Ode to a Smalltown Skater Punk

Sometimes you end up with a post stuck in your head that develops a life of its own. Sometimes I veer wildly into territory that I doubt anyone is interested in, and this might go there. The biggest challenge however is I am not even sure how I am going to navigate what I am wanting to talk about. Let’s start with the basics. This weekend I watched an excellent documentary on the making of Tony Hawk Pro Skater called “Pretending I’m a Superman” name from a line in the Goldfinger song Superman. I don’t think it exists on any of the streaming services, and was available for rental for $5 or to purchase for $10 so I just outright purchased it. It was a phenomenal documentary and essentially covers both the evolution of the skate scene and the events that lead to the creation of the Pro Skater franchise, and it’s eventual downfall.

There are times that I wonder if I am legitimately going through a mid-life crisis. There are times when I get hit so hard by nostalgia that it is almost painful. While I have been messing around with retro consoles lately, this latest venture was triggered by the impending release of a remastered Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. THPS was a very important game for me, but maybe not because of the reasons you might think. I spent a good chunk of my adolescent years as a skater punk, growing up in a very small town without much of a support structure for those sort of en-devours. Thankfully I had a group of about a dozen or so friends who had similar interests at a similar time, but in the pre-internet era we were grossly ignorant about a great many thing.

One of the things that you need to be aware of about living in a tiny town prior to the spread of the information super highway is just how small of an existence it was. In a small town in the 80s and early 90s you pretty much had a Dollar General, a Grocery store and if you were exceptionally lucky a Walmart. If something could not be obtained from those locations it was effectively a strange and magical artifact. Weirdly enough my very first skateboard came from the local grocery store and was purchased by me pestering my parents for all of the C&H Greenstamps they had available. I have no clue what the equivalent cost was, but above is an image that if not the same model comes mightily close to my memories of it.

It was not a good skateboard, but then again at that point we had no clue what a good skateboard was. My friends had similarly bad skateboards and we thought we were cool. The board lacked a lot of features that you really need to do much with it… namely it was completely flat and had no concavity at all. Second problem it didn’t really have much of a tail, so you were wildly limited in what you could realistically do with it. However it claimed by be a “Ninja” skateboard, which sounded really cool to us at the time. This was apparently a thing because I remember at least two other friends having one branded this, and a few others riding Nash which were at the time equally horrible. The thing I remember the most about it is just how bad the wheels were. They were an exceptionally squishy urethane that picked up every rock and caused you to come skidding to a halt at random.

Our primary source of information in these early days were horrible movies like the 1986 Josh Brolin vehicle… Thrashin’. The movie did serve a greater purpose however because it introduced us to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers which is a theme that will resurface later. The grocery store news stand infrequently carried the magazine Thrasher, and it was pretty much a race to see who could purchase it before they would ultimately sell out. I had the good luck of being Catholic and our tradition was to go to the Grocery store immediately following Mass, which was a good two hours before anyone else in town would be there. As a result I managed to pick up most of the issues, because the concept of subscribing to a magazine was wildly foreign to any of us.

As we came to realize just how bad our skateboards were, we sought a way to improve our lot in life. The friend who could talk his parents into buying him anything had mail order as an option. The rest of us needed a physical location, and at this point the only place any of us knew was Gadzooks. This was located in a mall roughly an hour and a half from our tiny town, and was effectively a clothing store chain. For some reason unbeknownst to any of us, they carried a small stock of decks and various bits needed to make a proper skateboard. While I did not get my first skateboard there, I did manage to talk my parents into a pair of 65 mm Santa Cruz Slime Ball wheels that were neon pink and neon green. While this was largely a stop gap measure because the board itself was still awful, it did go a long ways to making the experience more manageable.

My first real skateboard came not long after that, but I remember it being a Christmas present. It was however the sort of Christmas present that you know about because you ended up having to pick it out. By then we had found another option for skate equipment in the form of a ski shop called Think Snow. They didn’t have much in the way of stock, but had access to order pretty much anything we could want and I wanted the Jason Jessee Neptune board. I mean your first skateboard is going to be chosen because it has badass graphics right? I also got to pick out a pair of turquoise gullwing trucks to go with it… which I thought looked cool but in hindsight were really poorly designed and lead me to grinding the bolt off.

I managed to assemble the rogues gallery that were all of the boards I rode over the years. The first one being of course the Jason Jessee. It had a really shallow tail and nose kick, which lead me to grossly over compensate with the Staab Genie, which was a heavy as fuck monstrosity that was designed for ramp skating. This lead me to over compensate again when I got the Natas which had a really short wheelbase and pretty aggressive nose and tail kicks, but was not really comfortable for my already 6’2″ frame. The Danny Way board was a case of finally choosing a board for how it felt rather than how it looked. Jason Lee was another case of me doing this, even though I did really like the Cat in the Hat artwork. Side note this is in fact the same Jason Lee of Television, Movie and now photographic fame.

The biggest challenge by far of being a skater from a small town was the general lack of options for where to skate. I grew up in the country, and since skateboards do poorly on dirt… I spent a lot of time without many options. My dad ran a photography business and when he added a studio onto the house, it included a really nice ADA compliant wheelchair ramp. I spent many an hour riding down that ramp and then trying to bail before falling off when I hit the gravel.

The highlight was always when I got to got visit my “city friends” and hang out, but that in itself was its own kind of misery given that our town had an excessive number of brick streets. If you have ever encountered it… apparently at some point in the history of the town we had a famous brick plant and as a result many of our street were never paved over to show this heritage. Given time and as the skateboarding fad spread, we got access to ramps of varying degrees of quality, and I even got a second hand 8 foot tall half pipe which was enjoyable and increased my access to riding more regularly.

All of that said there was still a lot of time when riding just wasn’t feasible. At home I had a three-tier giant fingerboard skatepark that I had built out of cardboard, index cards and the barrels of various pens as coping. There were a very small number of Skateboarding games on the NES but between my friends and I we had copies of them all. I spent most of my time playing Skate or Die, but later I got access to the port of Atari’s far superior 720. The other major downtime activity was watching various skate videos that we had somehow acquired.

I say somehow acquired because you have to remember, in a small town that which does not come from Walmart does not exist. That said there was a bit of an underground trade in bootleg copies of things that someone at one point legitimately purchased. Anytime something new would enter the system, there would be a sequence of bad copies of copies until practically everyone had access to whatever it was. One of my happy realizations of late is that a lot of these skate tapes have found their way onto YouTube. So now it is entirely possible for me to watch some of my favorites including Streets on Fire by Santa Cruz, Ban This by Powell Peralta, and I even managed to find a copy of the Vision Street Wear US Championships that I can only assume someone originally taped off cable. Side note… most of us had no access to cable television either.

Small towns don’t really have a proper culture of their own, but instead adopt things through whatever means necessary. We didn’t have peers to look up to and show us the ropes. Instead we relied on these videos and the few magazines we could scrounge together. As a result being the impressionable youths that we were, our identities were very confused mirrors of what we had been seeing. We dressed like the skaters we saw dressed. My artwork at the time was deeply influenced by the artwork that adorned the boards and my best friend and I spent countless hours drawing what our boards would look like… you know when we went pro because that was absolutely a thing that was going to happen.

Of all of the influences, I would say the biggest for me personally was the music. In a small town we had access to two kinds of music… hair metal and even bigger hair country music. I mean I listened to my fair share of Poison and Def Leppard, but craved something more. These skate tapes had these phenomenal soundtracks from band we had never heard of, and had no clue how to even get access to. I remember pausing the credits to Streets on Fire and scribbling down the name of every band that had been featured. Our little tribe made it a mission to spend birthday and allowance money trying to acquire a trove of this magical stuff.

Of course not a damned bit of it was available local, so it would involve frantically scouring the racks of every music store we got access to, but over time through a similar bootleg network we had built up a soundtrack for this shared culture. This lead me down the rabbit hole of labels like SST Records, Epitaph and Sub-Pop and to obscure dives like Mohawk Music that I still miss to this day. This also represents the time when we were heavily listening to bands like Black Flag, DRI, Fugazi, Minutemen, The Descendents and still my favorite of the batch Firehose. Once one person got access to something, it was rapidly spread throughout our burgeoning community, because that is the sort of thing that happens when access to anything “new” is so damned limited.

So when I talk about Tony Hawk Pro Skater, it is all of these things that come rushing back to me in their vivid technicolor glory. It has never necessarily been about the specifics of the game, but instead the quirky culture that surrounded my days as a skater. I was never certain what lead me to stop skating, but looking back now I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I spent the majority of my junior year in high school pretty damned ill. I was having black out spells and even managed to very neatly park my car into the ditch during one of them. With this came a fading away from a lot of the people that I had been involved with… I lost my gig as drummer of our band and as that circle of friends made their way into harder and harder drugs I sorta just stayed purposefully distant.

Around this same time circumstances lead to us getting our very first computer, a 25 mhz 386 with two whole megabytes of ram, which we eventually upgraded to four. With this my friend group changed as well, as I shifted from Skateboarding as my primary interest to all the things that had taken a backseat. I delved more deeply into pen and paper roleplay and wargaming. I spent more time playing Super Nintendo and then was completely blown away when I got to play Wolfenstein 3D for the first time on the PC. The underground network of acquirers of things shifted from bootleg music and skate videos to bootleg copies of Civilization or Prince of Persia. I still lived in a tiny town and my access to things was just as impossible given that Walmart didn’t start selling anything PC Gaming related until I was in college.

After that the come the internet and access to all of that knowledge that I had so desperately been wanting all the years trapped within my tiny confines. I commuted back and forth to junior college for two years, and during that time I was introduced to my wife from a mutual friend from Belgium. This acted as a gateway to meet a lot more denizens of Undernet and ultimately influenced which college I went to, leading us to get together as more than just passing friends. My life changed in a lot of ways rapidly as happens when you graduate high school and move on with living.

The truth is I was never a good skater, but I enjoyed it. I could Ollie if somewhat unreliably, and through moments of sheer miracle could occasionally land something like a pop shove it. The truth is among the dozen or so of us in the little tribe… there were maybe three with any real talent that acted as tutors to the rest of us who just enjoyed cruising around and doing simple things like grinding parking blocks. To the best of my knowledge none us actually skated past our senior year. I kept my board in the back of my car for years and through a bit of freak accident wound snapping a truck trying to land a kick flip. I never repaired it after that and as a result it put a somewhat permanent end to my skating days.

We are nearing the launch of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 on September 4th, and with it has come this flood of emotions. I have access to the warehouse demo, and it plays just as well as I remember the originals playing. That said none of my feelings are really about the game, and are instead about this fairly important time in my development. Deep inside of me is still buried a little skater punk, and I think this is the era when I developed my deep distrust of authority figures. We went through a period where everyone seemed to be trying to pass ordinances to stop us from having fun, and I got shot at (I think it was just a pellet gun) by a local gas station owner when we rode up to try and buy something out of the pop machine.

Nostalgia is a very powerful drug, one which I seem to be deeply susceptible to. I am thankful to this time and the influences it had on my musical tastes. I still get joy by watching those old skate videos, and from time to time I break out a fingerboard with a strong desire to once again build a completely nonsense skate park. For the time being however I will just look forward to the THPS Career Mode and the ability to build and share sweet park designs with my friends online. Like I said at the beginning of this nonsense, this is a post that I felt like I needed to write. I am writing it in large part for myself, but maybe someone out there will get some enjoyment from it as well. I will close by channeling my preteen self that was listening to way too much Exploited… Fuck the police, Skateboarding is not a crime.