on instincts that no one ever taught you. You’re making something that’s not even a part of your body perform like it is. The flip comes around and you feel that back foot catch on the gritty sandpaper- perfect style. Then, you fell the edge of the board set in right underneath your knee cap. Wait. That’s not how it’s supposed to happen. Fuck. You’ve just been rocked. This is nothing new of course, but each time you slam, it’s as if you were born yesterday and your supple little body never knew pain. To properly imagine how this all feels, go outside and stick a broom handle into the ground. Now jump and try to slam your knee directly on the tip of the broom handle. That’s a great comparison actually. After a quick stagger around reassuring everyone you’re “straight”, a little gremlin runs up beside you and throws napalm on you knee. Now you’re really done. You’re lucky if you can even make it to the bus stop now. Lie down and bite your lip. That’s it, taste the fury. Skateboarding is a hungry monster that feeds on your blood and tendons- you’ve just made your periodic sacrifice. And so began my weekend. But, like any skater, there’s only one thing to do while you’re injured- party.

My friend Charli is great at having parties, if there is such a thing. She said she might event want to do that as a living, and she’d definitely be great at it. Every time I go to her place, I’m struggling to move around, but everyone is awesome and it’s no bother to get trapped in a doorway or on her couch. There’s Jello shots, games of pong, and great music. We come up there after the snow starts falling heavily outside. This became our best option for the night because Charles and I had to do was walk upstairs- no icy roads or MapQuest involved. We squeeze inside and Charli informs me that tonight there is a special challenge in store: rainbow shots. Seven flavors of Jello shooters. Always up for performing feats of heroism (or hedonism), I go for it. After I’ve done it, I lay claim as only one of two or three people that crossed the other side of that hazy rainbow. Having ingested a drug known to make one quite uncoordinated, we feel it’s time for me to play a game requiring impeccable depth perception: water pong. This is similar to beer pong, only you use water instead of beer- cutting out the danger factor, yet still providing a fun game. For my first time, I did fairly well, but sadly my friend Jason and I were outdone by two undefeated ladies. Around this time, the rainbow has begun to catch up with me, and my memory becomes a beautiful spectacle of color and light.

Saturday morning, I’m up and heading over to Kegstand’s house. Today’s the first ever NC SKATE Christmas Contest. We’re raising money and materials for a charity called “For Piet’s Sake.” Their goal, like the board donation program I set up in Afghanistan, was to give used boards and skate materials to underprivileged kids. The whole reason behind it was the founder was given a board by his friend Piet on his deathbed. From then on, the guy felt he had to do the same- give the gift of skateboarding to people in need. NC SKATE decided: why not have a Christmas contest to boot? Bring your old skate stuff, some cash, and we’ll give away prizes for the best tricks and the people who donated the most stuff- perfect. My job was to help set up and judge the event, using my nerdy skateboard knowledge and a panel of others to empirically decide who did the best tricks. I pull up on the gravel drive way and knock on the door, a la Goodwill Hunting. Keegan and I get to moving the stuff in my car- boxes of Vans shirts, hundreds of stickers, a table, and some of our used boards. Seeing as we had a good hour and a half to kill, he puts on a pot of coffee and we watch skate videos to help us wake up. When the time comes, we head out to State and are pleased to see the spread before us.

Some of the homies after the contest.

Despite it being below freezing and windy, there’s about twenty kids practicing on the various obstacles we got for the contest. There was a nice ledge with a banked wall on the side, a straight ledge, some kickers, and a massive quarterpipe/launch ramp- I was bummed to be out of commission. First was the high ollie contest. Here, you have a bar that you have to ollie (jump) over. Knock it down and you get one more try. Knock it down again and you’re out and the bar moves up an inch. It’s always interesting to see how high someone can get, and everyone has a method. Some just smack as hard as they can, some try and tweak the board to one side, some go slow, some go fast. As the final three guys are battling it out somewhere past the two and a half feet marker, flurries of snow start coming down. Everyone is stoked. After the last man falls to the high ollie, we move it to the best trick and give all the guys thirty minutes to do the best tricks they can. This got pleasantly chaotic as everyone just went for it, tearing into everything with ferocity as the snow came down. My favorite was this skinny teenage blonde who was getting really technical on the ledges- flipping in and flipping out of all sorts of grinds and manuals. It was easy to tell he had natural talent. From about ten minutes in, we knew he was going to win. Our own David Garcia decided to enter the contest and ended up getting second by killing a different ledge with really fast, powerful tricks like frontside 50-50 to backside 180 out. A lot of people don’t get this “style” thing, but it’s important. Skating is more like an art form than a sport or hobby. That might be why people who skate seem weird or “radical” to outsiders about how we use public property or why we behave the way we do, but a lot of us see this is our form of self expression. I see skating as another one of my artistic pursuits- just like writing or painting- there’s really no difference to me. People have different ways of doing the same trick- a 360 flip from Mike Mo Capaldi is going to look different from one done by Brian Anderson despite being the same end product. Powerful, chaotic, smooth, aggressive, simple, how you push with your foot- there’s so much there, and everyone falls into a style that fits them, just like you fall into a taste for music or fashion. Trick after trick went down as the snow began to pummel us harder. Everyone pushed on despite the slippery conditions, and a few used them to their advantage, getting their wheels to slide out an additional spin or two. After declaring blondie the winner and David a runner up, we got up onto the Free Expression Tunnel and threw out all the shirts and stickers we had. Everyone left with at least a shirt or hat and more stickers than they could fit in a hand. I make it back just before the snow really piles up. Check out the continuation of the events above.

Listen to This: “Mushrooms”- Hammer No More the Fingers, “the Ocean”- Led Zeppelin, “Gangsta Gangsta”- N.W.A.