Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(26)

“Who is best?” I asked the boy.

“That one there?” he nodded toward the taller black kid in the checked flannel shirt. “He’s confident. Smooth.”

“Yep,” I confirmed.

“And that little kid?”

I knew who he was talking about, I’d seen him earlier—practically a tyke, with long strawberry-blond hair.

“He’s pretty damn good, he’s got air.”

I was picturing the kid flying off the back canyon wall, disappearing behind a cloud.

“But that guy back there—” he nodded at the slightly older white guy, a dude in his early thirties, with a goatee and a loud mouth—he’d been trash-talking some of the other guys before and after he rode and he was himself really good—amazing loops and air, no crashes; fast. “That guy? He is tough.” He did seem really tough—like he had taken a lot of falls in his life and never stopped riding. I was behind a fence, but even there, I felt a little afraid of him. (Earlier, he’d come by and shown another guy where the fence was broken at the top and could be pulled out. “This is where we come in at night,” he’d said.) Now this kid, talking to me through the fence, started talking trash, too, suddenly adopting street language, foreign to me, and talking about how he was going to do pops and tricks, grabbing at his crotch as he spoke. I wished I had a translator. But even if I had, it wasn’t what he was saying but how, almost like an MC, rapping; it was plainly for show. I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t flirting with me. I had to chuckle.

I asked him how long he’d been skateboarding.

“Only a year, year and a half. I used to come here at eight in the morning, and just sit right there”—he pointed to the rim on the other side of the canyon. “It was empty, no one here. Then they started coming. And I started to hang out, and learn some tricks.” He paused. “I don’t got a board—”

“So how do you skate?”

“Friend let me use one—sometime.”

He must not have any money, I realized.

“But I just got this deck,” he said, “someone’s old board.” I hadn’t noticed that he had been crouching on it this whole time—a skateboard without any wheels; a tiny stage set. He picked it up, turned it over in his hands. It was messed up. Both ends were splintered, like it had seen a hell of a lot of crashes. “Gonna get myself some trucks. Have myself a car.”

Trucks, I had picked up earlier, are wheels; and the skateboards themselves? Cars: boys’ cars. Now I got it. I asked him what made a good skateboard anyway.

He picked up the board and proceeded to explain its anatomy. “See this here?” He was pointing to a very shallow dip, an inverse bump, about four inches from one end. “That’s where you pop.” His voice had taken on a serious, authoritarian tone. “You know?”

He must have seen that I didn’t know what he was talking about. He got onto the board and shifted his weight and, in an instant, used his feet to pop the deck off the ground. He did it three or four times, studying my face all the while until I clearly got what he was talking about.

He crouched back down, proceeding with his lesson. “That little curve there, that shows you where the tail of your board is.”

“The tail?”

“The end—that’s the end of your board. So this is the front.” He showed me the totally banged up and splintered anterior.

“The head?” I asked.

He thought about this. “Okay, the head.”

I had interrupted his flow. “Now, boards are all different layers sandwiched together,” he continued. “See this, when you look down the length of it?” He presented a cross-section view. “This one is—one, two, three, four … five … six, six layers. See?”

I saw.

“But some of ’em, really good boards, are nine layers. Those are heavy fucking boards, and if you’ve got a guy who’s got some good solid weight, you can really fucking fly. But you see,” he was bringing the narrative back to himself now, “I’m kinda small, I’ve got really small feet.” He put the deck back down on the ground and stood on it. I was now at eye level with his feet and the board. He did have small feet, maybe size six. He couldn’t have weighed more than 125 pounds. “So, for me, this is just about perfect, a six-ply board, about eight and five-eighths wide. And you see this tread here?” He was talking about what looked like sandpaper covering the deck. “This is what keeps you sticking to the board.” He demonstrated this quality, standing on the deck without wheels on the rim of the canyon where skateboarders better than he could even dream of being were diving and flying. In that moment, he looked smooth, confident.

“All you need is some truck—”

“And I’ll have a car,” he replied. It was like we were harmonizing.

He picked up his banged up deck and looked me in the eye and smiled. “So: Skateboarding 101, sir. That’s right.”

“Thank you very much.”

“S’alright.”

He wandered away. I kept watching. I remembered how once I’d brought Oliver here on a hot August afternoon. It was a long walk for him, but he had been fascinated. “It’s a living geometry, isn’t it?” Oliver whispered, dazzled by the sights. He mused about how the ancients would have admired them—these boys who “describe curves in hyperbolic space” with their lithe bodies. “They may not have read Euclid, but they know it all,” Oliver said.