Words by Chris Kent
Photography by Aileen Kent
My shins are a very ugly place. If you were to run your finger from my kneecap to my ankle, along the rocky topography, you would recoil in disgust. The single most important relationship of my life began brutally when I was eleven. And I nurtured it.
Every day I’d ride my bike to the bottom of my street to watch in awe as the older kids rolled from driveway to driveway on wide, flat, neon colored Nash Executioners, the most popular bottom-of-the-line skateboard available. It was as if there was a single moment when I turned to my huffy and said, “it’s not you, it’s me.” I was changed. The breakup was quick and painless and I moved on to pursue my new object of adoration – one that would be quicker, much more painful and last forever.
Any pursuit is difficult at eleven. Especially if your parents don’t want you to “break your freakin’ neck.” I would find myself perusing the toy stores for the perfect board, and hiding it so that nobody would buy it first. Later, of course, I’d need to present a map of this treasure’s whereabouts to my parents so they could locate it and bring it home. I did this often, without favorable results.
It wasn’t until I sketched my own personal schematics for the construction of a skateboard that they finally caved in. I guess fearing for my well being on something that is actually supposed to be a skateboard is less damaging to an adult’s nerves than fearing for it on an eleven-year-old’s concept and construction of one.
This process was just long enough for the majority of the crew at the bottom of the block to lose all interest in skateboarding whatsoever. But when you’re young and you fall in love with anything, you fall hard. Believe me, I fell hard. It wasn’t about fitting in anymore. I didn’t know or care what happened to any of them. I was alone with my new love, and I was fine with that. Even if that new love beat the living shit out of me every day.
I rode that same board for a solid year before I completely destroyed it. By the time I was done with it the wheels looked like green, misshapen cones. I even snapped it in half at some point and continued to ride it. So what if the middle would scrape along the pavement… Now it had brakes!
On a beautiful crisp autumn day that relationship escalated. There were two of the older kids who never quit. Greg and Todd sat on Greg’s stoop with their brand new boards. Boards that were like nothing I had ever seen before. Greg’s had a green monster riding a giant Bowie Knife covered in blood with the word “Slasher” dripping from the blade. Todd had a Vision Gator with this odd spiral across the top half of the design. The wood was shaped differently. It sounded different than mine as it rolled along the street. Even the words: Slasher, Gator, Vision, Slimeball… It was like a special language that I didn’t understand, but needed to.
So it began. From this point on it was a bit like a kung-fu movie. I rolled around for a few years coming across lone warriors to join me in my quest for a perfect technique. Learning a trick was a process that began with finding out that the trick even existed and then cracking yourself in the shins repeatedly until you figured it all out. I barely remember losing my virginity, but I can tell you the sneakers I had on when I did my first ollie, the t-shirt I wore when I first lost control to speed wobbles and tore open my hip and shoulder.
Skateboarding didn’t make me popular or improve my social status in any way; if anything, it hindered it. I was like an alien to the average person in my high school. I would walk into school with strange sneakers ripped to shit, proudly displaying the scabs across my elbows. My teachers probably thought I was abused.
For six years I had two constant scabs just above the belt-line on my back. That’s not even mentioning: 16 stitches in my chin, nine above my ear, eight to the back of my head, four across my eyebrow, a total of seven broken fingers, one broken wrist (but I sprained the same one three times), a broken toe; I chipped the ball of my foot and the nub of my ankle, sprained both ankles at the same time (and couldn’t walk for a week), had constant heel bruises, a torn ACL and meniscus, a chipped hip and bruised elbow bone (?). Seriously, I didn’t even know that was possible. All for love. I just hope bionic science advances enough before I’m old enough to feel it all again.
Skateboarding changed me – and not just in the way I have to sleep at night sometimes or the landscape of scars riddled across my legs. Skateboarding exposed me to new places, new music and new people that I would have never had a chance to meet. Some of whom I never wanted to meet in the first place, but now there’s a special connection – that secret language.
It’s good because it’s true… moving even.
I especially like the part about the broken board becoming a stopping option. Classic. But I became a tad envious upon reading that the numerous shared injuries we co-suffered have not come back to haunt you yet. I can barely get out of bed on some mornings. Chalk it up to the difference between having health insurance and staying thin, and discovering illicit vicodin and getting fat.